Domestic violence | When illness rhymes with alibi

Over the past year, 14 feminicides and six filicides were committed in a conjugal context by a spouse or ex-spouse. Tragically, this thorny and painful reality does not run out of steam.

In these circumstances, awareness campaigns remain essential and we salute the government’s efforts to inform and raise public awareness in a fair and impactful manner. With good reason, domestic violence and post-separation domestic violence are among the hot topics covered in the media. On the other hand, the treatment of the problem sometimes takes winding paths that reveal either a biased understanding or a deceitful intention. This is the subject of our intervention here.

On January 22, on the show Everybody talks about itduring an interview about the series With beating heart, one of the two headliners, Roy Dupuis, mentioned that domestic violence was an illness. The intervention generated a lot of favorable reactions on social networks. On the contrary, the words of Ève Landry, wanting that violence is a choice, did not arouse passions, showing that in public opinion, the excuse of illness easily outweighs the inexcusable choice!

Yet, associating domestic violence with an illness is misleading and insidious. No, violence is not a disease!

If violence were a disease, why would it overwhelmingly affect men who are the perpetrators of acts of conjugal violence in some 80% of situations? Why would the symptoms of this disease manifest themselves only in the conjugal sphere in many cases? The use of violence is a learned behavior and unfortunately too often tolerated and too little punished when it is exercised against women, especially in the marital context. If it is a learned behavior, the perpetrator can learn something else. Otherwise, it would be useless for him to try to change.

The 2018-2023 Government Action Plan on Domestic Violence is clear: abusers are responsible for their violent behavior; the intervention must aim to make them recognize their responsibility for their violence and to assume it (p. 23). Responsibility for resorting to violence must therefore be at the heart of interventions, with everyone being responsible for what they do with what they feel, regardless of their individual and family history.

Affirming that conjugal violence is an illness constitutes a justification that seeks to make the intolerable tolerable, the inadmissible admissible, the inexcusable excusable.

The function of justifications is to normalize the abuse of power in order to avoid social and legal consequences and foster social tolerance.

Illness, for example mental illness that would impair free will leads to non-responsibility. Justify the “acting” of a spouse or ex-spouse with violent behavior with remarks such as: he had an unhappy childhood, he is ill… maintaining in a register of non-responsibility. Among the basic principles for understanding the behavioral pattern of perpetrators of conjugal and post-separation violence are the notions of personal choice and the authorization that the individual gives himself to resort to violence.

Human beings need to understand, to find meaning in upsetting situations. In the context of conjugal violence, this analysis is carried out, among other things, through a process of justification which seeks to make the situation humanly acceptable. For example, when a man assaults his spouse, isn’t it more reassuring to think that it is the disease that pushes him to act in this way, than to consider that he resorts to violence by choice? The justifications shift the responsibility for the acts of the aggressor, at best towards an external cause, at worst on the shoulders of the woman who suffers them. The justifications are effective because they have “meaning” for the woman, the entourage and the workers who receive a client with violent behaviour.