This thesis explores domestic abuse in the British Armed Forces over a total of eight chapters.
Chapter Two reviews the main bodies of literature which are of interest to this thesis - feminist-informed literature on domestic abuse and, in particular, on help-seeking in response to abuse;
literature on sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings; and literature specifically concerned with domestic abuse in military institutions. I identify two main gaps in the literature which this study begins to redress. The first, an empirical gap, consists of a lack of literature which focuses specifically on responses to abuse in the British military context. In particular, I illustrate the lack of empirical knowledge about the barriers to help-seeking which limit victim-survivors’ ability to respond to abuse in ways which make themselves safe - something which civilian scholarship on domestic abuse has highlighted as particularly important.
In addition, I also illustrate a conceptual gap in the literature in that, with a few exceptions, there is a lack of scholarship on domestic abuse in military institutions which takes seriously the role of gender and of gendered militarism in shaping responses to domestic abuse in military contexts. I draw on the insights of feminist scholarship on domestic abuse, and on scholarship on sexual and gender-based violence in conflict and post-conflict settings, to argue that the application of these lenses to studies of domestic abuse in military institutions would be beneficial. This chapter also lays out the research questions which the study seeks to answer.
Chapter Three offers an exploration of the methodological approach of this study. The chapter outlines the feminist-informed, qualitative, post-positivist approach which I take to the research.
It explores my personal investment in the study and the impact this has had upon the questions I have sought to ask and the types of knowledge I have sought to produce; noting in particular that the research begins from a political start-point, one which encourages me to centre the experiences of victim-survivors and to approach the study in a critical as opposed to a
problem-29 solving manner. I discuss the processes through which I gained access, sampled participants, and conducted and analysed in-depth, qualitative interviews with victim-survivors and perpetrators of abuse and with support workers in military, quasi-military, and civilian roles, and reflect upon how the decisions I made throughout the process of the study have shaped the findings and the analysis presented. One of the main focuses of this chapter is the ethical balancing processes which I have undertaken throughout the course of the research, in particular the steps taken with the aim of ensuring the safety and wellbeing of participants.
Chapter Four moves to a discussion of the theoretical framework through which I make sense of the interview narratives collected for this study, focusing in particular on a theoretical engagement with gender, power, domestic abuse, and militarism. The chapter lays out the dual approach to power and to gender - combining structural and post-structural approaches - which helps me to build a nuanced understanding of the complex experiences of participants in this study. I explore the interest of this thesis in forms of violence and abuse on both the intimate and the geopolitical stage, and argue for a model for understanding the two as innately intertwined together. The chapter takes care to emphasise the political nature of domestic abuse and of militarism, suggesting that both are socially constructed phenomena which work through and function to reproduce social inequalities. I argue that the use of violence in both domestic abuse and militarism is motivated towards the acquisition and maintenance of dominance and control over an ‘other.’ Domestic abuse is therefore theorised not in terms of incidents of violent or abusive behaviours, but as the gendered patterns of abusive behaviour which perpetrators build up in order to establish control over their intimate partners. Similarly, I conceive of militarism as the normalised, everyday, gendered social relations of the preparation for, and conduct of, political domination and control for which the use of organised violence is a viable option (see Stavrianakis and Selby 2013: 3). The chapter finishes with an exploration of the British military institution as a heteronormative space in which there exists particular idealised models of masculinity and femininity which are, in important ways, formulated through and in support of the norms of gendered militarism.
Chapters Five, Six, and Seven offer analyses of the empirical materials collected for this thesis;
with Chapters Five and Six focused on the barriers to help-seeking faced by victim-survivors in this context, and Chapter Seven zooming out somewhat to explore the depoliticised ways in which abuse is understood - and therefore responded to - within the military community more broadly.
Chapter Five draws upon post-structural approaches to explore how victim-survivor participants
30 in this study make sense of their experiences through their understandings of their gendered identities and those of their abusers. Paying attention to the affective attachment which many of the victim-survivor participants in this study expressed towards their identities as ‘military wives,’
I investigate how their responses to abuse were shaped by the ways in which they are held accountable through the workings of disciplinary power to military ideals of gender identity. In particular I focus on the norms of stoicism and strength and on the expectation that civilian women married to servicemen will offer support to the military career, and show how these ideals act as a barrier to help-seeking by discouraging victim-survivors from reaching out for help.
Similarly, I explore the dominant ways in which the gender identities of military servicemen are understood. I draw upon the interview narratives collected for this thesis to demonstrate that these understandings, too, produce barriers to help-seeking by making it difficult to recognise abuse as abuse and, in some cases, by producing particular levels of fear about the possible repercussions of seeking help. I emphasise the rootedness of the norms of gendered identity in the British military context in the political project of militarism writ large, noting that these norms are not merely coincidental but play important roles in enabling and legitimating militarism itself.
Chapter Six employs a structural approach. It seeks to understand the impact upon victim-survivors’ responses to abuse of the structural inequalities between servicemen and the civilian women who are married to them. The chapter argues that civilian women married to servicemen are positioned by the structures of military life in a precarious situation in liminal space on the borders of the military community. Through a discussion of the provision of housing and of welfare support, I illustrate that the structures by which these services are provided simultaneously bring civilian women married to servicemen into the military community and prevent them from occupying a full and equal status within it. As such, these women occupy a disempowered, precarious space on the borders of the community, which produces particular barriers to seeking help in response to domestic abuse. Specifically, I suggest that the threat of homelessness, and the difficulty of finding welfare support which prioritises the needs of victim-survivors themselves, prevents many from seeking help. Again, I emphasise that the structures through which civilian women married to servicemen find themselves thus disempowered are not random or coincidental, but are rooted in important ways within, and are constitutive of, the social relations of inequality which constitute militarism.
Chapter Seven steps back somewhat from the empirical focus on specific barriers to help-seeking which is offered in the preceding two chapters, and instead draws attention to some of the ways
31 in which domestic abuse is understood within the British military community more broadly. This does, of course, have an important impact upon responses to abuse, because the ways in which abuse is perceived shapes the ways it is responded to, both by individual victim-survivors and on a wider scale. However, my analysis in this chapter is primarily concerned with the depoliticisation of domestic abuse in the British military - that is, the ways in which it is understood not as a political issue rooted in gendered social inequalities which is requiring of political solutions, but as an individual, pathological, ‘cultural’ or otherwise non-political concern.
The chapter explores three clusters of depoliticising narratives which emerged from my interviews: ‘cultural’ narratives which ‘other’ domestic abuse from the mainstream culture of the British military by identifying it as overwhelmingly perpetrated by Fijian personnel; pathologising narratives which treat abuse as extraordinary by attributing it to the mental health effects of combat; and gender-neutral narratives which strip the gendered politics from understandings of abuse. These three clusters of narratives, I argue, make it difficult to engage politically with domestic abuse in this context. Moreover, I suggest that while a political analysis of military domestic abuse could threaten the naturalisation of the social relations of militarism by exposing the everyday inequalities through which they are constituted, depoliticising approaches which abstract this abuse from the everyday gendered relations of militarism serve to naturalise these very social relations. As a result, I identify depoliticised responses to military domestic abuse as one of the many sites through which militarism is reproduced on an everyday basis.
The final chapter in this thesis returns to the gaps in the literature identified in Chapter Two to reflect upon the three main arguments and clusters of findings produced by the thesis and their wider implications, and to highlight the empirical and conceptual contributions which this study makes to the literature. I begin by reflecting on the empirical contribution that the study makes to the literature by providing in-depth, qualitative data on the lived experiences of domestic abuse in the British military context; in particular, on the barriers to help-seeking with which victim-survivors in this context are faced. Next, I discuss the conceptual interventions which my study makes in taking seriously the role of gender and of gendered militarism in shaping experiences of domestic abuse in the British military. I draw together the arguments presented in the preceding chapters to argue that the particular ways in which domestic abuse is experienced in the British military context are neither coincidental nor apolitical, but rather, are shaped and produced by the gendered social relations of militarism. Moreover, I argue that experiences of domestic abuse in this context are not only shaped by militarism in a unidirectional fashion, but rather that the ways in which domestic abuse is understood and responded to in this context
32 function to reproduce militarism. Therefore, I suggest that domestic abuse is something which is implicated in the production of militarism - and therefore of war - itself. Finally, the chapter reflects on some of the weaknesses of the research, pointing towards the gaps it leaves and the questions it poses for further study.
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