Instrumentos de recogida de datos

The selection of research methods used in this study sought to highlight the devastating impact of domestic abuse on the participants and identify cultural factors within Salford. To this end, a qualitative methodology was utilised. Research methods are of crucial importance to produce accurate information about the severity of domestic abuse (Desai & Saltzman, 2001). The central focus of discussion within the evidence base is the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), the most widely used tool for collating quantitative information on domestic abuse (Straus, 2007). Some studies applying the original CTS, designed to look at the way conflict occurs within relationships based on a behavioural checklist, suggested that women could be equally as

violent as men (Straus, 1979; Straus et al, 1980). However, such conclusions were heavily criticised for ignoring emotional and sexual abuse and the context in which the violence occurred: “The CTS did not give any weight to the social consequences or the effects of the violence, to how the recipient felt afterwards and what happened then. It ignored the traumatic life events that could follow and the way in which these differentially affect women and men” (Hague & Malos, 2005: p13). In other words, gender roles were ignored and social contexts rendered meaningless.

A revised conflict tactics scale was devised (CTS2) which includes references to psychological aggression, sexual coercion, negotiation and injury (Straus et al, 1996). The revised scale sought to focus on the experience of domestic abuse as well as its frequency, however, criticisms remain. Dobash & Dobash (2004) highlight many limitations of the CTS tools. Firstly, intent and severity are often lost in establishing who committed violent acts. Discussions around ‘kicking’ for example could be seriously misconstrued. A woman kicking a man in the leg who was attempting to strangle her is very different to a man kicking his pregnant partner in the stomach. Yet, within the parameters of the CTS, these two acts cannot be distinguished without further qualitative study. The nature and intent of violent acts committed by men and women differ greatly with women’s acts of self-defence being labelled as violent attacks. Although the CTS2 does consider emotional and psychological abuse, it does not clearly define what this is. Dobash & Dobash refer to the question of whether the participant has ever made threats to leave, listed under the category of psychological abuse, with no consideration as to the context in which the ‘threat’ is made. Thus, according to the CTS2, an abused woman stating her intention to leave her abusive partner could be considered psychologically abusive towards him. Again, the CTS2 scale fails to differentiate between the nature and intent of verbal threats and to delineate verbal and physical abuse. Thus, punching and kicking acts are grouped together with shouting and screaming. This could produce

misleading results if the male partner is perpetrating acts of violence and the female partner is shouting and screaming at him to stop.

Studies using CTS methods can produce misleading findings. Nazroo (1995) undertook quantitative research into domestic abuse using the CTS and found approximately equal numbers of violent incidents perpetrated by men and women. However, when he directly interviewed the participants he found that male violence was far more severe with women sustaining 100% of the most serious injuries and mental trauma. Another study identified that, of 22 men who had previously identified as victims of domestic abuse, 13 had actually been perpetrators of the violence. When re-interviewed, 13 of 46 men in a similar study admitted that they had never been victims of domestic abuse (SECRU, 2002). Self-reported violence always relies on the honesty of the participant, whether male or female, but one can surely assume that the many women who flee their homes to refuges are, indeed, genuine victims of abuse whereas men are rarely forced to leave their homes (Christodoulou, 2011).

A purely act-based approach to researching domestic abuse, augmented by CTS tools, inevitably reduces women’s experiences to a series of isolated acts that “are stripped of theoretical and social meanings and, as such, provide an inadequate basis for describing or explaining the violent acts of men and women” (Dobash & Dobash, 2004: p332).  Fundamentally, the CTS tools do little to inform or understand the experiential aspect of domestic abuse, seeking to focus instead on who does what to whom and how often. That the CTS tools have been misguidedly co-opted as evidence of gender symmetry within abusive relationships demonstrates lack of clarity and failure to gain any real insight into a profoundly damaging issue. Moreover, the CTS tools assume that couple violence is associated with disagreement and conflict (McHugh & Frieze, 2006). However, Johnson’s category of intimate terrorism does not reflect disagreement or conflict, but specifically abuse and control. Intimate terrorism is based on a cycle of coercion and control inflicted by one person on another, often

unpredictably with no obvious trigger (Hoff, 1990). It does not, therefore, represent mutual conflict or any other conflict per se. To consider how conflictoccurs within these relationships is missing the point. Abuse is an entirely separate concept. My point is that the CTS tools use purely quantitative methods to document and analyse a highly personal and emotionally damaging experience, the nature of which can never be fully captured by quantitative methods.

The dangers of reducing the complex dynamics of domestic abuse to a series of ticks on a checklist within a survey without further qualitative exploration of the intention behind the violent act, the context and the physical and emotional impact of the violence, are evident. Without knowledge of the context in which the violent acts take place, it is simply not possible to reject the notion that women use violence primarily in self-defence and/or retaliation (Johnson, 1995; Saunders, 2002; Dobash & Dobash, 2004). Moreover, discussions about context must take into account historical precedents in which the private institution of marriage contributed to the patriarchal domination of women in an environment that was portrayed as safe but effectively trapped women in violent situations that were concealed from public view (Dobash & Dobash, 1979; Dobash & Dobash, 1984; Pleck, 1988; Dobash & Dobash, 2001; Warrington, 2001). Anderson (2010) further states that, “it is not the frequency or the severity of acts of control and violence but rather the location of the perpetrators and victims who experience the acts that is gendered” (p731-732) and, as such, researchers must consider the context of gender rather than the context of violence. The gendered and cultural structures of domestic abuse are effectively hidden by interpreting situational couple violence as intimate terrorism which negates its heavily gendered discourse. Qualitative approaches offer alternatives to positivistic quantitative studies claiming validity using survey methods. To present a more balanced view of domestic abuse as an issue, my study sought to restore participants’ abuse experiences to the social and cultural backdrop against which they occur. Butler provided some means of doing this. Her notion of performativity enabled a discussion

of domestic abuse that took into account cultured practices of gender identities that unconsciously influenced abused women and the options available to them. Other research approaches such as phenomenology, grounded theory or case study might support the testimonies of the women in my study but at the cost of cultural insights from the locality in which the women lived. An ethnographic approach was able to identify factors in the location of Salford as key features of domestic abuse. Although qualitative research has its limitations, its interpretive frameworks provide a more fully-rounded picture of women’s domestic abuse experiences. An ethnographic approach enabled an examination of how damaging cultural myths about domestic abuse arise.