Gender, Power and Relationships

Gender, power and relationships

The publication of Gender and Power in Families (Routledge 1990) marked a milestone in the application of feminist thinking to therapeutic work with families and brought important new ideas into the thinking and practice of students, trainers and professionals. This second volume of contributions from leading practitioners shows how these ideas have been taken up by those working with different approaches in a variety of settings, and reflects the move away from a model of therapists as experts to one of therapists as collaborators who put their knowledge at the disposal of the client. Two areas of work which have been particularly challenging to feminist-informed systemic approaches are those of sexual and physical abuse and ethnicity. The chapters in this book explore and extend previous debates by addressing some of the contradictions and dilemmas inherent in this work. The book also considers gendered experience in changing family forms, such as stepfamilies, as well as the place of men within these structures. It explores gendered aspects of HIV prevention, and describes a new approach to work with women drug addicts, and sets these different perspectives in the context of an overview of feminist theories of the family. The contributors: Robert Bor, Charlotte Burck, Nollaig O’Reilly Byrne, Jane Dutton Conn, Barbara Dale, Gwyn Daniel, Peter Emerson, Stephen Frosh, Virginia Goldner, Gill Gorell Barnes, Sharon Henessy, Elsa Jones, Sebastian Kraemer, Annie Lau, Imelda Colgan McCarthy, Robert Palmer, Lawrence Ratna, Heather Salt, Lynne Segal, Gerrilyn Smith, Gillian Walker, Maria Wheeler, Julie Wilkes.

Gender, power and relationships

Edited by Charlotte Burck and Bebe Speed

London and New York

First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001. © 1995 The editors for the collection, and individual contributors for each chapter. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

0–415–10636–2 (hbk) 0–415–10637–0 (pbk) 0-203-13475-3 Master e-book ISBN 0-203-18549-8 (Glassbook Format)

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Charlotte Burck and Bebe Speed 1 The construction of gender in family therapy Elsa Jones 2 The wounded prince and the women who love him Gillian Walker and Virginia Goldner 3 Abuse, risk and protection: a Fifth Province approach to an adolescent sexual offence Nollaig O’Reilly Byrne and Imelda Colgan McCarthy 4 Reclaiming a female mind from the experience of child sexual abuse: a developing conversation between writers and editors Gill Gorell Barnes and Sharon Henessy 5 Hierarchy in families where sexual abuse is an issue Gerrilyn Smith

vii xi 1 7 24

46

69 86

6 Autonomy and connection: gendered thinking in a statutory agency dealing with child sexual abuse Jane Dutton Conn

100

7 Gender, power and relationships: ethno-cultural and religious issues Annie Lau

120

8 Race and gender issues in adult psychiatry Lawrence Ratna and Maria Wheeler

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9 Dangerous liaisons: issues of gender and power relationships in HIV prevention and care Heather Salt, Robert Bor and Robert Palmer 10 The importance of being connected: implications for work with women addicted to drugs Barbara Dale and Peter Emerson

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11 Moving on: gender beliefs in divorce and stepfamily process Charlotte Burck and Gwyn Daniel

185

12 What are fathers for? Sebastian Kraemer

202

13 Unpacking masculinity: from rationality to fragmentation Stephen Frosh

218

14 The social construction of a caring career Julie Wilkes

232

15 Feminism and the family Lynne Segal

248

Index

266

Contributors

Robert Bor CPsychol AFBPsS is a clinical and counselling psychologist and family therapist. He worked for five years as an HIV/AIDS counsellor and applies a systems approach to psychotherapy with people with medical problems. He is a senior lecturer in counselling psychology and director of the Medical Counselling Unit at the City University, London. Charlotte Burck is a family therapist, trainer, and organising tutor at the Tavistock Clinic, and a clinical supervisor and teacher at the Institute of Family Therapy. She is currently involved in researching the process of change in family therapy and its connection with gender. Nollaig O’Reilly Byrne MB FRCP is a consultant child psychiatrist and senior faculty member of family therapy training in the Department of Child and Family Psychiatry, Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin. With her colleagues, Fifth Province Associates, she has published articles and presented workshops in a variety of national and international fora. Jane Dutton Conn MPhil is a qualified teacher, social worker and a registered family therapist. She is a senior lecturer in social work at Middlesex University and a staff member of the Institute of Family Therapy. She has published widely on systemic ideas and gender differences. Barbara Dale is a social worker and family therapist at the Tavistock Clinic where she is organising tutor of the MSc in Family Therapy and Vice Dean. Her current research relates to gender patterns in parenting and family illness. She is a trainer at the Institute of Family Therapy. Gwyn Daniel is director for training at the Institute of Family Therapy and codirector of the Oxford Family Institute. She is co-author (with Charlotte Burck) of Gender and Family Therapy (London: Karnac, forthcoming) and is engaged in a research project on growing up in stepfamilies.

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Contributors

Peter Emerson MA(Cantab) MSc(Family Therapy) is a social worker and family therapist in Norfolk involved in consultation and training. He is undertaking a clinical PhD in Child and Family Psychology and his area of interest is the impact of feminist developmental theory on assumptions about male development. Stephen Frosh is a senior lecturer in psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London and a consultant clinical psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic. He is the author of several books, including Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis and Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. Virginia Goldner is on the senior faculty of the Ackerman Institute, New York, where she is co-director with Gillian Walker of the Gender and Violence project. She has written numerous articles integrating feminist theory, systems theory and psychoanalytic theory which address issues of gender and power. Gill Gorell Barnes works as a therapist with individuals, couples and families at the Institute of Family Therapy and the Tavistock Clinic, London. She teaches and lectures internationally and writes as much as she can. Sharon Henessy has worked in a variety of business settings in the USA and in Europe. She currently lives and works in America with her two children and intends to write more in the future than she has done in the past. Elsa Jones is a family therapist and clinical psychologist working freelance as therapist, trainer and consultant. She is one of the British pioneers of the attempts to integrate feminist critiques with systemic theory and practice. She has recently published books on working with adult survivors of child sexual abuse and on developments in the Milan-systemic therapies. Sebastian Kraemer BA MRCP FRCPsych is a consultant child and family psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic and Whittington Hospital, London. His principle interests and publications are in family therapy and psychosomatic disorders, training of child and adolescent psychiatrists and the origins and roles of fatherhood. He is married with two sons. Annie Lau is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist working for Redbridge Healthcare Trust and clinical director of the Child and Adolescent Services, Mental Health Care group. She is a member of the Institute of Family Therapy, London. Of Chinese ethnic origin, she teaches and publishes on transcultural family work and consults widely on race and ethnicity for courts and local authorities.

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Imelda Colgan McCarthy PhD MSocSc is director of the Families and Systemic Therapies programme, board member of the Family Studies Centre, and lecturer in social policy and social work at University College, Dublin. With her colleagues, Fifth Province Associates, she has published and presented on child sexual abuse, violence, power and gender throughout Europe and North America. Robert Palmer has been a director of London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and a founder worker for the East London HIV resource, The Globe Centre. He is now the HIV and AIDS development officer for the London borough of Tower Hamlets. Lawrence Ratna MBBS DPM MRCPsych is a consultant psychiatrist at Barnet General Hospital and associate professor at St Georges University. He is the author of The Practice of Psychiatric Crisis Intervention and Family Therapy with the Elderly Mentally Ill. He has worked for twenty-six years with families, the elderly, crisis intervention and community care. Heather Salt is head of Health and Counselling Psychology Services at Northwick Park Hospital and is a consultant lecturer for City University. She has clinical, research and training experience in HIV/AIDS and has published works nationally and internationally. Lynne Segal is professor of gender studies at Middlesex University. She has published a number of books on feminism, including most recently Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, and Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (edited with Mary McIntosh). She is currently writing a book on heterosexuality. Gerrilyn Smith is a chartered clinical psychologist and family therapist, and clinical director of Limewood, a therapeutic residential unit for young women, many of whom have been sexually abused. She was course lecturer for a government funded initiative for Area Child Protection Committees to develop assessment and treatment services for sexually abused children and their families. Bebe Speed worked for ten years at the Family Institute, Cardiff before moving to Birmingham in 1989, where she now combines a private practice with clinical work in the National Health Service, teaching and co-editing the Journal of Family Therapy. Gillian Walker, co-director with Virginia Goldner of Ackerman Institute, New York’s Gender and Violence Project, is the author of two books, Brief Therapy with Single Parent Families and In Midst of Winter: Systemic Therapy with Families, Couples and Individuals with AIDS Infection.

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Contributors

Maria Wheeler SRN RMN is a counsellor and systemic family therapist in Hertfordshire. She started her career in community psychiatric nursing, gaining experience in crisis intervention, family therapy and lecturing, and trained in systemic family therapy at Kensington Consultation Centre where she now works as a tutor supervisor and consultant. Julie Wilkes is researching social constructionism and management at Loughborough University. She has an MSc in social work, and a Diploma in Systemic Management from Kensington Consultation Centre. She works as an Education Adviser for CCETSW and has edited a book on Sexuality, Young People and Care.

Acknowledgements

To the contributors who have engaged with us so thoughtfully in the recursive process of producing this book. Our special thanks to Jan Cooper who was centrally involved in organising the Third Conference on Feminism and Family Therapy in 1992 – where many of the contributors to this volume presented their ideas – and in the conception of this book. Our thanks also to the Henry Gorell Barnes Trust for a grant towards the cost of the conference, and hence to this volume. To our mothers: to Charlotte’s who by training as an engineer against great odds, taught her the possibilities of challenge, and to Bebe’s who by being ‘only a housewife’ provoked her to rebel.

Introduction

Charlotte Burck and Bebe Speed

This book reflects the continuing development of ideas and practice arising from the interplay between feminist and systemic thinking. The first British book about gender issues in family therapy Gender and Power in Families (Perelberg and Miller 1990) put the examination of gender and power more firmly on family therapy’s agenda. Many of its chapters argued for the incorporation of a feminist perspective into family therapy, a position which, by this volume’s publication in 1995, seems much more taken for granted. This present volume shows the way in which practitioners have taken further some of the ideas addressed by those authors in areas such as child sexual abuse and race and cultural issues and also turns the gender lens towards further issues such as violence within partnerships, drug abuse, AIDS, working with child perpetrators of sexual abuse and post-divorce and stepfamily process. Reflecting the broadening use of a gender focus, this volume contains chapters which range from applications in contexts wider than the family such as adult psychiatry and social services, to the intimate context of two women’s joint experience of a therapeutic relationship. Family therapy’s growing interest in, and influence by, feminism is part of a wider context of helping professions, such as individual therapy (e.g. Ernst and Maguire 1987), social work (e.g. Langan and Day 1992), and clinical psychology (e.g. Ussher and Nicholson 1992) developing similarly. Feminist influenced family therapy in Britain should also be viewed in the context of similar work in other countries and of a growing international network of family therapists concerned with gender and countering oppressive practice.1 Many British practitioners were originally inspired by the work of American feminist family therapists and found Goldner’s ideas (e.g. 1985; 1987) to be particularly congenial. In the first chapter of this book Jones explores the interaction between feminism and family therapy and highlights some current issues for feminist practitioners.

2 Charlotte Burck and Bebe Speed Subsequent chapters examine a variety of applications of feminist informed systemic thinking and therapy. The last chapter of this volume does not concern therapy directly; rather, in giving an overview of the development of feminist ideas about the family in its changing political and social contexts, Segal offers family therapists a detailed view of the feminist critique and its development over time. Feminism is often assumed to be a homogeneous whole, particularly when attacked and stereotyped by its critics and the media. As Segal and Jones both indicate, it is more accurate to talk about feminisms because of the diverse and sometimes even contradictory ways in which feminists conceptualise and apply their thinking about gendered arrangements. Contributors to this book are no exception, offering implicitly and explicitly, a range of opinions of what constitutes a feminist view, from radical feminism on the one hand to gender sensitivity on the other. We think it is important that such diversity be supported and that the growing respect within feminism for difference arising from different racial, cultural and class backgrounds as well as ideological positions, continues to be fostered. Contributors to this volume also reflect a range of views about what constitutes systemic theory and practice. Although all agree that systemic implies a focus on wider context and the significance of relationship and interaction, they diverge considerably according to which particular systemic approaches have most influenced their work. There are significant differences too in the ways they borrow from such diverse theories as psychoanalysis and social constructionism to forge systemic connections with those parts that traditional systemic thinking did not reach. The feminist critique has profoundly influenced family therapy in recent years in drawing attention specifically to the gendered nature of clients’ and therapists’ experiences. It has also radically affected systemic theory and practice in a more general way. Feminist emphasis on the wider context of gendered power relations has encouraged a greater awareness of the significance of other wider contexts in shaping our clients’ and our own lives. Feminist thinking has also, via work in the areas of sexual and physical abuse, fundamentally challenged the traditional systemic view that all participants in an interactional pattern contribute equally to maintaining that pattern. This has enabled practitioners to think more explicitly about the idea that some individuals within families may be more influential than others in maintaining any pattern, not just one where there is an abuse of power. Connected with this, some systemic practitioners have recently shifted ground in their view of the acceptability of working with individuals and the admissibility of individuals’ inner experience in understanding problems and relationships. Work with individuals in areas of particular interest to feminist therapists, such as sexual abuse

Introduction

3

and violence (see Goldner et al. 1990), has contributed to a growing acceptance of the relevance of the intrapersonal level in other areas of work. Many family therapists nowadays (e.g. Pinsof 1994) draw more explicitly on theories of individual functioning and recognise the usefulness and even the necessity of thinking and intervening at multiple levels to respond to complex problems. In recent years, feminist family therapy has also strongly influenced a change in style within the systemic approaches away from a technical, arm’s length, distant expert approach towards that of a collaborative model with an emphasis on empathy and mutuality, where therapists recognise their ideas, their position and special knowledge but respect and learn from those of their clients (as shown here particularly in Gorell Barnes and Henessy’s account of their work together). Feminist therapists have strongly challenged a tendency within the helping professions (fed by wider social beliefs) to hold women unfairly responsible for their own and other family members’ difficulties. For example, Smith (Chapter 5) argues that professionals (including some family therapists) have often over-emphasised the responsibility of mothers in patterns of child sexual abuse and that it is necessary to challenge such ‘mother blaming’. Trained to see the interactional aspects of behaviour, however, systemic practitioners with feminist views have had to struggle with the issue of what contribution women themselves do make to their problems, both in their personal and wider social and political contexts. Challenging ‘women blaming’ should not lead to exonerating women from any responsibility at all, as this would diminish women’s sense of effectiveness and agency altogether. Work on the ways in which women’s premises about gender affect their lives (as in Walker and Goldner, Chapter 2) can enable women to take appropriate responsibility for their share in the perpetuation of difficulties. This issue is also addressed by Salt, Bor and Palmer (Chapter 9), who show how, in the context of HIV and AIDS, changes in girls’ and women’s attitudes to responsibility for their own sexuality may be life and death issues. In contrast to Smith’s view of the importance of removing blame from mothers, Henessy (Chapter 4), writing from a client’s perspective, describes how vital it has been to acknowledge her mother’s responsibility in her father’s abuse of her. Such differences indicate the importance of holding in mind both our culture’s tendency to blame mothers and the complexities and variations in women’s own experience. As the examination of gender difference proceeds, first driven by women but now joined by growing numbers of men, definitions of masculinity and men’s experience are on the line as never before. Kraemer (Chapter 12), speaking from personal experience, explores what fathers are for in their children’s early years, and Burck and Daniel (Chapter 11) address this question in relation to the experiences of parenting when

4 Charlotte Burck and Bebe Speed couples separate, divorce and remarry. Traditional family therapy has been criticised by feminists for protecting men in families while pushing women to change. While Frosh (Chapter 13) puts the case for why men’s vulnerability should be a focus in therapy, Walker and Goldner (Chapter 2) skilfully unravel societal assumptions about the entitlement of men based on this vulnerability in a violent relationship. How to address these issues without having men’s tears ‘wash away’ the reality of male power (Segal 1990) and without replicating the neglect of women’s needs for the sake of men’s, are current dilemmas for practitioners working with families. Some of the different ways in which men and women manage stress and vulnerability and how and whether that difference is dealt with is also crucially relevant, as Conn (Chapter 6) shows, for social workers responding to child abuse. Systemic thinking, with its emphasis on multiple views, has taught us that it partly depends on where we stand in a system as to what we see. The recent influence of social constructionist thinking underlines the significance of with whom we are standing in also determining what we see. Contributors to this volume reflect the wide range of views within feminism and the systemic field about the status of reality and how and what we can know (see Speed 1991). Although all the contributors to this volume would agree that patriarchy is a reality, they take different positions on the nature of knowledge and the possibility of ‘objectivity’ which in turn affects their practice. For example, Dale and Emerson (Chapter 10) write about their use of research findings about women’s experience in transforming their way of working with women addicted to drugs, while Wilkes (Chapter 14), drawing on social constructionism, brings into question the validity of the notion ‘women’s experience’ and challenges the reader to reflect on the social purpose of the stories – including those about women’s experience – we tell. Burck and Daniel (Chapter 11) use ideas about the social constructions of mothering and fathering to enable different ways of parenting to develop when couples separate or remarry. Feminists take different positions on how they construct the fact of patriarchy, and its meanings. For example, Wolfe (1993) asserts that women are at risk of underestimating the power they have won by continuing to see themselves as powerless victims. While power relations are partially constructed, i.e. influenced by beliefs about power (see Burck and Daniel forthcoming), they also have some reality basis; they do not just reflect a point of view. A balance of power between the sexes exists (Elias 1970) and both varies in different social contexts and changes over time. Therapists have to be aware of the realities of their clients’ lives – the constraints that not only gendered relations but also the social inequalities that poverty, race and class impose. But they must also monitor the degree to which they and their clients construct

Introduction

5

those as completely disempowering, when they might be frameable in a more empowering way. Aspects of race, culture and gender interact in highly complex ways and raise particular dilemmas for practitioners working cross-culturally or cross-racially. We have to beware of talking of culture as if cultural values in a society are universal. In all societies there will be diverse groups and subcultures, with different views and with differential access to decision making. The assumption that gender constructions are problematic and constraining for both women and men in all cultures raises challenging questions for therapists. How do we show respect for the family’s culture if we think there are aspects which clearly disadvantage and even abuse women? How do we work without abandoning our own principles and values, yet keep in mind that our own values are culture-specific? How can we engage family members in being open about the advantages and constraints of their gendered interactions in a racist context where minority cultures are under attack? Can women raise their voices against some of their culture’s practices without fearing the devaluation of their culture as a whole? These contradictions are painful and not easily solved. Lau (Chapter 7) and Ratna and Wheeler (Chapter 8) struggle with the issues of balancing a respect for cultural difference with enabling greater manoeuvrability for women (who are often particularly constrained because they are the ‘culture carriers’). Feminist family therapists have become skilled at holding contradictory and complex positions and avoiding a polarised and oppositional stance. Byrne and McCarthy (Chapter 3) demonstrate the usefulness of maintaining rather than resolving contradictions when working with clients and professionals in the area of sexual violence, where professionals often push for clarity and early resolution. This move from certainty towards curiosity about the complexities which power and gender raise for us all has led to an atmosphere of growing respect for difference within the feminist family therapy field. The current fashion for the championing of a position which recognises ‘necessary contradictions’ and ‘complexity’ is far removed from the propositions of family therapy of former years as well as from some earlier feminist positions. Accepting the legitimacy of contradictions offers a way out of seemingly irresolvable situations and is thus a compelling position. For many feminists though (for example, Kitzinger and Perkins 1993), for whom feminism provides a moral framework proposing views about good and bad, right and wrong, this may be far from satisfactory. Many of the practitioners in this volume have developed their thinking about gender differences and power in the areas of men’s violence against women, child sexual abuse, AIDS and drug addiction. These are situations in which women and men

6 Charlotte Burck and Bebe Speed face dangerous consequences of gender premises and they are particularly challenging and emotional areas of work. It is in such relationships, where gendered power relations are seen in their most extreme form, that we can most clearly grasp some of the central questions concerning gender and the crucial importance of change. A fundamental aspect of the therapeutic project for those concerned with issues of justice is, without underplaying societal constraints, to challenge taken-for-granted gender assumptions – enabling both a different view and a choice of ways to conduct our intimate relationships. This is also the project of this book.

NOTE 1 The editors are currently involved in planning an International Conference on Gender and Family Therapy in Britain in 1996.

REFERENCES Burck, C. and Daniel, D. (forthcoming) Gender and Family Therapy, London: Karnac. Elias, N. (1970) ‘Sociology of knowledge: new perspectives (Part 2)’, Sociology 355– 370. Ernst, S. and Maguire, M. (eds) (1987) Living with the Sphinx, London: Women’s Press. Goldner, V. (1985) ‘Feminism and family therapy’, Family Process 24: 31–47. —— (1987) ‘Generation and gender: normative and covert hierarchies’, Family Process 27: 17–31. Kitzinger, C. and Perkins, R. (1993) Changing Our Minds: Lesbian Feminism and Psychology, London: Only Women’s Press. Langan, R. and Day, L. (eds) (1992) Women, Oppression and Social Work. Issues in Antidiscriminatory Practice, London: Routledge. Perelberg, R. J. and Miller, A. C. (eds) (1990) Gender and Power in Families, London: Routledge. Pinsof, W. (1994) ‘An overview of integrative problem centred therapy: a synthesis of family and individual psychotherapies’, Journal of Family Therapy 16: 103–121. Segal, L. (1990) Slow Motion. Changing Masculinities. Changing Men, London: Virago Press. Speed, B. (1991) ‘Reality exists O.K?: an argument against constructivism and social constructionism’, Journal of Family Therapy 13: 395–411. Ussher, J. and Nicholson, P. (eds) (1992) Gender Issues in Clinical Psychology, London: Routledge. Wolfe, N. (1993) Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the 21st Century, London: Chatto & Windus.

1

The construction of gender in family therapy1

Elsa Jones

BACKGROUND Family therapists were slow, compared, for example, with psychoanalysts (e.g. Mitchell 1974) to allow the voices of feminist critique to influence theory or practice. Many explanations for this might be advanced. Family therapy got off the ground in the 1950s, when the ideology of the return to ‘traditional family forms’ (i.e. father as breadwinner and mother as home-maker) was in its heyday, following the trauma of the Second World War, and accompanying the need to free up jobs (done by women during the war) for returning male soldiers. During the 1960s and 1970s, when resurgent feminism started to question the traditional roles of men and women and the idealisation of the family itself, family therapy was just beginning to find its feet, to build its theories and to expand its applications. It might be that family therapy, as a relative newcomer amongst the psychotherapies, avoided internal dissension in order to maintain strong boundaries while engaged in establishing itself as a viable new psychotherapeutic approach. We could therefore only allow ourselves to begin to question our practices when we started to feel sufficiently secure. In Britain, the feminist critiques of theory, and attempts to establish gendersensitive practice, received their first impetus from the work of four American family therapists, Betty Carter, Peggy Papp, Olga Silverstein and Marianne Walters (Carter et al. 1984; Walters et al. 1988), who brought their Women’s Project workshops to the UK in the early 1980s, and from the writings of American pioneers such as Rachel Hare-Mustin (1986) and Virginia Goldner (e.g. 1985a, 1985b). Following this, a group often British women family therapists met in Cardiff in 1986: this small beginning has, to date, given birth to three conferences, two books (Perelberg and Miller 1990, and the present one), the creation of local networks, and many other, less specific consequences. An increasingly rich international network of feminist family therapy

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Elsa Jones

writings has become an invaluable source of mutual influence for women and men therapists.

FEMINISM IN FAMILY THERAPY When we first started in Britain to challenge orthodox ideas about gender roles, inequity, and power abuse in families, it was done with much hesitation and a sense of breaking taboos. Many of the feminist critics of accepted family therapy theory and practice had long been schooled in the discipline of feminist politics and awareness. Nevertheless, we had also taken on board the idea, mediated through our trainers and colleagues, that these views were personal, value-laden and political, and did not belong in the therapy room, and thus we continued to exercise self-censorship. Expressing an interest in the gendered arrangements of clients’ lives, in the history of their gender socialisation, and in the differential access they might have to decision making or money was seen as tantamount to exerting undue influence, and might attract the label of ‘hysterical feminist’. Yet somehow, not paying attention to these issues, or to the use and abuse of power between therapist and client, was not regarded as demonstrating personal, value-laden and political views. Thus we all, for a long time, supported the status quo, and kept silent about many issues, even though, as systemic thinkers, we also knew that it is impossible not to communicate, and that what we were perforce communicating must have been seen by clients as condoning the violence, narrowing of options, unhappiness and frustrations that they were experiencing. Feminist critiques arise from theoretical stances which offer the tools to analyse and deconstruct the premises underlying received truths in family therapy, as in many other disciplines. The exploration of the construction of gender within individual, familial and social contexts has often been easier for therapists to take on board, whereas the wider implications of a theoretical and political analysis of androcracy2 has remained somewhat daunting or unpalatable to many practitioners. This may reflect the a-theoretical stance of many family therapists, for whom practical application remains the priority. Thinking and talking about gender in family therapy remained, for some time, a marginal activity. Increasing lip-service was paid to it, and many brief seminars on gender (and race) were added to the ends of training courses, when they could be fitted in. Family therapy teams began to talk with each other about their own responses to the gendered aspects of client dilemmas, and even – carefully! – about the way that gender could be seen to be relevant to the structures and relationships of therapists’

Construction of gender in family therapy 9 working lives. While it may have seemed innovatory to consider gender influences for the purposes of therapy, it began to seem downright dangerous to turn the same lens on to working relationships and questions about pay scales, status and power. However, for many, gender remained – and to some extent remains – a ‘woman’s issue’. Conferences or workshops with the words ‘gender’ or ‘feminism’ in their titles tended to attract men in the ratio of about 4–100. This situation has changed somewhat, largely perhaps because family therapy courses started to integrate ‘gender-sensitive’ training into their curriculae. Nevertheless, it is still sufficiently the case to warrant attention. It is as if ‘gender’ means ‘woman’. A similar phenomenon has been commented on by those working in the field of anti-racist training, where it seems that, for many, words like ‘racism’ or ‘race’ or ‘colour’ connotes problems that black people encounter. Thus gender is seen to be something women have, or have a problem with. There are of course many male family therapists who prove the exception to this rule (for example, Mason and Mason 1990; Reimers and Dimmock 1990; Doherty 1991; Kraemer 1991 and Chapter 12 this volume; Frosh, Chapter 13 this volume), but it remains true that the proportion of men attending forums such as, for example, the 1992 ‘Gender, Power and Relationships’ Conference, continue to be extremely small. An associated phenomenon is that those (predominantly women) who write and offer workshops on gender-related themes tend to become ‘ghettoised’; that is, they begin to be seen as people who are able only to speak on gender, and may risk being edged out on to the margins of the family therapy field. At the same time that feminist perspectives were beginning to be included in family therapy approaches, the entire mental health field was being required to come to terms with the revelation of widespread sexual and physical abuse of children, and to develop and refine therapeutic approaches to working with all the members of systems within which abuse had occurred. It seems to me that this (client-driven) phenomenon, together with the feminist focus on social, cultural and familial structures which embody misogyny and constrict the psychological and relational development of women and of men, has been the most significant influence for change in the work of family therapists. Family therapists, like those working in other models, have had to learn from their clients how to integrate ideas in relation to mutuality and empowerment, and have looked to feminist therapy, as well as to new theoretical developments, for ideas about how to help clients free themselves from the tyranny of abusive relationships and beliefs. The recursiveness of the therapeutic process has meant that therapists themselves could not go through these processes without changing either. Although somewhat tardily, the practice and teaching of family therapy in Britain

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Elsa Jones

has been responsive to feminist critiques, and has even been described as exemplifying ‘the flowering of the “second wave” of feminist analysis and agitation: the move from a basic critique to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of systems theory and therapy’ (Goldner 1991: 341). It is relevant to note that here, as in the field of feminist scholarship generally, one must now speak of pluralities, i.e. of feminisms and feminist critiques, rather than of one unitary orthodoxy. The guidelines set out by the British Association of Family Therapy for training courses requires attention to be paid to the development of gender-sensitive therapy, in tandem with other anti-discriminatory (e.g. non-racist and anti-oppressive) stances towards practice. Workshops, articles and training curriculae testify to the fact that ‘gender’ is now out of the closet and on the agenda. However, it is crucial at this stage to avoid complacency. The research of Coleman (1990) and her colleagues in the USA3 makes it evident that the existence of professional guidelines for anti-sexist practice and gender-aware training does not guarantee that these matters will be given more than lip-service. Without fundamental changes in our theories and ourselves, the difficulties brought to the attention of family therapy by feminists will not alter our practice. Instead, a tokenist addendum will result in a superficial nod in the direction of ‘gender roles’, leaving untouched the difficult and risky territory of the social and political construction of gender, and the role played by therapists in the maintenance, adaptation or subversion of family systems which may operate to the advantage or disadvantage of some or all of their members.

DEVELOPMENTS IN FAMILY THERAPY At the same time that feminist voices were becoming part of the discourse of family therapy, the field also underwent other significant changes. Some family therapists became interested in exploring more democratic ways of working, and began to characterise the process of therapy and change as co-constructed between all the participants, all of whom (therapists and clients) were engaged in the creation and shift of meanings. Many therapists no longer described themselves as standing outside that which was being observed, but rather as subjective participant-observers together with clients. Radical ideas from other disciplines such as biology and chemistry changed the way in which mutual influence was characterised, so that family therapists became more interested in how to present their ideas so that these might usefully be taken up by clients, rather than assuming they could unilaterally cause clients to change in directions desirable to the therapist (cf. for example, Andersen 1987; Cecchin 1987; Hoffman 1990; Jones 1993).

Construction of gender in family therapy 11 The increased flexibility and diversity within the field of family therapy, together with a diminished concern with ideological purity, has meant that ideas from other psychotherapies, and other disciplines, can more easily be brought to bear on the thinking of family therapists in order to facilitate our attempts to make sense of the complexities with which we struggle in our desire for just and effective ways of working. Many of the family therapy practices characterised as belonging to ‘second order cybernetics’ are coherent with aspects of the practice of feminist therapy (e.g. Gilbert 1980): the idea that the therapist acknowledges and takes responsibility for the imbalance of power which exists at the beginning of therapy and works in such a way as to ‘shed power’ and allow clients to empower themselves; the greater openness and demystification of therapeutic processes, and the sharing of hypotheses and tentative ideas with clients; the willingness to explore the influence of contexts outside the family, such as androcracy, racism, or socioeconomic factors (Andersen 1990; Holland 1992; Jones 1991 and 1993; Waldegrave and Tapping 1990). In attempting to understand the difficulties experienced by an individual woman or man, alone or in interaction with each other and their wider families, we may need to consider more than the interactional systemic regularities of their mutual patterns of behaviour. If we look only at the patterns in the here-and-now we may fall into that familiar systemic trap of assuming that each participant disposes of equal access to choice, influence and power (cf. Goldner 1985a; Jones 1991). Thus we may usefully direct our attention to: (1) the ‘internal’ world of the individual; (2) their family history with its myths, gendered and other roles and its teachings about the nature of the world we inhabit; (3) the social and cultural context in which the individual (client and therapist) lives, and by which she or he is shaped; as well as (4) the observation of systemic regularities and the maintenance and change of interactional patterns (Goldner et al. 1990). Observation at any of the four levels described above may contradict observation at another level. One of the strengths of the systemic approach is that it enables us to take a ‘both/and’ perspective on contradictory data. The assumption that no one observation or position is exclusively true can enable us to experience the creative tension of struggling with ‘necessary contradictions’ (Goldner 1992). For example, a couple locked in a relationship where he is physically violent towards her and she repeatedly shows more concern for his vulnerability than for her own safety, may well be cooperating in the maintenance of a complementary system, and at the same time be acting on the basis of roles learned within their original families and their internalised assumptions of who and what they are. In addition, their assumptions and beliefs about the freedoms and constraints of their gendered roles will be shaped, as will those

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of their therapist, by economics and by the social and cultural construction of gender which permeates their lives at conscious as well as unnoticed levels of influence. The systemic paradigm and feminist theory may be seen as occupying contradictory positions in relation to each other when it comes to the consideration of problems such as inequity or power abuse in relationships. While feminism has focused, understandably, on issues concerning the status of women within androcratic society, systemic therapy has found it difficult to incorporate any thinking about inequity into its theory or practice, whether this applies to differences between people of varying gender, age, class, colour, race, economic status or ability. Family therapists continue to balk at acknowledging the easily observable differences in systemic influence between, for example, male and female, white and black, or adult and child within most societies, and continue to act and write as if the problem of power will disappear if we can find words to render it meaningless (cf. Simon 1993). Systemic therapists, understandably, are wary of fundamentalist positions about right and wrong, which would erode the valuable multi-positional ‘dis-position’ (Kearney et al. 1989; and see Byrne and McCarthy, Chapter 3 this volume) which renders us able not only to empathise with or understand the perspectives of all members of a client group, but, even more usefully, to bring new flexibilities, options, points of view and potential meanings into the explorations of the therapeutic system of which we form a part. The apparent polarity between feminist and systemic views is maintained by our failure to apply our own theories to our own dilemmas – we apparently find it difficult to maintain a ‘both/and’ position in relation to our own deeply-felt dilemmas (cf. Krüll 1987 for a very interesting examination of this issue).

THE DIFFICULTIES OF CHANGE Why is it so difficult for systemic therapists to deal with the problems raised by a contemplation of gendered relationships, or of power use and abuse in relationships? When family therapists pioneered the therapeutic inclusion of family contexts in the understanding of human problems, why have we so often shied away from a consideration of the wider cultural and political contexts within which we and our clients live? We have recently given ourselves permission to think again about the internal worlds of ourselves and our clients, and to include the self of the therapist as a relevant participant in the (mutual) influencing of the therapeutic endeavour. Can we become brave enough to include, consistently, speculations and hypotheses about the effect of cultural, social, political and historical patterns on the lives of our clients, even when such speculations may threaten our desire, as therapists, to consider

Construction of gender in family therapy 13 ourselves as even-handed, value-free and non-directive? However can we do evenhanded, equitable therapy when we ignore differences between our clients in regard to freedom of choice, sense of entitlement, economic power and other factors sensitive to the constraints of gender? It may be helpful to remind ourselves that Bateson, on whose ideas much of systemic therapy rests, pointed out that experiencing and struggling with contradiction or paradox invites curiosity, stimulates our interest, and can lead us to potentially fresh ideas and an opening up and diversification of our thinking (Bateson 1978). It may well be that those therapists who choose to work with families – and who often do so in teams, with or without one-way screens – bring to their work a particular talent for being comfortable with the tensions that arise from membership of more than one system, or from the holding of contradictory premises. Observation suggests that family therapists more than other therapists may have developed these talents in response to particular formative influences. Such influences would include growing up in families experiencing emigration, speaking more than one home language, subscribing to different religious or political beliefs, coming from different ethnic, racial or national groups, having parents divorce or living in stepfamilies, or being mobile in terms of home, school, or class. These kinds of experiences might lead a therapist to be comfortable at the margins of systems, to move easily from membership of one system (family/therapist) to that of another (therapist/team), or to respond creatively to the contemplation of different, contradictory or paradoxical ideas. Whatever its origins, such flexibility, if family therapists could lay claim to it, should help to maintain an openness to challenge in our thinking and our practice. However, family therapists do frequently avoid the tension generated by attempts to include the influence of wider contexts in our understanding of the problems experienced by women and men in interaction. Why is this? While many reasons could be advanced, a few that seem particularly relevant to current family therapy practice will be discussed.

Being part of the system under observation Therapists are as influenced as their clients are by the gender discourses4 which – often outside awareness – shape, constrain and determine our assumptions about normality or deviation (Jones 1991). It may therefore be much harder for us to notice how the premises, beliefs, identities or actions which arise from these discourses function in a way which makes the choices and well-being of some participants central and obvious to all those interacting in a system, while the choices, well-being, etc. of

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other participants may become marginal or invisible. As Foucault (1980) has pointed out, a dominant discourse functions in such a way as to silence the voices and perceptions of the subjugated narrative. This means that even those of goodwill may not think that particular practices or taken-for-granted behaviours are unjust or exceptionable, until and unless their system of meaning is perturbed sufficiently by new input to make it possible for them to think and see differently. A few examples from recent history may flesh out this point. While slavery was regarded as ‘normal’ and acceptable to many societies, people who would have considered themselves to be decent, religious and compassionate used slave labour or profited directly or indirectly from it. Some great British cities still show the glorious architectural consequences of the financial profits of slavery. The racism which was one of the concomitants of – and perhaps the necessary precondition for – slavery, has only relatively recently been challenged on a large scale, and anyone living in Britain today will know that this challenge has far from completed the transformation of society it seeks to bring about. A visit to any major art gallery in the western world will show the observer a multitude of images of the romanticisation of rape, dressed up, usually, in mythological clothing, but fitting well with predominant social attitudes towards women’s control of their own bodies, and gendered premises about the meaning of consent. We are so accustomed to living in a society where women’s bodies are displayed to the observer in a range of contexts and guises (Berger 1972), from the commodities of the advertising industry to the cheap thrill of nude ‘availability’ throughout the media, that we do not notice that the passivity with which she sits under the gaze of the observer is part and parcel of the construction of the female gender role. Those who point out these and similar aspects of ‘brainwashing’ about the proper conduct of femininity and masculinity are frequently dismissed as extremist. We are all like the islanders who, on the first arrival of Captain Cook’s ship (Bateson 1978), stopped ‘seeing’ it because its scale did not fit with their previous assumptions about what was possible. Our blindness is reinforced by our fear that an acknowledgement that, in certain societies at certain times, some may be more equal than others, will diminish our valuable theoretical insights about interactional reciprocity. In addition, the continued ethos of non-partiality makes us fearful of seeming to ‘take sides’. We should perhaps remind ourselves that non-partiality may simply be the acceptable face of that icon of our discarded medical and psychological cradle, namely objectivity. As Bertrand Russell said, objectivity is ‘a delusion which other lunatics share’ (Russell 1953).

Construction of gender in family therapy 15 The taboo on doing ‘world therapy’ Family therapists often feel distressed by the accusation that we are in the business of maintaining family cohesion at all costs, and many clients are anxious about seeing us because they also hold this assumption about our likely bias. Family therapists will protest vociferously that we are even-handed and open-minded, and seek to help people achieve the outcomes they would consider best and most achievable for themselves. Nevertheless, many a young (and not-so-young) family therapist has been admonished not to take on matters which lie outside their own sphere of influence. These matters generally seem to include money (for example, the mother of several young children cannot leave her violent partner because she has no job skills, nowhere to go, there are long waiting lists for housing, and the women’s refuges are full and underfunded); politics (for example, the depression of those without work or prospects of work, who learn to blame themselves rather than the policies which require ‘acceptable’ levels of unemployment); and the social construction of gender (which includes the taboo on male vulnerability or female rage, so that men ‘self-medicate’ on alcohol or violence, and women are drugged into silence by medically prescribed ‘tranquillisers’). Yet inclusion of these matters in our understanding of, and work with, clients would surely indicate that we are being true to our theories which require us to see individual behaviour within its many influential contexts.

Paralysing paradoxes or necessary contradictions? At times, family therapists find that those stances and premises which seem most likely to enable us to work ethically come into conflict with one another, and lead to a fear of proceeding on the routes of curiosity, challenge and support which might otherwise have been taken, and so produce a kind of paralysis demoralising for the therapist, and probably unhelpful to the client. This clash of values seems most typically to occur in cross-cultural work; that is, where the therapist comes from a different ethnic, religious, class or cultural group to the client’s. Thus the therapist’s commitment to working in such a way that each family member may have the space and permission to speak freely, to have equal access to therapeutic validation, and to explore the possibilities of diversity and choice5 may appear to be in conflict with family, cultural or group rules which restrict the options of some family members for reasons that seem acceptable to the dominant ideology in the family. If the therapist hypothesises that the expression of these dominant norms constitutes part and parcel

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of the difficulties the family experiences, or sees the family’s request for help as constituting a desire that the therapist should make an aberrant or rebellious member acquiesce to a subordinate role, this will be experienced as a dilemma. The therapist’s desire to be respectful of diversity could then be described as being in direct conflict with her ethical responsibility to increase choices for all. In addition, therapists may become so fearful of imposing their own values, derived from their own unique background, that they lose energy and passion in their work, and start following a safe, colourless, bland and ineffectual middle road. This fearfulness can become operative in a variety of circumstances, determined by the uniqueness of therapist and client. Again, a few examples are proposed, mainly in order to stimulate the reader’s recall of examples from their own repertoire: the therapist belongs to a dominant subculture (white, or male, or middle class) and the clients do not; the therapist belongs to a subjugated subculture (black, or female, or working class) and the clients do not; clients present with subtle but profound gender stereotypes (he holds all the financial power and shouts when he is displeased, she has headaches and sees martyrdom as her destiny); or clients present with behaviours which they define as culturally normal, but which deviate from the therapist’s own assumptions about acceptable behaviour, e.g. for ‘westernised’ therapists, the practice of polygamy or female circumcision. These problems of ‘contradiction’ will be acute in particular for those therapists who hold feminist views about the cultural and familial roles of women and men while also adhering to a non-directive, second order cybernetic stance in family therapy. Therapists holding only one, or neither, of these positions are unlikely to recognise the existence of a problem at all. The struggle of trying to work in ways coherent with ethical aspirations, which are probably part of most therapists’ value base, while also behaving in a respectful and non-oppressive manner towards clients, is the challenge which may enable family therapy to continue to move forward. As we face our own difficulties, confirm our entitlement to hold true to our own beliefs, and the clients’ entitlement to be heard and respected, we may enrich our repertoire of practice and force our theory to expand in order to contain these ‘necessary contradictions’ (Goldner et al. 1990; Waldegrave and Tapping 1990).

Dominator cultures and their dominant discourses Ideally, most therapists would probably like to find ways of dealing with the inequities between men and women in therapy in such a way that both female and male clients (not to mention therapists) could emerge from the experience with wider options,

Construction of gender in family therapy 17 increased flexibility and a sense of self-enhancement. One of the obstacles to doing this work, or even to thinking clearly about it, is probably the fear that thinking about it at all will give rise to enmity. We are all, after all, male or female (although these are probably not the unitary identities we often pretend they are). Our language is full of phrases that denote the riskiness of the material lying just underneath the surface – ‘the war between the sexes’, ‘sleeping with the enemy’, etc. In a sense, whether we are heterosexual or homosexual, we all in our daily lives sleep with the enemy, unless we live in wholly enclosed separatist communities. We have working, or neighbourly, or friendly, or intimate relationships with members of the ‘opposite’ sex. Facing some of the hurtful, destructive and sometimes violent or fatal actions that constitute part of the war of the sexes may spill over into our pleasant, cooperative or loving relationships with partners, colleagues or friends. We may find ourselves beginning to think along the lines that ‘all men...’ or ‘all women...’ do this or are like this. A useful counter to this type of unacceptable categorisation is offered by Riane Eisler’s proposition regarding ‘dominator’ and ‘partnership’ cultures (Eisler 1987). Looking at the very long record of human civilisation, she suggests that cultures can broadly be divided into two types: the dominator model, in which difference is ‘equated with inferiority or superiority... the ranking of one half of humanity over the other’, and on the other hand the partnership model, in which ‘social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking rather than ranking... [and] diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority’ (ibid., p.xvii). For those who would like to explore her valuable and revolutionary insights further, see Eisler 1987. (I have considered some of the implications of her work for the practice of family therapy in other publications; see Jones 1990; Jones 1993.) I will here briefly explore the implications of this thinking for family therapy’s struggle with the meaning of gendered role difference. It could be argued that most contemporary world cultures are to a greater or lesser extent based on dominator models, i.e. these are cultures in which difference (male/ female, white/black, young/old) becomes the signifier for superiority or inferiority, for privilege or oppression. If we accept this as a categorisation of our social organisation, then it becomes possible to ask how, in a dominator culture, gender has been constructed. Thus we are dealing not with the aggressiveness of each individual male or the propensity for martyrdom of every female, but with the problem of how the culture constructs and instructs their gendered identities. Which aspects of their human diversity are encouraged and which suppressed? What are they allowed or not allowed to do, encouraged to feel or express, and what not? What are the assumptions about maleness and femaleness which the wider culture fosters, and how do these assumptions express themselves in subcultures and local social groupings, in families and in the self-

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characterisations of individuals? What are men and women taught about what they may be allowed to get away with? Eisler makes a further useful point when she discusses the concept of domination and actualisation hierarchies. In her view, a dominator hierarchy is based on force or the implied threat of force, whereas an actualisation hierarchy functions to maximise the organism’s potential. The latter would then apply both to ‘types of hierarchies found in progressions from lower to higher orderings of functioning’ (e.g. in the area of biology) and to human hierarchies such as good-enough child-rearing (Eisler 1987: 205). Adopting this view of hierarchy would go some way towards resolving the difficulties of family therapists who either deny that power differentials exist between clients or between clients and therapists, or who on the other hand see all concepts of power or hierarchy as inevitably negative, and try to get rid of them by ‘sleight of language’. Thus as therapists it is important to acknowledge that, whether we are women or men, all the selves we are and could be are organised, and sometimes constrained and warped, by the various layers of the culture in which we live. For most of us, this culture is one which construes difference as an indication that one must be right, good or superior, and the other wrong, bad or inferior, so that those who find themselves in positions of influence, choice and attributed power often use these positions to exploit, ignore, diminish and control others. The question, then, is what options people may have access to within dominator patterns, and what the influences may be that will incline them to use these options to the benefit or detriment of others. We can therefore see that men who beat up women, and women who beat up children are acting on the basis of certain assumptions about (among other things) a pecking order, and might behave differently when they find themselves in a different place in that pecking order. They might behave even more significantly differently were they to find themselves able to try out the rewards of participation in a partnership culture.

PRACTISING FEMINIST SYSTEMIC THERAPY The problems posed for family therapy by our increasing awareness of the significance of gender discourse and relations of dominance to the interactions of our clients with one another and with ourselves, have not yet been resolved. Nevertheless, we are able to practise our craft in ways which make it more likely that the troubled women and men who seek our help will emerge from the encounter with an enhanced sense of their options for choice. Some of the components of this way of working will be noted briefly.

Construction of gender in family therapy 19 If the therapist sees herself as part of an observing system called therapy, it follows that the most useful focus for change will be on her own attitudes and actions in her work rather than on how she may change her clients. It is important then that the therapist should allow herself to occupy a passionate and sceptical stance towards the observations she makes as well as towards her own beliefs and premises. Either passion or scepticism alone will not be good enough – the one will lead her into a sense of smugness and justification and the other will rob her of the very qualities of ethical compassion which motivate her work. Recognising the power imbalance which exists – particularly at the beginning of therapy – between client and therapist makes it more likely that the therapist will avoid abusing this. She can then take responsibility for those areas where power (in the sense of ‘ability to...’) is realistically attributed to her by the client and society, and use her skills and expertise to create a safe and containing environment in which clients may discover their own resources for change, and in which the therapist’s technical expertise may introduce new perspectives, areas of enquiry and options into the therapeutic exploration. She can also work, gradually and appropriately, to ‘shed power’ and share skills, knowledge and responsibility with clients. Therapists, whether male or female, can be aware of the degree to which their own gendered premises and prejudices are likely to affect their perceptions of clients. This awareness makes it possible also to notice where the clients’ premises and prejudices in relation to their own gender and that of the therapist are relevant to the work of therapy, and to discuss these in ways that increase systemic curiosity for all participants. When hypothesising about possible patterns of interaction and influence in the lives of our clients, we can include speculations about the influence of gender in the various contexts which impinge on their current dilemmas. How did they learn how to be female or male in their families and their cultures? How clear or subtle, overt or covert, freeing or constraining were these messages and rules? What might happen if they changed them? How are their views about their gender – whether biologically, familially or culturally constructed – being expressed in their current lives, and to what extent are these part of the problems they bring to therapy? How do they divide up the tasks of family maintenance such as wage-earning, childcare, cooking, cleaning and repairing, and how do decisions about who does what get made? What are their experiences and beliefs about power and influence, equity and domination? How may these be relevant to their current lives? Having asked ourselves these questions about our clients, we can fruitfully ask them of the clients themselves, should they seem relevant. It has long been clear that

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the recursive process of questioning informed by systemic curiosity acts, if appropriately responsive to client concerns, as a profound perturbation of the client and therapeutic system, which is then likely to lead to meaningful change. The therapist who is interested in issues of power and gender does not have to beat a political drum: asking interested and interesting questions about gender premises and arrangements in family life will of itself allow clients to think about, and change, those aspects of their lives which they consider redundant. If we assume that clients are motivated by ill-will, and will continue to choose to abuse one another by choice, that constrains us to use force ‘in their best interests’. If we assume, on the other hand, that people would rather live lovingly and creatively with one another if they could find ways of doing this, then we will assume that our task is not to point out the correct road but rather to help them remove the obstacles which prevent them from travelling on the road of their choice. This stance applies whether or not we are dealing with overtly gender-linked topics.

CONCLUSION Can we continue to move towards partnership models in our therapy, as we have been attempting to do (Andersen 1990; Hoffman 1990; Jones 1993)? Can we allow ourselves to hope that the effects of our therapeutic interactions with clients do not stop when they leave therapy, and do not stop at the boundaries of the family, but may spread out, like seepage from a river, to help also to influence our societies towards structures and beliefs that will make equity and diversity more possible? The feminist critiques have been powerfully influential in the changes which have occurred in recent years within family therapy. We can no longer pretend to a stance of theoretical purity and valueless objectivity. Nor can we believe that we, as impartial outsiders, know what is good for our client, and that it is our benevolent right to steer them towards that good. We know that power is used and abused between our clients, and between ourselves and our clients (Aghassy and Noot 1990), and we know that we cannot not take a stance in relation to this. My own stance, as will be amply evident from the above, is subjective and shaped by my values, which derive from many and varied influences, as are those of all my colleagues. The changes in family therapy theory and practice over recent years have made it much more possible for us to grasp hold of the difficult questions surrounding relationships between women and men, and the construction of gender – to struggle with them, experiment with them, disagree over them, and begin to integrate our conclusions into our practice. Nevertheless, it is evident that we have not yet resolved

Construction of gender in family therapy 21 the (necessary?) contradiction regarding ways of tackling the problem of power and gender inequities on the one hand, and systemic stances on the other. I hope that these contradictions, and the tension generated by them, will continue to stimulate our creativity.

NOTES 1 This chapter is based on a plenary lecture given to the Third Conference on Feminism and Family Therapy, London, 15/16 May 1992. 2 I follow Eisler’s (1988) usage of androcratic, i.e. ‘ruled by men’ as preferable to patriarchal, i.e. ‘ruled by the father’. 3 Coleman et al. (1990) investigated family therapy training programmes in the USA and elsewhere to establish the extent to which they were complying with the guidelines for gender-aware training set out by professional associations. They found that, despite these guidelines, most programmes ignored the topic of gender, or paid it only superficial attention. 4 By discourse I mean all the ideas, images, mythology, rules, conversations, etc. pertaining to a particular subject, communicated overtly and covertly. Thus the discourse on femaleness would include all of a particular culture’s tenets about the female gender, from Madonna to the madonna, from educational policies to clothing fashions, from visual representations to jokes and idioms, etc. 5 Von Foerster (1990), in his attempt to define ethical practice, has suggested that a therapist should try to act in such a manner as to increase choice for clients.

REFERENCES Aghassy, G. and Noot, M. (1990) Seksuele Kontakten binnen Psychotherapeutische Hulpverleningsrelasies, ’s-Gravenhage, VUGA. Andersen, T. (1987) ‘Reflecting teams: dialogue and metadialogue in clinical work’, Family Process 26: 415–428. —— (ed.) (1990) The Reflecting Team: Dialogues and Dialogues about the Dialogues, Broadstairs, Kent: Borgmann. Bateson, G. (1978) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and Epistemology, London: Paladin/Granada Publishing. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Carter, E., Papp, P., Silverstein, O. and Walters, M. (1984) Mothers and Sons, Fathers and Daughters, Washington, DC: The Women’s Project in Family Therapy, Monograph Series 2:1. Cecchin, G. (1987) ‘Hypothesizing, circularity, and neutrality revisited: an invitation to curiosity’, Family Process 26: 405–413.

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Coleman, S., Avis, J. and Turin, M. (1990) ‘A study of the role of gender in family therapy training’, Family Process 29: 365–374. Doherty, W. (1991) ‘Can male therapists empower women in therapy?’, in T.J. Goodrich (ed.) Women and Power: Perspectives for Family Therapy, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Eisler, R. (1987) The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, San Francisco: Harper & Row. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (ed. C. Gordon), New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Gilbert, L. A. (1980) ‘Feminist therapy’, in A.M. Brodsky and R.T. Hare-Mustin (eds) Women and Psychotherapy, New York: The Guilford Press. Goldner, V. (1985a) ‘Warning: family therapy may be hazardous to your health’, The Family Therapy Networker 9 (6):19–23. —— (1985b) ‘Feminism and family therapy’, Family Process 24: 31–47. —— (1991) ‘Essay book review: Rosine Jozef Perelberg and Ann C. Miller. Gender and Power in Families, London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge 1990’, Journal of Family Therapy 13 (3): 341–345. —— (1992) ‘Making room for both/and’, The Family Therapy Networker March–April, 55–61. Goldner, V., Penn, P., Sheinberg, M. and Walker, G. (1990) ‘Love and violence: gender paradoxes in volatile attachments’, Family Process 29: 343–364. Hare-Mustin, R. (1986) ‘The problem of gender in family therapy theory’, Family Process 26:15–27. Hoffman, L. (1990) ‘Constructing realities: an art of lenses’, Family Process 29: 1–12. Holland, S. (1992) ‘From social abuse to social action: a neighbourhood psychotherapy and social action project for women’, in J. Ussher and P. Nicholson (eds) Gender Issues in Clinical Psychology, London: Routledge. Jones, E. (1990) ‘Feminism and family therapy: can mixed marriages work?’ in R. J. Perelberg and A. C. Miller (eds) Gender and Power in Families, London: Tavistock/ Routledge. —— (1991) Working with Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, London: Karnac Books. —— (1993) Family Systems Therapy: Developments in the Milan-Systemic Therapies, Chichester, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Kearney, P.A., Byrne, N. and McCarthy, I. (1989) ‘Just metaphors: marginal illuminations in a colonial retreat’, Family Therapy Case Studies 4: 17–31. Kraemer, S. (1991) ‘The origins of fatherhood: an ancient family process’, Family Process 30: 377–392. Krüll, M. (1987) ‘Systemic thinking and ethics. Political implications of the systemic perspective’, in J. Hargens (ed.) Systemic Therapy: A European Perspective (1990), Broadstairs, Kent: Borgmann (originally in Zeitschrift für systemische Therapie 5:4). Mason, B. and Mason, E. (1990) ‘Masculinity and family work’, in R.J. Perelberg and A.C. Miller (eds) Gender and Power in Families, London: Tavistock/ Routledge. Mitchell, J. (1974) Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Perelberg, R. J. and Miller, A. C. (eds) (1990) Gender and Power in Families, London: Tavistock/Routledge.

Construction of gender in family therapy 23 Reimers, S. and Dimmock, B. (1990) ‘Mankind and kind men: an agenda for male family therapists’, Journal of Family Therapy 12: 167–181. Russell, B. (1953) The Good Citizen’s Alphabet and History of the World in Epitome, London: Gaberbocchus. Simon, G. M. (1993) ‘Revisiting the notion of hierarchy’, Family Process 32: 147–155. Von Foerster, H. (1990) ‘Ethics and second-order cybernetics’, Paper delivered at the International Conference on Systems and Family Therapy: Ethics, Epistemology, New Methods, Paris. Waldegrave, C. and Tapping, C. (1990) ‘Just therapy’, Dulwich Centre Newsletter 1: 3– 46. Walters, M., Carter, B., Papp, P. and Silverstein, O. (1988) The Invisible Web: Gender Patterns in Family Relationships, New York: Guilford.

2

The wounded prince and the women who love him

Gillian Walker and Virginia Goldner

INTRODUCTION A recent American sculptural memorial to the women who served in Vietnam says it all. A woman in army fatigues cradles a dying soldier who lies across her lap in the pose of the Pieta. The focus of course, is not on her, the putative honoree of this memorial. Rather, directed by her gaze of compassion and sorrow, the sculpture’s focus is on the soldier’s agonized, dying face. A bandage hides his eyes so that (predictably) he cannot see her. Minus his reciprocal gaze, the woman does not exist as herself because she has been defined in relation to him, the man, the subject of our story. As the ‘(m)other’ in this tale of heroes and martyrs, she is the object of our complex fantasies about the second sex. For example, she is powerful and survives while he is weak and dying. She may be the nurse who comforts him in the hour of his death, but she is also the mother who trained him to risk his life in his father’s wars. As a French woman once said to the poet, Adrienne Rich, who bore three sons, ‘Vous travaillez pour l’armee, madame?’ (Rich 1976). In this particular sculptural metaphor of war, the wounded soldier is the traditional sentimentalised picture of heroic male suffering. He is not a servant of his country’s war machine with its indulgence in the slaughter of women and children, nor does the viewer experience him as an active participant in the violence which has killed him. He is merely the victim of war, and she is the traditional female nurse-mourner. The cultural subtext of their relationship, almost detectable in the image, includes an implicit thought that since the nurse-mother both cares for and survives him, she is somehow implicated in his death. The image of the wounded male nursed by the compassionate woman is embedded in the psychology of gender relations. The cultural mandate that a woman should nurse her man (by placing her power to love and to heal at his service) is one of the

The wounded prince 25 myths which allows women to excuse inexcusably tyrannical or abusive relationships. Whether the relationship is mother/son, daughter/father, or husband/wife, the mandate organises all of them into a variant of ‘mother-to-wounded/martyred-son’. In an incest survivor’s group, for example, one woman described her father’s apology when, at age 12, she confronted him with his sexual abuse. He answered, as if this explained everything, ‘honey, I didn’t think you would remember. I know it was wrong and I am sorry, but I was so vulnerable at the time.’ Despite her father’s terrifying rages, his verbal abuse towards her mother (who made excuses for him) and his sexual inappropriateness even after the actual abuse had stopped, the daughter was more aware of his state of ‘woundedness’ than of her violation. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the emblematic father/daughter drama, Cordelia is ultimately sacrificed to Lear’s vulnerability. No matter how appalling Lear is to Cordelia, after a brave initial protest when he tries to bribe her love, Cordelia recognises her father’s essential vulnerability, stays loyal to him and loses her life as a result. Her reward is to become literature’s archetypal heroine daughter, the agent of her sinful old father’s redemption. Since the story centres on Lear (of course), the daughters are merely arranged around him representing the familiar categories: Goneril and Regan, ‘transgressive’ women who want their own power and autonomy versus the strong but self-sacrificing, good daughter/wife Cordelia, whose reward is our approbation and some quality time with Dad in jail along the way. Western mythologies about gender positions in relationships are constructed to elicit sympathy for the father (as in the incest story described above), or admiration for the archetypal good caring daughter (mother). These mythologies support the power system of patriarchy at a subtle psychological level. They make relational altruism the dominant motif of woman’s psychology, while damning her as selfish, even diabolical if she has a will or desire of her own. It is via a woman’s desire to be experienced as altruistic and to maintain connections through care-giving that the martyred son makes his irresistible claim for special treatment. The image of the wounded (thereby entitled) lover, son or brother is supported at all levels of myth with origins in the ancient mythology of Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia (Bly 1990; Frazer 1959; Graves 1955). The myths of Attis, Osirus, Tammuz and Adonis are all similar in structure and meaning. In all of them, the youthful male god, who represents the life force of providence and vegetative life, is wounded and dies, most often at the hands of a male god, either a father figure or a jealous brother. And it is the female earth mother goddess who mourns, searches for his dead body – sometimes dismembered – buries him and, by nursing him, prepares the way for his ritual resurrection.

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In the Greek myth Venus and Adonis, the boy Adonis, a god of vegetation, the lover of the mother goddess Venus, is fatally wounded by the war god Ares, disguised as a boar (Frazer 1959; Graves 1955). Ares is not only Adonis’s rival for Venus but as an older god he represents the omnipresent avenging father. Adonis dies, and Venus, unable to protect him from her rival’s murderous castrating impulse, is depicted in classical sculpture mourning her lover-son, sometimes cradling his dead body. This myth sits at the heart of western culture. It is transformed into ceremonies for the death and resurrection of Christ where the principal mourner is His mother Mary, the Christian version of the mother goddess, love stripped of sexuality. The ancient mother goddesses at least had their own power. While they could not protect their sons-lovers from the destructive impulses of other males, they could, in their own right, be both benign and destructive forces to be reckoned with. But as the role of woman changes over time, she becomes more compliant and ultimately more passive. Figures such as Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Homer’s Penelope and the Bible’s Mary send a powerful message that dictates what women should be, and by implication, what they should not be. Penelope’s career is to await the return of her war-weary husband Ulysses, so that she can soothe his wounds and submit to his sexual desires. Ulysses, of course, has had a far better time of it, dallying with Circe and the Sirens during years of exotic travel. Penelope by contrast, waits at home, enduring the mindless tedium of weaving and unweaving a tapestry, in order to resist sexual temptation from her ardent, numerous (and potentially sexually desirable) suitors. Homer implies that Penelope was rewarded for her fidelity by having a good time in the marriage bed when her twenty years’ absent husband deigned to return. Unfortunately, the archetypal good woman of western mythology, Mary, the mother of Jesus, had no such fun. Interestingly, Mary is the antithesis of Eve, the mother of us all. Unlike Eve, who wants to know and thus transgresses God’s command, Mary passively accepts her destiny. She has no sexual desire of her own, whereas Eve is Adam’s seducer. Mary gives birth without her hymen being ruptured and without Eve’s labour pains. But perhaps the most important aspect of Mary’s story is her absence and her grief. She disappears as soon as her son receives public acclaim and reappears only when, wounded, He staggers up Calvary to His death. One of the most powerful and haunting images of western art is the Mary of the Pieta. Here, the passivity of her sexual life is extended to her grieving. Anger is an emotion foreign to her. In many paintings and sculptures she is depicted like the nurse in the Vietnam memorial, cradling her dead son with a face of grief and compassion. Her reward for passive acceptance is ‘derivative’ power: she is the woman behind the man.

The wounded prince 27 The Marys, Penelopes and Cordelias are idealised versions of passive, selfsacrificing women against which we living women are measured. Moreover, we also absorb equally strong mythic warnings against becoming ‘transgressive’ women: those who seek personal power, intellectual or sexual, or those who have power over men. Such women are castigated and punished in classical and popular mythology, and are seen as versions of Eve, Circe, Helen, Jezebel, Goneril and Regan, ‘the witch’, the intruding mother-in-law and in the most recent example of demonising a powerful woman, Hillary Clinton.

GENDER PREMISES AND PATTERNS OF VIOLENCE These mirror images, the compassionate nurse/mother and the transgressive, wilful siren, are instilled as psychic polarities in the mental life of men and women alike. Moreover, in our work with violent men and their partners, we have found that these split images play a central role in rationalising both violence and victimisation. In the extreme circumstance of a violent encounter, the man typically justifies his behaviour by describing his partner as some kind of transgressive woman: she is provocative; she is, or will be, unfaithful, she is indifferent to his needs and insensitive to his vulnerabilities; she is selfish. And then, in the honeymoon of contrition and forgiveness which follows the violence, this evil female figure transmutes into the longed for, irreplaceable nurse/mother, who knows and cares for this hurt man/boy better than anyone ever has or could. In both descriptions, the woman is never constituted as an outside ‘other’, a subject in her own right. She is always and only an object of fantasy in his internal world. But it is not only the men who rationalise their abuse. Women, who are also caught in the web of their culture’s gender myths, excuse the men who hurt them. The ideal of female altruism in relationships, and as a corollary, the female practice of establishing a sense of self through connection and care-giving, serves to rationalise female subordination to men and perversely provides women with some measure of selfesteem for ‘standing by their man’ even though he is violent. But perhaps the most powerful means by which women tolerate victimisation is their dogged belief, induced and supported by the culture, that no matter how abusive or violent a man may be, ‘a bad man is really a hurt child who needs a good mother’. Thus both the men and the women in the gender and violence project were caught by the split-screen polarities of gender. Where the men oscillated between viewing their partners as the idealised Mary and the hated Delilah, the women split their picture of the men into the ‘wounded child’ and the cynical, vicious oppressor. These

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intense reversals constitute the explosive flack that fuels both the violent act and the remorseful reunion that follows it (Goldner et al. 1990). As we unpack the dense thicket of fantasies, beliefs and affects that constitute the glue of these painful relationships, we can begin to narrate the story between the couple. The woman is often bewildered, and eventually beset by self-doubt as her partner shifts between seeing her as an angel of mercy and as evil incarnate. To protect the relationship, indeed to make any sense out of it at all, she holds on to her perception of the man as wounded and in need of care. He frequently comes from an abusive background that resembles her own. In order to connect with him emotionally, as she recognises her experience in his, she offers him the care that neither of them has ever had. Paradoxically and dangerously, through the process of being cared for, the man gets in touch with childhood feelings and yearnings which frighten him and lead him to experience the woman as weakening him by the very act of her care-giving. He defends against this by withdrawing and repudiating any feelings of vulnerability. And, as the couple then begins to move apart, tensions and suspicions rise, and the cycle begins anew.

Case example In the following case, where GW was the therapist, and VG the consultant, a central theme, that of the wounded prince and his nurturing consort, was explored over the course of therapy. Our interventions challenged the gender premise, shared by the couple, that the role of the wife was to nurture the man and heal his feelings of vulnerability. Prior to therapy, the man’s violence had been seen by both partners as an inexorable outcome of male vulnerability, an extreme ‘sensitivity’ to almost any action or failure to act on the part of the wife. These beliefs were paralysing for both members of the couple. The man saw himself as without the capacity for taking action about anything and the woman experienced herself as worthless except for her ability to heal the man. One argument against conjoint therapy which the anti-battering movement has used with some wisdom is that psychology, almost by definition, emphasises psychic vulnerability. Feminists have argued that couples therapy will play into the notion of male vulnerability, using it to exonerate the man from his moral responsibility for the violence. In our conjoint therapy, it is the construction of the gender premise, ‘the vulnerable male/bleeding son joined-at-the-hip to the nurse/mother’ that is deconstructed and

The wounded prince 29 becomes the subject of therapy. Throughout the couple’s work, we highlight how this metaphor supports abusive behaviour, and we trace it back into its multi-generational origins. In our work with the couple Danny and Arlene, this theme of man as a wounded prince and woman as his nurturer was central to the couple’s narrative and thus to the therapeutic text. The husband, Danny, saw himself as an emotional cripple like his father, who was also literally crippled by polio. Over time his wife Arlene experienced her world shrinking under the barrage of his demands and abuse. He was also afraid of her having any relationships outside their dyad, which included her relationship with her own young daughter of a first marriage. Not only was her relationship with her child swept away in the storm of his demands and her resentful acquiescence, but any sense of a self apart from her self-in-relation-to-him eroded as her focus became confined to managing him and their volatile relationship. In our clinical work with this couple, as with all couples where violence is an issue, the primary goal is to get the man to take responsibility for stopping his violent behaviour. This usually involves eliciting and then challenging the idea that the man is psychically injured and therefore helpless to prevent himself from acting violently if his wife ‘provokes’ him. The first step in debunking the myth that it is her ‘misuse of her power over him’ that somehow ‘makes him do it’, is the therapist’s use of language which emphasises choice and volition. Questions like ‘tell me about a time when you chose to manage your anger and didn’t hit her’, or ‘tell me about a time when you chose to hit her instead of getting out of the situation’, utilise Michael White’s (1989) idea of the unique outcome. We use this construction to demonstrate implicitly that the man is capable of restraint and of moral action, and that no mythology of woman’s ‘power’ or of male vulnerability can be used to escape responsibility for one’s actions. In the initial consultation phase, the therapist uses a gender-focused genogram to explore the power relations and gender premises in the family of origin which shaped (along with the larger culture) each partner’s ideas about men, women and power. The genogram provides a depoliticised forum for exploring and demonstrating how power relationships of domination and submission are transmitted across the generations and re-enacted between the couple. In the initial interview with Danny and Arlene, the therapist did a brief genogram of both families of origin, and connections to the present were underlined. For example, both partners had identified Arlene’s jealousy as a major catalyst for their fights. When the therapist explored this theme in Arlene’s family of origin, it was clear that Arlene’s mother had a similar experience. She was humiliated by her husband’s many affairs, but powerless to do anything about them. We pointed out that although Arlene’s hypervigilance on this issue was a way of insisting that she would not suffer

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the same fate as her mother, her relationship with Danny was itself a re-enactment, insofar as it began as a secret affair while each was married to other people. As the therapist explored Danny’s family of origin, he described all the men in his family as having ‘male tempers’ and being ‘male know-it-alls’. In the following segment of the interview, the therapist guides Danny towards making connections between his stance of coercive dependency vis-à-vis Arlene and the way power was enacted between his father and mother. Danny:

Therapist: Danny:

Therapist: Danny: Therapist:

Yeah. There has been an evolution from the apes in my family. I am almost off all fours now (laughs) . . . . My mom took care of the whole family incredibly competently, took care of my father who acted like a baby. OK. So I see that’s why you say ‘I’m the baby’. You learned from him that a man can act like a baby and get cared for by a woman. He was the big baby. He pouted for everything. He was difficult for me to deal with . . . emotionally demeaning to me. Nothing I did was good enough. Your mother sounds like an early version of Arlene. She was loving and she was needed. And she needed to be needed. She adored him even though he was a shit to her. I guess from your fights one could surmise that at least you and Arlene are attempting to have a more honest relationship.

Both partners saw their mothers as subordinate to domineering, babyish and tyrannical fathers towards whom the mothers were devoted, and around whom their lives revolved. They both laughed when they saw the similarity to their own relationship. This brief use of the genogram introduced the idea that gender premises structure relationships. It also made it easier for the couple to observe issues of injustice between men and women and to recognise gendered strategies which are used to rationalise them. By the fourth session, Danny’s self-presentation as sulky, babyish, threatening to explode, and subtly asking the female therapist to soothe and comfort him, provided the emotional backdrop for a deeper exploration of the culturally conditioned gender myths which supported his behaviour. Arlene had already confirmed that Danny’s angry silences usually pre-figured the initiation of a cycle of violence. In this session, the therapist begins to draw connections between this pattern and its meaning in Danny’s family of origin. The therapist asks Danny for his associations to silence. He is reminded of his relationship with his father, whom he has previously described as absent, other than

The wounded prince 31 as his mother’s enforcer. It emerges that Danny’s father was also moody and silent, demanding that his two sons ‘do things for him’, although making sure that they could never please him. Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny:

Therapist: Danny:

You don’t know how to talk to him? You stay silent with him? I never talked to him until my ass was against the wall, and I came crying home to my father until I’d come clean. To come clean? For me to come clean. Like when I’d quit college, I’d taken it as far as I could go, pretending to be going to classes, but then it was eating me up inside. He was the one that I finally told when I couldn’t go any further, when I was falling apart. So you can’t talk to anyone in good times, only when you are really up against the wall. Yes I had to let go of it, had to get it out, get it out . . . I think the only time he was soft was when I was more vulnerable than he was.

Here Danny introduces the critical theme of male vulnerability and its misuse in relationships. The therapist begins to ‘unpack’ the word and to explore its relational meanings. Therapist: Danny:

Do you see him as vulnerable? I see him as vulnerable. That’s probably how he feels about himself . . . . He was a man who grew up with polio and he never felt good about himself and I think he always took that out on everybody around him, especially his children.

Here Danny rationalises his father’s patriarchal privilege by a sentimentalised description of his father’s life as defined by a tragic illness. Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny:

But I know people who’ve grown up with polio and felt terrific about themselves. He didn’t seem to be one of them, he didn’t seem to be a very happy man. You attribute that to the polio. I guess I always needed an excuse for why he was such a bastard to me. I guess I felt sorry for him . . . so I didn’t answer him back. I let him run his shit on me – not that I ever had much of a choice about it, but I let him run his shit on me because I felt sorry for him.

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Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny:

You felt sorry for him. Now where did you get the idea that you should feel sorry for him? It comes from my mother, if anybody. How does she convey that? She always catered to him. She took care of him like he was crippled.

Notice how the description of the father begins to move from ‘the bastard who cannot help what he does because he is wounded’, to a relational description in which both parents cooperate in constructing and enacting the underlying (bizarre) premise that an abusive man is a helpless man. Because Danny identifies with his father, it is critical to identify the underlying premises which construct the way that father and son enact and experience masculine identity and behaviour. The therapist wants Danny to see his father’s bad behaviour as a choice, not an inevitable ‘effect’ of masculinity, just as she wants him to see his own moodiness and subsequent abusiveness as choices he makes. As the therapist gently challenges his description of his father, Danny begins to speak about his father’s behaviour in volitional terms. Danny:

Therapist: Danny:

Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny:

He’d whine and he would make demands and she would ‘yes him’ . . . ‘yes, sir’, kind of. So she catered to him like he was – I mean she was more capable than he was to take care. She conveyed the message that we should all feel sorry for him if anyone did. Did he convey it too? Well, how did he act that he permitted her to cater to him in that way? There must have been some collusion. He whined . . . . He whined, he acted like a spoiled brat and then he’d get angry at her and be very vicious and then if he didn’t get his way he’d throw a temper tantrum. (Smiles.) What are you thinking, Danny? (Laughs.) What are you laughing at? As I talk about it, the apple never falls far from the tree.

This is the moment of the ‘ahaa’ experience for Danny, when he begins to see that he has carried on the male tradition of coercive dependency into the next generation. Therapist:

And how are you the apple with Arlene? . . . When you said you are the apple that does not fall far from the tree, you do act like your dad in that distant, tortured, crippled mood. Stuck with your emotions. Can’t really walk or talk. Do you relate to Arlene in the same way as your dad

The wounded prince 33

Danny: Therapist:

related to your mom? How are you the same? How are you different?. . . (Long silence.) I’m trying to answer the question and having trouble. That’s a good example.

Here the therapist uses the transference to underline how the stance of coercive dependency is over-determined: it is played out in the session in Danny’s looking to her to help him out of his ‘trouble’ by answering her questions, it is played out between the couple in their daily battles around his needs, and it is played out between his parents in his family of origin. As Danny looks at each parent, he can see the pattern of his behaviour. It now becomes much more difficult for him to see his violent behaviour as instigated by Arlene, or as unique to the couple’s relationship, since it has now become too clear that it stems from Danny’s belief system about men in relationships, received from the culture, enacted in his family and memorialised in his behaviour. Therapist:

Danny: Therapist: Danny:

What would you expect Arlene to do right now if I weren’t sitting in the room, if you were in a . . . paralysed . . . mood . . . that’s a good metaphor! What would she be likely to do? What would I expect her to do? What would she be likely to do? Depends on what’s going on at different times. If it was fresh, she’d probably talk to me and if it’s gone on a while, she’d be very leery of hanging around me, particularly leery of trying to make conversation. She probably would have had her head chopped off a few times by now.

By moving the focus towards Arlene, the therapist is inviting Danny to begin thinking about the effect of his coercive dependency on his wife. Moreover, by suggesting that she and Arlene have a similar oppressive experience induced by Danny’s brand of silence, she is again using the transference to underline the power of his insistent covert demands. Moreover, in putting words to this experience, she gives Arlene a language for her wordless experience and a voice in the couple’s conversation. This is not only psychologically helpful to Arlene, but it can increase her safety because Danny’s lack of empathy for Arlene’s experience leads him to invent his own paranoid meanings for her behaviour, which then increases the likelihood that he will become violent. As she helps Danny put himself in Arlene’s shoes, the therapist is helping him act out of conscience, rather than acting out of a distorted kind of self-interest. Danny is not a man without a conscience, but he does feel entitled to the behaviour of an

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emotional cripple. The memory of the few moments of warmth, safety, love and forgiveness which he experienced from his father when his ‘world was falling apart’ are so powerful that he constantly strives to repeat the experience. Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny:

Therapist: Danny:

Therapist: Danny: Therapist: Danny: Therapist:

So the only time that you could get that close to your father was when you were falling apart? Yes. And then he made you feel safe. Is that the strongest experience of closeness that you’ve had in your life? (Holds back tears.) What’s sad about it? I have such mixed feelings about him . . . . I guess what’s sad is that it couldn’t be like that more often. That we hardly ever knew each other except for those times. Those catastrophic times for you . . . . It’s sad because I hate him most of the time. I mean not that I hate him – my memories of him were harsh except for those moments, you know when I – he was there for me. He was there for me like a rock – with all the abuse, I have a very warm place in my heart for him. Last time you talked about always having to please somebody in order to be loved. The strongest thread in my life. I always feel I have to please everybody to be loved. But then you put this to a test. You went to him as a complete fuck up . . . . What did you find out? That I still had a father and a home. Like a big test. You had to go through this trial and come out the other side.

The therapist now turns to Arlene to learn of her experience of the session. Arlene:

Therapist: Arlene: Therapist:

It was very interesting in that I thought this could be me. And I’m off the hook, it’s you and Danny. And looking at this I could relax. Usually I’m such a wreck when we are at that impasse and I get so involved in it that we end up fighting like cats and dogs. You mean the impasse of Danny being so stuck. So paralysed? Right. When he says to me, ‘talk, why don’t we talk’ and today I just felt like. . . ‘whew’. . . . I’ve never seen or felt it like that. In the impasse – When Danny says ‘talk’ what do you feel?

The wounded prince 35 Arlene: Therapist: Arlene:

Therapist: Arlene: Therapist: Arlene: Therapist:

Arlene: Therapist: Arlene: Therapist: Arlene:

I feel scared and angry. Scared because . . . ? Scared because I’m in for trouble ahead. I don’t know if I can talk . . . and I don’t know if I can feel comfortable. I don’t know how I can get things moving to get Danny off that position. Alright, so today you sat back and relaxed. I watched you throw the ball back at Danny – If you had done that what would have happened? I’ve done that at home plenty of times and he’ll start yelling and we will get into a fight. So you feel at this point there’s no way that you can – when he does that to you, you are totally stymied. He says talk, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Not unless I just kind of get lucky and hit the right nerve, I don’t know, the right sentiment, the right thought. Like his mother, you feel you’ve got to cater, you’ve got to fix it, you’ve got to make it work. Fill the holes. Fill the holes. I don’t even know what I’m saying half the time . . . keep it up . . . I come out with things . . . pull him out . . . keep it up. . . . And then I just retreat.

Arlene now begins to explore the gender themes which will be central to her therapy: her belief that she is responsible for healing Danny in order to make the relationship work, the extent to which her sense of identity is tied up with her success or failure in this role, her fear that if she is not needed by Danny in this way, she will have no value to him and he will leave her, etc. Later in the therapy, we have a session with Arlene, her mother and her daughter to explore the way in which the women in all three generations operate with these premises, to their detriment and to the detriment of their relationships with each other. The therapist ends the interview by tying together the themes of the session in a final challenge. Therapist:

Danny, my last question to you is, how are you going to construct the same situation with Arlene that ‘worked’ so well with your father? By which I mean, to what lengths do you have to go to feel enough of a failure, to hit ‘rock bottom’ so that you could enact with Arlene what you did with your father, and get something of the same response?

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Danny remains silent for a long time but Arlene answers. Arlene:

What you said reminds me of everything we go through with those episodes when there is violence attached to it. He’s got to do something that’s very aggressive physically to me, and feel shitty about himself. If he hurts me, then he can feel really shitty. I thought about that when you asked the question, and then I thought about the time he had hit rock bottom, and he turned around and said to me, ‘I’m not afraid anymore!’ (She goes on with great emphasis.) He started talking to me. He was talking to me about what he wants, what he needs to do, how he’s frightened of losing the relationship. How . . . all kinds of things. And we just talked for four days!

In Arlene’s response we now see the particular, idiosyncratic meaning and power of the cycle of violence for this couple. A new explanation is in place which underlines the powerful bond between this couple and the peculiar role that violence has come to play in it. This lays the groundwork for a strategic intervention which both underlines the volitional aspect of Danny’s moods and depression and creates a playful challenge that brings forth the rebelliousness that underlies Danny’s passivity. The couple was spending a week in Florida with Danny’s parents and the therapist suggested that he should ‘test’ the idea of only being loved if he was being pleasing by making sure not to be pleased or pleasing about anything. Arlene was encouraged to continue to play out the role of the passively nurturing mother in order to see if and how she could affect his moods. When the couple returned, there had been no violence but both partners enacted their roles to the hilt. Arlene described her devoted efforts to lift Danny out of his moods, a task that was made more difficult by the presence of both her daughter and his daughter. Not surprisingly, she felt she had to compensate for Danny so that the children’s vacation would not be spoiled by his moods. She was clearly ‘in the middle’ trying to make everyone happy, but especially Danny. Her happiness with the children was predicated on her being able to get Danny into a better mood. The therapist decides to explore Arlene’s side of the problem more fully. The consultant joins the conversation at this point. Arlene: Therapist: Arlene:

I feel I have to keep showing Danny how much I love him. I feel I need to be needed. On the surface it looks like I don’t play a role in this . . . . That you have no control over the outcome. But if I am not important to him, it feeds on an insecurity in me. What

The wounded prince 37

Therapist: Arlene:

Therapist: Arlene: Consultant: Arlene:

Therapist: Arlene; Therapist: Arlene: Consultant: Arlene: Consultant: Arlene:

Consultant: Arlene: Consultant:

is he going to need me for, if I can’t get him out of this mood? It makes me more special because I went through this hell with him over and over and over. When we first went together he always told me that the reason he loved me was that I was always there for him. I used to say, ‘What about my personality?, What about me? And the things we do together, all the things which make us the couple we are?’ He kept saying over and over – ‘the key is that you are always there for me’. My insecurity is my fear that if I am not there for him like that, I won’t be me, I won’t be useful to Danny. My insecurity is that I could be anybody if I don’t play my role in that situation. Where did you learn that idea that you define yourself by your usefulness to your spouse? From my parents, subconsciously at least. I would see my mother and my father. My mother was there for my father, always there, needing to be needed. Her whole life revolves around my father . . . . Can he act like Danny? Moody like Danny? Yeah. If you were to discuss this idea with your mother, that you have no worth outside your usefulness to Danny, what would she say? She would relate to that. She would say it’s like that with my father. But she would be afraid to tell me to be different because if I came to her and said things are bad between us, it would make her upset. The explicit message is that it’s a terrible way to live your life. But the subliminal message is how much she can’t stand it. She tells me how abusive my father is to her. Physically? Emotionally, verbally. Does she fight back? At times. She looks like she doesn’t. Do you fight back more than she does? Yeah. What goes into your decision to fight more? I hate her as my role model. I hate her for being in the situation she is in. I love her as my mother but I wish I could have had a really strong individual woman role model. I don’t want to be like her. Part of you fights and the other part acquiesces. Yeah. When do you feel closer to your mother, when you fight or when you acquiesce?

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Arlene: Danny:

Neither. I would have said the same thing. She is always angry at her mother.

Danny explains that Arlene becomes angry at her mother when she puts up with Arlene’s father’s abusiveness but complains about it. ‘On the other hand,’ he adds, ‘she adores her father. Arlene’s role is to protect everyone.’ This confusing scenario is replicated in the relationship between Arlene, Danny and their respective children. Arlene plays the difficult role of ‘monkey in the middle’ trying to keep peace between Danny and the children but, as a result, she is never able to have separate time with her daughter. Therapist:

Who loses the most in this arrangement, the kids or Danny, when you are in the middle trying to make everyone happy?

Both the therapist and Danny are surprised at Arlene’s immediate answer ‘Danny’. Both thought she would say the kids. Arlene explains that Danny suffers emotionally when threatened with the loss of centrality, but the children have already learned to defer their expectations. Therapist: The kids lose you then because you are most attached to Danny? Arlene: Definitely. Consultant: Which one of you would have the most difficulty giving up the idea that Arlene could fix things and make them better? Is it Arlene, who would lose the idea that she was special if she were not the instrument of Danny’s redemption, or is it Danny who would not feel loved if Arlene did not give him constant proof that he can be loved despite his bad behaviour? Danny: I guess me and I guess her reaction would be to agree with me. The intervention by the consultant which follows is lengthy but is closely followed by the couple. In the starkest terms, it lays out the dilemma of male privilege and entitlement, which, in this family, is primarily predicated on the belief in men’s fundamental vulnerabilities: that men are helpless to control their emotions and their actions, and that women’s raison d’être is to make men’s lives work. The consultant summarises the crucial themes which have been developed in the treatment so far, and expands on their implications. She points out that Danny has identified with a tyrannical father whose abusive privilege was justified by the family belief that Danny was a vulnerable cripple, physically and psychologically. Since father and son did not have a real relationship, Danny did not have the opportunity to

The wounded prince 39 form a ‘personal’ identification with his father, one based on a satisfying, full and complex father/son experience. Instead, he had to settle for a ‘positional’ identification with his father, where he substituted behaving like father for being with father. The only time that Danny could resurrect a positive ‘being with father’ experience was when he forced Arlene into those ‘rock bottom’ encounters that ended with his feeling loved and forgiven. Once he constructed that moment, he could then make Arlene into a better, truly loving ‘father’ who would then listen as he ‘really talked’ about his deepest feelings. Moreover, having felt sacrificed by his mother, he turns to Arlene for reparative mothering. In so doing, he demands that Arlene sacrifice her daughter in much the same way that he had been sacrificed by his mother, since his father’s neediness took precedence over the children’s needs. The perfect fit between Arlene and Danny comes from Arlene’s ‘positional identification’ with her mother, her role model, who, though emotionally close to her, none the less also chose her tyrannical husband over her children. Arlene repeats her mother’s behaviour by predicating her own sense of identity on being special to Danny by being able to rescue him from his uncontrollable moods. In recompense, she hopes for a position of ‘primacy’ from him which she did not experience from her mother. The consultant plays with the idea that were Danny to begin to change his idea that he was an emotional cripple, unable to control his own moods, vulnerable and dependent on Arlene to rescue him when he ‘hits rock bottom’, he would no longer be able to justify his position as the central figure in the stepfamily vis à vis Arlene. Tyranny is only made acceptable because of the myth of the wounded prince. She also warns Danny that if he were to change this belief about himself, he might lose his forgiving attitude towards his father (the original model of the wounded prince). The consultant then gives the couple a ritual. Danny is told to do a private ‘odd days/even days’ experiment which he is to keep secret from Arlene by not telling her on which days he has decided to explore which position. Every other day of the week, he is to visualise himself as acting (1) fragile, (2) needing special care and attention from Arlene, and (3) entitled to that special care. He is then to observe Arlene’s reaction. On the other days, he is to visualise a different set of behaviours and beliefs predicated on the view (which is not his view at present) that he is resilient and able to take care of himself. On these days if he has setbacks, he should think thoughts like ‘if I saw myself as resilient rather than helpless, how would I be thinking about this little tangle I am in? How would I operate differently in this moment?’ Danny quickly asks if he should behave differently on these days and is told that he should not change behaviour, only think about what the world would look like and

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how it would feel to have a different idea about himself. Arlene is instructed to watch Danny carefully, and on the days when he seems fragile and demanding she is to be ‘devoted to him in the usual way’, in order to carry out her belief that she can only be special to him if she ‘is there for him’. When she feels that Danny is exploring alternatives to vulnerability and dependency on her magical healing powers, she is to explore mentally the question: ‘What would I risk if I saw Danny as more resilient and less fragile? What would my life be like if I were not the only one who could save him, indeed, if he could save himself? How would I see my mother differently, my parents’ marriage differently, my father differently, if Danny and I had a different way of thinking and behaving?’ Arlene answered immediately, ‘The first thing that comes to mind is that were I to view Danny differently, it would make me angrier at my father!’ The intervention had a startling effect on both members of the couple. Danny found himself not just thinking about the task but experimenting with controlling his moods. He found himself identifying those times when he felt that he was going to be swept away by feelings, and when normally he would allow the mood to build until Arlene was drawn into it. He began to predict the usual interaction between the couple which often ended in violence, experience disgust at his usual behaviour, and talk to himself about ways of mastering the mood. Arlene in turn began to reflect on the isomorphism between her relationship with Danny and the relationship patterns in both families of origin. She looked at herself through the lens of Danny’s parents’ relationship, suddenly seeing a reciprocity between Danny’s father’s emotional paralysis and his mother’s frantic filling up an interior sense of emptiness with ‘good works’. She wondered whether, if Danny and Danny’s father could have taken care of themselves, there would have been room for her mother-in-law, and for her ‘to think about who I am, my needs, what I want with my life’. Both partners found these ideas and practices exhilarating. In the months to follow, over the middle stages of therapy, these themes were elaborated and many changes occurred. But about six months later there was an important set-back, as Danny began to resist the pace of change. Some segments from the interview in which these issues became apparent are given below. By this point in the treatment, we were seeing the couple on an every-other-week basis. Slowly and subtly, we began to sense that Danny was ‘resisting’ us in the sessions. Before we had actually begun to formulate this for ourselves, the couple arrived for a session in a very heated, agitated state. It became clear in the early phases of the interview that Danny had ‘regressed’. He seemed to have lost all interest in differentiating from Arlene, which of course revived his panicky dependency and, more dangerously, his sense of angry entitlement regarding

The wounded prince 41 Arlene’s obligation to take care of him. He was ranting and hovering, and had begun to act somewhat menacingly. Arlene, on the other hand, seemed to have kept on track. She had begun to see friends, to become a more responsible and interested mother, and to tackle personal issues like weight and smoking without looking to Danny for advice and counsel. Faced with Arlene’s burgeoning independence, Danny began coercively using his misery and aggression to intimidate and guilt trip Arlene to, in Murray Bowen’s words, ‘change back’. As the interview progressed, Danny became increasingly defensive and argumentative. During a break, the therapists decided that he had induced in us the same feelings he induced in Arlene: anger and helplessness. We decided, just because it was a change, that the consultant would continue the interview while the therapist went behind the mirror. Beginning by addressing the immediate problem of the therapy, which was Danny’s ‘resistance’ and the feelings of fear and anger this induced in his two therapists, she began. Consultant: What I didn’t like about the picture that was forming of both of you in this session was that Arlene was doing everything right and you were doing everything wrong. You were doing everything to sabotage yourself, to keep the relationship stuck, to hide from life and she was finally beginning to get out of the cave, see the world and to go for it. And the thought I was having is who would want to take a chance and do something different under a description like that? I had an image of the therapy as a foot race, and since Arlene had such an early lead, I could see you having the thought, ‘I’m not going to compete with her in this race because she’s already out in front. What I’m going to do instead is die at the starting gate. I’ll just throw the race, so that she will win because there will have been no contest’. By framing Danny’s ‘stuck’ position as a motivated strategy, rather than a sorry state, the consultant reframes the complementarity between them, ‘Arlene is up, Danny is down’, into a symmetrical relationship: both are competing for first place in the therapy. This shift loosens something for Danny, since he makes an unexpected contribution to this formulation. Danny: Yes, it’s kind of what I’ve done with my life. Consultant: Like what other things fit this paradigm? Danny: Oh, in school and my general career and where I ended up definitely fits

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Gillian Walker and Virginia Goldner it. I mean I never tried, so I really never had any idea where I could go with this. I just sabotaged it at the beginning so that if I didn’t succeed like my father told me I wouldn’t, I might as well give up before I try. Not working hard is always the key.

Notice how Danny introduces his father into the failure story, with the throwaway line, ‘not succeeding like my father told me I wouldn’t’. Danny:

Consultant: Danny: Consultant: Danny: Consultant:

Danny: Consultant: Danny:

Consultant: Danny:

Consultant: Danny:

I always felt like I was smarter than everybody else, but look at me. What have I gotten out of it? Mediocrity at best – a miserable life. I look at myself – I’m pathetic. That’s how I feel. Well, but now we see how brilliantly you set this up. It wouldn’t have been my conscious decision. In some way you made an implicit decision. I must have. I mean it’s too coincidental, it carries through every thread of my life. It’s too coincidental. Who do you think benefited most from your decision to fail before you tried? To lie down at the starting gate and throw the fight? Whose star shines as yours falls or you make sure never to lift it? (Long pause.) Well, I guess it’s hard to face but obviously my father’s. Can you spell it out? It sounds so crazy, I mean even after all these years it sounds so crazy. I just – I don’t think my father could ever have dealt with either of his sons being very successful as much as that’s what a father wants. He says he wants what every parent wants for their children, but he never treated us like that. There was never any ‘I’m proud of you’ or a pat on the back or ‘you can do it’. There was never any support. So I guess not having his support is one thing; having him clobber you every time you try to do something to please him is worse. I just don’t think he could have dealt with it. Well let’s follow that a little bit. What would have been hard for him if he had produced a successful son, which ostensibly every father wants? Because he’s somebody who – (slowly and deliberately) because wherever he came from he couldn’t do it. He’s – he never felt successful himself and . . . he’s the way I am. (He holds back tears.) He’s me. In what way? (Through his tears.) He’s a bitter, angry man who never lived up to his potential. He’s very much like me. He’s very much like me. He’s just

The wounded prince 43 meaner. And I guess I got a lot of that too. Yes, I think he pulled the plug on himself for whatever reasons he did and I don’t – and as much as this hurts also, he probably – my mother was probably not a good choice for him as far as sabotaging himself, she was probably a bad choice to marry. She let him play little boy his whole life. He played it and she nourished it every step of the way. He could play little boy until the day he dies. And mommy would take care of him . . . my whole life I say, ‘How did she live with him?’ I feel so bad for her, but she’s one of the worst things that ever happened to him – you know they’ve been together for a long – I mean I never even thought of it before, but she was probably not very good for him. Consultant: Because she helped him be a baby . . . Danny: She was good to him, you know she took a lot of abuse, but you know, that’s what I know. He abused her for forty-five years. And she took it and still made his meals and still wiped his ass and . . . Consultant: Exactly. Danny: And kept him to be the – instead of saying, ‘Fuck you’ like Arlene’s trying to say to me. Danny’s deepening recognition of his identification with his father as a ‘failed, angry man’, a theme that was developed early in the treatment, continues the process of his taking full responsibility for his actions. He also begins to hold his father accountable. As we had earlier predicted, the more Danny took responsibility for himself, the less sympathy he would feel for his ‘paralysed’ father. Indeed, as the sentimentalised view of the failed, fragile father further gives way in this session, Danny is now free to see his father as also actively choosing passivity. ‘He pulled the plug on himself too’ is an important addition to his understanding of his father’s misery. Moreover, as he further elaborates the early insight about the terms of his parents’ bond – the crippled baby and devoted servant – he is finally able to see Arlene’s attempt at separation as a positive act and not a betrayal. Consultant: So your mother helped him stay a cripple instead of telling him to get on with it, as Arlene is trying to say to you. Danny: Absolutely, and he will die a cripple. And bitter and angry (long silence) . . . and I love him. Consultant: Well one of the ways that you seem to need to express it is by doing his life all over again.

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Here again we see in Danny’s touching and ironic statement about his father, ‘And I love him’, an expression of the psychological consequences of a love that cannot be recognised or acted upon. As we said earlier, men like Danny have to substitute ‘being like’ father for ‘being with’ father. This is what was meant by the consultant’s statement, ‘You need to express [your love] by doing his life all over again’. The session ended with both therapists joining Danny, without Arlene, to discuss his plans for change. Consultant: (In a playful tone.) Now, if you were deciding that you’d given your father forty years and not a penny more. You’d reached middle age – no threat, don’t worry – you may look young, but the fact of the matter is you are middle-aged and you have yet to make your mark. And he has no reason to fear. If you continue this way, your father will go to his grave not feeling like his son was any threat. Now, if you made the decision – and of course as we said, Arlene is the one who certainly at this moment looks much better in the therapy – definitely as we would score it today. Danny: What a surprise! (Laughs.) Consultant: Right, what a surprise. So if you decided forty years and not a penny more, what would your first act of being in the competition be – getting in the competition, throwing your hat in the ring? It could be in relation to Arlene, your father, your brother, all of them – because they’re all sort of versions of the same issue – your therapists . . . what would it be if you were saying ‘watch my dust?’ Danny: (Long pause.) To me it would be an internal declaration. Consultant: Internal declaration? What would it be? Danny: Declaring that . . . starting today I’m gonna show my stuff! After this session, although Danny has had minor set-backs and temptations to revert to his ‘demanding baby self’, he has never really abandoned his newer, more mature and responsible (for himself) stance. The themes of his struggle, suggested in the first session, and articulated most profoundly and mutatively in the fourth session, continued to weave their way through subsequent sessions, and were here reiterated and further elaborated six months later.

CONCLUSION It is now six years since we first began our work with Arlene and Danny. They are now the senior members of a couples group we have formed of men and women who are

The wounded prince 45 struggling with the after-effects of a violent relationship. They are enormously helpful in innumerable ways to the other group members. Danny has become very ‘militant’ on the subject of non-violence for men. He supports and challenges the other men to stay the course, and he is sympathetic to the women’s experience. While occasionally he still reaches for his ‘wounded prince’ costume, he catches himself quickly. He jokes that he is nostalgic for the ‘one brain’ model of relationship. In the past when he assumed the role of ‘Danny boy’, the injured, helpless prince, Arlene inevitably gave up any independent thoughts to join him. Now she very much subscribes to the ‘two brain’ school and refuses to dance attendance (most of the time) no matter how plangent his plaint. Arlene has also become a role model for the other women in the group. She has been where they are, not only in terms of having been battered, but also in terms of having lost herself by becoming consumed in and by the relationship. And she brings her own brand of ‘tough love’ to the men who are not as far along the line as Danny with regard to non-violence. We believe that this case illustrates the power of gender to structure relationships in particular ways. The dispersal of power and the allocation of roles and responsibilities between the sexes are organised by cultural narratives as old as civilisation itself. Each of us makes meaning of our lives by situating our own particular family drama into these available story-lines. We have found the use of the genogram particularly helpful in articulating how these themes are constructed, repeated and resisted across the generations. We have probably not heard the last of the wounded prince and his devoted consort, but perhaps we can create a space to observe and critique the endless variations on this powerful and problematic theme.

REFERENCES Bly, R. (1990) Iron John, New York: Vintage Books. Frazer, J. (1959) The New Golden Bow, T. Gaster (ed.), New York: Mentor Books, New American Library. Goldner, V., Penn, P., Sheinberg, M. and Walker, G. (1990) ‘Love and violence: gender paradoxes in volatile relationships’, Family Process 29: 343–364. Graves, R. (1955) The Greek Myths, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Rich, A. (1976) Of Woman Born, New York: W. W. Norton. White, M. (1989) Selected Papers, Adelaide: Dulwich Centre Publications.

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Abuse, risk and protection A Fifth Province approach to an adolescent sexual offence Nollaig O’Reilly Byrne and Imelda Colgan McCarthy

INTRODUCTION This chapter aims to explore the moral and political constitution of violence, risk and protection in the arena of family life and professional intervention through a case study where a 15-year-old boy has committed a sexual offence. The family is not the only site of cultural and gender oppression, particularly when ‘the family’ enters the domain of professional treatment and investigation. The response of society (via its institutions) to protect vulnerable groups, while drawing on values of justice and civil rights, can also be understood as an exercise of power drawing on normative, moral postulates and wider political agendas in contemporary western society. A model of practice, The Fifth Province Model (Byrne and McCarthy 1988; Kearney et al. 1989; McCarthy and Byrne 1988), is referred to by the authors. The model proposes a dis-position for therapists in the deconstruction of taken-forgranted meanings which firmly isolate the issues as merely personal, familial and therapeutic, not political. Dis-position refers to a movement away from the taking of a certain position but does not infer moral or political fence-sitting.

MORAL PURPOSE The faults and frailties of personal lives are expounded upon by a variety of experts – moral and legal reformers, social scientists, politicians and therapists. In time, these decontextualised ‘deficits’ obscure the moral premises which have shaped professional discourses1 in the first instance. The use of the language of risk and the necessity for the protection of women and children as a vulnerable group has such a moral purpose in society. This is clearly articulated in projects which aim to identify and remedy ‘deficiencies’ in parenting. An

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idealised childhood is proposed in professional discourse which manifestly is remote from the expectations and experiences of the majority of children and the achievements of their parents. Parents quickly emerge as ‘moral failures’ who lack commitment, are weak, dangerous or ignorant, and their children become objects of moral and psychological evaluation. Faulty parents and damaged offspring are the dominant premises forming the mainstay of child protection practice and affect a wide range of interventions. Severed from their material base of astounding inequality, issues are individualised as spiritual and psychological catastrophes of personal and family failure.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPHERES: THE DEPOLITICISATION OF ISSUES In western societies, culture and law define the family as a private domain. This is an example and a reinforcement of the reification and privatisation of contemporary western social life in general. Such a distinction produces private families who seek refuge or salvation (or fail to find it) behind their four walls. Detaching the family from political, economic and wider social contexts is similar to traditions which have privatised and silenced women’s and children’s concerns. The isolating and silencing of women and children is intrinsically connected to the prevailing political and economic system of patriarchy. The problem of attributing stark social problems to particular ‘detrimental’ family forms (e.g. welfare dependants, single parent families) overlooks how institutions generating wealth, poverty and rapid social changes have battered, bruised and invaded community forms that once were ‘family’. (Goldner 1985; McGoldrick et al. 1989; Perelberg and Miller 1990). The question is, under what circumstances did the family become a privatised domain and in whose interest is it to be thus maintained? The dominant social order upholds the privatised family – a rarefied stratosphere of devotion and contentment! The failures are theorised and treated as marginal enclaves of deficit–deviance which are then thoroughly exposed to the scrutiny of state institutions. The desire for privacy on the part of these families (promoted by the state as appropriate for all families) is seen to be motivated by the desire to hide their difficulties and obstruct the authorities. If anything, such a marginal family is a casualty not by its deviant pursuit of privacy and secrecy, but from the social isolation which privatisation brings. Privatising and marginalising of families occurs in the same arena of history and politics. What is privacy for the conventional family is isolation for the marginal one. What is obscured and denied are the wider contextual abuses which historically and politically constitute marginalisation.

48 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy In family therapy, the concept of ‘neutrality’ in the systemic model (Palazzoli et al. 1980), as practised in the early 1980s, has been justifiably criticised for its lack of political insight, i.e. the non-recognition of the family as a site of oppression of women and children (MacKinnon and James 1987). Ironically the systemic view, while privileging relationship and context over individual, shifted from one domain of privacy to another. The depoliticised family as a conventional form was easily trapped on a procrustean bed of systemic theory. As a ‘science’ of systems, family therapy prided itself on the absence of political and moral content. However, new developments, giving primacy to the language of daily experiences, cultural contexts and gender inequality, have re-formed systemic theory and practice. Two major re-formative movements may be identified. The feminists reintroduced the concepts of power and social justice politicising and revitalising family therapy (e.g. Hare-Mustin 1987; Jones 1993). The social constructionists reintroduced a focus on language and the ethics of reflexive participation in clinical conversations (Andersen 1990; Anderson and Goolishian 1992; Fruggeri et al. 1991; Hoffman 1992; Lang et al. 1990; Salamon et al. 1991; White and Epston 1990).

TREATMENT AS AN ALIBI OF SOCIAL CONTROL The non-acknowledgement of inequality in the relationship between client and therapist favours the imposition and power of the ‘expert’. The client enters as a spectator to professional discourses and enlists as an obedient imitator – as a member of a patient class. Rituals of professional practice, i.e. observation, enquiry and commentary, author a narrative where the client is fully disclosed in abject otherness. From this professional vantage point, protocols of recuperation and reformation are enunciated as final closures. For example, despite apparently different stances towards victim and perpetrator, in this view the politics of the practice addressing both is colonial and impositional. A ‘victim’ is co-opted into a professional discourse of ‘victimisation’ and ‘recuperation’, a perpetrator into one of censure and correction.

PROTECTION AS PATERNALISTIC CONCERN Protection relies on societal values which have an intensely moral content. It is a coercive authority which justifies its involvement by asserting that it acts on behalf of subjects who do not have voices. Its premise favours response to particular domestic crimes while ignoring the context from which they are derived, i.e. inequality. These ‘domestic crimes’ are represented as if they were transparent neutral phenomena

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outside the professional discourse which establishes them. However, a feminism which cites the behaviour of particular males in the private domain of the family as the foundational site of power and domination, and without reference to their social position, i.e. race, class or level of ability, is also misleading. It is an unlikely feature of marginalised families that they are suspect of being sanctuaries of male privilege. The widespread acceptance of the belief in the protection of civil and human rights apparently requires no justification. Likewise the protection of children’s rights arouses strong emotions of espousal in most of us. The premises of protection propel workers to intervene with the alarm and surreptitiousness of soldiers going into battle. ‘Air strikes’ (for example, the Orkney dawn raids) are performed when political appraisal and dialogue might be more useful. They soothe worker anxieties in relation to their functions of social control especially in work with those who are under state-mandated vigilance for a suspicion of failure to meet socially designated standards of living and caring. As O’Donovan (1984: 80) points out, however, ‘protection is a concept which must be carefully analysed. Protection – for whom, from what, from whom?’ Likewise when we talk about ‘risk’ we also need to begin to ask, risk to what and to whom, risk from what or from whom? Such discourses reflect the wider societal anxiety about contamination and the erosion of dominant social norms. Hence the goal of intervention is primarily that of containment. The mobilising motifs of punishment and obedience ensure the paternalistic orientation of the practice. The reward is ‘protection’ of women and children. The sacrifice is a ball and chain captivity for women as child watchers and domestic protectors. The effect is the casual exit or discharge of men from families. In maximising the variable of protection there is often no room for asking the question, might less protection with a sub-optimal outcome for those thought to be in need of such protection be more desirable for all in some circumstances (Kearney 1988)?

THE FIFTH PROVINCE MODEL The Fifth Province Model was developed in the early 1980s by the authors and a third colleague, Philip Kearney. The model takes its name from the ancient Celtic myth of the Fifth Province and its orientation from the work of two Irish philosophers, Hederman and Kearney (1982). The Fifth Province may have existed or it may not. There are many versions. Some say it was a province of imagination and possibility which was other to the pragmatic concerns of the ‘real’ world. Others site it as a druidic place at the centre of Ireland where the four provinces met and where kings and chieftains came to receive

50 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy counsel and resolve conflicts through dialogue. Today, its only remaining trace is in the Irish language where the word for province is ‘coiced’ which means ‘fifth’. In our work we have used this metaphor and the political metaphor of colonisation to review issues of power, justice and language. The implied structure of the five provinces has also inspired a figurative principle in our work, otherwise known as ‘diamonds’ (see pp. 54–55).

A critique of power Power, as it grows more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family: a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party or the State just as a child has no right to keep a secret from his father or mother. (Kundera 1988:111) The concept of power has been challenged by social constructionism as being essentialist and foundationalist, meaning that power is seen as an entity, force or characteristic of an individual, a class or a group. We in contrast, hold that, just as equality is a social phenomenon, power is also relational and as such is part and parcel of social discourse (see also Lannamann 1990: 7). To deny discourses of power has many social implications, especially for those who do not count themselves or are not counted among the elite. Every conversation we engage in with clients is saturated with power – how we ask questions, to whom we address questions, what we ask questions about, imply decisions which include certain subjects and exclude others. Where the exclusions concern the lived experiences of those we converse with (hence defined by default as illegitimate, not normal), we generate situations of domination in our practice. The question is, how can the social practice of therapy reflexively reproduce itself as a credible non-coercive practice? Under what circumstances can clients as subjects validate their own subject matters, their own stories from the mess and entanglement of intimate ties, and still not be reduced by an ‘expert culture’ to an edited, punctuated, corrected or completely rewritten version? The first step is to recognise that the relationship of family to a state institution, such as social services, is a moral and political one. In focusing attention on power in a conflictual situation using a moral and political lens, a questioning practice is proposed as an alternative to expert opinion. In this way attention is not on the ‘objectified’, ‘pathologised’ difference of the other but on the appraisal of the other’s wider context as just or unjust. Therapy in the first

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instance is a concrete social situation where articulation of cultural beliefs, normative standards and action regimes must be tied to a protocol of mutual understanding and legitimation. This requires that the professional system must understand that the social norms invoked must apply equally to their practice as to those who are in receipt of care and help.

Justice The non-recognition by professionals that family and state institutions begin from unequal bargaining positions is a tacit endorsement of the structural inequality which pertains. In this context, acceptance of professional viewpoints and consensus often reflect obedience rather than understanding or agreement of the disadvantaged party. For the process of therapy to be just, it must reflect ‘procedural equality, participation, non-deception and non-manipulation’ (White 1988: 76; see also Waldegrave and Tapping 1990). Such practice is one of open conversation where many voices and a kaleidoscope of perspectives emerge which disrupt the didactic impulse of the privileged discourse (Colgan 1991). Here a different kind of power can emerge which Heilbrun (1988:18) defines as ‘the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter’. Reciprocity in client–professional relationships replaces the conventional authority–obedience theme of a moral narrative (Shotter 1989).

The figurative aspect of the model The moral and political premises of a wide range of treatment models are often hidden. Our research project, the Fifth Province Associates (FPA), has attempted to elaborate such premises by proposing a linguistic model which figuratively constitutes in diamond form an ensemble of political actors and the discourse in which they are embedded. The free play of opposition and contrast, as a structural principle or rule of the discourse (Barthes 1988), aims for standpoints to be explored, not for the premature capture and resolution of opposing elements. FPA, as participant, imposes a structural principle of ambivalence, which as a political model illustrates the power differential between parties; coupling the marginal and dominant themes in this way (con)textualises the relationship as political and re-presents an ambivalent social field of contradictory and contrasting propositions in an ongoing dialectic. The intention in this process is to uphold the marginal voice not in terms of its exotic and extreme difference, whether of deviance or victimisation, but to explore its dialectical play with the dominant other.

52 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy Language The Fifth Province Model heightens the affectivity of ambivalence (expressed in language as contrast and contradiction) by a type of enquiry referred to as ‘questioning at the extremes’ (Colgan 1991). Exaggeration, humour and ambiguity give a form to these questions whose orientation is not the truth of the situation, but a stark and dramatic illustration of conflict. The relationship of counter-claims is explored at the extreme limits of presentations of fear, risk and protection. This process appears like a reversal of the usual ‘masculine’ and conventional order where the aim is to resolve the contradiction, mask the fears and capture the conversation exactly, which inevitably leads to a colonial project with one ‘correct’ viewpoint overriding others. Our model entertains a violent dimension in its utilisation of dramatic language which explodes fixed categories, claims and meanings by exaggeration. Here the rival domains of expert and client open out to and are modified by each other. The alarm of exaggeration and the confusion of ambiguity affectively charge a discourse that is held together in the application of our structural principle. The appropriate way to enable people to speak in this social organisation is theatrical. By contrast, the confessional and confidential structure of traditional client–professional narratives may promote the dominance of the expert as the voice which usurps the confidence and confidences of clients and closes the conversation in pursuit of the ‘correct’ opinion.

At risk protagonists: at risk conversations Traditional treatment models are premised on the observation and measurement of some objectified other. To counter this surveillance impulse lurking in treatment and intervention, we have displaced ‘risk’ as an objectified standard in favour of the exploration of the discourse emerging in the therapeutic relationship. By this we mean that ‘risk’ is not only a tangible or imaginary threat to the safety and welfare of a designated vulnerable party. It is also implicit in every therapeutic moment where differences occur. As such, a professional discourse embodying prescribed norms is also placed at risk. Subjects, no longer ‘measured’ and ‘observed’, engage in a process of dialogue. However, this process also is not without risk of closure. For example, powerful normative claims may exclude the marginalised ones. Alternatively, the marginal voice may be prematurely exposed as deviant when pitted as a runaway against a dominant professional discourse. In both situations oppression and abuse may occur (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

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A FIFTH PROVINCE DISCOURSE: CREATING A ‘SAFETY NET’ In the following case, the main emphasis is on the creation of a ‘safety net’ constituted by the family and professional networks of a 15-year-old boy, Roddy. This network was convened by FPA in the aftermath of a serious suicide attempt by Roddy, subsequent to his rape of a 6-year-old girl. The family comprises long-separated parents Sonia and Raz, daughter Dunya who has left home, and Roddy. The professional system includes medical staff from the hospital where Roddy was admitted (following his overdose), social workers and their seniors from social services, a family friend and FPA. The six consultations took place over a six-week period.

The articulation of power Roddy’s grave sexual crime has created an account which strengthened the voice of his victim’s family while grievously offending his own. This is the polarised discourse of victim and perpetrator. It has become publicised in community anger directed against Roddy and his mother, who are forced from their home and into hiding. In this crisis, Roddy makes a suicide attempt and is hospitalised. In the wake of the crime Roddy and his mother are suspect. He is a deviant and, both as mother and protector of a deviant, Sonia is also suspect. His subsequent suicide attempt and her engagement with professional and police systems temporarily holds in abeyance their suspect identity. Sonia, brought up in an institution, shifts from the suspicious ground of ‘deviant family’ to the security of the professional platform. As a childhood recipient of institutional care, she appears comfortable in her acceptance of professional involvement. Here, ambiguously exposed as mother and as aligned with social services’ view, she finds refuge in the co-authoring of the professional text. Father, Raz, erased from the family since Roddy’s birth, comes into the margins of this text, a shadowy presence echoing agreement with Sonia. A suicide attempt in the wake of physical danger and ostracism is a marker opening the text to ambiguity. Roddy is now seen as both victim and perpetrator, threatening cleavage in the original discourse. Now, he is both a subject and an object of concern or scrutiny. He has committed a grave crime but he is also homeless, forced to leave his school, has tried to kill himself and is in some physical danger. His suicide attempt speaks to this isolation and is also a mute reparative gesture for the many lives he has shattered. His parents, qua parents, are less visible to him because of their cooperation with social services. He appears to cooperate with professional involvement but may be doing this more on the grounds of prudence for his mother’s sake. Thus his own more ‘heroic’ choices, severing himself from parents and

54 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy professionals, lie in the contemplation of suicide and/or in the embracing of community anger.

Issues of justice Social service professionals, by requesting a consultation, show their desire to insert the claims of protection and treatment as a mutual rather than a coercive agreement between all parties. Rather than become impositional or coercive, they were anxious that the parents would recover their just entitlement to speak as parents on their own behalf and on behalf of their son. The question then became whether ‘another meaning (an ethic of justice) could be applied to Roddy’s silence, enabling and entitling him to speak on his own behalf and not just defensively?’

The figurative–theoretical principle The figurative principle, spatially organised in a diamond form in this model, illustrates the power differential and hence the speaking sites among the principal participants. At the initiation of consultation the professional system of social services, hospital staff and FPA, along with the parents, appear to be in a cooperative relationship from which Roddy, as victim and perpetrator, is the complementary and contrasting exclusion (see Figure 3.1). The political organisation re-presents a powerful parens patriae where social services act by proxy for the parents. However, should the parents begin to speak on their own behalf as parents they may be pathologised and risk the same exclusion as Roddy (Figure 3.2). Herein lies a dilemma for consultation.

At risk protagonists The professional monopoly The professional monopoly, i.e. social services, hospital staff, submerged parents and FPA, from which Roddy is excluded, runs the risk of schism by reason of the ambiguous insertion of parents who may shift their ambivalent allegiance from social services to their son. This shift may promote a split in the professional group where the battle to establish Roddy’s identity as victim or perpetrator ensues. Is he a victim meriting protection or a perpetrator meriting exposure and correction? Emphasising protection may obscure and silence the crime. Premature exposure, exacting remorse and reformation, may deliver Roddy into an unhelpful obedient acceptance in which he

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would comply without consideration of his own unique reflections on the grave situation in which he finds himself.

The parents The submerged parents belong to the professional monopoly on tenuous grounds (Figure 3.1). If the history of their parenting and their own relationship is exposed (desertion and physical abuse), one or both may become excluded, silenced and suspect. Blamed and seen as ‘bad parents’ they may become unable to speak from their own position (Figure 3.2).

Roddy Roddy is at risk of further silencing in the guise of obedience to the monopoly or, if he dares to speak, he may further accentuate his deviant and excluded status.

FPA FPA, as consultant in the professional system, is at risk of promoting, between the professionals and between the family and professionals, splits which are lurking in the ambiguous text of protection and correction where the accounts of Roddy and/or his parents are excluded (i.e. Figures 3.1 and 3.2).

56 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy Languaging in the Fifth Province Exclusion, as the complementary motif to professional monopoly and the site of Roddy’s silence, is explored in the first consultation. Speaking to his exclusion and enabling him to talk from his own position and his own definition of the extremes of his act, allows Roddy to stay connected and not be dismissed by professionals and parents.

First consultation: ‘the lowest of the low’ The meeting comprises social services personnel, hospital staff, FPA, mother and Roddy.

Exclusion by homelessness and deviance Interviewer: If your mother cannot care for you, what will happen? Roddy: I don’t know. I suppose I’d have to go somewhere. Interviewer: You’d have to live somewhere. Would it be a kind of a hospital place or an institution? Roddy: I don’t know. Wherever I’m going . . . I think I’m going to a home. Interviewer: A home. A home for people without a home? Roddy: I don’t know. No, I think it is a home (lowers voice) for people like me, and people that have been evicted and all that. Interviewer: Or is it for boys who have been offenders? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: That’s where you’d like to go? Roddy: No. That’s where I think I’m going. Interviewer: How do you think you will fit in with boys who are offenders? Roddy: I don’t know. Interviewer: Do you think of yourself as an offender? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: A sexual offender? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: When did that begin to dawn on you? Was it before that happened with Natasha (6-year-old victim) when she started to bleed, or were you thinking about that during the year? In this brief conversation, a proposition based on how others are speaking about

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Roddy is proffered by the interviewer. Roddy accepts the proposition and the interviewer begins to elaborate further the context from which and in which this designation arose. She cites it as a social and discursive action and extends it beyond any individual or objective sphere. Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Mother:

Afterwards. Afterwards. When your mam took her to the hospital? Yeh. Do you think that your mam thinks about you differently now . . . now that you have become an offender? Yeh. In what way? Does she love you less? Eh, I don’t know, it’s just . . . Is it harder to love an offender? I suppose it is, yes. Why? Eh, I don’t know. Knowing what they have done makes it harder. Makes it harder from your mam’s point of view? Is there anything worse you could have done than this? It’s the worst thing I could have done. There is nothing worse, is that right? Yes. He has done the lowest of the low.

Citing the designation ‘sexual offender’ within the realms of social action, the interviewer goes on to give it a relational ground. The implications of the abusive action and the designation are explored in the context of the boy’s current relationship with his mother. By asking him when and how he accepted this term connects him to its meaning rather than as a label given by others. This opens up the possibility of a dialogue in which the participants begin to shape the context of their meanings, descriptions and actions in their particular situation. Mother posits her son as ‘the lowest of the low’. Roddy remains in the hospital.

Second consultation: one week later: father attends Immediately prior to this session the situation had changed somewhat and Roddy had moved to live temporarily with his mother while the professional system offered ongoing appraisal and support. Father offers to support mother by keeping in contact with Roddy. He requests help from a member of the professional system to find ways

58 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy to make a connection with his son. On exploring with Roddy his perception of police involvement, he suggests that the member of the professional system ‘who most knows about it’ tell him what the current deliberations and likely outcome are. At his mother’s request, Roddy ‘agrees’ also to attend a psychiatrist in the hospital for weekly meetings. Social services keep in close contact with the family.

Third consultation, 1: ‘I trust nobody’ Since Roddy’s return to his mother’s house there had been angry outbursts between them and Roddy bad begun to threaten his mother with violence. Mother complains to social services about his aggression. Social services are concerned that Roddy will become more out of control and that the vulnerable mother–child relationship will collapse. The impulse is to control and correct Roddy’s behaviour and recreate his exclusion status. Roddy, however, challenges the legitimacy of his mother’s attack on him. Their mutual ‘abuse’ is thus contextualised and father finds more words to include himself as a potential resource to mother and son. Social worker: (To Roddy.) Then what about . . . you have been verbally abusing your mam? Roddy: Yeh. Social worker: Yeh. Roddy: She does the same to me. Father: (To Roddy.) She is your mother. Roddy: Oh, that gives her the right, does it? Father: She is just asking you . . . Roddy: Oh sorry, sorry. So that gives her the right . . . to call me what she wants, does it? Does it? Father: You are not pulling your weight. You have to pull your weight. Roddy: (In a raised voice.) Does that give anybody the right, does it? Father: (Also in a raised voice). She is chastising you, that’s what it is. Roddy: Does that give her a right? Father: Yes. Roddy: Does that, does that give my mother the right to call me names just because she is my mother? Father: Yes, I suppose it does. Roddy: Yeh, well that’s the first I heard of that. Interviewer: What is your view about that? Roddy: Well, she doesn’t have a right to call me whatever she wants. I didn’t ask

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Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer:

Roddy:

Interviewer: Roddy:

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to be here . . . so I don’t see why I should take any shit from her like. I don’t see that. I don’t see the point in that. So you think your mam abuses you? Yeh, she calls me names. She always did it. So if it’s all right for her to call me names, then it’s all right for me to call her. It’s as simple as that. If you can give it, you can take it. That’s the way I see it. So these days more like you and your mam are two equals, rather than mother and son, is it, from your point of view? Yeh. Is this just since all these things happened around you? I’m no different now, am I? Well indeed, you have been through a very trying and difficult time and you may be a very different person now than you were a few weeks ago. Yeh. Well, she wants me to act like an adult, right, and she says that we will be equals, so . . . she doesn’t treat me like one so I don’t treat her like one. Is it your experience that you feel humiliated? I don’t see why I should sit back and let people call me whatever.

In accepting Roddy’s statements of hostility and pitting questions at the extreme of Mother’s fears – that she now had an abusive son – it was possible to get to Roddy’s explanations. Rather than convert Roddy’s version into a professional judgement, his contrasting but complementary version of mother as abuser was inserted. Interviewer: Roddy: Interviewer: Roddy:

These days what is the most difficult thing for you? How do you mean? In what way? In terms of your feelings and reactions. I don’t know. I suppose I don’t know what I think of people. I’m not so sure if I can trust them or not. Interviewer: Even your parents? Roddy: Yeh, so I just. . . Interviewer: So you think your mother would hand you over to social services just like that . . . or the police? . . . And your father, would he do the same? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: So you are waiting for it any day? Would you trust social services more than your parents? Roddy: (Shakes head.) I trust nobody. In his accusations against his mother, Roddy is none the less proclaiming his entitlement

60 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy as son, albeit an unruly one. Father’s spontaneous interjections in support of mother signify his status as father. From the platform of family, Roddy has spoken of his feared exclusion. In the first meeting he passively accepted whatever was being arranged for him. Here he loudly protests his entitlement and his doubts about being understood.

Third consultation, 2: how dangerous is Roddy? The fear of professionals and parents is now brought into view by asking Roddy to reflect on the threat he poses to his mother and others. He divulges his mistrust and lack of control. With this emergence Roddy went on to talk about his humiliation as a context for his untoward behaviour towards his mother. Marking the context in this way opens up further opportunities to explore the fears of the professionals that Roddy is dangerous, not only to himself but to others as well. Interviewer: Well, what about the idea that you might still be dangerous to other people? Roddy: The way . . . the other thing? Interviewer: Yes . . . sexually. Roddy: That people might think that I am still dangerous? Interviewer: Yes. Roddy: (Long pause.) I’m still not too sure . . . now. Interviewer: But in a way it is even broader than sexuality. It has to do with these intense feelings. When you got frustrated with your mam, you said to your dad, ‘I feel like getting a knife and killing her and killing myself’. It sounds like in that moment at least in fantasy, you were extremely dangerous. Or are they just words that spill out? Roddy: I suppose. When you are angry you will say anything, you know. There’s nothing wrong in saying anything, you know. There’s no law against it. There’s nothing wrong. No one can do anything about you saying something. I suppose I was pissed off, you know, really angry, you know. That’s it, as well as that she humiliated me as well, you know. Interviewer: I understand that, from your point of view you were provoked. But the question that we will be asking of you Roddy, in that moment, how dangerous did you feel? Roddy: (Long pause.) I suppose dangerous enough ’cos I did have the feeling to do it, you know. Interviewer: Em. Roddy: You know, that’s the way I feel.

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Fourth consultation: ‘I don’t fancy getting thrown around, you know’ Roddy’s perceived dangerousness is likely to reform the professional monopoly in which the parents are submerged. Father meekly follows Sonia’s initiatives as the only action open to him, given his history of abuse and abandonment of Sonia and their children. Their relationship as parents at this critical juncture remains untested. Roddy remains fearful that mother will push him away from her. Father’s status remains suspect and Roddy may fear that a connection with his marginal father will exclude them from mother. However, mother, surprisingly, begins to present Roddy with a different father. Interviewer: Well, I know you are very interested in your mother and her life and all. But how come you are not interested in your father? Is he just a shadow person? Roddy: I see him more as a friend, a friend than as a father, you know. Like I’m only getting to know him. You can hardly expect me to start jumping into his arms. When he was in my life, he disappeared, then he came back into my life and then he disappeared again, you know . . . just sort of a rag doll like, in a way, like a novelty sort of thing. A new toy. You get bored with it and then you see it again and then you start liking it, you know. . . . I don’t fancy getting thrown around, you know. I don’t need it, you know. Mother: Roddy, I’m stepping in here! Roddy: Well step in. Mother: Now I have to say it – Raz has been great. Roddy: Yeh, I know. Mother: Excuse me I’m talking. Roddy: I know. Mother: Just be quiet a second. Your father has been very good from the time of this horrible crime you have committed. He was the one who went to the hospital every night to you. He was the one who took you in. He was the one who did all those things, Roddy. He is there 100 per cent and more now, behind you. He is trying to make up for lost time. But it will be a while, a while for the two of you. But he is trying to make up for lost time. Family friend: I think they are both right. It does take time. You can’t just – it doesn’t heal overnight. Is that fair comment? Mother: But don’t mistrust him . . . ’cos . . .

62 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy Roddy: Mother: Roddy: Father: Roddy: Father: Roddy:

I don’t mistrust him. I see him just as a friend, because it is easier to lose a friend than a father. Who said you were going to lose a father . . . him . . . now? Well, who says I am not going to lose him? I do. Well, you said that before and you did it. When did I say this? When you were in Barrystown, you know, that seemed the impression me and Dunya were getting – that you were there for good and the next thing we knew you were gone.

Fifth consultation, 1: ‘breaking the bond’ Roddy continues to keep father at arm’s length. However, despite Roddy’s resistance, father has arranged more access visits. The parents agree to meet once weekly to discuss Roddy and the theme of potential exclusion emerges again in the senior social worker’s address to mother. Interviewer: (To Roddy.) So we have it all sewn up now? There is no escape for you. You are in our safety net, eh? Family friend: Have you a sleeping bag and some gear? (Refers to planned camping weekend.) Interviewer: (To Roddy.) Do you want to make a strong statement about any of this? Roddy: It suits me fine – the way he has to change, you know (i.e. that father has to spend more time with him). Interviewer: What? Roddy: The way he has to change towards me. Mother: No, Roddy, it’s both. Roddy: If I don’t like it, he’ll find out anyway. Interviewer: Yeh, but I’m going to hold on to my hunch – the reason you won’t like it is your way of staying loyal to your mam, to the fifteen years she has spent with you. I think you are very loyal to her. Mother: Break the loyalty, go on. Interviewer: No, I think we have to honour the loyalty. Mother: Honour it. But then you can go across I think. You are getting the chance now Roddy, for yourself and Raz. Break the loyalty, go on. Interviewer: Yes but there is a contradiction. It involves breaking the bond with you and that’s a problem and we are all aware of that.

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Mother: Roddy: Mother: Roddy: Mother:

Well Roddy, I don’t mind. You tried it before. I tried what before? To break the bond? Yeh. But Roddy, you are not going to be breaking the bond as in breaking the bond as a permanent break. You are getting the chance to know your dad and to share things with him. Senior social worker: I just wonder Sonia, if sometimes you should just let Roddy say those things, not try to convince him about what you are saying. (Here the senior social worker, on behalf of the professional group, articulates an appreciation of Roddy’s experiences of exclusion and henceforth his caution in reestablishing connections.) Mother: Yes – just let him. Senior social worker: Just hear it and say nothing. Then maybe Roddy will feel that you listened and he can go. Otherwise I think he may feel pushed out. Roddy: I just want to say. It’s not going to be easy.

Fifth consultation, 2: ‘I shouldn’t have a life’ Interviewer: If you were trying to explain to Ivan [friend] what happened to you . . .. Roddy: Well, I suppose I could rehearse it now, for the next twenty years and if I was to say it to him, I’d . . . it wouldn’t be the exact . . . it wouldn’t be the words I had rehearsed. I could have it in my head but I could say it anytime no matter what state I was in but when it comes to explaining something to someone, it’s difficult, you know. Interviewer: I know, yeh. Roddy: The words are there on the tip of your tongue but you can’t say them, you know. I don’t know the way . . . what it’s going to be like when I explain to Ivan, I don’t know. It hasn’t happened before. Interviewer: Do you have any idea why this kind of problem happens to young lads like you? You are not the only young person with this kind of problem. I am not saying it is common but it does happen to young people of your age.

64 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy Roddy:

I don’t know . . . I never thought of that . . . all I. . . I never really thought . . . all I think of is what I have done, what I deserve. That’s all I ever think of. Interviewer: You deserve to be put away for life? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: That long? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: Why so long? Why for life? Roddy: I don’t know . . . . I suppose I ruined someone’s life so I shouldn’t have a life in a way. In the safety net of the professional and parental system, Roddy’s accounting of his crime is approached as an imaginary dialogue with his friend Ivan. He demonstrates that in this imaginary dialogue with a significant other, meaning changes in each telling. In his interior dialogue with himself, meaning is closed in self-condemnation.

Sixth consultation: re-sourcing motherhood: a story of abuse and acknowledgement Following her son’s acknowledgement of ruining someone’s life, mother brings the family saga to a confessional closure. Father’s acknowledgement of his history of abusiveness and her story reshapes her entitlement to ‘speak out’ in a community of listeners and re-forms his previous marginal status as father. Both mother and father have previously laid the ground for this closure – in father’s support of mother’s right to discipline and in mother’s support of father’s new relationship with Roddy. As such the interviewer thus frames mother’s story as a context for the possibility of father and son’s relationship and paternal accountability. Interviewer: What’s the story you and your sister had about why your mam and dad were not together? Roddy: Just the story my mother told us and we just went on that and then we never really . . . talked about it. Interviewer: Is that repeatable, that story? Roddy: No. (Laughter.) Mother: The story is very repeatable, Roddy. Roddy: No it isn’t. Mother: Yes it is. (To interviewer.) I will repeat the story for you. Interviewer: (To father.) Do you know the story that was told? Father: I don’t think so.

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Mother: Well, I think he will admit to the story I’m telling now. Interviewer: (To Roddy.) Did you feel that your father had treated your mother badly from the story you have heard? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: And did you ever ask your father about it? Roddy: No. I don’t fancy digging up . . . reopening the wound or something like that. Interviewer: Whose wound? Roddy: His wounds . . . the way he acted. Interviewer: You don’t want to hurt him? Roddy: Yeh. Interviewer: (To father.) Is he right to protect you? Father: I’m not sure what Roddy is talking about. Roddy: Well, the way I say something and it sort of triggers something. . . in that you’ll be shocked that I know, you know. Interviewer: He’ll be shocked that you know. Roddy: Yeh, so I just don’t mention it. Mother: (To interviewer.) Would you like to know the story? Interviewer: I’m resisting my curiosity here. (Everybody laughs loudly.) Mother: To give you a wider picture . . . Interviewer: Well, it is not so much a wider picture. I am more interested in the things that might block them being father and son. It might be this unrepeatable story . . . but if it’s not . . . Mother: Well, it’s quite simple. I was a battered wife. I could not cope with it and at the same time he was out womanising, at discos, out everywhere and I was at home trying to make ends meet. So I said, ‘this is it’. So I threw him out on a real cold night, but beforehand I was charged with assault on him, because I just cracked. It was after having Roddy, even the day I came home with Roddy, he started. And I was going through a postnatal depression and I didn’t even have any milk. I had nothing for him and I said, ‘I have a boy now and there is no way he is going to have the life or see the life that I have got’. I certainly didn’t need it. ‘He will have respect for the female’ and then my husband came in one night and he started again. I just got mad and threw him out in the cold, just out the door and said, ‘go, I don’t want to know’, into the snow and all the rest of it. I was reared in an orphanage and I know I trapped him into marriage, but I didn’t expect this, didn’t want this so I decided they (children) shouldn’t have this. I could manage with two as well as with one, so

66 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy that’s how it is, Roddy. I threw him out when Roddy was less than a month old and Roddy didn’t see him until he was six months. Now Raz can say differently if he likes. Father: No, I’m not denying any of it. Mother: But he was young and immature as well, you know. One of us had to be the strong party, so it had to be me. But I was lucky because I had girlfriends that I was reared with in the orphanage and we all helped each other out. We stuck together. We were children rearing children, so we just didn’t know any better. We were always told to look after our responsibilities. That was how we needed each other. Interviewer: (To Roddy.) So that was the unrepeatable story? Roddy: Yeh, there was a few ‘F-ings’ and ‘B-ings’ missed out but that’s it. Interviewer: (To father.) What’s the story that you would like to tell your son? Father: What Sonia has said is true – most of it anyway. There were good times, very few, but there were good times as well. I don’t know, I was a crazy mixed up kid then. But I wasn’t a kid. How old was I? Twenty-three or something, very naive. Mother: Well, both parties, both sides were to blame, you know. I was probably looking for a bed of roses, a man . . . to be a strong person. Father: I just felt conned. She told me that Dunya was going to be taken away from her if she wasn’t married and I believed her. So we got married. It was just a mistake at the time, a bad mistake. Having said that though, here we are.

CONCLUSION In this situation a catastrophic event (rape) brought about a particular social organisation of professionals and parents, of itself fairly typical when a child is deemed to be deviant, dangerous or out of control. The problem, however, is that the more one speaks about another the more that other is excluded. This often happens when parents become helpless. They allow professionals to speak for them. This becomes even more confusing when parents speak as if they were professionals and the latter speak as if they were parents. The potential exclusion of Roddy, as the counterpart of professional monopoly (Figures 3.1 and 3.2), was deconstructed not in the challenging of monopoly claims, in which FPA was also implicitly embedded, but in the exaggeration of exclusion by way of questioning at the extremes so that the voice of Roddy proclaimed itself. The parents responded to this deconstructed text by taking an active part as parents in the protection of their son. Here the boy’s speaking and a parental response brought forth a new social organisation, where the double constituency

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of family and professional system were more clearly defined. Roddy reappeared as a subject, empowered now to speak on what mattered most to himself. In this way, the parents re-established their protective status as mother and father in partnership with social services. With the re-emergence of Roddy and his parents as ‘responsible’ subjects in the deliberations, social services were released from their dominant insertion of control and protection.2

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Nollaig O’Reilly Byrne was the principal author of this chapter. The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of their associate Philip A. Kearney in the generation of many of the ideas in this chapter. They also wish to express their gratitude to their colleagues in social services, especially Olga Garland, Head Social Worker, and Mary Tallon, Social Worker.

NOTES 1 Discourse: a discourse sets out not what is true or false but what can have truth-value in society. In other words it is about what is statable and what is privileged (Foucault 1972). 2 Roddy was subsequently referred to an adolescent sexual offenders’ programme in which both parents participated. Eighteen months later, the case has now been satisfactorily closed by social services, with no further police or legal involvement.

REFERENCES Andersen, T. (ed.) (1990) The Reflecting Team: Dialogues and Dialogues about the Dialogues, Broadstairs, Kent: Borgman. Anderson, H. and Goolishian, H. (1992) ‘The client is the expert: a not-knowing approach to therapy’, in S. McNamee and K.J. Gergen (eds) Therapy as Social Construction, London: Sage. Barthes, R. (1986) The Rustle of Language, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (1988) The Semiotic Challenge. Trans Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang. Byrne, N.O’R. and McCarthy, I.C. (1988) ‘Moving statutes: re-questing ambivalence through ambiguous discourse’, Irish Journal of Psychology 9: special issue, V. Kenny (ed.) Radical Constructivism, Autopoiesis and Psychotherapy: 173–182. Byrne, N. O’R., Kearney, P. and McCarthy, I. C. (1993) ‘Gender, power and social justice: the Fifth Province Model, two-day workshop’. Turku, Finland, March. Cecchin, G., Lane, G. and Ray, W. A. (1992) Irreverence: A Strategy for Therapists’ Survival, London: Karnac Books. Colgan, F. I. (1991) ‘The Fifth Province Model: father–daughter incest and systemic consultation’, Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row.

68 Nollaig O’R. Byrne and Imelda C. McCarthy Fruggeri, L., Telfner, U., Castellucci, A., Marzari, M. and Matteini, M. (1991) New Systemic Ideas from the Italian Mental Health Movement, London: Karnac Books. Goldner, V. (1985) ‘Feminism and family therapy’, Family Process 24: 31–47. Hare-Mustin, R. (1987) ‘The problem of gender in family therapy theory’, Family Process 26: 15–27. Hederman, M. P. and Kearney, R. (1982) The Crane Bag: Book of Irish Studies, Dublin: Blackwater Press. Heilbrun, C.G. (1988) Writing a Woman’s Life, New York: Ballantine Books. Hoffman, L. (1985) ‘Beyond power and control: toward a “second order” family systems therapy’, Family Systems Medicine 3: 381–396. —— (1992) ‘A reflexive stance for family therapy’, in S. McNamee and K.J. Gergen (eds) Therapy as Social Construction, London: Sage. Hyden, M. and McCarthy, I.C. (in press) ‘Woman battering and father–daughter incest disclosure: conversations of denial and acknowledgement’, Discourse and Society 4. Jones, E. (1993) Family Systems Therapy: Developments in the Milan-Systemic Therapies, Chichester: J. Wiley & Sons. Kearney, P.A. (1988) ‘Family conversations and incest’, two-day workshop, University of Tromso. January. Kearney, P.A., Byrne, N. O’R. and McCarthy, I.C. (1989) ‘Just metaphors: marginal illuminations in a colonial retreat’, Family Therapy Case Studies 4: 17–31. Kundera, M. (1988) The Art of the Novel, Boston: Faber & Faber. Lannamann, J. W. (1990) ‘Power, equality, and other unintended dialectical constructions’, paper delivered at the International Communications Association Annual Meeting, Communication and Equality, Dublin. Lang, P., Little, M. and Cronen, V. (1990) ‘The systemic professional: domains of action and the question of neutrality’, Human Systems 1: 39–55. Le Brocquy, L. (1981) Louis Le Brocquy, D. Walker (ed.) Dublin, Wardriver Press. McCarthy, I.C. (1993) Serving those in poverty: a benevolent colonisation? Plenary Presentation at Fifth World Family Therapy Congress, Amsterdam, May. McCarthy, I.C. and Byrne, N.O’R. (1988) ‘Mis-taken love: conversations on the problem of incest in an Irish context’, Family Process 27: 181–199. McGoldrick, M., Anderson, C.M. and Walsh, F. (1989) Women and Families: A Framework for Family Therapy, New York: Norton & Co. MacKinnon, L. and James, K. (1987) ‘The Milan systemic approach: theory and practice’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 8: 89–98. O’Donovan, K. (1984) ‘Protection and paternalism’, in M.D.A Freeman (ed.) The State, the Law and the Family: Critical Perspectives, London: Tavistock Publications/Sweet & Maxwell. Palazzoli, M.S., Boscolo, L., Cecchin, G. and Prata, G. (1980) ‘Hypothesising– circularity– neutrality: three guidelines for the conductor of the session’, Family Process 19: 45– 57. Perelberg, R.J. and Miller, A.C. (1990) Gender and Power in Families, London: Routledge. Salamon, E., Andersson, M. and Grevelius, K. (1991 ) The AGS Commission Model, Stockholm: AGS Institute. Shotter, J. (1989) ‘Social accountability and the social construction of “you”’, in J. Shotter and K.J. Gergen (eds) Texts of Identity, London: Sage. Waldegrave, C. and Tapping, C. (1990) ‘Just therapy’, Dulwich Centre Newsletter 1: 3– 46. White, M. and Epston, D. (1990) Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. White, S. (1988) The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas: Reason, Justice and Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4

Reclaiming a female mind from the experience of child sexual abuse A developing conversation between writers and editors Gill Gorell Barnes and Sharon Henessy

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we explore some aspects of the joint experience of reclaiming ‘mind’ in a therapeutic context that was female. In working together, two women – one having experienced sexual abuse by her father over ten years, the other working as her therapist – have as their goal in writing the wish to activate more thinking about the condition of all women in societies where men’s ways are privileged. The process of reclaiming their female minds from experiences of male oppression is complex and multi-layered. In considering a ‘mind that is free’, we mean a mind that is capable of thinking about and reflecting on experience rather than only being able to respond to events through the constraints induced by former terror, family or social requirements. This contribution represents a developing conversation between the authors over time and in response to questions from the editors whose curiosity has provoked further reflection a year after our work together ended. This chapter includes material which was written during the course of therapy, as well as reflections on that writing and on the therapeutic work and relationship now that the therapy has come to an end. Sexual abuse represents the extreme end of a spectrum of male/female relationships of which coercion may be a part. The focus of this chapter is on the impact of oppressive experience on the development of a woman’s mind in the context of sexual abuse and also in the larger context of oppressive experience within which women are kept from a knowledge of their own potential.

GOALS IN WRITING Sharon: My goal in writing about my experiences is my wish to lay something out as

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clearly as I can so that other women can be helped. I do worry about other women who may not be as strong at this as I am now and might be left out, remain imprisoned outside themselves unnecessarily. In sitting down to write for this chapter I initially experienced a sense of terror. I sat in front of my computer screen a bit tense for a variety of reasons and enshrouded in this sensation of comfortable, cruel, familiar, dangerous environment. There was a block until I found what I called a starting point, and I was able bring my mind up from the recesses with difficulty. The writing felt constrained. I realised that the fear was not one of self-doubt, it was the fear of fear itself; of breaking the silence of speaking. It was the fear of reprisal that he, my father, might arise from the pits, the bowels within me, strike and shut me up. Flashback: I am a child lying asleep in my bed, a deep peaceful sleep. I have slept alone for a while and have forgotten in my short memory that blankets provide anything other than warmth and protection. Slowly my blanket is lifted and a draught enters from the side of the bed. I am brought down by another body whose enormous weight causes me to sink. And there it stays, a dead weight at first, slowly coming to life and sucking me into a violent rhythm. Breathing shatters the silence, invading my ears and shattering my mind. He goes as quickly as he came, leaving an even flimsier dimension to sleep. There is very little rest for a haunted child expecting anything when it should be least expected. Gill: My purpose in writing this chapter with Sharon is to record some of the nuances of the joint therapeutic processes between us. Some of these may be an essential part of learning to trust oneself as a female in a new way, others are about mutual learning in many areas. The therapeutic encounter is not only one in which a client or patient encounters a therapist. I believe it is also when two human beings engage round an area of difficulty which may have some common aspect that reverberates for both. One may be currently more entangled than another, but through the struggle to understand the impact of the experience aspects of both therapist and patient are engaged in a joint search for new meanings. Thus while the boundaries of therapy to do with time, space, recognition of responsibility and steadfastness in the therapeutic endeavour remain the responsibility of the therapist within that framework, the mind and the spirit of both the participants are free to engage in a wider exploration. In our context this included the subjugation of women, the deprivation of a female mind in a variety of life contexts and the development of freedom as a necessary aspect of our own adult living. Both therapist and client are also free to engage in discoveries of strength and feminine triumph. In this sense the therapy between two women becomes subversive in relation to the culture within which both women co-exist. As well as the deconstruction

Reclaiming a female mind 71 of events specific to the therapy a different continuity develops. This stems from a joint scanning of many of the small tasks of daily life in which oppression may be actively experienced, such as childcare, cleaning, household finance, domestic administration and the confrontation of male belief systems. The conversation uses a joint legacy of females’ experience of growing up and forms an ongoing female critique of life and its daily hazards. This component of the therapeutic conversations is interactional and egalitarian, based on genuine mutual influence, often leading to new insights for both participants and a move to a new position for the conversations more specific to the therapy.

A PERSPECTIVE ON FEMALE IDENTITY Identity, and particularly sexual identity, does not develop in isolation. The child develops in mutual interaction with the males and females in her family and it is in relationship to the male and female images both of reality and of imagination that she constructs her identity according to her experience. The erotic sensitivities of the child’s body are interpreted through the meanings the child attaches to her body and its sensations through early experiences in a sexed family world (Jones 1986). Phallocentric power, and the constraints it imposes, are determined not only by her direct experience of a father, but by her mother’s perceived and experienced reactions to this, as well as by her perception of her mother’s experience or her sister’s experience of her father. In addition, direct access to her mother or other important senior women in her life will make a difference. These will all contribute to her own systems of selfperception and self-valuation. In families where sexual abuse by the father is an ongoing and regular part of the life of the family, not only will father play a disproportionate part in the family structure of power, but access to mother will be either prohibited or confused in relation to the role the daughter is, and experiences herself as, taking on ‘for her mother’. In Sharon’s family there were times when the burden of responsibility was too great for her mother. ‘Perhaps a mother, overloaded, devalued and impotent, finds whatever way open to shift the burden. The responsibility is handed down to the next female in line. In the case where sexual abuse is the legacy, this sharing of responsibility has horrifying ramifications for all – not only the abused daughter – like a highly contagious virus. We were all contaminated by sexual abuse.’ In such circumstances access to other adults who might offer different conceptions of the female child is likely to be blocked, out of reasons of fear, loyalty, protectiveness, secrecy and shame. Alternative models for viewing the self and other are unavailable; and the

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family system and resulting ‘mental representations of relationships’ (Main 1985) are highly constricted.

Constructing a different base for thinking about female identity French feminists (e.g. Cixous, Irigary and Kristeva – see Moi 1985/1988) believe that western thought has been based on a systematic repression of women’s experience and have emphasised the essential importance of establishing a ‘site de différence’, a different starting point from which phallogocentric concepts can be taken apart. Kristeva, in relation to this theme of female mind and female identity, suggests that first comes the question of how a young girl finds a way of refusing to identify with a father and with the logic of paternal discourse. Kristeva says, Women have a role to play in the assuming of a negative function: reject everything finite, definite, structured; loaded with meaning in the existing state of society . . . a feminist practice can only be at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’. By woman I mean that which cannot be represented, what is not said, what remains above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies. (Kristeva 1974: 21) The editors have asked us to expand on what this idea meant to us. To Gill it meant primarily that concepts which structure the gendered self at every level are available for questioning from a female perspective. This includes sexuality, spirituality and social and political domains. Sharon comments: ‘I interpret Kristeva as saying that we can only define ourselves as female by exploring who we are not. We cannot step outside the phallogocentric discourse which defines the feminine-female mind, only in relation to the masculine. We cannot formulate a new discourse since we cannot step outside language, exist outside western philosophy and the false dichotomies of male and female. When we refer to the female mind it is an assertion of difference and not a reference to essential unchanging qualities of femininity. We begin a feminist practice by recognising this difference, by acknowledging our lack of representation, by questioning the images prescribed for us, and challenging the fit.’ In relation to sexual abuse, Kristeva’s vital concept of difference may be prohibited internally as well as externally or hidden away in an inaccessible place. The struggle to regain a female mind using a family systems perspective includes the question of not

Reclaiming a female mind 73 only how to get out literally from under the father but how to get out from under the father-subjugated mother. The challenge is to find a way of being female which has a newly defined centre, not a phallus dominated centre with the attendant images of power and abusiveness that entails. The mind has to be liberated in the sense of being free to ‘think for herself’. We emphasise that it is not the single relationship of ‘fatherdaughter’ that has to be attended to but the way the daughter perceives the mother’s relationship with the father, as well as the way she herself is used as a consequence of this relationship. The ‘mind’ has to free itself from a series of abusive encounters and their interconnections with other networks of collusion and distortion. Aspects of Kristeva’s passionate statement then inform the therapist’s stance, ‘reject everything finite, structured, loaded with meaning. . . accept that which cannot be represented, what is not said’. Sharon: This idea was initially developed for me in my therapy with Gill – a place and a time where I felt I could discard preconceived notions about myself. I was free to wander in my imagination. I was safe. I had had some therapy sessions with a man. We seemed to spend much time talking at one another – like radio towers trying to transmit signals but trapped by too much interference. As a result, I shifted my focus from the topic of abuse to holding on to a buried and well protected sense of my own abilities – in order not to feel entirely responsible for the lack of communication. I would hint at my intelligence and even reveal my ability to grasp his ideas when I was feeling brave, but did not feel my efforts were recognised. There was a different quality to the sessions with Gill. I felt the sense of mutual understanding which she conveyed through a recognition of shared human experiences. I did not, at first, think of the difference between these two therapists as gender related. I chose to put my analytical, intellectual self to the side for a while and set free my trapped emotions. I made a commitment to myself not to read, and to allow the ideas created in therapy to be my primary influence. I was able to do this in the therapy with a woman, because Gill ‘allowed’ for my intelligence. The struggle to prove its existence became unnecessary.

THE EARLY WORK The early work: acknowledging the context for the child’s mind Sharon: I am the victim of sexual abuse inflicted by a man who gripped my mind and possessed my body. He created a world for us which no one else could enter. He created a realm of bizarre fairy tales for me to indulge in. They were acted out in pantomime but never read aloud. So now, ghost of my childhood, look me in the eye

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and tell me, did you fuck me. . . did you stick your finger in unwanted places and draw blood. How young was I. Did you play naughty games with me when mother wasn’t looking. You rubbed your rough hands over my smooth skin and stuck something on my tummy so we could see how big it would get when I touched it. Sometimes it was slimy and you told me it was my toy, my plaything and I believed it belonged to me. You weren’t brutal or violent then. You offered me a skewered reality where something very scary was denied. You didn’t say ‘this is what I’m going to do to you: fuck you, impale you, nail you to the wall’, but these insinuated threats pervaded the atmosphere. We played at make-believe and spoke in nursery rhymes, invented characters and gave them names, treating each other’s private parts as though you’d pulled them down from a box of toys. I was a dolly and you were a toy soldier engaged in battles and strange rituals; losing your posture and shedding fine form with your clothes as a camouflage of dignity gave way to another man – a naked soldier who spewed sticky stuff and retired to the trenches for a new phantasmal battle. (A particular memory of Sharon’s captures the permanent tension between the illusion of security and the knowledge that nothing was safe.) All the leaves were red and turning brown. I’d been out walking on this autumn day. Leaves were swirling around me when a hand reached from behind and grabbed my mouth to stifle a scream. He forced me to the ground, laughing and throwing leaves, burying me beneath a mound of autumn evidence. Even in such manifest innocence there is no peace. I was frightened; a tryst was suspected, and I was caught in the ambivalence of his warmth and the chill air, the crunchy leaves and his gravelly voice, the whipping wind and the shield by his wall of a body. The elements were in conflict with false security. There is no respite for an abused child, no safe haven when anything can happen anywhere. So one’s mind becomes a padded cell, a treasure trove of ideas and stories where language is the only freedom. Words are whispered internally; clarity is kept locked away in a safe. My mind was my only sanctuary, the safe place to which I could withdraw. When systems of power become absolute, as in dictatorships or families with persistently abusive patterns, there is no space for the child’s developing mind to include any sense of volition or active organisation of their own thinking or being. The rage of adults abused as children is not only that their bodies were abused, but their minds also. The way that this happens is different for each person, but the experience of fragmentation, of being deprived of coherence and of having to put part of the mind and the self away, dissociated, hidden to keep it safe, is common (Jones 1991). This encapsulated experience may start to clamour for attention in painful ways once abuse begins to be remembered; as Sharon puts it, ‘a mind by definition trapped in a tiny internal space’.

Reclaiming a female mind 75 The early work: private and public truths It is well known from many sources – not only that of child sexual abuse, but also other situations of entrapment and terror like imprisonment with torture, or living in concentration camps – that in order to function in adult life a survivor may have to make a division or compartmentalisation between their memories and their so-called ‘normal’ life. (As Sharon put it, ‘There is nothing worse than inhabiting the wasteland, fraught with anxiety, where the pen does not write and the mind has no focus and direction is directionless.’) The survivor always knows that the world can be dangerous, randomly cruel and contain unbearable pain under the facade of everyday behaviour. Keeping this in mind may always be a necessary part of true personal integrity. Finding a meaning from a traumatic experience that allows it to be resolved cannot easily be found and may never be found. Negotiation between the private truth and what the client thinks the therapist can accept or stand, the ‘public truth’, may take place many times, as the private self which, shamed, has hitherto withdrawn, risks further exposure to condemnation, disgust and contempt in the safety of the therapeutic context (Jay 1991).

TAKING CHARGE OF ONE’S OWN MIND Taking charge of one’s own mind: developing a voice Through finding our own words and weaving different connecting threads we can make a different sense out of lives in which we have felt ourselves to be the objects of other people’s will. Developing a voice that can be clearly heard leads to experiencing the possibility of future life in which one is an active and not a passive player. When Sharon began to remember and was unable to sleep, Gill suggested that she wrote her thoughts down. For eighteen months she wrote continuously. Initially she used scraps of paper, writing a memory down whenever it assailed her. At first she could not look at the words once they were on paper. It was necessary to keep the words and herself separate. Gill was the safekeeper of the words. Then Sharon began to keep her own words in an exercise book and gave Gill a copy. Sharon: Whose brilliant idea was the journal? I trust the journal whose often bizarre and confusing narrative has a will of its own which winds its way through labyrinthine thoughts to the only exit from my mind. I can refine and edit the journal, check it for lies or hints of subterfuge, go over it with a magnifying glass as if it were my own skin;

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a palpable extension of me. I am honestly here in these pages. My honour and credibility are at stake. I do not wish to bluff myself. In thinking further about the value of the journal two years later, Sharon adds: for a long time the journal seemed to write itself. I followed it through its often terrifying and debilitating course until I felt I could take charge of it and write about the truth instead of relying on reading the truth as it was uncovered in the journal. Later I discovered that I was not alone. Reading Kristeva and others was a visceral encounter with myself in language and ideas. I borrowed from feminist theory and transformed the abstract into a quest to find meaning beyond what I have learned. I learned to trust my own feelings and drop the logic I had inherited from the father who had abused me and then to question the education which had failed me when I tried to speak out.

Taking charge of one’s own mind: confronting the voices of others in therapy Taking charge of traumatic events also means changing the experience of being the passive recipient of the abusive experience of another. Gaining even a small amount of control within the adverse relationship can make a significant difference to other contexts. Obviously many other people may act as intermediaries in relation to such experiences: a partner, work colleague, the therapist or indeed a child. Here we will explore a small piece of one session between Sharon and her mother. Gill wished to ensure that Sharon retained the focus that she herself wished for in the context of exploring the triadic relationships in which she had experienced herself as interchangeable with, but organised by, her mother in relation to her father. Gill’s very small interventions which keep Sharon on track allow her to express her rage at being deprived of her ‘formal mind’, the education which she would have had but from which she was disallowed through the illicit relationship that she had with her father. Her mother’s mind had also formed part of this ‘context of disqualification’, as she had previously given up her own education to support father through college. The interview with mother therefore included a recognition of her own deprivation. The challenge was to stop her from drowning her daughter’s developing narrative with her own compelling needs. She had crossed the Atlantic for a visit to her daughter, knowing that coming to meet with myself and Sharon was on the agenda. She arrived halfway through the ninety-minute interview with a story to tell, the truth as she saw it. As so often in a family interview the potentially abusive pattern recreated itself in the room with mother’s voice overtalking Sharon’s voice. Gill therefore suggested that she should send her her own story on a tape which could be

Reclaiming a female mind 77 kept for her daughter to listen to if she wished. This gave her a sense of having been recognised while preventing the truncation of the purpose of the interview as Sharon had constructed it. As Sharon’s later commentary shows, however, the most important purpose of the interview was not what was said but the process. On the one hand, Sharon felt able to take effective charge of this, but on the other, this very attempt to get some clarity helped her to face how this could never be achieved because of her mother’s ongoing investment in maintaining the version of reality which was most functional for her own survival. Mother:

Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon: Mother: Sharon:

The ‘truth’ – I was busy, I was scared, I was traumatised, I was paralysed, he told me – one of the reasons I get crazed when people shut me up – I did not speak when I was married – he told me that I was the stupidest thing that ever walked – every time I opened my mouth I said something that embarrassed him to tears so I did not speak. He did that to me too. As far as I knew you were the smartest thing that ever lived. . . you were brilliant. . . So why was he jealous of me? He was a jealous man. He was insanely jealous of me, insanely. How about me – see if you can help me figure out me, not you. (They both talk very fast, nearly simultaneously.) (Talking over her.) I understand you. I understand what you are saying. Try, please try. I am subjective. I can only work through trying to recreate. Darling, that’s what I’m trying to do, I promise you. I need you to recreate for me . . . (not for you). But can I tell you what it was like . . . I can understand . . . we were together the whole time. (New sequence: overlapping.) (Strong.) Mother, I need you to recreate for me. I am trying. Try, really hard; you’re over here and I’m here and daddy’s there, please (showing with her hands). I’m trying to do that . . . Do that. But do you understand (shouting) that you were never alone with him. Then when you were there try and see how it is (showing with her hands), him and me and how it was.

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Mother:

He hated his daughters – it broke my heart – I overcompensated like crazy with you all, with my attention. (Gill takes up idea of mother making a tape and ‘going step by step in your own time . . .’. Goes back to Sharon.)

Gill:

Did you find that what your mother said about your father fitted with your mental representation, because you have often talked of feeling there was a lot of love between you and your father?

Sharon:

I do find that it fitted . . . I think that as a child I can see lots of shifting roles and memories. . . in the past couple of years I have seen things I thought was mother and things that were father the wrong way round. Do you know what I mean? (Turning to mother.) I know that you loved me . . . there have been times when I thought we have not communicated in the right way, but I always get back to knowing you love me.

Mother:

Oh sure.

Sharon:

But there’s a great uncertainty about daddy – so rather than accept the

Mother:

(Tries to interrupt.)

Sharon:

Please.

hate it was easier as a child to remember something that was an illusion.

Mother: . . . (Persists). Sharon:

Mother, please, this is really important. Can you let me finish please.

Mother:

I wanted to give you the whole picture.

Sharon:

The process is far more important than the whole picture, and if you have given me something to put things into a perspective in my mind, than if you had given me lots of details – the process is far more important (mother tries to interrupt) . . . than what you have to say. This is probably what made me feel I couldn’t turn to you . . . that you can do this to me . . . completely just taking it over and not letting me talk.

Gill:

You’re not doing badly.

Sharon:

(Laughs.) No I’m not.

Gill:

As long as you know your mother is doing it with love, and not because

Sharon:

(Strong.) I know . . . so it does make sense (crying) that he didn’t like me

she is trying to take your mind away. . . . and that he tried to destroy me, and he tried to destroy my mind, which is better than his, much; and he knew it, so I didn’t get the education I needed or wanted. He didn’t even offer it to me and I was the one out of the three of us, of the three of us I was the one who most

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Mother: Gill:

looked for it, wanted it, would have pursued it, out of the three of us I was that type, the one he tried to destroy . . . (Softly.) You’re right on, absolutely right on. And I guess you felt powerless to move in because he’d done that to you as well.

In reviewing the interview Sharon commented on the memory of herself as an aspect of her mother – the madness of not being separated from her, the truth she speaks is that we were not often separated. To that truth I add that I was where I should not have been because she felt me to be part of herself. In her fantasy when I was subjected to cruelty, it was her that my father was hurting. She saw me as reabsorbed into her, not born yet. At the best of times I was her companion, an imaginary friend, the doll she had when she was 5. (She had named her Sharon.) My internalised vision of a real physical space is suffocating space where they fitted me between them. I wasn’t there, yet I really was. This must be the saddest experience I have had thus far reading and hearing again my mother’s voice, her hypnotic singsong voice trying to lull me into believing there was nothing to fear as she engulfed me in herself. Her little Sharon was being offered to an impotent man by a powerless woman. Commenting further in the process of writing and reviewing Sharon added: ‘Do you know what is so sad for me? The desire to search, to explore, to be bold, to be daring, it reminds me of my mother. My father gave me intellectual discipline. My mother was the brave one in life, but her act of betrayal was the most fundamental; it was a primary and natural trust which she violated.’ In response to the editors’ request to comment further on the blaming of mothers, Sharon comments: ‘I am afraid of mother’s voice. She might just deceive me into a false sense of security; I might just get caught up in her story again; not get my mind away quickly enough and what would she do if she had access to it. She would take it to her own domain, and that is the abuse I think that she suffered. Someone, probably my grandmother, who was her guardian not her real mother, took her mind away from her and in her madness she never saw me as someone other than her self. She needed me to complete what wasn’t there. The session she attended marks the only time I tried directly to disengage myself from her by literally telling her to separate my narrative from her own which she could not do. The act of trying was a very important experience for me. It was the initial step into taking charge of my interpretation of events separating from myself what was my truth and thereby separating myself from her. In a way, it was an appropriation of my own mind.’

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Sharon’s perception of her mother is of a woman who could not differentiate her daughter from herself and could not therefore offer a ‘site de différence’ from which she could develop. Her father, paradoxically, offered her such an opportunity through the sharing and teaching of ideas. The power of a woman’s ambivalence and sense of betrayal in relation to such suppression from her mother may be greater than her ability to achieve a metaperspective on the intergenerational arrangements as a whole. The therapist then has to act as a springboard for this beginning differentiation in small but powerful ways. ‘It would not have been possible without your protection, Gill. I would not have risked making a statement about the quality of my mind to my mother. That statement might have been the first little opening through which the hidden self, hidden mind, began to emerge.’

Taking charge of one’s own mind: facing father’s intellectual discipline – attraction and dangers Sharon: My father fucked me in every orifice he found not too tiny but I find myself sobbing for his loss. There was a gentle man of summer evenings who cast a long shadow over my mind. He was the intellect in our family. He groomed me secretly, privately, to have an intelligent and independent mind as if I were his heir apparent. He wrote poems to me as a small child curled up in his lap. He taught me to play baseball, pitching endless futile strikes but never calling me out. And in spite of his own bitterness he taught me clear thinking through a peculiar logic which I tried to tuck away. He was a tortured soul, a violent man, a gentle man, a weak man. He forced a pact on me and now I am the keeper of it. The mad insane story is mine, part of me, sane me, blameless me. I loved my father; seeking safety and freedom in loving him and being taught a different lesson, one where saying no was taken as yes, tossing basic meanings into the air and landing them upside down. He stripped me bare, deprived me of my rights and in my nakedness sent a bewildering message where the beauty of his ideas was perverted and betrayed. He took away my power to say no to him; a power which is fundamental to the freedom of loving.

Taking charge of one’s own mind: co-evolving new constructions In the course of working together over eighteen months, Gill inevitably became experienced as the abusive parent. Sharon describes a dream about this which relates to her emergent voice: The dream about you has a real interpretation. At that time I

Reclaiming a female mind 81 wanted to be able to reveal more of myself, my real intelligence. At the time I was terrified. The dream represents the fear of what would happen to me if you were to know that I was very intelligent and found me interesting. You would try to destroy me for being too quick. I felt safe with you because you were one step ahead of me, quicker, brighter. I persistently disagreed when you tried to reframe this. You finally made a joke about me having to have it said in my way and we both laughed. My insistence stems from fear, a very pervasive sense of danger and violence. If I am found to be too clever by anyone else who is clever I will be silenced. What used to feel like random movements and shifts in direction in therapy I now see as choices I didn’t have the courage to recognise. To have said that my choices belong to me was to risk feeling the fear of reprisals, the attacks, the punishment, the violence, the silencing which had always followed when I suggested or even hinted at my autonomy as a child. Now I can explore the idea of freedom and how it is found in love. I think of them as necessary components of the reconciliation between my father and myself. We did love each other. It was extraordinarily difficult to allow this love to survive with the awareness of sexual abuse. I wanted to kill his love just as I had annihilated the memories of abuse. Part of me wanted to stay trapped and avoid the excruciating pain. The search and, in a way, the story, began by unleashing the first layer of terror and rage as if the narrative were situated in there, hidden in the anger and pain, waiting to be recognised. If we imagine an ending (the story is always ongoing) it was when I could see that my father and I were both a product of our culture, unique in the details of our family history but pervasive in our society. I hid with my anguish during many long nights working on this narrative, thrashing out the meanings of abuse and violation, trying to accept that they had existed in the same context as love. Eventually the fury of displaced memories was superseded by an acceptance of the past. Gill was the witness who neither despised nor judged either one of us. One evening at dusk I was standing in the kitchen, thinking about this reconciliation – the past, my self, and my father. I was looking out the window for him. And there he was – at his finest, a handsome young man, stocky and short, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, short cropped hair and even features. The doors to the garden were open. The cats were running in and out. For a long moment the clock stopped ticking. It was a warm and still evening but a cool breeze moved along my back, wrapping itself around my shoulders, teasing me with this memory. It was my father’s breathing; his breath mingling with my own, too weak now to take it away. We stood there, silently staring at each other, our gaze locked at eye level until I told him to go away. And the involuntary pain which usually writhes inside held me gently instead, as if to say, I am your friend and the freedom in your mind is to be found in me as well.

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And I am able to say sometimes I was proud of him. He had a mind turned inward and saw beauty in ideas. He gave me an appreciation of ideas to match the fervour usually reserved for music and art. An idea grasped and held for perhaps only a short moment can be deeply moving and exciting. When I say to you, Gill, that I have a good mind, I am saying that I have taken out of this legacy what was good about me. I can separate myself and my intellect from the context of abuse and speak in my own clear voice. I can fashion something good, a morality, from what was at one time unspeakable. I have learnt that I can accept the abuse even as I continue to experience it in my life. It can resonate in very painful ways but I can move through the bouts of rage and use my mind to acknowledge the pain rather than become inured to it. I use your recognition – of strength, of talent, of resilience, of the society that limits opportunities for me – to hold on to who I am and how I would express myself if I only could. I try to convey this recognition of strength – a common ground for many invisible women.

Taking charge of one’s own mind: is there a potential for difference in the therapeutic encounter? What can be rescued, valued, reframed and amplified as a female perspective from the perspective of the abused child? Each of us was aware of the dangers of illusion in relation to the idea that there was something within the abusive relationship which could be valued. The evolution of a different sense of self should not be confused with a false reconciliation to abusive experience; but it is also a valid recognition of what has not been destroyed and has now emerged to be celebrated. In our society it is not only women who have to operate through false selves but in the context of abuse it is mainly women who have to hide their secret and free thinking selves away. A passage from Winnicott, which Gill had found very relevant in her own therapy with a woman some years before, had a powerful meaning for the two of us in the context of this piece of therapeutic work: The false sense defends the true self but the true self is however acknowledged as a potential and is allowed a secret life. Here is the clearest example of clinical illness as an organisation with a positive aim; the preservation of the individual in spite of abnormal environmental conditions. (Winnicott 1960:143) In discussing this dichotomy of ‘true’ and ‘false’ Gill wrote to Sharon: I find myself

Reclaiming a female mind 83 suspicious of this idea of a false self. Perhaps it is more useful to consider aspects of one’s own being or potential that are brought forth in particular contexts in ways which are functional at the time. If we stay with socially descriptive language we might say that for young girls this includes socially prescribed ideas about compliance and sweetness, especially to older men and women. Also powerful, at least in the decades following the war, was the idea of being pleasing to men. Thus the idea of cooperating in acts that are abusive to the self in order to please, were instilled for my generation through school, church and the wider media as well as through the more powerful distillations peculiar to each family. Most young women had sufficient opportunity to giggle or whisper with each other about the peculiarities of men and their daily sexual oddities (‘flashing’ at school fêtes, coats over the knees on the tops of buses with invitations to stroke penises underneath, men in dirty raincoats wanting to see your knickers in the park, etc.), and this gave them, the girls who giggled, a shared sense of being different from and immune to the impact of these behaviours. None the less, they did expect and accept that men behaved like that. However, for a young person locked into an intensified abusive relationship with her own primary male care-giver, there is a necessary submission to the perceived importance of male sexuality cut off from any sharing and giggling. Pain, humiliation and terror are compounded by an awareness, however unformulated in the early years, that there is no protector from he who is supposed to protect but in fact invades and destroys. Any attempt to think has no way to ‘language’ itself, and no person with whom language can be developed. As Maturana (1980, 1993) has described it, the operation of distinction, and the power of observation and distinction, is brought forth through language. The person abused from an early age does not have access to these distinctions, and therefore remains unseparated from processes imposed on them. In this sense I see the concepts less as ‘true self’ and ‘false self’ than as aspects of self not yet brought into being through distinction and being thought about. Later, when thought becomes possible in other contexts such as school, the self established in the abusive relationship is no less true or false than the other aspects of the developing self. However, some have been imposed or amplified at the expense of others which have not been chosen or evolved. The newly cognisant and observing self, developing in the context of school, will also despise those sexualized and imprisoned aspects of self that have been or still are cooperating in what is going on. There is a danger that they will therefore disqualify and invalidate aspects of their own being for which they are not responsible. To be able to incorporate both the cooperating self and the highly critical self may be an important move towards a ‘true’ self. In our work together, an approach to thinking developed which comes from not

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accepting what you are being told about your experiences because what you are told and the way it is told do not fit with the way you experience yourself in your own experiences. So thinking women become observers of their own experience in order to protect their truth. The form of the language we have inherited, our discourse of discourses – philosophy – privileges an objective knowledge of reality. We have found ourselves in search of new approaches to thinking and doubting the theories developed by men about women – theories which on close scrutiny have not helped to free us from bias but inherently represent an objective (phallocentric) knowledge of reality.

CONCLUSION Each of us wished the other to have ‘the last word’. Of course, there is no last word. This is only one contribution to the many words that came before, and that will need to follow. The keynotes belong to Sharon and Adrienne Rich. Sharon: Our conversation was not about right and wrong. It was about the freedom of the mind in a particular context. But this freedom can survive outside that context. We talked through our imaginations and we talked about the importance of imagination. We accepted the many paradoxes of my life and life in general without trying to make logical sense of them. We exchanged metaphors and let them float in the space between us. I would like to quote Adrienne Rich (1977: 285) because this is where I would pick up our conversation if we were to meet again now: ‘We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children (if and when we choose) but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence – a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin’.

REFERENCES Jay, J. (1991) ‘Terrible knowledge’, Family Therapy Networker, November/ December: 18–29. Jones, A. R. (1986) ‘Writing the body: toward an understanding of l’ecriture feminine’, in E. Showalter (ed.) The New Feminist Criticism, London: Virago. Jones, E. (1991) Working With Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, London: Karnac Books. Kristeva, J. (1974) ‘La femme, ce n’est jamais ca’, Tel Quel 59: 19–24. Main, M. (1985) ‘Security in infancy, childhood and adulthood; a move to the level of

Reclaiming a female mind 85 representation’, in I. Bretherton and E. Warens (eds) Growing Points of Attachment Theory and Research, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 50 (1, 2 Sen. No. 205), 66–104. Maturana, H.R. (1993) ‘Maturana’s basic notions’, Paper, Institute of Family Therapy of Santiago, Chile. Maturana, H.R. and Varela F.J. (1980) Autopoesis and Cognition, Dordrecht: Reidel. Moi, T. (1985/1988) Sexual Textual Politics, London: Routledge. Rich, A. (1977) Of Woman Born, London: Virago. Winnicott, D.W. (1960) ‘Ego distortion in terms of true and false self’, in D.W Winnicott (ed.) The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

5

Hierarchy in families where sexual abuse is an issue

Gerrilyn Smith

INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the theme of gender mediated hierarchy in families where sexual abuse is an issue. Intra-familial sexual abuse highlights gender difference in that it is most frequently the male parent who abuses his power, authority and status within the family by sexually abusing the child or children of that family. It is also important to recognise that not only are children targeted and groomed for sexual abuse by individuals who have a sexual interest in children, but that partners can be similarly targeted and will be groomed to be less effective as external inhibitors to sexually abusive acts (Finkelhor 1984). This distance between non-abusing parent and child as well as the non-abusing parent’s effectiveness as a future protector will need to be addressed in rehabilitation work. The hierarchical position of the non-abusing parent – usually the mother – within the family is therefore crucial. However, restructuring the family by putting mothers in the hierarchically superior position runs counter to generally accepted notions of structure in traditional two-parent families. It also carries the additional risk that the father will be infantalised and not take appropriate parental responsibility within the family. Post-protection work must take into account the way in which the family was organised by the offender; in particular the undermining of maternal authority that would have been an essential part of the grooming process that any offender engages in prior to targeting a particular child. Hierarchy needs to be addressed at several different levels – within the parental dyad, the marital subsystem, and the family as a whole, bearing in mind that one member of the parental dyad has already violated and abused their authority.

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 87 HIERARCHY AND THE EXECUTIVE DYAD The notion that hierarchy (or some form of order) is a necessary condition to the healthy functioning of any system is an accepted tenet of family therapy (Haley 1976). It is often difficult however to conceptualise order in any form other than vertical, where higher positions in the arrangement imply greater status and responsibility. Coupled with this notion of vertical hierarchy is the concept of an executive dyad, traditionally the parents in families. An executive dyad carries greater responsibility for the integrity of, the introduction of new members to, and the general smooth running of, the system. Whilst the functions of the executive are necessary, its exact composition can be flexible. However, social beliefs and customs can continue inadvertently to empower men as fathers even when they have sexually abused their children. This can happen because the treatment issues in relation to fathering are frequently obscured by those in relation to individual adult male needs. This minimises the offender’s parental responsibilities (Smith 1991). The individual adult male’s needs often remain central even after disclosure and conviction and in treatment work: events which clearly impact on all family members. Many rehabilitation programmes are not directed by the pace of the child’s recovery work, but by the need or readiness of the offender and his partner to resume their marital relationship. At the same time the mother’s parental responsibilities are often overemphasised at the expense of her individual adult female needs. This can be coupled with a belief that mothers are equally to blame or responsible for intra-familial sexual abuse (Alexander 1985; Bentovim et al. 1988; Furniss 1983; Gutheil and Avery 1977; Zuelzer and Reposa 1983). Recent research specifically focusing on female sexual offenders (Saradjian 1992) has examined not only the woman’s sexual offending behaviour but also her role as a parental figure. This can be contrasted with research on male sexual offenders which concentrates almost exclusively on the sexual offending behaviour and rarely looks at the male’s parental responsibilities. Within the dominant construction of the parental executive dyad, there is an unspoken assumption of equality between the pair. This ignores the wider social construction of gender and access to institutionalised power conferred by gender that is available to men (Goldner 1985a). Consequently, within the executive system there exists inbuilt inequalities and double messages about the relative importance of maternal and paternal tasks. The tendency to place offenders’ individual treatment needs so centrally in rehabilitation work is evidence of this.

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SYSTEMIC FORMULATIONS OF SEXUAL ABUSE Early systemic formulations of sexual abuse not only ascribed equal responsibility to both parents but also suggested that responsibility was shared by all members of the family ( Bentovim et al. 1988; Furniss 1983). This view provoked strong criticism from many quarters (James and MacKinnon 1990; MacLeod and Saraga 1988; Will 1989). This notion of shared responsibility is reflected more recently in the radical constructivists’ position which, according to Goldner, is one where ‘nothing is real beyond point of view... and inequality is entirely a matter of perspective’ (1985b: 22). Such a stance can lend itself to minimising offenders’ personal responsibility for sexually abusive acts. In describing rehabilitation work it is important that the separation of and difference between marital and parental roles is made clear by the language used to describe pattern. The interchanging use of mother/wife, father/husband descriptions exacerbates the hierarchical confusion frequently present in the family. Women are both wives and mothers simultaneously. The conflicting role demands can produce individual confusion which should not be amplified by professional interventions. Child protection agencies, of necessity and in the interests of the child, should prioritise parental roles over marital ones and place individual adult needs secondary to the responsibilities of parenting.

CASE EXAMPLES The case examples have been selected to illustrate hierarchy in families where sexual abuse is an issue. In each case, the non-abusing parent needs to re-establish or confirm her position as a parent to her children following the disclosure of sexual abuse. Her relationship to the offender also needs to be reconsidered. The first step in the reparative or preventative work is to establish maternal authority as an effective external inhibitor to future episodes of sexual abuse.

Case 1: K family Ellen had two girlfriends from school to stay overnight at her house. Mr K, her stepfather, came into the bedroom with requests to look at their private parts. The girls told their respective parents, who reported it to the school, who in turn contacted social services. After a delay social services came to interview Ellen who also disclosed. Prior to the disclosure there had been no contact with social services. Ellen’s mother and stepfather are white middle-class professionals.

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 89 Mrs K knew of the allegations by Ellen’s friends and had responded to the disclosures made by the girls by taking away the torch Mr K used when he went into the bedroom. This was clearly totally ineffective as a protective measure. However, it indicates that she felt she had to do something. She did not use her knowledge of the other children’s disclosures to directly confront the issue with either her partner or her children. She cooperated with the statutory investigation. When confronted with her daughter’s disclosure, she believed and supported her. Both Mr and Mrs K did not want the children to be removed from the family home. They agreed that Mr K should move out and that they would all participate in treatment. Despite her cooperation with all aspects of the investigation, Mrs K was viewed as a colluding mother who had knowledge of the sexual abuse but had not acted. She was also seen as being more concerned with her partner than with her child who had been victimised. Mr K on the other hand was viewed sympathetically because he had admitted the offences and his offer to move out of the family home was seen as evidence of his sensitivity as a parent despite the fact that this was a plan worked out by both parents. Mrs K’s relationship with social services deteriorated, especially with the allocated social worker, who would come to do individual work with Ellen and her brother, excluding their mother. The children felt unable to talk, sensing the tension between their mother and the worker. Mrs K was continuing to see Mr K and was very committed to rehabilitation. They arranged to meet in Mr K’s flat at times when the children were visiting their biological father. The local authority felt Mrs K should end her relationship with Mr K and that her continued contact was indicative of her collusion with him. Mrs K eventually refused to work with the local authority social worker and requested referral to an outside agency. Before any treatment work began, a professional consultation was organised which dealt with the wider system issues that were impeding further therapeutic work. For the purposes of this chapter this will not be examined in detail. However, it was important that the authority of the social worker was not disqualified but realigned in relation to the existing hierarchy within the family and that she be re-defined as a potential source of help. The hierarchical structure of this family could be described as the mother in the one-up position in relation to the stepfather, who functioned more as a child than as an adult. Mrs K felt she had become more distant from her children than she wished. She was upset that Ellen had not been able to tell her about what Mr K was doing and that the individual work with Ellen excluded her. She wanted to be more actively involved in helping her child recover but did not know how.

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Following his move out, Mr K became very depressed. Mrs K became preoccupied with him and how he would survive. She started to organise him as she had always done. She was keen for him to begin his treatment work so that they could rebuild their life together as a family. Structural interventions with this family aimed at bringing Mrs K closer to her children and on a more equal footing with her partner. She was encouraged to use the separation from Mr K as a chance to get to know her children again. Together with the social worker, they looked at material devised for helping children to recover and the social worker would allocate homework for Mrs K to carry out with her children. (Mrs K was a schoolteacher, hence the didactic approach in the intervention.) By using Mrs K’s skills, she became more engaged in aiding her children’s recovery rather then reverting to old patterns of interaction where she was overly preoccupied with Mr K’s well-being. By doing this work with the social worker, Mrs K was able to redefine that relationship as a helping one. Mrs K could then encourage her children to meet on their own with the social worker as well as giving them a clear message that if they had worries and were unable to tell her, it was more important to tell someone rather than keep it secret. Work with her partner was more problematic. In part this was because the relationship prior to the disclosure was structured ostensibly with her in the one-up position. She found it hard not to organise Mr K’s treatment for him. A balance was needed that allowed Mr K to take responsibility for his actions but also recognised that, should he return to the family, increased vigilance on Mrs K’s part (as well as his own) would continue to be needed. In part the therapeutic intervention with the marital dyad, whilst addressing the imbalance within the couple, would ultimately reenforce Mrs K’s one-up position by placing a greater onus on her to monitor her partner’s interactions with the children. Given social constructions that the man should occupy the one-up position, Mr K was having some difficulty dealing with the idea that he should defer to Mrs K on issues of parenting but be more challenging on issues within the marriage. He saw Mrs K’s dominance of him as contributing to his sexual offending behaviour. A number of professionals within the network shared this view that it was Mrs K’s one-up position, being distant and unavailable, which caused him to turn to little girls for sexual and emotional gratification. As the work progressed, in his role as parent Mr K was able to apologise to the children and take responsibility for his behaviour. He told Ellen she was right to have made the disclosure and that he was getting help so he wouldn’t do it again. However, he was more conflicted about his relationship with Mrs K which was especially painful for her. It meant exploring the possibility that Mr K had not been

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 91 attracted to her as a woman but to her children, in particular Ellen, and that now he might not want to continue in the marital relationship. The therapeutic team needed to find ways of dealing with the marital subsystem that realigned the relationship, allowing a more equitable distribution of responsibility for the marriage if it was to continue, whilst maintaining and respecting the necessary inequitable distribution of parental responsibility. Mrs K, by organising her husband’s treatment, amplified the family’s previous hierarchical structure in an unhelpful way. She needed help to disrupt this pattern and develop a closer relationship with her children. This case illustrates some of the ambivalence that professional networks have regarding strong women, as Mrs K’s wish to control and organise the situation was seen as pathological. She was identified as colluding with her husband in the sexual abuse, actively excluded from the recovery process of her children and yet overinvolved in her husband’s progress. Using the existing hierarchy creatively produced more obvious structural changes. Mrs K’s closer relationship with her children offset Mr K’s, which had previously been closer. She felt able to contemplate life without him when she focused on her life with her children. Although she found it extremely difficult, she recognised that Mr K had to take responsibility for himself and his behaviour if they were going to rebuild their life together. She came to see her over-helpfulness as part of the problem. Once this helpfulness was directed more appropriately towards her children she was more able to disengage herself from previous patterns within her marital relationship. Increasing her own self-confidence and assertiveness helped her to recognise that she could expect Mr K to take more responsibility for their marital relationship and still maintain greater parental responsibility herself. She became clearer that her prime motivation for maintaining the relationship was that she wanted a partner for herself rather than a father for the children.

Case 2: R family This family had been known to social services for some time. The children were poor attenders at school, often arriving inadequately dressed. The family is white and working class. Sheila, now 14 years old, told her mother when she was 9 that her father had been giving her sex lessons. Mrs R told Sheila this was wrong and that she would take it up with Mr R, which she did. Years later, Mrs R noticed that Mr R was picking on Sheila and would take her into the bathroom to discipline her. Mrs R spoke to her daughter who disclosed that dad was sexually abusing her. Mrs R called the police. Mr R

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admitted that he was sexually abusing his daughter, was later convicted and served a jail sentence. When this family came to treatment, the local authority wanted to remove all the children from Mrs R’s care because she had failed to protect Sheila. The earlier episode when Sheila told her mother about the sex lessons was cited by social services as evidence of mother’s collusion with the sexual abuse. Mrs R had dealt with the episode by confronting Mr R but did not follow this up by seeking more information from her daughter. However, it had been Mrs R who facilitated the latest disclosure by asking her daughter if anything was happening. In this family, the father occupied the dominant position. He was described as a bully by all his children. In Mr R’s absence the family presented a flattened hierarchy, more like a sibship with no parental figure. Mrs R was offered some individual time as well as family sessions. In the individual sessions, Mrs R described Mr R’s violence towards herself and the children. She also described his sexual violence. She had been to her GP to ask for help as she felt ‘his sex drive was too high’. Mr R refused to go anywhere for help. Mrs R felt that if she let him do these things to her she would be containing him. He regularly tied her up, spanked and raped her. His physical and sexual violence escalated throughout the lifetime of the marriage. As Sheila became older, Mrs R noticed her partner’s interest in their daughter and correctly identified it as inappropriately sexualised. This had prompted her to question her daughter. She was very angry that her own sexual compliance had not prevented her daughter’s abuse. This case demonstrates that far from being sexually rejecting of their husbands (Bentovim et al. 1988; Furniss 1983), many wives try to meet their husbands’ sexual demands. Mrs R saw her husband’s sexual appetite as excessive and deviant, yet she received little advice or support when she tried to get outside help. More detailed work with partners of sex offenders regarding their sexual relationship often reveals similar patterns. Family work involved Mrs R and the children in exploring the legacy of violence within the family. There had been very clear gender messages about the roles of men and women. Stuart expressed fears that he would become like his father; he had anger control problems and was frequently involved in violent exchanges, usually with neighbours. Mrs R in particular found it hard to control Stuart and was worried lest the little ones would also challenge her authority. It was clear that Stuart felt he was the man in the house, especially now that his father was gone. He felt it was his responsibility to discipline his siblings. Family work was needed to alter the hierarchy in the new family. Maternal authority

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 93 had to be identified, supported and exercised. Stuart was enlisted to support his mother in the task of bringing up his younger brothers. Mrs R obtained a part-time job and initiated divorce proceedings. Mr R wrote long pleading letters from prison, apologising for his behaviour and asking for her forgiveness. These were discussed in family sessions. Strategies were planned and rehearsed as the children felt that Mr R would try to return to the family home and that Mrs R would find it difficult to stop him. The children role-played their father and demonstrated for both their mother and the workers what they thought would be the most likely tactic their father would use. This helped to generate specific solutions for each approach. Mrs R began to receive letters from intermediaries (the prison chaplain, the probation service) acting on her husband’s behalf. Social services helped clarify the situation by clearly indicating that the children would be removed if Mr R were to return. During family sessions Mrs R and the children rehearsed all the reasons why they didn’t want Mr R to return. Mrs R was still very frightened of her husband’s violence. However, she continued to plan her life without him. She still experienced control problems in relation to Stuart. After eighteen months of struggling as a single parent, she began a relationship with another man. She saw this as her best protection from her ex-husband and as a source of support in controlling her sons. Very soon after becoming involved with this new man, she dropped out of treatment. The gender patterns within this family were modified, but not radically transformed. Often the expectations of child protection agencies are unrealistic. In Mrs R’s case, the agency wanted her to function effectively as a single parent on reduced finances, get her children to attend school after years of messages from their father to the contrary, control her 15-year-old son, help her 14-year-old daughter recover from sexual abuse and continue to keep a violent and abusive ex-partner out of her life. Mrs R was effective in helping her daughter and her sons understand and recover from the experience of sexual abuse. She was less successful in challenging her sons’ aggression and anger control problems. She found a job for herself. Becoming involved with a new partner was the clearest way of conveying to her ex-partner that the relationship was over. It also signalled a new beginning for her as she felt more confident in herself and clearer about what she would and would not tolerate within a marital relationship.

Case 3: S family The S family were referred for a court ordered family assessment. When the family

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had moved into a new area, Mr S had gone himself to the social services department to inform them he was a Schedule One offender, with serious criminal convictions for sexual offences against children in his past. The family consisted of Mr S in his fifties, registered disabled, Mrs S in her twenties, and two children, Katy, 10, and Anna, 8. Mrs S was expecting a child. The local authority became concerned when Mr S came to be in the house alone with his daughters when his wife went to hospital to have the baby, and initiated legal proceedings. The family thought they were being persecuted, as they had informed social services of the Schedule One convictions voluntarily, and until the impending birth there had been no statutory involvement. A more detailed assessment focusing on the non-abusing parent’s capacity to protect (Smith 1994) was requested. As part of the assessment, Mrs S was asked to attend a number of sessions without her partner. In part this was to assess her degree of independence. From the supporting paperwork and background information it was discovered that Mr S was an old family friend and was said to have had a longstanding affair with Mrs S’s mother. Mrs S had been received into care following the discovery that she was being sexually abused by Mr S, for which he was convicted. She was the only child from her sibgroup to be received into care. Mr S disputes paternity of Katy and Anna, saying that they are his son’s (from another relationship) children. It is also believed that Mr S is the biological father of Mrs S. In this case the hierarchical confusion is evident, with many family members occupying different generational roles simultaneously. When Mrs S’s baby was born, he had several congenital defects. Given the theme of disputed paternity, the history of Mrs S’s mother’s affair with Mr S and the baby’s birth defects, the possibility that Mr S is indeed the father of Mrs S has to be considered. Mrs S was unable to discuss spontaneously Mr S’s Schedule One offences. She knew generally what a Schedule One offence was and recognised that because of his previous convictions, professionals were concerned that he would offend again. When confronted with the professional knowledge that one of his convictions was against her as a child, she volunteered additional information that she felt angry with her mother for ‘putting her in care’. She said everyone in the family was involved in the sexual abuse, so her separation from the family confirmed both her feeling of difference from her siblings and her confusion as to why she was singled out. She revealed that Mr S had abused her from a very young age and that he had lied about the age of onset in order to receive a lesser sentence. She was confused about what constituted sexual abuse, giving a text book definition but not relating it to her own experience. The local authority thought that she should tell her children about her

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 95 own abuse by Mr S in order to protect them. She said she was able to talk to her children about sexual abuse and could tell them about Mr S’s convictions generally, but could not say that she herself had been victimised by him. She discussed the theme of disputed paternity both within her own family of origin and her current family and did not have any idea why Mr S would not accept paternity of her children. Mrs S had lived only three months of her life away from Mr S, which she described as the best months of her life. She did not decide to have a relationship with him. He lived with her, had sex with her and, because they claimed state benefit from the same address, they were classed as a family. Her mother continued to have an on/off relationship with him which made Mrs S angry. He threatened to have the children taken away from her and given to her mother if she made any attempt to move away from him. He constantly put her down. He told her she was a terrible mother, a lousy housekeeper and dreadful in bed. She stayed with him because she was frightened of him and he was the children’s father. She felt that if she began to recognise herself as a victim of his sexual abuse she would not be able to live with him. She derived enormous satisfaction from her children on whom she doted. She brought all of her children with her, because she didn’t want to leave them alone with Mr S. She was appropriately caring and attentive and managed all the extra care the baby required because of his birth defects (the older children were not present during the interview itself). The children were very attached to her, showed no signs of disturbance in school and functioned at developmentally appropriate levels. Mrs S expressed a willingness to come to future interviews to explore some of the issues raised in more detail. She was clear that if forced to choose between Mr S and the children she would not hesitate to choose her children. She did not attend any subsequent appointments. Mr S forbade it, saying he needed her to be with him because of his disability. Any alternative forms of care arranged for him were unsuccessful in freeing Mrs S to attend further appointments. Ideally, mother and her three children should have been received into care. Mrs S’s childhood experience of sexual abuse was continuing but because she was now over 16 and living supposedly of her own free will with Mr S, her experience was not defined as abusive. On the contrary, her relationship with him was being framed as one of common-law partner. The twenty-three year age discrepancy was not seen as relevant or of concern. The space and opportunity for Mrs S to define her relationship with Mr S and to reflect on her childhood experiences did not exist. The one session that did occur proved so threatening to Mr S that he exercised his authority and ensured she had no

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further sessions, ironically by assuming a one-down position of invalid. It seems most unlikely that Mrs S would be able to protect her children from Mr S. He will sexually abuse them when and if he feels like it. He has had no treatment. He continues to lie about his original offences and uses his current relationship with her as evidence of his enduring love for her. Removal of the children seemed precipitous however, as there was no evidence that sexual abuse had taken place or that the children’s development was not progressing. The children were well cared for at a physical level and clearly attached both to each other and to their mother. Had the local authority initiated proceedings when they were first informed that Mr S was a Schedule One offender, a different approach could have been taken. Allowing the family to live together with no intervention until the birth of the third child undermined any sense of urgency the local authority wished to convey. The idea that in the years previously Mr S had not spent time alone with the girls is naive. By not attempting to engage the mother separately, and dealing with Mr and Mrs S as a couple, they strengthened Mr S’s position within the family and weakened that of Mrs S. Mr S’s complete control of the situation was amply demonstrated when the case was heard in court. Both Mr and Mrs S were present with the baby. Mr S arrived in his wheelchair which required numerous members of court to help manoeuvre him into the court room. He clearly demonstrated how the needs of the disabled were not catered for. He sat at the back of court listening to the evidence, shaking his head at points of disagreement. Mrs S in contrast gave all her attention to the baby. When the case was finished (a supervision order was granted), Mr S was wheeled out from the court room and lifted out to the car-park for the couple to begin their journey home. As the professionals rounded the corner, also en route to the carpark, Mr S was seen to propel himself to his car, stand up, fold the wheelchair, open the car boot, place the wheelchair in the boot and get into the driver’s seat.

DISCUSSION The clinical examples indicate that hierarchy needs to be attended to when intervening in systems where sexual abuse is an issue. However, the gender implications in establishing hierarchy must be recognised, as well as the inequality of gender arrangements between men and women which are weighted in favour of men even in the most ideal circumstances. Some of the basic principles identified by a model which attends to family structure are relevant to treatment interventions. It is important to restore or establish an

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 97 intergenerational sexual boundary (Furniss 1983). The parental responsibilities of establishing authority and providing a protecting environment are priority clinical tasks (Smith 1994). Parental and marital relationships are not necessarily syntonic. In sexual abuse cases the state places the emphasis on the parental relationship. This should be reinforced by clinical interventions. Earlier formulations of the aetiology of sexual abuse encouraged clinicians to focus on the marital relationship, often to the exclusion of parental responsibilities. Parents as a concept is ungendered but parenting as an experience is. Phyllis Chesler (1986) in her book Mothers on Trial, uses the term ‘mother-reared children’ to help emphasise this. Maternal authority needs more attention, not only in and of itself, but also in interaction with the gender of the child. Both gender and generation play a role in establishing hierarchy in families (Goldner 1988). Sexual abuse often reinforces the former, while substantially undermining the latter, as in the case of the S family. In the R family, gender mediated messages were communicated through the sexual abuse in the targeting of the female child with male children as bystanders. This issue came up in the family sessions where the loyalties of the children, to gender or generation, were conflicted. This was especially the case for the boys in the family who had to decide whether to ally themselves with their sister who had been abused (generation) or with their father who had abused her (gender). Therapeutic work must address these conflicting loyalties. Hierarchy is not static and individuals can move between one-up and one-down positions. This in itself is not unhealthy, as the constant movement between these positions allows for the possibility of equality over time within a relationship. This movement generally operates in favour of the individual who has maximum choice, usually men by virtue of their greater gender privilege. Additionally a powerful member of a family can move to the one-down position when confronted by a greater authority such as legal intervention. The S case demonstrated this clearly. This is especially important in working with male sex offenders who may present themselves to male professionals in the one-down position but with female professionals attempt to move into the one-up position – asserting gender over professional status. Hierarchical confusion in sexual abuse cases, rather then diminishing over time, amplifies. Paradoxically though, it can come to be seen as normative as in the case of Mr and Mrs S where, by virtue of Mrs S’s gender and her age, she is no longer viewed as his stepchild or victim but his partner. In part the normalisation of perverted structures occurs because they mirror accepted gender inequalities within society. Age differences in favour of males in marital relationships, for instance, are seen as normal. Yet, despite Mrs S’s now being older, Mr S is still able to continue his oppressive

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sexual interest in her, and worse, to use her as a vehicle to produce other victims. In such a perverted hierarchy, it is easier for professionals to accept the apparent construction of husband, wife and children which allows them to view Mrs S as colluding and protecting her partner rather than recognising that despite the passage of time she remains Mr S’s victim. Whilst we may like to believe that there is no totally victim-like position, until Mrs S has the freedom to define herself, she remains unequally bound to Mr S as daughter and wife. She also has to struggle to retain her role as mother to her children. By refusing to reveal to her children that Mr S’s sexual offences occurred against her which social services requested her to do, she can be seen to be maintaining a boundary around information that she feels is inappropriate for her children to know. An appreciation and understanding of hierarchy including its perversions is essential in working with sexual abuse (Smith 1992). A failure to understand and address these issues within the therapeutic context can ignore the perversion of hierarchy and reinforce its normal facade. Equally, women assuming hierarchically superior positions in families, even when sexual abuse has been disclosed, can be viewed as pathological or their position can be seen to have contributed to the sexual abuse in the first place. Protection within families comes from the responsible exercise of parental authority in both its gendered forms (maternal and paternal). In identifying the abuse of authority as central to our understanding of sexual abuse, we must confront the concept of hierarchy and its connexion to wider systems of oppression be they gender, generation, race or class. This implies that hierarchy is intertwined with power. However, it does not deny circular reciprocity in relationships or the necessary interdependencies that exist between different individuals. Professional interventions should avoid insisting on unrealistic hierarchical transformations. Professionals should be aware of the difficulties of placing mothers in positions of greater authority both in relation to their children and in relation to their partners without due consideration being given to the wider social context, which confers little value but great responsibility on maternal authority. A perverted hierarchy is a structure in which existing notions are amplified in service of the needs of the perpetrator or the most powerful, at the expense of the needs of the victims or the least powerful (Smith 1981). Naming structured inequalities within family relationships does not mean that hierarchy itself must be abandoned. It does however require a more realistic approach that recognises those inequalities and works towards the ideal of equal but different roles within families.

Family hierarchy and sexual abuse 99 REFERENCES Alexander, P. (1985) ‘A systems theory conceptualization of incest’, Family Process 24: 79–88. Bentovim, A., Elton, A., Hildebrand, J., Tranter, M. and Vizard, E. (1988) Child Sexual Abuse within the Family, London: Wright. Chesler, P. (1986) Mothers on Trial, Washington: Seal Press. Finkelhor, D. (1984) Child Sexual Abuse: New Theory and Research, New York: Free Press. Furniss, T. (1983) ‘Family process in the treatment of intra-familial child sexual abuse’, Journal of Family Therapy 4: 263–279. Goldner, V. (1985a) ‘Feminism and family therapy’, Family Process 24: 31–47. —— (1985b) ‘Warning: family therapy may be hazardous to your health’, Family Therapy Networker 9 (6): 19–23. —— (1988) ‘Generation and gender: normative and covert hierarchies’, Family Process 27: 17–31. Gutheil, T. and Avery, M. (1977) ‘Multiple overt incest as family defence against loss’, Family Process 16: 105–116. Haley, J. (1976) Problem Solving Therapy, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hooper, C. (1992) Mothers Surviving Child Sexual Abuse, London: Routledge. James, K. and MacKinnon, L. (1990) ‘The “incestuous family” revisited: a critical analysis of family therapy myths’, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 16: 71– 88. MacLeod, M. and Saraga, E. (1988) ‘Challenging the orthodoxy: towards a feminist theory and practice’, Feminist Review 28: 16–56. Saradjian, J. (1992) ‘Typologies of female perpetrators of child sexual abuse: an emerging perspective’, unpublished Master’s Dissertation, Department of Psychiatry, University of Leeds. Smith, G. (1981) ‘Incest and male power’, New Forum 7: 56–57. —— (1991) ‘Work with sex offenders: keeping it child centred’, unpublished paper presented at 1991 ROTA Conference, Liverpool. —— (1992) ‘The unbearable traumatogenic past: child sexual abuse’, in V. Varma (ed.) The Secret Lives of Vulnerable Children, London: Routledge. —— (1994) ‘Parent, partner, protector: conflicting role demands for mothers of sexually abused children’, in M. Erooga, T. Morrison and R. Beckett (eds) Sexual Offending Against Children: Assessment and Treatment of Male Abusers, London: Routledge. Will, D. (1989) ‘Feminism, child sexual abuse and the (long overdue) demise of systems mysticism’, Context 1: 12–15. Zuelzer, N. and Reposa, R. (1983) ‘Mothers in incestuous families’, International Journal of Family Therapy 5: 98–109.

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Autonomy and connection Gendered thinking in a statutory agency dealing with child sexual abuse Jane Dutton Conn

INTRODUCTION This chapter looks at the contributions which systemic and gender sensitive thinking make to analysing male and female roles in the world of paid employment. The specific organisational focus is social services, the individuals involved social work managers and practitioners, and the work content, child sexual abuse. The impact of gender difference on the relationship between workers and the effect this has on the work system itself (and therefore on the service) is explored through a small-scale research study and through the analysis of case conference material. Within social work, particularly in relation to child sexual abuse (CSA), there has been acknowledgement of the importance of gender difference and the unequal distribution of power between women and men (e.g. Dominelli and McLeod 1989; Hudson 1989; Parton and Parton 1989). Research in CSA work has found behavioural patterns that were gender related, with both family members and workers at times adopting stereotypical positions (e.g. male ‘doing’ and female ‘being’; see Chodorow 1989). The potential for men and women working collaboratively in such a context therefore seemed particularly problematic, and yet in this work the importance of collaborative working, within and between agencies, is considered imperative. Of course gender difference forms only one part of the use and abuse of power within organisations and between members of organisations and client groups. In a ‘dominator’ culture (Eisler 1987) any difference, for example, of race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, age and class, can imply inferiority or superiority. Different situations may particularly highlight one or more of these, and place different emphasis on the importance of each (Dutton Conn 1993: 41).

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CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AND THE SOCIAL WORK SYSTEM The connection between the ‘public life’ of the work context and the ‘private life’ and psychological development of the individual has been examined from a number of different perspectives (e.g. Abott and Wallace 1991; Chodorow 1978; Gilligan 1982; Gorell Barnes 1990; Morgan 1986). Differences in personal feelings that men and women experience will have implications for working together within the CSA area. Workers of both genders have strong and often uncomfortable associations with aspects of their clients’ lives. CSA strikes at the core of the nature and definition of intimate relationships, and therefore evokes particularly uncomfortable feeelings. Inevitably these at times produce professional differences which may mirror some of the confusion inherent in the work itself. The Cleveland Inquiry (1988) in an attempt to address this, recommended interagency cooperation, and the setting up of area review committees to create ‘an habitual context of working together’. However, Whetton (1982) quoted in Stephenson (1989:18) comments: ‘Mandated cooperation creates a negative, fatalistic attitude in the organisation’s staff that sharply limits its effectiveness’. It is in the context of these rather contradictory notions that the debate has started to focus increasingly on the issue of power; that is, the relationship between the family and the state (Frost 1990). In a situation where power of adults over children is the key issue, the way in which professional and statutory authorities understand the power relationships within their own organisations becomes particularly important. These relationships are partly defined by the hierarchical structure of the organisation, partly by social constructs such as gender, and partly by the workers’ individual experiences which affect attitude and behaviour. When placed within the arena of care and control the potential for confusion and ambivalence is heightened. Over the past few years, child abuse enquiries (e.g. Jasmine Beckford Inquiry 1985; Cleveland Inquiry 1988) have constantly indicated a polarisation between workers’ concern with showing care in response to the family’s experience of deprivation on the one hand, and exerting control on the other. Recognition that girls are abused in greater numbers than boys and that a larger proportion of perpetrators are male has informed a gender sensitive debate around power in this context (e.g. Conn and Turner 1990; Hearn 1990; MacLeod and Saraga 1988). The Gender and Violence Project at the Ackerman Institute has particularly addressed the notion that ‘abusive relationships exemplify, in extremis, the stereotypical gender arrangements that structure intimacy between men and women generally’ (Goldner et al. 1990: 343). This includes male identification coming through separation and difference from the primary care-giver (almost always female), and female

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identification being forged through similarity with that care-giver. A social context which elevates the male perspective and devalues the female perspective contributes to creating a climate in which abuse can occur.

THE RESEARCH STUDY This was a small-scale qualitative research study designed to explore women’s and men’s experience of CSA work in a social services organisation. The study reported here is part of a wider study, an element of which, concerned specifically with supervisory relationships, has been discussed elsewhere (Dutton Conn 1991, 1993). The study examined gendered difference and similarity, particularly in relation to the complex power relationships within the organisation, which at times mirror some of the aspects of family life which workers are trying to clarify and untangle. The main research questions were: (1) what is the nature of gender related difference and similarity in this specific work context, if any; and (2) what is the impact of these differences and similarities on professional relationships, and subsequently on the service?

Methodology It was recognised that the research process itself might reflect similar issues about power and control, and a decision was taken to use a research style and approach which would explicitly address the power issues in the relationship between the interviewer and the respondent. Just as all knowledge is political (i.e. reflecting power relations; Foucault 1980) so all knowledge is gendered. Research has largely taken place within a structure of man-made rules, but there have been a growing number of studies which offer significant contributions to the development of a female-oriented research approach. Oakley’s (1981) study of the transition to motherhood of fiftyfive women is one. Her research strategy of ‘connection’ with her respondents was the antithesis of the ‘distancing’ techniques of traditional research. Ideas of separation and connection explored here similarly influenced the design of this study and the choice of methods. The researcher was striving to find a way of thinking about the research itself which valued the notion of connection and intimacy, without devaluing difference and separation. It must also be noted that the observations, themselves filtered by the participants context, are further filtered by the observer, in this case the researcher (Von Foerster 1981). The reflections, views and ideas

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propounded in the interviews were developed through conversation, and need to be seen as such rather than as objectifiable fact. Information was drawn from semi-structured interviews and case conference observations. The interviews offered the opportunity to use both ‘connecting’ questions and questions which required a more distanced response. It seemed important to describe the research method overtly to interviewees, to acknowledge and address the power relationships inherent in the work. The researcher (female, white European) conducted all the interviews. Differences or similarities of race and and gender between researcher and researched will influence the research interviewing process. In this study respondents were specifically asked their views about how this might influence their response.

Interviewees The systems targeted for study were area teams comprising community based field social workers, home care and domiciliary services and their administrative support. The intake and children and families teams were the primary sources for child protection referrals. Social workers were key workers, middle managers their immediate supervisors, and senior managers both supervisors of this group and policy makers. The organisation was said to offer male and female applicants equal access to posts at all levels. At the time of this study the representation of women at senior management level was 20 per cent in comparison to 80 per cent male representation: a higher proportion of women to men than found by Brock and Davis (1985), who found 91 per cent of senior managers were male. Among middle managers the gender balance was even and therefore so was the sample selection. Women were overrepresented at practitioner level with a 60 per cent–40 per cent bias towards female workers. For this part of the study, six people were interviewed at each level, selected randomly (apart from their gender) from staffing lists within the appropriate sections. The first eighteen people approached (initially by telephone) agreed to be involved. The context, content and aims of the research were discussed during this initial contact and each person was offered a copy of the research outline and areas to be addressed. Interviews were to be held at a venue chosen by the respondents; anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed. A semi-structured interview covered four main areas: (1) Current work and organisational position; (2) Theoretical framework; (3) Working practice – self and departmental; (4) Use of self and of support systems. Data was collected via notetaking and audio tapes which were transcribed and coded.

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RESEARCH FINDINGS A range of variables within a small-scale study of this kind will have an impact on the findings. In this study, for example, an individual’s age, experience, class, race and cultural identity affected the way in which gender, power and difference were viewed in supervisory and managerial relationships. The semi-structured interview enabled these differences to be explored, and respondents were able to comment on the most important influences for them in the formulation of their individual belief systems around their professional roles. It was therefore possible to look for areas of commonality when coding these responses, and some key themes emerged. These will be reported under three headings – organisational issues, understanding of CSA, and personal issues – for the three different groups of workers: senior managers, middle managers and practitioners.

Senior managers This was the only group which did not contain an equal gender balance (four men and two women). This imbalance of gender at senior management level is an important organisational issue in itself, connected to how women are encouraged to see themselves and how others see them in relation to career advancement (Stamp 1986; see also Wilkes, Chapter 14 this volume). The six participants were all responsible in some way for policy making in relation to children and families and also for supervising middle managers.

Organisational issues All six participants agreed that the impact of people’s feelings was more strongly felt in CSA than any other area of work. They were all conscious of anxiety about making the wrong decisions, based on the difficulty of untangling information when the strength of emotion was high. They were also concerned about the stress involved for practitioners and their immediate supervisors, and practitioners’ lack of knowledge. All these factors potentially contributed to unclear decision making processes. There were however some marked areas of difference between the men and the women linked to gender. The connection between the issues involved in CSA and their professional role was strongest for the two women interviewed. They thought the complexity of this area of work frequently made their role and tasks unclear. In comparison, the men thought their role and tasks in this context were very clearly

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defined by organisational rules and expectations. In this area of work particularly they saw themselves having different roles at different times, and keeping these delineated was seen as helpful. Both women found being distant in their managerial role from the CSA work made them feel less in control of it. One of the women used the word ‘distant’, the other used ‘removed’. They did not think it was appropriate to be more involved because of their position, but found this personally difficult. The men, on the other hand, thought their distance from the work made them feel more in control (two used the word ‘distance’, two ‘overview’). The women described their management style as ‘concerned with process’, or ‘process focused’. The language they used when talking about this was facilitative and interactive, e.g. ‘helping question assumptions’, ‘help to feel less vulnerable’. The men all described their style in this context as ‘case focused’ and the language used to describe this was generally instrumental, e.g. ‘fact finding’, ‘use of evidence’, ‘acting in the child’s best interests’. Three of the men did not think gender issues were important in terms of their role. The work for them was focused on policy, information and the legal possibilities, rather than on the relationship between aspects of the work and personnel. In contrast there was a definite connection made by the women between the sensitivity of the work, potential blame or exclusion of the abuser (usually male), and the relationship between supervisors and supervisees of different sexes. They were both clear that this related to gender difference (their words), but were unable to be more specific about this connection and therefore were not sure how to use this understanding in the context of their work. Both thought fewer women in the social services hierarchy meant there was generally a stronger emphasis on male ways of doing things.

Understanding of CSA The only point of similarity between the men and women was that they considered societal contexts to be important in contributing to the occurrence of CSA. They focused on different aspects of these however (apart from one man, who generally had the same views as the women). Both women and one man preferred not to generalise about families where CSA had occurred. They said they tried to consider each individual situation according to its context. The other men said they found it helpful to have definite if general views about a ‘type’ of family in which CSA might occur. The wider societal context contributing to CSA was, for these three men, lodged in sexualised male attitudes towards women and children, validated and exacerbated by socialisation processes and the media, pornography and strip clubs.

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The women had general views about some aspects, however, which informed their thinking. For example, they were concerned with the monopoly of power both without and within the family by men over women and children, and saw this as instrumental in contributing to a general validation of domestic abuse. They saw the greater number of male abusers as a reflection of this monopoly of power and use of power over people, rather than an authority invested in the self which is then used in relationships with others. They saw female abusers as acting within the context of male power, i.e. although clearly responsible for their actions, these took place within a wider context of male domination. Three of the men said they felt more anger towards female abusers than male. They could not understand how women could act in this way and thought that either the women had been abused themselves or had been coerced by men.

Personal issues All participants said they were aware of their own family experiences, particularly as parents in relation to this area of work. Only one participant was not a parent. None of the participants in this group sought support from others within the department in relation to this work because none of them felt that they could trust others sufficiently to do so. The women thought being able to discuss the issues raised by the work and to have some support was vital and therefore felt they were missing something, whereas three of the men did not think they needed any particular support.

Middle managers Organisational issues Three women and three men were interviewed, all of whom were responsible for supervising practitioners involved in CSA work. All participants saw their role as helping workers to maintain appropriate boundaries and ensuring that procedures were followed. They were also all conscious of discussions about gender within the work force, both in relation to supervision and to allocation of work. They all said their male supervisees found it more difficult to discuss issues around sexuality, possibly because most abusers were male. Unlike the men, the women in this group all described their roles as ‘supportive’, ‘advisory’, ‘enabling’, ‘facilitating’. The language they used was very similar. The women thought the supervision they received was the major influence on their decision making, whereas borough policy and the legal system were the major influences on decision making for the men.

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Understanding of CSA Everyone in this group was actively concerned about the use and abuse of power by men over women and adults over children and saw themselves as influenced by feminism. They all had quite a strong sense of the relationship between themselves, their feelings and the work they were doing, and both men and women were interested in further training. The women’s understanding about sexual abuse was based on their own experience of relationships and through their practice. The men’s came primarily from reading feminist theory about power relationships between men and women and from their understanding of being part of a culture which validates pornography in the media. Both men and women had quite complicated reactions to abusers of their own gender. The men felt anger towards male perpetrators but also a sense of guilt as men themselves having power, which they experienced particularly when dealing with CSA. The women’s response to female perpetrators was complicated by their understanding of women’s experience in a patriarchal society. They all reported some confusion about these responses and wanted more supervision from another woman to explore and understand their reactions to this work. They were very aware of the impact of the work on themselves and the possible consequences of not understanding this sufficiently.

Personal issues Trust and safety, both reportedly lacking within the organisation, were important issues for both men and women. Only one woman thought she could explore issues safely with her female supervisor. Support systems were mainly outside work, with some peer group support within. Everyone in this group talked overtly about the importance of maintaining some distance from the work, recognising that the impact of the work at a personal level could lead them to become too closely involved to be helpful. They also thought that there were more differences of opinion, and more was left unsaid in this area of work than in any other. There were no major differences of view between the genders about personal issues.

Practitioners Organisational issues Three men and three women were interviewed and all used supervision, case conferences

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and specialist resources to contribute to their thinking and planning in CSA work. All the women had chosen to become involved in this area of work and had actively sought further training. They had also developed collaborative support networks, as they all saw this as their most challenging and difficult area of work. They considered gender to be very important in terms of who did the work, with whom they discussed the work and the implications of the worker’s gender for the child and the family. Their approach centred around empowerment of mothers (and through them of children) to enable them to identify their own needs and take more control of their own and their children’s lives. The men in contrast were unclear how to intervene in order to facilitate change. Lack of clarity was reflected in differences between them about what they considered the most important focus, e.g. one man mentioned poverty and social deprivation, another the impact of male sexuality in working with single female parents. None had chosen to train in this area of work, and they were ambivalent about being involved in it at all. If they did have to be, usually because of staff shortages, they always involved a female worker in some way. Gender issues were not consciously part of their thinking or discussion other than in their concern about the misuse of male power.

Understanding of CSA There was no similarity in the comments made by the different genders working at practitioner level. The women thought they had a clear theoretical understanding of the issues, based upon the abuse of power, {particularly male power) of adults over children. They thought that the training, joint work and discussions they had been involved in enabled them to feel more empowered to do the work. They experienced conflictual feelings about women in the course of doing their work, such as anger at mothers for ‘failing’ to protect and at girls for ‘putting themselves at risk’. The men did not think they had a clear theoretical understanding of the issues which they saw to be based on an abuse of power, predominantly male power. They also emphasised that the way in which men were encouraged to express their sexuality was important, but felt overall that their understanding lacked coherence. All the men felt uncomfortable and confused doing this work, but did not wish to use training or supervision further or to become more involved. They could articulate the discomfort they experienced but said they dealt with it by concentrating on organising and carrying out specific tasks.

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Personal issues All participants, apart from one man, said they brought their own family experiences into their work. Supervision was not mentioned by anyone as a forum for discussion of difficult personal issues raised by the work. The women had all developed support systems to talk about the work among their peers and friends within and outside the office. They deliberately did not discuss the work with their male partners (two interviewees said this was ‘protective’ of their men) as they thought it would be too upsetting or too difficult for them as men to contemplate other men abusing children. The men approached the issue of support differently, although not uni- formly. One man said he actively discussed his work with his female partner and he thought women were emotionally stronger than men. The others said they did not need to discuss the work at all in their personal lives.

SUMMARY OF THEMES In collating the themes elicited in the interviews at all three levels in the organisation, distinct differences emerge between women and men in their beliefs and understanding of CSA. These can be understood as a difference of ‘male’ and ‘female’ orientation. A ‘female’ orientation could be described as maintaining control of the work, of the self and of the context by a close involvement with the persons for whom the worker had primary responsibility (e.g. child/non-abusing parent, social worker, etc.). This involved individual discussion, training, personal development and so on. A ‘male’ orientation essentially maintained control through preserving some distance in these relationships, through for example a concentration on policy rather than close attention to individual experience. It was apparent that these differences in orientation affected working relationships, the way work was carried out and, at times, decisions about outcome. These differences were further observed in the case conference setting, of which the following are two examples.

CASE CONFERENCE ANALYSIS Three main areas of case conference functioning were selected for observation of possible gendered differences. These were (1) the relationship between social worker, senior social worker and the case conference group; (2) the relationship between senior and social worker; and (3) the decision making process. The researcher joined the case conference as a non-participating observer and the following observations have been selected for report.

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Conference A There were ten participants (four men and six women) at the first conference, plus the researcher. There was a clear division in the seating, with the four men sitting together. The female participants were as follows: chairperson (social services senior manager), child protection coordinator, specialist social worker (working with the mother), child therapist (working with the children), day nursery officer (the younger children attended the nursery) and the health visitor (concerned with the youngest child). The teacher (from the children’s school), the court officer, the senior social worker (middle manager and supervisor) and the social worker (for the whole family) were all male. The issues for discussion were whether a single female parent had adequate care and control of her six children and the nature of alleged abuse.

(1) The relationship between social worker, senior and conference group The male social worker made the major contribution to the conference. He referred to his senior only twice in relation to decisions made which they had discussed, and did not look to him to intervene or add anything to what he was saying. He added comments to the contribution of the specialist social worker, child therapist and day nursery officer and cut across contributions from the latter two workers twice. There was a clear gender division in the conference among those who were working directly with the family. The social worker (and senior) and the teacher (all male) particularly focused on issues of control, e.g. if mother could not exercise this the children should be removed. The specialist social worker, child therapist and day nursery worker (all female) were all primarily concerned with care, including care and support of the mother, in order to help her with her parenting. There was a further divergence around the nature of the abuse. The social worker saw this as physical, some of it stemming from lack of parental control, and mainly relating to three of the boys. The specialist social worker and child therapist were also concerned that there had been some sexual abuse of two of the children, although not by mother, and were particularly concerned that the one girl in the family (who was very withdrawn) was being overlooked. The chair of the conference took a strong position in relation to this debate and supported the concern about the female child. For example, she said: ‘Because girls may not act out as boisterously as boys and may be withdrawn and therefore easier to handle, they regularly receive less attention.’ She also strongly supported the notion of ‘caring’ for the mother, working with her individually as well as in the family

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context, and providing appropriate services within the home, rather than removing the children to respite care when the concern of the professional system became too great. She quite clearly contradicted the approach of the male workers, other than agreeing with them that the children’s names should remain on the register for further assessment.

(2) The relationship between senior and social worker As has been noted, both were male. There was no disagreement between them, and the senior’s contribution supported the social worker’s statements. The latter operated independently in the conference, largely without reference to his senior, whose role therefore appeared less important.

(3) The Decision making process As previously noted, the decision for the children’s names to remain on the register for further assessment was not disputed. The process of arriving at this decision was however different for the male and female workers. Both were concerned that the mother needed to be more in control of the children and their lives. The male workers thought that this should be accomplished by being clear and authoritative about the consequences of not doing this. The female workers saw it more as a process of exploring with the mother what made this so difficult for her and whether there were ways of helping her to change. Both were concerned with the best interests of the children; for the male workers this related to anxiety about their safety, to be resolved through respite care. The female workers thought that service within the home, preventing the removal of the children at this point, was a preferable way of dealing with this anxiety. In this conference, the person with the most power over decision making was female. She (the chairperson) made the major decision, specifically relating the reasons for this to supporting a female single parent under very difficult circumstances to try to enable her to remain in control of her family, rather than social services assuming that role. The language used was the language of enablement. To this end the individual work with mother and children undertaken by the specialist social worker and child therapist would continue. This was in spite of the fact that the male social worker’s alternative view had taken up the largest amount of air space within the conference.

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Conference B There were eight participants in this conference, six men and two women (both of whom sat together) plus the researcher. The chairperson, senior social worker, GP, probation officer and two teachers were all male. The social worker and specialist social worker were female. This conference concerned a mother, father, son and daughter, where the father had sexually abused the daughter, been prosecuted and given a short prison sentence with a six-month probation follow-up. He was living in the area and putting pressure on the family to return home.

(1) The relationship between social worker, senior and conference group The social worker and senior clearly had some different views about the work, and the best way of carrying it out. The specialist social worker was most closely allied with the social worker (both female) about what was happening within the family and how the work should be carried out. Their plan, supported by the (male) GP, was to work with the family (without the perpetrator) about what had happened and how the mother could be supported in protecting her daughter in the future. The other members of the conference (five men) were sceptical about the mother’s ability to protect; all seemed to be in agreement that she had failed to protect in the past and by doing so had ‘colluded’ with the abuse. She had been described by a police officer as a ‘cold fish’ and as ‘reserved’ by the probation officer, who, together with the GP, described the daughter as ‘provocative’. The chairperson also referred to the mother as ‘colluding’ with the abuse by ‘failing to protect’ in his summing up, and the senior social worker agreed with this.

(2) The relationship between senior and social worker The senior contradicted and disagreed with several statements made by the social worker and the specialist social worker. He particularly disagreed over the question of the mother’s ‘collusion’ and ‘failure to protect’, which the other two workers saw as the mother having difficulty in acknowledging what she suspected might have been happening. As soon as she knew for sure, she excluded her husband from the house and supported her daughter in taking legal action, although she found this process very difficult. The senior also thought that all the work should be concentrated on helping the daughter. These differences were not resolved in the conference.

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(3) The decision making process There was some disagreement about the young person’s name being removed from the Child Protection Register. The social worker and specialist social worker thought that the mother had taken sufficient control of the situation and would feel supported by the daughter’s name being removed. She had indicated that she wanted the work to continue. The senior, probation officer, police and teachers thought that her name should remain on the register. The chairperson agreed and this was the decision taken. It was also agreed that the work should continue in its present form. The use of language was that of ‘managing’ the work. In this instance the views of the female practitioners directly involved with the female non-abusing parent were not supported by the (male) chairperson. These practitioners were hierarchically in the least powerful position in the case conference, but were most concerned with the work. Their view was not validated. Consequently the mother’s view was also not heard, although she was the person most directly concerned with protection.

DISCUSSION OF MAJOR THEMES This is a small-scale piece of research which has many limitations. However, the findings, connecting as they do with recent explorations of gender difference in the fields of psychology, social work and family therapy, have some potentially important implications for men and women, managers and practitioners working together in this field. Gendered differences vis-à-vis separation and connection were consistently present in both interview and case conference settings. For the women who were interviewed, maintaining a close connection with the work gave them a clearer sense of control over it, and over themselves in that context. The description of the connection varied according to position in the organisation but whether primarily concerned with direct practice, supervision or policy making, the need to connect with others through discussion and training was paramount. Work in psychological theory on gendered identity has dealt with the importance for women of connection with others. Chodorow (1978) argues that the female child’s experience of similarity to her mother or primary carer provides a sense of connection, important in later relationships. It has also been proposed that women’s morality is informed by a perspective of care and concern about the impact of decisions on interpersonal relationships (Gilligan 1982; Gilligan et al. 1987).

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For the men interviewed, at each level a consistent theme emerged about using the written word (policy, guidelines, research, etc.) to obtain both knowledge and control. The closer they were to the work (as the practitioners were) the less in control and the more confused they felt. Gilligan’s work on the construction of moral reasoning indicates that a male approach to decision making tends to be based on the use of rules and justice which underpinned most of the male participants’ responses. Chodorow (1978, 1989) argues that the difference in gender of a male child from his mother/carer places the main emphasis in his development on separation, which then impacts on his future relationships. Frosh (1987), in considering the construction of masculinity, suggests that this is in part based on a rejection of the feminine, which at the most destructive end of the continuum could contribute to male violence towards women, and a difficulty in maintaining intimate relationships in adult life. The way in which the dominance of the masculine and the subjugation of the feminine is embedded within the prevailing social climate affects how men and women work together. CSA engenders in workers a need to disassociate from the material. This need to feel different from, to deny any connection to, the forces involved in abusing situations, only reinforces the need to preserve difference in professional relationships also. Closeness and intimacy spell danger within an abusing family or network; closeness and intimacy may similarly be experienced as dangerous in a professional network struggling with personal feelings aroused by the nature of the work. Fleeing to the familiar gendered territories is one way of maintaining safety. If this is not overtly acknowledged however, there is a strong possibility of confusion and misunderstanding, just as there is in any other relationship where the effects of the context in which it is occurring are not understood. Placing these ideas in the context of work with child sexual abuse raises some important questions. If female workers tend to engage closely with the work, to use a framework of care and concern, there may be a propensity to ‘merge with the other’ (Chodorow 1978); to become too linked to the mother, to the female child, even to the female abuser within the framework of male domination, and therefore to miss important information. Maintaining a distance for male workers, on the other hand, may indicate an unwillingness to acknowledge any connection through gender with the male abuser. The unwillingness to engage in training or discussion might indicate a fear of involvement in a process which would require an examination of similarities in relation to gender, sexuality and attitude. Gendered differences elicited in the interviews could also be observed in action in the case conference setting. In the first conference setting, the female chairperson used the power of her position to support and validate the female worker’s views. The male

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senior and social worker wished to increase the use of statutory powers to produce change. Although there was agreement between them, the two men operated independently of each other, presenting as separate and self-reliant, even though they were organisationally closely linked and appeared to have a social relationship. This could be interpreted as presenting an identity which valued separateness rather than connection, even when a connection is structurally present, as it is in the organisationally defined relationship between worker and supervisor. This could be linked with the interview material in which the men clearly came across as valuing supervision less than the female workers. The two conferences exemplified different uses of power. In the first, the chairperson overtly recognised the importance of power, validating the female workers who were concerned with the empowerment of the woman and her children. The second conference exemplified the notion of different approaches to moral dilemmas (Gilligan 1982). The female workers were concerned with considering the impact that a course of action might have on the whole family system. The male workers saw tighter controls imposed from without as the only solution. There was no overt acknowledgement of power relations, either within the family under discussion or within the conference, although the female workers’ contributions were consistently disregarded. Hearn (1990), in talking about the social work system surrounding child abuse, quotes Hadley’s (1987) advocacy of mixed gender co-work to link client work with the structural gender divisions of the agency, as an acknowledgement of the different power structures inherent within it. His solution is to use gender balance to ensure an equal distribution of power and equal voice for both male and female workers. However, if it were possible to generalise the differences obvious in the interviews in this research, this could also make working together confusing. If one worker wishes to be more involved in the process and another less so, and these differences are not overtly understood and stated, disagreements could result. Hamer and Statham (1988) argue that an increase in women in management would alter the balance of power in social services and influence the way in which work was organised and understood within the work system. This would make it more likely that the organisation could draw on the use of autonomy and connectedness (Goldner 1988) to achieve a position of balance. Balance could only be achieved, however, through recognising the complexity of difference and its impact on the work process. Female practitioners, unlike their male counterparts, were clearly motivated to be involved and to develop their understanding of CSA. Currently there are more female workers than male at basic grade level in mainstream social work. Even if a department

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does not have a policy of allocating CSA work to female workers where possible, it is more likely to be women doing this work than men. Middle and senior managers are more likely to be male. The work is therefore generally defined by ‘male oriented rules’. There are potentially important implications here for supervisory and management relations if the manager is male and can only evaluate a woman’s contribution through male views and beliefs about decision making. There are similar implications if the roles and gender were reversed, but a female supervisor, although having more structural power than the worker, would not necessarily have her own values and ideas validated in the wider context of, for example, case conferences, if the latter reflected the rules of the prevailing patriarchal structure. The importance of language in organising contexts has been documented extensively elsewhere (see Foucault 1980 and Gergen 1985). Morgan (1986) has particularly addressed the ways in which language contributes to the development of a culture of domination within the organisational context. In this research, the use of language reflected the gendered differences already discussed, e.g. some of the female interviewees’ use of the language of care, and the males’ use of the language of ‘managerialism’. Different styles and use of language (i.e. facilitative and authoritarian) created two very different experiences of supervision and decision making, which in turn partly influenced outcome. A striking theme which continually recurred in the interviews was the lack of trust in supervisory relationships and between the different levels in the organisation. This was also clearly observed in the conference setting. The content of child sexual abuse work is centrally concerned with a betrayal of trust by, and a lack of trust in, those with most power (i.e. adults). In this study this was mirrored in the professional system. Both in the interviews and in the conferences it was not solely organisational position which contributed to the lack of trust but also unacknowledged gender difference. The impact this may have on men and women working together is profound.

CONCLUSION The need for women and men to work together in the child sexual abuse area is undoubtedly essential. The recurrence of certain themes in the interviews in this study point to important unacknowledged areas of gender difference. However, the limitations of a small-scale study must be emphasised and this chapter has not addressed the potential complexity of any specific relationship in the context of CSA, nor taken into account the variations between women, or between men in attitudes and behaviour. It has however looked at some of the possible impact of the identified themes.

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The mistrust of those in more powerful positions experienced by these workers could seriously inhibit collaborative work if it remained covert. This is particularly an issue in the context of this area of work where so many aspects of relationships are covert