engleski

Violent Bodies, Cruel Emotions: Ethnography of High-Conflict Divorces

His seminal essay on violence and torture, Talal Asad (1996) starts with the UN declaration on human rights which sates that: “No one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”. However, he calls this statement “unstable”, suggesting that our culture is permeated with violence and that deliberate infliction of pain, physical, but also emotional, psychological and verbal, as is suggested in the second part of the UN statement, has been part of our cultural history and remains part of our cultural present. Approximately one third of all the divorces (Turkat 1997), the number of which is rising in most of the Western countries, are defined as high-conflict divorces. They are defined as being characterized by lack of communication between the divorced parents (or those undergoing the process of divorce), by child visitation interference and by child manipulation. However, based on my on-going research of high-conflict divorces in Croatia, they are also characterized by extreme and inhuman physical violence, which includes violent beating, throwing things, homicide attempts in the form of strangling or suffocating, sexual violence, in the form of rape or forced intercourse through threats and blackmail, emotional and verbal violence in the form of using degrading words, attempts at humiliating, belittling and hurting the partner, forcing them to do what the violent partner wants, again through blackmail and using children as their weapons. My aim is to question this link between the emotions the partners encounter in the process of divorce and their violent outbreak in the form of bodily behavior which can be excessively cruel, inhuman and degrading. Part of the answer lies in Asad’s claim that our culture “allows” for certain types of violence to take place in different contexts, because violence, as Foucault suggested, is not about torture, but about power. I will also try to deconstruct the idea of violent bodies (in the context of divorce), by tracing the way in which they were constructed, maybe not as desirable, but, judging from the fact that they are all too common in similar situations, as tolerated, even “expected”.

ethnography of parenting, high-conflict divorce

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