Rights, Religion, and Community Approaches to Violence against Women Notes

Rights, Religion, and Community Approaches to Violence against Women

• Gender violence is increasingly viewed as a serious human rights violation globally, leading to legal intervention.
• The battered women's movement in Europe and North America has pushed for the recognition of gender violence as a serious crime.
• This movement has advocated for new laws to punish batterers and provide protective orders for women.
• In global debates, especially in UN meetings, alternative approaches rooted in religion and indigenous practices are emerging as challenges to the rights-based approach.
• This represents a broader conflict between secular legal approaches and religious or ethnonational approaches to social justice.

Study of Three Approaches in Hilo, Hawai'i

• A study was conducted in Hilo, Hawai'i, examining three approaches to gender violence: rights-based, religion-based, and community-based.
• The study focused on a feminist batterer intervention program (Alternatives to Violence [ATV]), a Pentecostal Christian church, and an indigenous Hawaiian form of family problem-solving called ho‘oponopono.
• Each group defines gender violence and its elimination differently and envisions ideal gender relationships differently.

Feminist Approach (Rights-Based)

• This approach emphasizes women's safety and promotes an egalitarian gender order.
• Women in danger are encouraged to separate from their partners.
• Couples are taught to negotiate decisions, with the promise of increased trust, love, and sexual pleasure for men who refrain from violence.
• The batterer is seen as a criminal, and the victim is viewed as having rights not to be beaten, regardless of her actions.

Conservative Christian Approach (Religion-Based)

• This approach stems from conservative Christian ideas of salvation, healing, and the authority of Biblical texts; uses scriptural counseling based on Biblical quotations.
• It emphasizes gender complementarity and discourages divorce.
• The husband is considered the authority figure in the family, under the authority of God.
• Women are taught to submit to their husbands, respond gently, and pray to overcome resentment and hostility.

Native Hawaiian Approach (Community-Based: Ho‘oponopono)

• Ho‘oponopono is based on repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, with an emphasis on family and community responsibility for conflict.
• The process seeks family reunification, but an unrepentant person may be exiled.
• The process dictates that husband and wife should treat each other with mutual respect.
• It emphasizes the value of every person and the importance of forgiveness.

Similarities in Technologies of Personal Transformation

• Despite different ideologies, all three approaches share similarities in their methods of personal transformation.
• They emphasize making choices, holding people accountable, controlling feelings, and building self-esteem.
• Individuals are encouraged to be responsible for their choices and manage their feelings.
• All approaches focus on the entrepreneurial creation of the self.

Convergence on Technologies of the Self

• The adoption of self-management as a solution to gender violence is driven by the need for financial support and the desire to attract clients or members.
• Organizations professionalize their leadership, moderate their rhetoric, and develop reform programs that seem reasonable to leaders and funders.
• Psychotherapeutic techniques of self-management are used to protect women from male violence.

Gender Violence in Windward Hawai‘i

• Hilo is a port city with a postindustrial, postplantation society, marked by unemployment and a tourism-based economy.
• A subculture exists involving guns, drugs, fishing, and hunting, where wife-beating is sometimes considered normal.
• Cases of violence against women in Hilo courts have increased dramatically, reflecting both an increase in battering and a greater willingness to seek legal help.

Rights: The Alternatives to Violence Program

• The feminist violence control program in Hilo is rooted in U.S. feminism of the 1970s, emphasizing power differentials between men and women.
• Early activism focused on legal strategies to eliminate violence, advocating for tougher laws and more active policing.
• The Alternatives to Violence (ATV) program initially followed the Duluth model, separating participants by gender.
• The men's group focused on violence control, while the women's group provided support and encouraged asserting rights.
• The program was seen as a movement to transform society through empowering women.

The Law as a Tool

• The women’s support group was organized around the trope of the family, with the law portrayed as a source of help and support
• The men’s program adopted the trope of the school and the prison, requiring attendance, demanding homework, and threatening jail for failure to attend.
• Men were required to come on time and stay until the end of each meeting, a technique designed to hold men accountable.
• The men were aware that ATV made reports to judges and the Child Protective Services. The law was always present in the room as a threat.

Changes in ATV Program

• In the mid-1990s, the ATV program experienced changes that eroded its status within the judiciary.
• The initial egalitarian feminist structure was replaced by a hierarchical one.
• The program moved away from treating men and women differently, initiating anger management programs for both.
• In 1998, the men’s program was redirected toward a new model, called Healthy Realization, this supportive approach encourages men to build self-esteem.
• Since the late 1990s, ATV shifted from seeing gender violence as oppression to viewing it as individual psychological functioning.
• The Duluth model is supplemented by therapeutic techniques, still acknowledging women's right not to be hit but also recognizing women's anger issues.

Religion: The New Hope Christian Fellowship

• Religion offers a major alternative to the feminist, rights-based approach.
• The New Hope Christian Fellowship in Hilo belongs to the Foursquare Gospel Church, part of the Pentecostal movement.
• Pentecostalism emphasizes direct experience of the Spirit and offers millennial hope.
• New Hope provides counseling for men sent by the court and works with the county on anger management programs.
• New Hope blends Pentecostal ideas of ritual healing and driving out demonic forces with Christian family counseling.
• Pastors believe God has given the wife responsibility to take care of the family, and the husband lays down his life for his wife, she should submit to him just like people submit to God.

Spiritual Warfare

• New Hope views healing as a battle between God and Satan.
• Pastoral counselors use Christian ideas of demonic influence and psychotherapy to help couples.
• Anger is seen as the result of demons and the devil.
• People involved with abuse are seen as having strongholds for demons, created by grudges and hurts.
• Eliminating strongholds requires forgiveness and prayer.

Community: The Ho‘oponopono Process

• Ho‘oponopono is a Native Hawaiian process for resolving family problems through repentance and forgiveness.
• It is a spiritual practice used to cure or prevent illness by resolving interpersonal problems and untangling transgressions.
• Ho‘oponopono means to set to right, restore, and maintain good relationships.
• Relationships are set right through prayer, discussion, confession, repentance, and mutual restitution and forgiveness.
• Ho’oponopono is increasingly used in social service agencies, as well as being incorporated into a burgeoning global movement to promote forms of restorative justice.

The Process

• Ho‘oponopono involves gathering the family to pray and seek help from the Gods to address the problem.
• The leader, or haku, guides the discussion through problem recognition, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
• The process includes an opening prayer (pule wehe), problem statement (kūkulu kumuhana), discussion (mahiki), confession (mihi), release (kala), severing knots (‘oki), and closing rituals (pani).
• The hihia encompasses the entanglement of emotions, reactions, and interactions that bind the injurer to the injured.
• The hala references the transgression that has been identified during the process.
• Failure to forgive is ho’omauhala, holding a grudge.
• If people become angry or feel out of control, the haku will call a ho’omalu, a period of silence or reflection.

Evolution of Ho'oponopono

• Ho‘oponopono has evolved, moving into social services and political movements for indigenous peoples.
• It has incorporated ideas from psychotherapy and dispute resolution.
• Techniques of intervention help people feel worthy, make choices, and understand their emotions.
• Some practitioners debate whether non-Hawaiians can benefit and if Hawaiian terms are necessary.

Conclusion

• The three approaches to violence against women—rights, religion, and community—start from different cultural places.
• Despite different beginnings, each program has adopted similar technologies of self-formation, drawing on psychotherapeutic approaches.
• The globalizing technology of the self appears even in domains that assert their distinctiveness.
• Each approach began with grassroots initiatives but gradually changed, moving away from radical origins and assimilating a mainstream perspective.
• The pressure to maintain the organization drove this change, requiring them to attract clients or members.
• The convergence on modern technologies of self may reflect the effectiveness of this approach but also raises concerns about homogenization.
• The expansion of a neoliberal vision of the person as responsible for self-making is evident.
• Debates about defining the problem and finding solutions are ongoing, particularly between secular and spiritual approaches.
• The homogenization of modern subjectivity is colonizing differences, even within religion and culture. Discussions of cultural relativism are virtually non-existent.