ABSTRACT
There is a large social scientific literature showing that men who abuse the women who they are, or were, intimately involved with are angry, insecure, and jealous. Why do they experience these emotions? The criminological work on stress and its relationship to male peer support provides some important answers to this question. Following Cohen and Wills (1985: 2), stress arises when a person ‘appraises a situation as threatening or otherwise demanding and does not have an appropriate coping response’. Male peer support is a concept I developed in 1988 and it refers to the attachments to male peers and the resources they provide that encourage and legitimate various types of woman abuse. I and other male peer support theorists (e.g., Martin D. Schwartz) contend that numerous men experience various types of stress in intimate relationships, ranging from sexual problems to threats to the kinds of authority that a patriarchal culture has led them to expect to be their right by virtue of being male. Some men try to deal with these problems themselves, while others turn to male friends for advice, guidance, and various other kinds of social support. A growing literature shows that the type of support provided by male peers may influence a man to deal with his emotional reactions to intimate relationship stress by abusing his current or former partner. As well, male peer support enables some women’s current or former male partners to resist their attempts to end their abusive behaviour. For example, after beating their wives, some husbands feel ashamed, display contriteness, and offer pleas for forgiveness. Such outcomes may result from stress generated from engaging in abusive behaviour. Still, many violent men have peers who alleviate their stress and encourage them to continue asserting their perceived patriarchal authority though abusive means. The main objective of this chapter, then, is to contribute to the criminological study of the emotional dimensions of crime and criminality by examining the relationship between stress, patriarchal male peer support and violence against women. Implications for future theoretical and empirical work are also discussed.
