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Why do Lesbians Batter?
An Interview with Janice Ristock

Helen Fallding

Many feminists believe that lesbians who engage in violent behaviour attack their female partners in the same ways that heterosexual men do. Others, trying to preserve a utopian vision of female love, may believe the dynamic is entirely different. Janice Ristock wants the feminist and lesbian communities to let go of simple theories in order to face the complex realities of violence in lesbian relationships. The University of Manitoba women’s studies professor is one of the first researchers to extensively interview lesbians who have suffered abuse and the women who work with them as therapists or shelter staff. Her book, No More Secrets: Violence in Lesbian Relationships, was published by Routledge in 2003.

Herizons: A decade ago, you and a couple of colleagues put together a booklet on abuse in lesbian relationships that Health Canada still distributes. What do you know now that you didn’t know then?

Ristock: I think that booklet is still a useful resource, but the way we wrote it was to rely on a lot of information and research that feminists generated for violence in heterosexual relationships. We assumed that there was one main experience of domestic violence that’s applicable to all women—one reaction to being victimized and one mindset of perpetrators.

What I learned through doing research is that not all violence in lesbian and heterosexual relationships is the same. I began to look more at the contexts surrounding abusive relationships—contexts like isolation and invisibility for lesbian couples. Or contexts where women had experienced a lifetime of violence and poverty and where this experience was just one piece. Or contexts of drugs and alcohol.

H: What unique weapons do lesbians have at their disposal for hurting or controlling their partners?

R: The tools of homophobia are unique weapons. A number of women talked about the ways their partners would threaten to reveal their sexual identity to their employers or family. Even if they were ‘out,’ their abusive partners could start questioning their sexuality—you know, “You’re not really a lesbian.” The other thing that lesbians have is gender—the fact that it is a relationship involving two women. Many of the women I talked to were so shocked that another woman could be violent towards them … many of them went through experiences of excusing, minimizing, or ignoring behaviour from their partners because they didn’t think that would add up to their partners being violent. Also, some women who are abusive go to women’s services and present themselves as victims. So services are put in this terrible position of trying to determine which partner they should believe. And a woman who has been victimized feels crazy—she sometimes begins to doubt herself.

H: What do women starting their first lesbian relationship need to know?

R: I think it is significant that more than half the women I interviewed talked about abuse within their very first relationship with another woman. There were a few women I interviewed from one community who were talking about the same perpetrator. It sounded as if that woman specifically looked for and found women who were just coming out. There’s a particular kind of vulnerability when you’re looking for somebody to kind of introduce you to the lesbian community.

There is some prevention work that could be done in coming-out groups or discussions about becoming a lesbian. Violence and abuse can occur between two women. We have to remind women that they have the right to be in violence-free relationships and they should trust any feelings they have about behaviour or comments being inappropriate. If they’re unsure, they should talk to somebody else and check out those feelings.

H: How should friends or other support people respond where it appears both women in a couple have been physically or emotionally abusive?

R: It’s very difficult to go into those situations thinking that what you have to do is determine who is being victimized and who I being abusive. Sometimes it’s just very muddled because sometimes victims act out in violent ways themselves. Rather than stepping back and saying, “Forget it, I can’t figure this out,” it’s more important to still be present.

I think that if you see somebody who is engaging in abusive behaviour, you should challenge that. If you see somebody who is hurting, you can offer your support and listen to that person. There are other things you can do in terms of just offering some resources. You can make some suggestions about where they might be able to go where they can talk to somebody else who can take the time and who has the skills to figure out the dynamics in the relationship and respond appropriately.

H: Do you think the lesbian community has a tendency to trivialize abuse by using the term too loosely?

R: There are two problems—there’s both the tendency to not name violence when we see it and at the same time there’s the tendency to use the term ‘abuse’ very loosely and uncritically, when instead we should be talking about ‘bad behaviour,’ ‘meanness,’ or ‘rudeness.’ For example, when people are breaking up, hurtful things are often said, but these are not necessarily part of a pattern of disrespectful, exploitative treatment.

H: How should women’s services change their response to lesbians in violent relationships?

R: I think that they need to broaden their victim-only mandate and offer services to women who are abusive a well. While there would be concerns about safety, I think those are concerns that can be addressed. Men and women both use some services for heterosexual couples, but counsellors talk to each other about when clients will be in the building.

Victim-only mandates mean that one of service providers’ main jobs becomes screening who is being victimized and tossing out the person who is being abusive—only being prepared to hear a certain kind of story of victimization. From my research, that seems to centre the experiences of white, middle-class women.

Broadening mandates to work with those who engage in abusive behaviour can teach us about the layerings of privilege and oppression and the limits of simplistic binaries. It helps push mainstream feminist organization to look harder at issues of racism and classism. For example, we can better address complexities such as both partners using physical violence, or an inter-racial couple here one woman is physically abusive and the other is emotionally abusive through her use of racist attacks.

H: Are there lessons from your research that would help feminists respond more appropriately to violence in heterosexual relationships?

R: Feminists need to ask the same set of crucially reflective questions that I’m raising about lesbian domestic violence in the field of heterosexual domestic violence. That’s a field where a great deal of important work has been done, and at the same time, we also have to stop and ask, “Whose voices and whose stories are heard when we talk about domestic violence?” “Whose stories are not heard?” “Who benefits from how we currently respond to heterosexual domestic violence and who might be left out of those responses?”

If we address those questions, then we look at some of the different contexts and different experiences of violence in heterosexual couples that I don’t think we’ve talked about in enough detail. For example, there’s still a tendency for most of the analysis and services to be focused on middle-class, white women. Service providers almost expect to hear a certain script from victims about how they should talk about their stories. Either women learn how to present their story in that way or they might be denied services. For example, a poor woman with street experience who might have experienced a lot of violence in her life, who has fought back, who is feeling angry, might not be heard as a victim. I also think that service providers may not have been fully able to deal with cases that involve emotional abuse.

We still need women-only services—there is still a strong pattern of male violence against women that’s very different from women’s violence towards women. And we need feminist services that understand those differences.

H: Aren’t there lesbians who hit or threaten for the same reasons that many men batter—to control their partners through fear?

R: Yes. Lesbians often control their partners through fear. The fear is perhaps most extreme in cases where the abuser is larger, stronger, has more financial power and social status, as is often the case in heterosexual relationships. When two women are in an abusive relationship, both partners can be relatively the same size and same strength, so fear isn’t necessarily the same immediate reaction, often shock is a common reaction. I think it is important to understand those differences, which may seem subtle, but in fact do affect how abusive dynamics develop and are sustained. Finally, not all abusive relationships necessarily include a dynamic of controlling through fear. It may be the more common dynamic and the one we have heard the most about, but for some women fear is not what they would identify as part of the abuse. We have to be able to hear those stories of abuse as well.

H: What do we still not know about lesbian relationship violence?

R: We still don’t know about prevalence. We also know very little about women who are abusive. Most of the research has focused on women who’ve been victimized. It’s important to talk to women who are perpetrators and who engage in abusive behaviour if we want to stop it. And we still don’t know what responses are the most effective for lesbians. We know that most lesbians tend not to go to the police, use the criminal-justice system, or go to shelters. Because lesbians are not often welcomed, remain invisible, or are treated in homophobic and heterosexist ways, they don’t feel that these are safe places. I think we have to look at other ways of responding and not assume that social services are always the way to go.

H: What other ways of responding?

R:There’s a lot of work that can be done within lesbian communities—to raise the issue within community forums, to talk about healthy relationships, to talk about ways to support people who are in relationships. For example, an innovative program in the US works with friendship circles to raise awareness about the signs of relationship violence, ways to intervene, offer support, and sometimes mediate in a situation.

H: What are the most controversial aspects of your research?

R: Some women talked about being victimized and then something shifted in their relationships. They spoke of reaching a point where they had had enough and they moved from responding in self-defense to initiating violence and hurting their partners. Other women who had been abused in one relationship, then became abusive in their next relationship, said that they were so focused on never being controlled by anyone again. Those examples are a direct challenge to the way feminists have talked about victims and perpetrators and kept that binary for understanding male violence against women.

H: What do critics think could be dangerous about those ideas?

R: If we start to look at some of the complexities and break down this dichotomy between victim and perpetrator, the danger is that perpetrators won’t be held accountable for violence. The greater fear is that this kind of thinking will shift over to heterosexual relationships and we’ll no longer be naming male violence against women as an issue. That’s a concern I share.

When we’re talking about male violence against women, we’re talking about a context in which the pervasive sexism in our society supports male power and control over women. When we’re talking about relationship violence involving two women, we’re talking about a differently gendered dynamic and a different context where the social power structure of mean over women is not a factor. Other social power structures such as poverty or homophobia, for example, might be much more relevant factors. It is not that poverty or other structures of domination are not ever factors in heterosexual relationship violence; it is just that sexism is very likely to be a key factor. While women might be united in their experiences of violence, we also have to really see and understand how all women are not the same and be prepared to talk about those complexities and come up with different response to them.

Ultimately, I think that will make feminism and the movement to end all forms of violence stronger rather than weaker.

Helen Fallding is a Winnipeg journalist.