Network Exchange Theory and Domestic Violence
Network Exchange Theory is a natural extension of basic social structures, hierarchies and interactions. However, can we use the same theory to analyse deviances in social interactions and try to predict the reason behind said deviances. This blog post will analyse one such deviance: Domestic Violence/ Domestic Abuse/Domestic Terror.
Most human interactions, at its core, work on a very basic rule, that is, everyone wants to maximise their rewards and minimise their punishments. Anywhere where we believe that the payoff of punishment is more than reward, we break off that interaction eg; quitting a job, breaking off a friendship etc. However, in the case of families, this becomes a bit more complicated. More often than not it is extremely difficult, both socially and legally, to break off a family relationship i.e get a divorce or disown a child. Furthermore, breaking up of these relations bring with it a social stigma, which adds on to its complexity. In the above setup then, how does domestic violence relate to the network exchange theory?
Let’s go back to the basic principle of maximizing rewards and minimizing punishments. In a familial setup, which in most societies is patriarchal, the hierarchy goes something like father -> mother -> children. In this chain, the position of the older members of the family has, over the years, changed from the top of the chain to the bottom because of their lack of economic and physical independence. Even though the man (assuming patriarchal society) is at the top of the chain and ideally the women should have more power being in the middle of the chain, we observe that he has two people dependent on him economically, giving him more power and no sort of economic transaction occurring between the mother and the child. Furthermore, biologically men were made to be bigger than women and hence father’s have significant power of mother’s in terms of physical strengths. This goes to show that fathers are both economically and physically stronger than the mother and the children.
What would ideally stop a person from committing violence? Broadly we can classify it as :1) Payoff and 2) Fear of social stigmatisation or ostracisation. For the first aspect, because of the difference in physical size more often than not, the man is not really scared of the women hitting back. We can further argue that the victim can easily call the police resulting in incarceration/imprisonment. In many cases, the woman is perceived to be more submissive and hence this payoff is also neglected. For the second aspect, we can divide the men(assuming a patriarchal society) into two broad categories. The first one consists of men who didn’t have strong social and/or familial relationships while growing up and hence don’t have the knowledge of social stigmas ingrained in them. The second group consists of those who have inordinate social power so as to disturb the principle of distributive justice and not worry about social ostracisation.
The above logic can be used to argue that similar practices will be equally rampant in a matriarchal society as it is in a patriarchal society. However, a study has found that “matrilineal societies have been identified in which the incidence of domestic violence is nearly absent.” Here we get to see that modelling social interactions using the network exchange theory might not be the best method because there might be additional features in relation to the basic rule of punishment and reward which govern how relationships are perceived.
The information for this blog post has been inspired by the following tow papers/articles:
- http://stanford.edu/group/womenscourage/cgi-bin/blogs/structuralviolence/2009/02/05/is-there-domestic-terror-in-matriarchal-societies/
- http://criminal-justice.iresearchnet.com/crime/domestic-violence/exchange-theory/