Marital Violence: Stress Coping Styles

The violence it has been part of the history of mankind. This phenomenon is as old as the first human instinct to dominate, to survive. At the moment, it has been sought to conceptualize and problematize it due to the various conditions derived from it. In recent centuries, humanity has been violated on unprecedented scales. The emergence of different ideologies of hatred has stained the chronology of human beings with blood, however there is still more behind this dark panorama.

Marital violence: definition and context

The specter of violence is more tangible every day. It crawls through the streets, spreads through the media, gurps in workplaces, schools, and homes. The number of investigations in this regard, typical of psychology professionals and experts on the subject, has increased in recent decades due to the need to generate new knowledge of both its causes and its consequences. It is evident that it is no longer enough to reflect on the problem, it is necessary to create psychological and social theories that allow to prevent and correct this evil that afflicts the whole of society. For this, a greater understanding of the reality, today so complex, must be achieved, directing efforts towards actions pertinent that not only prevent, but also give rise to a reformulation of the social paradigms around violence.

A study entitled “Unmasking marital violence: relationship between coping with stress and prolongation or termination of a devastating idyll ”, analyzed violence and its types according to the categorization established by World Health Organization (WHO) in the private sphere and addressed 3 variants of violence: family violence, partner or spousal violence and gender violence, focusing mainly on spousal violence.

According to WHO (2014), systematic abuse between two or more family members is called family or intra-family violence; Marital violence refers to the behavior of the partner or former partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm and the gender violence It is the one that emphasizes violence against women because they belong to the female sex, although some specialists differ from the latter and this will be detailed later.

The consequences of spousal violence

Now, what are the repercussions of acts of violence on the study subjects? Violence, in all its expressions (psychological, physical, economic, patrimonial, sexual and symbolic), carries observable consequences both in the social and individual aspects.

At the individual level they manifest themselves physically and psychologically. The individual level in turn has serious repercussions on the social aspect; where serious problems are found in education, economics and politics. Both individually and socially speaking, violence directly affects the quality of life. Psychologically speaking, the quality of life is modulated by different factors such as: anxiety, depression, expectations towards treatment, social support and stress in its various modalities.

The word stress has become so common today that its true effect has been neglected. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), stress is defined by Baum as "... [any] annoying emotional experience that is accompanied by predictable biochemical, physiological and behavioral changes." When faced with a stressful situation, individuals tend to resort to certain actions that allow them to regain control of the situation and reduce the level of stress; This is known as coping.

The coping It is, then, any resource used by the affected person to cope with or cope with the stressful event; These resources can be cognitive or behavioral. Coping resources are made up of thoughts, attitudes, omissions, reinterpretations, behaviors, etc., the individual in question can develop or adopt different types of coping, it is also necessary to mention that not all people react in the same way to certain situations.

The appearance of stress in marital violence: a study

The studies that allow us to know about the coping with stress in both men and women who suffer from spousal violence are limited. Studying coping and its styles will make it possible to decipher other methods that serve as prevention or guidance to deal with marital violence. So, The purpose of the aforementioned study was to identify the frequency of styles and strategies for coping with stress used by men and women who are victims of marital violence; as well as the relationship that exists between them and the permanence or termination of the relationship.

Among the unnamed voices and the invisible ones that are still present, 5 were the subjects that constituted the case studies; 3 of the female sex and 2 of the male sex. At the beginning, there were more subjects who had already provided their approval to be interviewed, without However, when faced with the questions in the questionnaires, they chose to abstain from participating. There were some who, although they preferred not to participate, asked for a little time simply to narrate their history, which were not included in the study due to not having completed the other instruments.

Qualifying: women and men can suffer marital violence

It is also necessary to point out that although statistically the woman is the one who suffers the most from violence in all areas of her, in order to This study also included men due to the importance that this represents in the search for greater gender equity in the society. This is because it is not possible to speak of gender equality when attention is paid to one of the both sexes, leaving violence against men invisibility only because of their condition male. Marital violence, whether it occurs from man to woman, from woman to man, from man to man or woman to woman, is reprehensible and cannot have a place within society.

The study subjects were selected by availability in terms of sex, orientation, age and education. In terms of age, they were in a range between 25 and 55 years. They are all active in employment and their levels of education range from higher to postgraduate average. The foregoing allowed that during the investigation the fact that there is a diversity of factors influencing marital violence, including social and social factors cultural.

It is also important to comment that when talking about violence, the mind tends to invoke or visualize it graphically with broken lips and eyelids. violaceous, however, according not only to the results of this investigation but also based on the results published by the INEGI in ENDIREH 2011, of the four types of violence the most representative is emotional or psychological due to its high rates of violence. incidence. It is due to the daily routine with which psychological violence occurs, that it has become naturalized, minimizing in turn the risks that it entails, the same ones that were mentioned above and that allow progress between the different phases of the violence.

The results

Within the ENDIREH questionnaire used for the interview, there was a section called opinion on the roles gender, which mainly refers to the most common stereotypes related to the female sex and the male. In the results of this section, 100% of the interviewees concluded that they disagreed that women should obey in everything that is given to them. order, in which the man should bear all the responsibility of the expenses in the home and in that it is the woman's obligation to have sexual relations with her partner of her. Also, 100% of the subjects agreed that childcare should be shared as a couple and in the woman's ability to work and earn money. This allows us to see that absolutely all the interviewees sought a politically correct answer, avoiding providing an answer that was consistent with their true opinion or reality. In this case, the ENDIREH is recommended to rethink the questions in this section. For the purposes of this research, it was not necessary to prepare another instrument to supplement this section because these data were considered as secondary and were not taken into consideration for the validation or refutation of the premises of the research since gender stereotypes are not part of the objects study.

Another important but alarming fact was found during the interview when the study subjects expressed their Disagreement regarding the care obtained at the time they requested help from the corresponding authorities and relatives. Both men and women reported that when requesting support, it was denied or the process was extremely long.

In relation to coping strategies and styles, both sexes had proportions almost similar in terms of self-blame strategies, with only .2 points of difference between their tights. The above means that both men and women show a similar tendency when blaming themselves for acts of violence against them. These types of strategies are very dangerous since to a certain extent they justify conjugal violence allowing the victim to stoically bear the abuse. At the other extreme are acceptance and ventilation strategies, which have a difference of 3.4 and 3 points, respectively, being men who used the resources of these more types.

Some conclusions

Synthesizing, from the results obtained it can be concluded that the subjects, men and women, who are victims of conjugal violence tend to use both the styles of coping focused on the problem and those focused on emotion, however there is a difference in the frequency of the strategies used between men and women, observing a greater recurrence to styles focused on the problem on the part of women as well as a greater incidence in styles focused on emotion on the part of women. mens. This means that women have a greater recurrence to face violence spouse actively, seeking to eliminate or reduce the effects of violence and violence in Yes; while the male faces it inactively and with strategies that are more oriented to the emotional and his interpretation of the problem.

The fact that men had a greater recurrence to use coping styles focused on the problem suggests that the mediatization of stereotypes and the role of the Men encourage him to cope with stress passively, compared to women, where day to day abuse by her partner is less accepted.

Regarding the results obtained on the coping styles used by the study subjects, it could be observed that those individuals who decide to remain in a violent relationship have a greater repertoire of strategies that allow them to deal with the problem, compared to those who decided to end the relationship. It was also shown that of the subjects studied, those who used more resources within the coping with the problem were more likely to end their relationship as can be seen in the following table.

According to Díaz-Aguado, psychology has the power and the duty to act as a substantial agent in the fight against violence. One of the essential factors is its representation, that is, “the representation that a person or a people has of violence and its possible victims, plays a decisive role in the risk of exercising it ”(Díaz-Aguado, 1999, p.415). That is why this study sought to show that marital violence is not inevitable. Reveal the multiple faces of spousal violence as well as coping styles and strategies employed by the victims is an attempt to reconfigure the current representation of violence as a couple. For now, it can only be said that the road against violence is long and narrow, but each step taken is not a step in vain.