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The ACTivist Volume 9 #1, January 1993.

The ACTivist is published monthly by the ACT for Disarmament
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/** gen.newsletter: 129.11 **/
** Written 11:47 pm  Jan  9, 1993 by web:act in cdp:gen.newsletter **
TV AND THE FATHERLAND

By Maggie Helwig
The ACTivist

It is not only in P.O.W. camps and on the front lines that violence 
against women becomes an integral part of war.

In Serbia, women at the SOS Telephone, a crisis line founded in 
1990, have seen not only an increase in domestic violence since the 
start of the ex-Yugoslav war, but clear and significant changes in the
 character of the violence. It is common for men to assault their wives 
and partners with weapons, or in the presence of weapons which can 
include machine guns and bombs; giving domestic violence, even more
 explicitly than usual, the same character as rape in a war zone.

The women of SOS Telephone have also isolated a pattern they call 
'Post TV Syndrome' -- that is, a large number of women report that 
they are assaulted by their husbands immediately after the family 
watchs the war news on television. Many of these post-TV assaults are 
first-time assaults, in couples where the man has not previously been
 violent. The women of the crisis line see the attacks as clearly 
generated by the violent nationalist propaganda which makes up a 
good part of Serbian TV 'news' these days.

But this is not only a Serbian phenomenon. Stella LeJohn of 
Winnipeg, speaking at the Women's Peace Agenda Project in Toronto 
last October, reported a frighteningly similar pattern in Canada 
during the Gulf War. Crisis workers in Winnipeg, too, saw not only 
more violence in the home, but new forms of that violence -- they 
too were told how men would watch the news of the war on television 
and then assault their wives and partners; how these men, especially 
refugee men who had themselves been brutalized in war, would 
sometimes dress up in their old military uniforms in order to attack 
their women.

It would be simplistic to see in this an argument against "television 
violence" alone. Rather, these two clearly related cases -- and probably 
many more that have not yet come to light -- reveal vividly the way 
in which war and domestic violence become near-equivalents in the
 construction of 'masculinity', psychologically almost interchangeable; 
and how, as well, this complex of 'male' violences becomes tied up 
with patriotism and nationalism, so that men vicariously participate 
in the efforts of the father-land by inflicting specifically militaristic 
forms of violence on the women around them. It must be remembered 
that we are looking not only at TV coverage of a war, but coverage 
which involves the home country of the abuser and the abused, and 
coverage with a particular patriotic-propagandistic slant.

Both cases show, too, how the trauma inflicted on war refugees 
and on civilian populations is repeated, re-enacted, in new cycles 
of violence -- particularly by men, as they receive the simultaneous 
message that masculinity equals violence. In a sense, it is only by 
re-enacting whatever physical or psychological violence they have 
suffered, but casting themselves in the role of aggressor, that they 
are able to reclaim their 'manhood'; threatened by their own suffering 
in war, or their own exile, or simply the fact that they are at home 
while their countrymen are fighting.

The immediate roots of 'Post TV Syndrome' and related patterns are
 televised war propaganda, untreated war trauma, and the whole 
variety of social stresses which wartime produces; all of which we 
can and must take steps to change. More deeply, 'Post TV Syndrome' 
is one way of acting out our centuries-old constructions of masculinity 
and patriotism, and the sort of enchanted relationship these 
constructions have with brutal violence; and another part of our 
task is to take apart these attitudes and begin to build new ones.


** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **