Research shows 'striking parallels' between motivations for mass attacks and domestic violence
Attempts to provoke fear and assert control are at the root of domestic violence and mass terrorism, according to a New York Times columnist.
Research reveals “striking parallels” between what drives domestic abuse and mass attacks, according to the Times’ new Interpreter column. The article cites research by Everytown for Gun Safety, which found that 57 percent of the mass shootings from 2009 to 2015 in an FBI database included a spouse, former spouse or other family member as a victim. Sixteen percent of the attackers had a previous charge of domestic violence.
Domestic violence often involves an attempt by the abuser to control every aspect of the victim’s life, such as social contacts, clothes and finances, the article says. The Orlando nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, had physically abused his ex-wife, she told news organizations. He didn’t allow her to talk with her parents or to leave the house, except when she went to work. She had to give him her paychecks. The rules were enforced with violence.
“Take this dynamic of coercive violence to intimidate and control to its most horrible extreme,” the article says, “and it looks an awful lot like how the Islamic State treats women in its self-proclaimed caliphate. … The group has created a vast infrastructure of rape and slavery in which women are held captive and bought and sold by its fighters. It is intimate violence on an industrial scale.”
The Islamic State uses its treatment of women as a recruiting tool, promising potential recruits that they will be in roles of male dominance, according to the article. “It seems natural, then, that the Islamic State might appeal to men who desire that sort of control over the women in their lives, separate from any ideological draw—the kind of men who might have domestic violence in their past.”
The article also says that a domestic abuser who wants to impose traditional gender roles may be troubled by homosexuality—and by any belief by others that he is gay.
The connection could help explain why Mateen chose a gay nightclub as his target, even though he had visited the nightclub in the past and had, by some reports, used a gay dating app. “Could Mr. Mateen have been trying to use violence to reimpose rules about gender and sexuality that he himself was troubled about violating?” the article asks.
Though Nimmi Gowrinathan, a visiting professor at the City College of New York who studies women’s roles in terrorist conflicts, warns against making assumptions about Mateen because he was a Muslim raised by Afghan immigrants. Domestic violence and homophobia prevail in many cultures, she says. Mateen “is the outcome of the United States’ political culture, not the Islamic State’s.”
