All names of informants in this paper are pseudonyms. This is a brainstorming paper, written to inform interested others on the status of a project and to elicit comments. Please share your comments with Jane Gilgun; email: jgilgun@che2.che.umn.edu

A paper presented to the 1998 Pre-Conference Workshop on Theory Construction and Research Methodology, National Council on Family Relations, Milwaukee, WI, November. Jane F. Gilgun, Ph.D., LICSW, is a professor, School of Social Work, University of Minnesota, 224 Church St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455. Phone: 612/624-0082; fax: 612/626-0395; email: jgilgun@che2.che.umn.edu

I'm asking participants in this brainstorming session at the Pre-Conference Workshop on Theory Development and Research Methodology to help me to think about a book I would like to write on family violence. I have lots of ideas. Many are probably pretty good, others only half-baked, and some not connected to anything else yet. Some of these ideas are destined to be discarded. I've developed ideas for this book during 14 years of life history research I've done on persons who have committed various forms of family violence and other persons who have risks for family violence but who are not known to have acted out these risks.

As is true for many perpetrators of family violence, persons in my sample who are perpetrators have also committed violent acts against persons not related to them. My sample is now at about 70, with about 52 men and some women convicted of felony-level violence. My other experience with violence includes social work for almost nine years with abused and neglected children and their families, being a volunteer in a rape crisis center for about two years, and doing dissertation research on the sexual abuse of girls and young adolescents.

I have written several papers based on the life history research (Gilgun, in press a, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1995, 1994, 1992; Gilgun & McLeod, 1998; Gilgun, Keskinen, Marti, & Rice, 1998; Gilgun & Reiser, 1990; Gilgun & Connor, 1989) and have four books for children and their families focused on prevention and social enhancement (Gilgun, 1998d, 1998e, 1998f, 1997). One paper (Gilgun, 1996c) was also a Pre-Conference brainstorming paper entitled "The Phenomenology of Family Violence," where I had presented earlier struggles with putting my findings and emerging theories into a book. In retrospect, I see that this paper was preliminary, focusing only on phenomenology, where in this paper I am attempting to lay out what I think will be pretty much the finished product, which will be a comprehensive theory of family violence.

Papers have been much easier for me to write--though they are still extremely challenging--because I can pick out a specific topic and then write about it. Trying to put on paper all the topics that I want to include continues to elude me.

Having written as much as I have, I expect myself to have a clear ideas of what should be the content of my book. I don't. I'm trying to be nice to myself about this. To facilitate the conceptualization of the book, I am seeking the insights of others on my emerging ideas.

After three or four years of doing this research, people began asking me when I was going to write my book. I had an answer: "In three or four more years. I'm a slow learner." As the years passed, people remarkably continued to ask me when I was going to write my book. You'd think they'd start believing that I was NEVER going to write it. I heard myself say, "Violence is a very complex topic. I only want to write this book once, and I want to get it right." I don't want to re-write such a book because of harmful, ignorant things I say in it.

What I am presenting in this paper are as many of the ideas as I can think of for the book. I will be presenting examples of what I'd like to say under the various topics I'm thinking about. I'd like readers to give simple and direct responses to both the ideas and the specific content that I'd like to include.

How I write about families may differ from how other family scholars do so. Though I have academic credential to be a family scholar, with a Ph.D. in family studies from Syracuse University and a licentiate in family studies and sexuality from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, my years of social work with families and children and my long-term research with persons who have committed violent acts have led me to believe that families are the chrysalis from which persons emerge but there are many other influences on human development besides that of families.

For example, in my sample and in my social work practice, I have seen persons who turned out well despite substantial family risks for violence and other dire outcomes. Conversely, I have many example of persons whose families appeared not only to have been "good enough" but who provided remarkable opportunities to their children and the children are locked up in prison for decades.

Therefore, in much of the discussion to follow not only will I be assuming that families have a central place in human development but I will also assume and discuss other influences. At times, it may appear that I am overlooking the centrality of families but that may be more related to my focus on non-traditional aspects of family scholarship rather than disregard for the influence of families. Each of the topics to follow are loaded with implicit and explicit questions I have. I hope you will respond to the questions that of are interest to you and not bother much with others.

The major issue here is whose points of view should be represented in the title. Perpetrators? Persons who've been victimized? Persons who are potential victims? Persons who want to prevent violence? I don't know what to call the book. These are some of the titles I've considered.

I have many concerns about writing this book. I do not want to do the following.

This is what I would like to include in the book:

These topics would involve the discussion of many issues, including the role of human agency in the development of violent behaviors. Agency may be a major finding in my research.

The rest of the present paper will deal with these topics. I'll provide examples of how I might discuss the topics. The examples are taken from papers I've already written, assuming that what I've written will be part--but only part--of what I will be writing in the book. I expect to do a lot more additional analysis for a book.

Do I Include Myself in the Book? Issue: The book is not about me; it's about persons who commit violent acts. The following is a sample of how I could talk about myself in the book. It's an excerpt from a paper that I've submitted for publication (Gilgun, 1998a).

Advantages. If I were to put this kind of material in the book, readers would know who I am. I am a narrator often conveying horror. Perhaps I can become a trustworthy voice, a friend, a guide who can help readers through this, like a guide in a descent into hell. I will take you there but I will take you out as well. I've been there and I'm back to tell the story, so to speak.

As a narrator who has a personality, I would also be able to share my horror when appropriate. Readers, thus would have company. They'd know they weren't the only ones who are horrified or who have other thoughts and feelings.

Also, as a narrator who is perhaps a "character" in the narrative, I would be showing that I am a living, breathing person whose sense of self and sense of the world are influencing how I'm presenting the material and what material I'm presenting. Thus, I'd be paying respect to contemporary discussions of representation in written texts.

Disadvantages. The book is not about me. It's about perpetrators. It's about how they see things, about how they grew up, what they want. I'd just be shill or a wild-eyed narrator getting in the way.

Should I include a brief section on my relationship to informants? I think such a topic is important in a comprehensive theory of violence. The following is an example of what I might say about my relationships with informants.

This wrenching, horrible tale evoked strong responses in me. How I portrayed his account of family murder is intimately connected to my status and identity as a woman, a reform-minded feminist, a researcher who wants to understand subjective aspects of family and community violence, and a methodologist. Alan's narrative is not about me, but I am convinced that the story he told would have been different had he told it to someone else. I felt part of his self-representation. Had I left myself out of the account I prepared, I think I would have provided an incomplete narrative. Furthermore, how Alan perceived me affected how he represented himself, and I certainly responded to his self-representation.

Alan presented himself in many ways. I sometimes experienced him as trying to shock and thus to control me. At times, I felt blindsided by him. Though I'm not sure that I identified with his victims, I have a sense that his attempts to dominate me were instances of his generalized will to control others, especially women. Compared to what he did to his victims, his attempts at controlling me were minor.

At other times, I think he wanted me to see him as a father who loved his children and a man who loved his fiancee. He emphasized how well he took care of his children. In a dream, and in many places throughout the interviews, he portrayed himself as a tender, loving, giving father. He also presented himself as loved by Greta, even as he murdered her. This narration used dramatic, even histrionic images that helped him create his life-- while ending Greta's.

At still other times, I believe that he simply wanted to tell a person whom he perceived as sympathetic and non-judgmental the story of his murders of his family and an unrelated woman. Perhaps my status of being an older, white woman who listened in order to understand provided a context for him to tell his tale. Talking to me may have helped him come to better terms with his murders (from Gilgun, 1998a).

Questions remain, however, about my rationale.

Advantages. From my point of view, I think that a complete account would include my thoughts and the thoughts of perpetrators on our relationship to each other. Informants frequently commented on this, sometimes sincerely and sometimes not. I think a brief section on this topic could also contribute to methodological discussions.

Disadvantages. I could once again be getting in the way of the important material related to my accounts of perpetrators' experiences.

Sometimes the informants told stories about their childhoods and about events later in their lives that gave me a dimension of understanding that I had never expected. One man, for example, talked in poetic terms about how he felt when he walked in the woods, the cool, green, shadowy silence soothed and uplifted him. This is a conversation I had with the same man who anally raped children he said he loved. Occasionally, he raped same-age peers. The following is an account of a rape he committed when he was 14.

You know. And, ah, I cleaned, you know, I helped him, helped clean him up and whatever. I, I think out of all the incidents that was about one of the first sincere one when I said that I was sorry. You know. Not that, ah, I raped him but that I physically abused him the way that I did. It was hard for me to take no for, for an answer. It was hard for me to hear a no. (5 sec) And my core belief, at that time, was real strong. My core, core belief was that if I couldn't talk a person out of it, or if I couldn't buy, then I had a right to take it. (6 sec) I think I was about fourteen.

Here he is talking to me about the rape of a 9 year-old.

M: I, I didn't care at that time. J: When you were, when he was screaming and crying? M: Yeah. You know I, I didn't care. J: At the time. M: At the time. J: But how did you feel? M: It, it was powerful to me. Excitin' you know. (3 sec) I, I'm on top, you know. You, you do as I say. I call the shots.

Such contradictory self-presentations are typical. Here's an example of another, excerpted from Gilgun (1998a).

The Alan who emerged from his narratives embodied to the extreme a postmodern view of human beings: contradictory, inconsistent, fragmented. A defining characteristic for me was his enactment of hegemonic masculinity that I saw as derived from his interpretations of his status as a white man and a father. He did not question his right to stop Greta from leaving, to murder Alicia so he did not have to pay her, and to strangle his sons so they would not have to go into foster and/or institutional care. Yet, bursting through his entitlement and his cold logic was his remorse at killing the children, and his love for Greta. His regret over his murder of Alicia did not convince me.

Furthermore, Alan frequently pointed out the tragedy of Greta's life and the lives of his children, such as in the earlier lexia when he called Greta's death "an awful tragedy" and the slight struggle of his older son as he murdered him. In this portrayal, he is a compassionate, remorseful murderer. The scenes he depicts and his reflections on the meanings of his murders constitute highly and sometimes contradictory plural texts that go beyond a unitary interpretation related to hegemony (from Gilgun, 1998a).

Disadvantages. Some readers may consider this evidence that I am soft on violence and have been taken in by perpetrators. I don't like to be thought of as a patsy, a dupe, an apologist for violent persons.

Advantages. On the other hand, perpetrators of violence are members of families: sons, daughters, fathers, stepfathers, mothers, stepmothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers-in-law, and sisters-in-law. Usually they are loved and respected members of families and communities. They are 80 and sometimes older, 62, 55, 44, 30, 21, 16, 13, 10, 8, and even 6 and under and all ages in between. Freddy, the character in the Halloween movies may typify how many persons think of perpetrators of violence, but the confusion of victims who have been violated by family members they love and trusted undermines this popular conception of perpetrators.

Providing verbal portraits that show the contradictions of persons who commit violent acts also may contribute to postmodern ideas of the fragmented and discontinuous nature of human beings.

Having fragmentation as a theme of the book also helps to show how seemingly pro-social loving human beings can instantaneously disconnect from persons they profess to love when they commit violence against them.

I'm not convinced that persons can physically and emotionally injure and even kill family members they love but many perpetrators have told me that. I think it's important to report such findings in a book purporting to presenting a comprehensive theory of violence.

The centrality of persons' sense of what they want is the most recent concept that I've developed in this long-term research. Why are people violent? Because they perceive they want something. Why are people not violent? Because they want something. In the social sciences, have we paid enough attention to human agency, what people want? What do human beings want? How do they get what they want? Among many other human wants, people want to feel safe, loved, competent, wanted, and respected. Some people feel entitled to pursue these goals with disregard for others and/or outright intent to harm others for the pleasurable consequences of being violent.

The following is an excerpt from a paper that discusses human agency and other attributes that lead to positive outcomes (Gilgun, in press a). As the excerpt shows, it is not possible to discuss human agency in a developmental context without discussing other elements that affect development. Neither agency nor other attributes appear to be dividable into discrete chunks.

Agency and father's maltreatment. His father also contributed to a sense that he was stupid. The following story not only illustrates this, but it also places his relationship with his father in a larger context. Finally, and perhaps most significantly for the purposes of understanding resilience processes, he showed a strong positive sense of agency in how he responded to his father's cruelty:

Well, we were working on a car one time, which is kind of--it sticks out in my mind, because I was lying underneath my car and working on it, and my shoulder touched his shoulder, and it burned, and I just hated it. I never touched him otherwise. We never shook hands, never did anything. And it just burned. So anyway, he said, 'Give me an open-ended wrench.' And I got a wrench. And it wasn't an open-ended wrench, and he says, 'You stupid son of a bitch.' He says, 'You fucking kids are so stupid.' He rolled out, and he went and got his own tool. So what I did is that I went and I got a Sears magazine, and I studied the tools, what was what, so I could--so he would never have to do that to me again.

Learning the names of all the tools is a positive coping strategy, just as running from the perpetrator and hiding in the trash can was. Phil developed not only a pro-social sense of agency and a sense of competence, but he also established affirming relationships with others. He had a life-long best friend named Dave in whom he confided most of his feelings and experiences, and, when he was 16 and had his first girlfriend, he told her his life story, leaving out only the sexual abuse. As an adult, he talked frankly to his wife about his problems at work, and she appeared to have been an important factor in his vocational success.

An alternate father. As an adolescent, he found an alternate father in Bob, Dave's father, who affirmed his sense of self-efficacy. He said of Bob:

I think he liked me because I was industrious. Dave and I would go to Dave's house and Bob would help us, and we'd get into conversations.

Bob taught Phil how to repair electronic equipment, and by the time he was 16, Phil was running a small business and making good money repairing small appliances, radios, and televisions. As Phil was learning how to repair this equipment, he sometimes made mistakes, but Bob was kind to him. Phil in turn would help Bob when Bob needed an extra pair of hands: He said, "Bob was a model for me. I would watch him and help him. If I got into trouble, Bob would help me." In other conversations about Bob, it appeared that Phil consciously sought to be like him.

Into adulthood, he continually attended school, acquiring skills that eventually led him to head a manufacturing concern. He attributed his hard work in school as attempting to prove to his father that he was not stupid. He said:

I suffered from severe low self-esteem for many years. I went to trade school, and I couldn't get into the class. I wanted to be an electrician, because my father used to be a tradesman, and I couldn't study in school. I was a wreck. I was just the bottom of all the grades. I got into the Technical Institute, and the guy said, 'You're nuts.' I took the entrance exam, and I didn't know any math. He says, 'You can't be an electrician. You don't know any math,' and it was just a knife in my heart. I thought I could finally prove myself to my dad, and I couldn't do it. So I took this other course, industrial hydraulics, pneumatics. And I got in there, straight A's. I just got a job, went back to night school and did the electricity course, took the refrigeration and air conditioning course, took electronics courses, and I'd get all this stuff. I kept trying to prove myself to my dad and prove that I was smart. And then I was sick of trade school, and I went to college. Anyway, things started clicking in my life, and I still suffered from this self--this issue that I'm stupid.

Determined to succeed in school and to show his father that he was not stupid, Phil displayed a strong sense of agency. He succeeded, and that success led to vocational success, a success. Though Phil had a single explanation for his school success, I believe there were other factors as well: he probably liked to learn, he may have set high standards for himself in terms of the kinds of jobs he wanted, and he probably formed some satisfying relationships with some of his teachers, as he had formed such a relationship with Bob.

A competent wife. His wife Sal helped him deal with work stress by "listening." She also was a capable household manager, which he recognized, although he put himself down--typical of persons who feel defective:

I was like a big baby. I couldn't take care of myself. She [wife Sal] took care of me completely, totally. She was like my mother, and if I was angry about work, she'd listen. If I was--she would wash the clothes, clean the house, handle the bills, I wouldn't have to worry about the money. That was her problem, not mine. I would go to work, take my paycheck, give it to my wife.

He was in school while married, and Sal's taking care of the household as effectively as she did undoubtedly gave Phil the time to devote to his studies.

Sal may have been instrumental in his decision to join AA and to enter therapy. She fought with him, refused to give in to Phil's self-defeating decisions. When one of their infants died, Phil at first refused to go to a grief group, which was what Sal wanted. He said, "I fought. I did fight. I didn't want to go to that thing." He went, however, because Sal "fought with me" and "convinced me to go." She said to him, "'You owe this to me. You do owe this much to me.'"

Sal's "fighting" with him and his becoming "convinced" was based on his desire to keep his marriage and to avoid abandonment. He said:

I thought that if I was going to save my marriage, because I think, come to think of it, Sal had threatened to leave a couple times, if I didn't start taking care of it, holding up to my deals, she would leave. That triggered my abandonment, and that made me react, and my abandonment came from my mother [who] would get into a fight with my father and grab her suitcases and walk out the door. She'd tell us kids that we were bad, and that she was never coming back, and we were on our own, and that's when I was abused in one of her little times that she left.

Phil, then, responded to his wife's request that he go to the grief group, which in turn led to his joining Alcoholics Anonymous and then getting therapy for his sexual issues. Whether his response was based on a desire to maintain a relationship he wanted or a desire to avoid abandonment, or some combination, is not entirely clear. Here, as when he talked about his vocational success, he is giving a single explanation for situations that could be much more complex.

Overall, then, Phil can thought of as displaying resilience. He overcame serious adversities, and he displayed many of the coping, problem-solving behaviors that have been noted in previous research and theory, as discussed above. His fortuitous marriage to a capable woman who was willing to struggle with him over pivotal issues and his responses to her shows the interactional nature of resilience processes. Sal was an asset, but if he had not responded to her, she would not have become part of his resilience processes. Earlier in his life, he also showed a capacity to make effective use of the resources in his environment. Bob, his best friend's father, was a remarkable resource for him; in turn, Phil responded well to Bob, learned a great deal from him, and then was able to build a business while a teenager, a business that increased his confidence in his abilities and that could have been a factor in his adult vocational success.

Interlacing of risk and resilience. His history also demonstrates that risks continue to be interlaced with resilience processes. He succeeded in school, but his need to prove something to his father was a possible risk condition that appeared to be undiminished once he proved that he could succeed in school. Another example of possible undiminished risks in resilience processes is his responses to his wife after she threatened to leave him. Is being motivated by fear of abandonment, even partially, a sign that risks are still present and not overcome?

A personal quality that may have been a factor in his ability to respond to environmental resources was his emotional expressiveness. Throughout the telling of his story, he is clear about how he was feeling at any point in his life. As an adult, as the excerpts from his interview demonstrated, he was able to maintain what appeared to be an emotionally expressive marriage. Emerging in my overall research program is the idea that emotional expressiveness is an essential component of resilience processes. I touch upon this in Gilgun (1996a).

Another emerging concept in my research is agency, for which I have no satisfactory conceptual definition. As is clear from Phil's story and from others that I have not reported here, a person's will, or sense of determination, appears to be pivotal in how risks and assets are utilized (from Gilgun, in press a).

Agency is also key in the development of violent behaviors. The following excerpt from the same paper as above shows the interlacing of agency with other developmental processes that lead to violent behaviors.

A sense of agency is not always pro-social. Both Phil and Andy did push themselves forward for the sake of pro-social goals. Many of the persons whom I interviewed and who were in prison for various acts of violence, also displayed strong sense of agency, but they sought to succeed in often extreme anti-social ways, such as being the most vicious, intimidating person they could be, or in being the best drug addict that ever lived.

Bob, 40, in prison for armed robbery and who had a 26 year-history of chemical abuse and dependency and physical assault, provides an example. His outcomes thus far are not optimal, although he is taking major leadership roles in the prison system. His wife and young son visit him frequently in prison, and they have participated as a family in several prison family life education programs. He is devoted to his family and working hard at learning a trade in prison, but he is not sure he can resist chemicals and the associated life style once he is released.

Risks. Like Phil and Andy, he had a long string of risks, such as paternal alcoholism, poverty, a young mother overwhelmed with family responsibilities, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect, being teased and beaten by other children in the neighborhood, and a learning disability that kept him from succeeding in school. He had some assets, such as being athletic, intelligent, good-looking, and having the ability to tell a good story. His mother worked at being an effective mother, but she had insufficient resources stress. Bob's nuclear family had strong ties to his mother's extended family, but Bob did not like them very much and one of his mother's uncles molested him. Often, when his father came home drunk, he was physically abusive to his wife, who took the children and stayed several days with her family. The family also moved frequently because they could not pay the rent. These were protective processes in the sense that they sheltered the mother and children from physical harm and kept a roof over the family, but these actions had negative affects on Bob.

The frequent moves took Bob away from organized activities in his neighborhood, such as Scouts and Little League, and he therefore was not able to succeed in areas where he did well when he was present at meetings and games. He continually had to move to new schools and each time he did, he was teased and often beaten by other children. Because of his learning disability, he was in special classes. Some of the other children called him "retard," "dummy," and "stupid." When he got older and was stronger, he started beating other kids up. He got a big kick out of harassing younger boys.

His sense of agency centered around wanting to feel powerful instead of being put down, to be excellent at everything he did. When he was unable to succeed in school and was not able to participate in Scouts and sports, he turned to anti-social activities, which readily were available to him. He loved and wanted to be like his father, who was a falling down drunk, rarely worked, and frequented hobo camps. Bob often went with him to the camps. In kindergarten, his teacher asked the children when they wanted to be when they grew up. Bob said, "A bum." The teacher said, "No, you don't." Bob became a bum and thought it was a romantic, wonderful life, even when he woke up so sick from chemicals he wanted to die.

Bob desperately wanted to feel good about himself, and he sought the admiration of others, often through anti-social acts. He said about beating other children:

I didn't want to really hurt them bad, but I just wanted them to be afraid, you know. That's what felt good is them being afraid, like I was afraid. That was a good feeling I got, is that they were afraid. And embarrass them in front of other, the other kids around. This one kid, Peter Mack [not his real name], he used to beat me up. And at, at sixth grade what I did is I took his shoes and I threw them over this fence, and I had it planned out, when he was going to go get his shoes I was going to go over there and beat him up. And all the kids on the playground playing kickball were there. He went over there. BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM. Blasted him about three, four times. He was on the ground. He started crying. I kind of kicked him. And, you know, he was just crying. He was just embarrassed. And that felt good for me. To have the other kids see that. And then I started liking it, I think. I, I think I liked that because then I kind of turned into a bully. Then I started picking on kids when I went to junior high school. I was tough, you know.

He succeeded in being tough, and he was proud of it. His words suggest that he was making up for the humiliations he had felt whenever he was beaten up by others. He wanted to feel powerful, and he committed anti-social acts to do so.

He also enjoyed harassing and teasing younger, weaker children, again because that gave him feelings of power. He sought an audience when he picked on others:

I used to really like the school peanut butter bars. So I'd have a few kids that I'd go and I'd just take them from them because I knew they weren't going to hit me back or something. And there was this one poor kid, I remember. Boy, I was just thinking about this the other day, about that kid. I felt real bad. I used to always catch him in the hall somewhere, but I would hide. And when the, you know he was kind of a little dorky looking kid with glasses and stuff, carrying his books. And I'd come up behind him and I'd surprise him. You know at least two, twice a week. And I would kick him as hard as I could in the ass. WHAM. You know and books would go flying. And I, I remember I kicked him hard. And I used to kick with everything I got. And he wasn't ready for it. A lot, most of the time it was a surprise because I would be hiding, and I would just do that and laugh and think it was funny, but there was a part of me inside, I remember, I felt bad for him. Sometimes I felt bad because I knew I really hurt him. Then I felt good because I thought it was funny that other, other kids were around.

Just as there are no such things as resilience processes without some interlaced risks, perhaps many risk processes have some streams of assets, such as the regret and guilt that Bob expressed. He had a strong sense of agency in terms of getting the approval of other children and of avenging his own earlier humiliations.

He tried alcohol and glue sniffing when he was 13, and this gave meaning to his life. He felt wonderful, on top of the world. When he needed money to buy drugs and alcohol, he had many mentors in the neighborhood to show him how to get money. Friends introduced him to beating and robbing gay men, to armed robbery of drug stores, and burglary. He prided himself at being good at all of these activities.

Part of beating and robbing gay men involved engaging them in sex first. Eventually, he established relationships with some of the men who showered him with money, clothes, and opportunities to travel. He took a great deal of pride in being good at gay sex and of being attractive to other men. Part of the pride had to do with his sense of power of being liked, for being attractive:

I liked it. I liked the feeling of, ah, but I always knew it was basically a sexual thing. I really knew that in my, in my mind I knew that it was. But it was still a, a sense of, you know, I was liked for something. I felt that I was real good at it. I don't know if you'd call it a soothing sense. I don't know. I think it was more of a powerful, you know, a feeling of power.

He wanted to be good at something, to have a sense of power, to be admired, to be liked. These were strong in him, and he sought them even at the expense of others. As an adult, confined to prison, he expressed regret at some of the hurt he had caused (from Gilgun, in press a).

I have many questions related to this section of the book and for the book in general. How much social science research do I include? For example, do I do a literature search on human agency and then fold it into the case histories I've collected? What balance should there be between the close, grounded interpretations based on the data and then adding in other related research and theory?

How should I arrange the presentation? I like how Roland Barthes (1974) arranged his analysis of Balzac's short story Sarrasine. He presented the text, then his close analysis of the text, and then his more theoretical analysis. I could do the same thing. I've used variations of this in the past, and I think it might work very well (e.g., Gilgun, 1998a, 1998b, 1996a, 1995, 1994).

Besides looking at violence as experiential and as a process, I also have another analysis that can be placed in the context of human needs and goals. The following is from a manual (Gilgun, 1998f) I developed as a companion to Lemons or Lemonade? An Anger Workbook for Kids (Gilgun, 1998d).

While women commit acts of violence, they are much less likely than men to inflict serious bodily injury (Johnson, 1995). Furthermore, men are overly represented in all indices of felony level violence. As the following excerpt shows (Gilgun, 1998a), a gender is basic to a feminist analysis, and I want to do a feminist analysis.

One other concern I have as I think about writing a book is a comment some persons have made to me when I do oral presentations of my findings. Some persons have said, "I feel assaulted when I hear about your research."

I think this reaction to experiential accounts of violence needs to be deal with. I as the researcher and narrator of the book also sometimes feel assaulted. For example, how would most human beings including me react when hearing, as I did:

I didn't mean to kill her. I only wanted to render her unconscious so I could rape her. This is what I wrote in my field notes after this session.

Those words have haunted me. I was close to traumatized by this interview. The tension built all day after the interview, which lasted about an hour. By 6 pm, I was screaming at other drivers for being in my way. I had a dancing lesson last night and didn't go. I was surprised that I can still be haunted by the image of a woman being--I assume--strangled so a man could rape her. Talk about being an object. In years past, I had even stronger reactions and made up my mind that if I wanted to do this research I would have to live with such reactions. I do the interviews on Fridays so I can have time to recover over the weekend. I have felt so much stronger these past few weeks, not having been to the prison for so long. I won't be going back for two more weeks, and although I don't feel really weak right now, I am not sure that I could not right back to feeling weak once again. The work takes a lot out of me, but I want to understand violence. It won't be forever that I'll be doing this. I think it will be worth it. I have learned a great deal about myself in this process and when the research ends I will probably be the kindest, firmest most wonderful person I could possibly be. I think it is important that I acknowledge how traumatic some the material is.

Other possible negative reactions to the material could be linked to persons' fears for themselves and their children. Rather than dealing with issues related to perpetrating behaviors, many people shift immediately to focusing on teaching children and others how to protect themselves against perpetration. Now, this is important but neglecting to deal with how to stop perpetration guarantees that perpetration will continue. Not wanting to hear about violence and focusing exclusively on self-protection actually protects perpetrators. Perpetrators are the problem.

These are some of my answers to concerns about feeling assaulted.

In many sections of the book, I appear to be developing a grounded theory, not so much in the mode of Strauss and Corbin (1990) but in the more general sense of developing a theory that is closely linked to narratives and that also is integrated to other research and theory. Glaser and Strauss (1967) provide a description of grounded theory that fits the type of theory I'm developing. Once again, I rely on excerpts from a paper I wrote (Gilgun, in press b) to demonstrate that I'm doing a form of grounded theory. As Glaser and Strauss (1967) pointed out, immersion of researchers in the field is a fundamental argument for the strength of qualitative research. By the time researchers are ready to publish, they are so intimate with their material that they have great confidence in its credibility.

Researchers's confidence and the demonstration of credibility, however, are not the same thing, as Glaser and Strauss (1967) demonstrated. Researchers have the responsibility to convey the bases on which others may conclude that the findings are credible. They can do so in several ways. Credibility rests on conveying findings in understandable terms. The first strategy that Glaser and Strauss (l967) suggested is for researchers to present their theoretical frameworks using conventional "abstract social science terminology" (p. 228). The presentation should be extensive, and, since, the terms are familiar, the framework should be readily understood.

The second strategy that Glaser and Strauss (l967) discussed is to present findings in such ways that readers are "sufficiently caught up in the description so that he [sic] feels vicariously that he [sic] was also in the field" (p. 230). Glaser (1978) later called this quality "grab." This connects to the methodological stances of the Chicago School of Sociology, especially as represented by Robert Park and others. Denzin, who worked for several years with Lindesmith and Strauss (Lindesmith, Strauss, & Denzin, 1975) on a social psychology textbook, reworked this idea for contemporary times and saw its relevance to policy research. He wrote, "The perspectives and experiences of those persons who are served by applied programs must be grasped, interpreted, and understood, if solid, effective applied programs are to be created" [emphasis in original text] (p. 12). A third strategy is to convey how researchers analyzed the data so that readers can understand how researchers arrived at their conclusions. Constantly comparing emerging findings across and within cases and searching for "negative cases" and "alternative hypotheses" (p. 230) all are important to delineate. Above all, integrating the theoretical statements with evidence help in conveying credibility.

Finally, Glaser and Strauss (l967) recognize the mutual responsibilities of researchers and their audiences. Researchers have the responsibility to convey findings as clearly as they can, including specifying how they arrived at their theoretical statements. Readers have the responsibility not only of demanding such evidence but also of making "the necessary corrections, adjustments, invalidations and inapplications when thinking about or using the theory" (p. 232). These researchers, therefore, made modest claims for their theories, seeing them as provisional and subject to interpretations and applications by others.

In Theoretical Sensitivity, Glaser (1978) again discussed the evaluation of grounded theory which he said is to be judged on fit, relevance, modifiability, and whether it works. Fit means whether or not abstract statements and concepts are congruent with the evidence. Refitting the theory to ever-emerging understandings as the research continues is part of the assessment. Thus, concepts and theory are not borrowed, but they "earn" their way into the emerging theory (p. 4). Findings become relevant when researchers allow emergence to happen and do not impose pre-conceived ideas onto them or do not shape findings to fit pre-formulations. Like other qualitative methodologists, such as Thomas and Znaniecki (1918/1920), discussed earlier, Glaser viewed all findings as modifiable as new understandings emerge. Modifiability, in fact, is a standard by which Glaser believes theory could fruitfully be evaluated. Theory that has fit, relevance, and modifiability, will also "work;" that is, "should be able to explain what happened, predict what will happen and interpret what is happening" (p. 4) (from Gilgun, in press b).

I want my comprehensive theory of family violence to have these qualities.

I have many ideas and concerns related to writing a book that delineates a comprehensive theory of family violence. I want to look at violence at multiple aspects of violence from the points of view of perpetrators. I want to include myself as a persona, a narrator with a personality, so as to be a friendly guide as well as to provide information about my stance regarding the material I've selected to put into the book.

My purposes are to look violence in its metaphorical eye--hence the title The Eyes of Hell--so that more people develop an iron will to challenge and undermine social conditions that foster the development and commission of violent acts. I hope that persons who have been affected by violence may draw comfort and insight from this book. I want the book to be scholarly enough to contribute to further interest in research and theory and that it will be practical enough to be taken seriously by program developers, policy makers, and practitioners from the many disciples that can contribute to the prevention of family violence and other violations of the human spirit. I welcome comments on these goals and how I can accomplish them.

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