Domestic Violence: A Hobbesian Dilemma

Can a new social contract emerge that doesn't see women's security as a threat to public security?

Image by Mary Long

One of the central philosophical ideas of humanities and the social sciences is the state being entity that holds a monopoly over the use of violence. This is not a justification that the state has the right to use indiscriminate force, but rather the recognition of a body of legitimate authority that is capable of establishing order through coercion if necessary.  Its primary goal is the establishment of an order, which can ideally prevent all forms of violence in societies and among individuals. To empower a Leviathan to counteract the nasty, brutish and short lives that may befall us all without an agreed upon – and enforceable – set of rules.

This idea has had varying degrees of success. There are states that have failed to fully secure a monopoly on violence like Pakistan, and those like the United States that, due to its unique culture of gun-lust, have an uneasy relationship with the concept. Alongside this, there are authoritarian states that abuse this monopoly for the blunt self-interest of an in-group, and liberal democratic states that believe – in theory, if not always in practice – that the power of coercion should be tied to a set of public morals and ideals, and be used in a restrained, transparent, and ethical manner. 

However, there is one consistent diversion from the state’s monopoly principle. One that applies to all states, regardless of their ideological status and power sharing arrangements, and which undermines the principle by producing considerable disorder, daily human suffering, and substantial societal burdens. This diversion is the household. As it is within the household that the state deems another authority to have a form of legitimacy over violence. One that runs parallel to its own.  

The state sees the household as a greyzone. A domain where adult inhabitants are given a certain amount of trust to construct their own rules and regulations. The regime-types these adults construct can vary in form, from being loving, cooperative, and diplomatic, to being coercive and authoritarian. The latter, just like in authoritarian states, produce conditions for individuals that can be highly violent and oppressive. While some modern states may have laws that declare these kinds of domestic abuses to be criminal offences, in practice these laws are only sporadically enforced. Murder may gain the state’s attention, but when there are other forms of violence, the state’s interest starts to wane – with it instead often casting its suspicion onto victims. 

Domestic violence is the primary form of human insecurity, and this insecurity overwhelmingly affects women and children. According to the United Nations’ recent report on Femicide, in 2022 around 48,800 women and girls were murdered by intimate partners or other family members. This is a rate of 133 murders each day – making the home the most dangerous place to be a woman. The report highlights that North America has witnessed a significant increase – by 29% – in female intimate partner or family-related homicides in recent years. Domestic violence is the most common cause of injury for women in the United States between the ages of 18 to 44 – a statistic replicated worldwide. Alongside this, the World Health Organisation estimates that around 1 billion children (2 - 17 year olds) experience either physical, sexual, or emotional violence each year.

In 2016, the UN estimated the total global cost of violence against women to be US $1.5 trillion, almost equal to the current size of the entire Australian economy - the world’s fourteenth largest.  This extraordinary sum is just the direct, measurable costs of these forms of violence; it excludes the intangible costs like the persistent emotional suffering of victims that inhibit their capabilities, and the psychological damage done to children from witnessing violence. Costs that are clearly detrimental to our societies, but cannot be estimated in monetary terms. 

The state has a clear self-interest in solving this vast, persistent, and appalling abuse, yet it chooses not to. Or the attempts that it does make are weak and very often ineffectual – band-aid solutions that are mostly directed at the effects of domestic violence, rather than the causes. This poses the question as to why the state tolerates such mass violence, and what are the assumptions and reasoning that guide its perspective?

The promise of security is the central element of the compact we make with the state. For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature – the theoretical time before the emergence of the state – was a place of total war, where each individual pursued their own wants and desires with violent force. To avoid this perpetual conflict, Hobbes argued that rational individuals would choose to surrender some of their “natural rights” in order to establish more secure societies – a social contract between the state and the governed.

Yet the idea of a social contract comes with notions about what these “natural rights” are, who is the state actually making this implied contract with, and what caveats are placed within it. A social contract that primarily seeks to curtail violence is built on assumptions about the nature of humanity, and in particular the nature of men. Hobbes argued that men – being the only real consideration of the era – were naturally vainglorious and had a lust for domination. Restraining these instincts would be for the benefit of all. 

Yet if men believed themselves to hold certain natural rights to power over others, then a social contract that sought to curtail these passions may also arouse them. As modern states remain inherently Hobbesian entities – primarily concerned with security – then this is the delicate balance they seek to maintain. The objective has been to create public security by restricting the ability for men to use violence to advance their status, but not inflame men’s passions by making them feel completely emasculated.  

As its own self-interested entity, the state is also wary of men’s passions being directed at itself through the collective emotions of political violence. So to insulate itself, as well as enhance public security, the social contract gave men a domain of their own – the household. A place where men’s lust for dominance could exert itself, with the hope of limiting it to within these four walls. A perspective akin to the Fable of the Bees – that private vices create public benefits – only more brutal. 

In her book The Sexual Contract, the political theorist Carole Pateman argued that this was the hidden second contract within the social contract. While the state governed men, it was men who governed women. Speaking in 2017, three decades after the release of the book, Pateman cited the philosopher John Stuart Mill in explaining how marriage formalised this second social contract:  

John Stuart Mill points out that you can have husbands who ill-treat their wives and you can have husbands who behave absolutely wonderfully. But the point is that the institution of marriage gives each husband the capacity, if he so wishes, to ill-treat his wife.

This is not to denigrate the idea of marriage – which often has a stabilising effect and can provide men with a sense of restraint and responsibility – but to recognise how the state has viewed marriage as part of a social contract that gifts men certain liberties inside the household. And to recognise how these liberties persist, even as social norms have shifted.

Modern law – having formally dispensed with the idea of coverture – may technically state that both men and women are equal before the law, but this remains an illusion. In practice men are given a social licence that excuses their violence towards women, and also often children. This is why women’s attempts to appeal to the state for security are frequently met with either apathy or hostility – as found by many mothers who seek to protect their children through family courts.

While these courts far too often punish mothers and children for reporting domestic abuse, these legal victories are often not satisfying enough to many men. The current opposition to No Fault Divorce bubbling up within the Republican Party rejects the idea that women should even be allowed the autonomy to distance themselves from violence. Through this lens there is no point in having the right to household violence if you are unable to exercise it.

The social licence given to men to dominate women is, of course, not limited to domestic violence, it clearly extends to sexual violence as well. Rape is effectively decriminalised throughout the world, and most women and girls know that reporting it will either be ineffectual or lead to their revictimisation by the state. There is an implicit – or maybe even explicit through ideas like the “right to sex” – belief in men’s ownership of women’s bodies.  

While the assumption that private violence will limit public violence can be understood as one pillar of the social contract, there is also another set of calculations that the state has made in regards to how it advances its own status. This is not just the stability and security that states seek, but the broader capabilities that it has to generate wealth, influence and power. 

States have understood their own capabilities through the capabilities of their men. The education and skills that men obtain, and the way these intersect with various national resources, has been deemed the platform on which state power is based. Traditionally, women’s role was simply to produce more men to enhance each country’s capabilities. That women could have their own skills and abilities that could be vital to national interests was not something seriously contemplated until recently. 

This formed the second pillar of the social contract. The state has sought to protect the material output it deemed valuable. If the state were to take men’s violence seriously there would be fewer male hands working productively, and a greater drain on public expenditure due to the process of justice and the punishment for crimes. Responding to the extent of men’s violence has simply been deemed unaffordable. 

While present-day women may not have been released from violence, in most countries they have now been able to gain freedoms and rights that were previously unavailable or limited. One of the great megatrends of recent decades has been how when afforded access to education in an equitable manner, women have quickly accelerated past men in educational attainment. Higher education institutions in the United States now enrol six women for every four men. In Europe, more women now hold a higher education degree than men with the age group of 25-34. According to the Pew Research Centre, American women now outnumber men in the college-educated labour force.

These educational trends have coincided with a shift in our economic structure. As technological advances have made brawn less necessary, cognition and communication have become more central to economic activity. The ability to be calm, thoughtful and empathetic has gained greater value, and these are traits that women are naturally more inclined to embody. 

This should be considered a positive. In their book The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Brown, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen empirically demonstrate that the greater the prevalence of female subjugation in a country the worse the country fares on a number of indices including poverty, autocracy, corruption, instability and violence. Both the social health and the financial well-being of countries are intimately tied to their treatment of women. 

Which leads to a question of what incentives that states now have to address violence against women? What if the state consciously saw its own capabilities through the capabilities of women? Would the state then take women’s security seriously? Would a new social contract emerge that no longer tolerates men’s dominance of the household and the social licence for private violence?  

These considerations are greater than just the value of women’s contributions to the economy and politics. Most Western and East Asian states are now facing precariously low birth-rates, which are at least partially driven by women no longer willing to submit to male household dominance. Women now have justified greater expectations on both partnership and fatherhood. The structural costs of low birth-rates means that the state should clearly see its own interests in the improvement of men’s attitudes and behaviour to meet these expectations. 

These costs have profound geopolitical consequences as well. The stability of the Indo–Pacific is especially tied to the relative power of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – all countries whose capabilities are projected to decline with their populations. In South Korea, women are simply abandoning the idea of dating altogether due to its adverse conditions. Men’s attitudes and behaviours towards women spiral up to the international realm. 

While we may recognise the findings of Hudson, Brown and Nielson in states that have achieved prosperity and political stability, we can also see that this stability is currently being challenged. The caveat to their work is that female advancement requires men’s acceptance – for men to not see this advancement as a threat to their own interests, or a slight to their egos. While in many countries men have accepted women’s advancement up to a point, the acceleration of women past men in educational attainment and economic worth – and the higher expectations on men’s behaviour this has created – is now leading to an extraordinary backlash. With a number of influential political movements being driven by their resentment towards women. 

Many of these movements are explicit in their desire to return to the social structures of the past. Flailing within emotional insecurity, this “brittle masculinity” can only comprehend a culture where men strictly govern women and the state acquiesces to this arrangement. Or endorses it. A world where women have agency and capabilities exclusive of men is not one they can tolerate, and it is a world they are determined to destabilise. 

These movements are coupled with the easy availability of pornography – much of which is highly violent – is breeding a new generation of teenage boys and young men who see women’s bodies as their property, and who are conditioned into a culture that views sex as a permissible way to harm women. A culture that not only tolerates, but celebrates “rough sex”, and endorses practices like choking as “kinks” that cannot be “shamed”, is a culture that is searching for ways to legitimise violence against women. 

It remains an overlooked feature of social relations that many men’s interest in women is not due to actually liking women, but instead due to an explicit hatred of them. We use the term “attraction” to describe two polar opposite instincts within male heterosexuality – the genuine desire to love and care for women, and the appetite to control, dominate and hurt. Without the language to distinguish between these two antithetical instincts dating can be a minefield for many women.

If these appetites to dominate and harm women are deeply embedded within our cultures then the fear of further inflaming men’s passions will always be the primary security concern for the state. Rather than advancing overall social health, the social contract will remain a calculation based on a negative assessment of men’s capabilities. However, as we are seeing in South Korea, this is a calculation that women will increasingly refuse to tolerate. 

States make trade-offs about their interests all the time, but they are also subject to a number of competing and evolving pressures. With women’s increasing economic and political power, and social conditions that make reproduction less attractive, it has become far less affordable for the state to tolerate violence against women. The calculation states now have to make is whether they continue to see confronting violence against women as too big a risk.

The state clearly has a role to play in creating laws, delivering justice, and promoting a set of values that it expects people to adhere to. However, a return to Hobbes may offer a pathway that is less reliant on the state to enhance women’s security. One that can weaken the current backlash to women’s advancement.

Hobbes is often misunderstood as a philosopher who advocated solely for the firm fist of the state to establish order. While the necessity of state power was central to his ideas, as someone grappling with the nature of men, he understood there are problems to address that are more complex than being simply reliant on force. What is also required is the cultivation of character, and the civic virtues of modesty and humility. This is the recognition that we are not slaves to base instincts and have the agency to establish cultures that eschew violence. 

Modesty and humility are the virtues of those who are able to acknowledge the equal worth of all individuals, and who have a conscious understanding of their own personal vulnerability. It is these civic virtues that are at the core of collective security. As Hobbes explains, “Vainglorious men who harbour delusions of superiority are especially testy, and men who harbour delusions of invulnerability are especially belligerent.” 

At the root of domestic violence – like authoritarian political movements – lies this lack of self-awareness, a personal insecurity that seeks domination of others to compensate for an internal anxiety and absence of emotional control. Machismo is the front to disguise these personal inadequacies. It is why the psychology of abusive men and strongman political leaders are so closely correlated. 

For modesty and humility to counteract vainglory, there needs to be a recognition of how we are all individually accountable for the norms within our societies. What we consider to be appropriate behaviour cannot simply be what we can get away with, but instead based on a foundation of social duties and responsibilities. This requires men to not see their own pride – or freedom – in the domination of women. It requires men to actually like women. 

Public security is not a civic virtue distinct from private security. The household should be a place of sanctuary – a domain of stability and certainty that is essential for both personal and social flourishing, from which the state’s – or the nation’s – own capabilities flow. Domestic violence is therefore not only an individual wreckage, it ripples out through our societies infecting every aspect of both national and international relations. A social contract that fails to understand these implications is one that reneges on the promise of security.