ATTITUDES OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN LLORIN METROPOLIS TOWARDS WIFE BATTERING

Introduction

Marriage, as a social institution, is cherished and highly approved in almost every culture of the world. It is usually contracted amidst joy, happiness and merry-making for the couple, family members and friends. According to Omari (1969), marriage involves the coming together of a man and a woman to raise a family and to meet the Satisfaction of security and of an enduring affection and companionship. in recent years, however, it has been observed that marriage relationships seem to be deteriorating and that couples no longer seem to enjoy each other's company. In fact, marriages all over the world have been witnessing an increasing wave of conflicts (Click, 1975; Alvarez, !982;Adegoke & Esere, 1998). One wonders why a social institution which calls for mutual love, co-existence and harmony should lead to a battle field, a place of violence, a place of assault and battering.

Wife battering has been identified as one of the factors leading to divorce among married couples (Truininger, 1971;Weiss 1980; Adeyemi, 1991). The incidence and prevalence of wife battering in Ilorin Metropolis is overwhelming. In the case register of one of the Area Courts (Area court I, No. I) in llorin, between January 1997 and September 1998, 306 cases of divorce based mostly on spouse battering were recorded. The problem of wife battering is an age long phenomenon of domestic violence (Philip, 1980). The surfacing of the battered wife as a specific problem out of many social problems occurred in Britain and many other countries in the I960's (Bell, 1971). There has been an increasing amount of literature on battered women (Bell, 1971; Gelles, 1974; Gelles, 1977; Rounds vile & Weissman, 1978; Walker, 1979; Mowaiye- Fagbemi & Idowu, 1997).

According to Stank (1985), wife battering is the maltreatment of a wife by her husband. This includes physical assault such as beating, biting, flogging, pushing, kicking and the like. Wetzel and Ross (1983) added that a little push to get a wife out of the way or holding her to keep her in control and other actions that may result into injuries requiring hospitalization are all forms of wife battering. In a research study conducted by Steinmetz (1977), it was revealed that nearly all the respondents reported the use of verbal aggression and physical attack to resolve marital conflicts. Straus (1973), using college students, found that 16% of them (about one out of every five) accepted that their parents use physical force to resolve marital conflicts. Also, Gelles (1974), in an in-depth interview of 50 families, reported that 60% (three out of every five) of the husbands and wives had used physical aggression during marital conflicts.

The fact that wife battering has persisted suggests that the society is yet to take the issue seriously. The American National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Crime and Violence found in large representative samples that between one-fourth and one-fifth of the adults questioned felt that it was acceptable for spouses to hit each other under certain circumstances (Stark& McEvoy, 1970). Some people do not seem to feel concerned about wife battering because they seem to believe that the man's home is his kingdom, a private institution where he is the king and where the interference of outsiders is highly prohibited. As such, it requires extreme evidence such as a severely battered spouse to gain the attention of the public.

The enumerated examples or instances give indication that violence between husbands and wives has long suffered from selective inattention both at the hands of the law and the society thereby resulting in serious marital maladjustment with adverse consequences on the couples concerned (Kitson & Holmes, 1992); the children of the marriage (Kelly & Wallerstein, 1975), and the society at large. This study focuses attention on one of the recipients of the effects of wife battering - the children, in this case, secondary school students in llorin metropolis.

The dynamic interaction between attitudes and behaviour has received a lot of attention in social psychological literature. Attitude is defined as mental disposition, as it indicates opinion or allegiance (Festinger & Berstern, 1964). Attitude has also been explained by Abiri (1966) as an acquired tendency to react either covertly or overtly in a manner which is expressive of a certain degree of favourability or unavoidability in relation to certain objects, persons, ideas or situations in the environment. An individual may show a certain attitude towards an issue in reacting to his/her conception of and feeling towards that issue rather than to its actual state of situation. Attitudes are best expressed when the individual makes statements about his/her feeling or opinions about certain events or ideas (Mukherjee, 1978).

Utilizing data collected from secondary school students, this study sought to find out the students' attitudes toward wife battering. In this context, an attitude toward wife battering is defined. as continuum of attitudes and dispositions ranging from opposition wife battering to overall acceptance of wife battering, cognitive dissonance and social learning theories provide; the theoretical frameworks for suggesting why certain independent variables are believed to be linked with wife battering.

Briefly, cognitive dissonance theory, as formulated by Festinger (1957) and Heider (1958), suggests that the individual strives to maintain a state of "consonance" or consistency between beliefs, feelings or perceptions and behaviour. Any inconsistency between ^these cognitions and one's actions create "dissonance", which is psychologically discomforting to the individual. In order to maintain cognitive consistency, the child who feels satisfied with his/her parents' marital relationship will perceive wife battering to be a poor solution to marital discord because it is inconsistent with his/her belief of what marriage can and should be. Accordingly, he/she will tend to score low on attitudes toward wife battering scale. On the other hand, the child whose parents are always fighting will be more liberal in attitudes toward wife battering in general, and thus will score higher on the attitudes towards wife battering scale.

Social learning theory provides an understanding of how the family of orientation furnishes the introductory setting for children to learn marital roles and values in the marital subsystem. In the social learning system, learning may occur through modelling. These learned response patterns are symbolically coded, retained for memory representation and may serve as guides for behaviour on later occasions (Bandura, 1971). Social learning theory provides the rationale for making two predictions regarding wife battering liberality. Firstly, the child is an observer of, rather than a participant in the marital subsystem. Children reared in a family in which the marriage is functioning effectively not only observe a viable model in which just many competencies are portrayed, but also develop the confidence that success in marriage is achievable (Hill & Aldous, 1969). It follows that exposure to parents who portray high satisfaction with marriage may exemplify a particular goal or standard for the child, as a married adult, to emulate and pursue. The prediction is that wife battering would tend not to be considered a viable option given prior exposure to this type of marital value system (Willin, 1 954). Secondly, social learning theory suggests the proposition that a familiar history of wife battering tends to make the child more liberal towards wife abuse (Omari, 1969). Thus, the child learns marital role behaviours and value system through observations 4 parents as role models. As a result, a familiar history of wife battering places wife battering into the child's repertoire of possible options in dealing with discord.

Previous studies have shown that receiving abuse as a child or observing violence between parent's tallies with expressing and acceptance of violence as an adult (Gelles, 1977; Steinmetz, 1917; Bernard, 1980; Straus, Gelles & Steinmetz, 1980). Gelles (1977) identified social factors related to family abuse and violence. One such factor is a "cycle of violence" in which observers or victims of violence during childhood are more likely than those not reared in violent homes to be violent in their future relationships. According to Gelles (1977), it seems that the greater the frequency of violence in a family, the greater the probability that the person from the family will grow up to be a violent spouse or parent. For example Straus, Gelles and Steinmetz (1980) found that spouse battering increased from 2% to 200% as a function of having parents who abused each other.

Furthermore, Henslin (I960) positioned that the sources of assaults and acceptance of marital violence most often than not result from exaggerated masculinity of a sex role in which the male feels compelled to always be in control - the power source and the sole determinant of what obtains in the family. Aro (1986) explained that the relationship between husband and wife in the traditional setting is such that the basic social principles affirmed the subordination and subjection of female to male authority and superiority. And in the modern society where some educated and even the less educated women are no longer prepared to accept their traditional role in marriage (Esere, 1993), the end result is clash of personality which ultimately leads to spouse battering. This study is therefore pertinent and significant especially in the wake of increase in divorce rate (Adegoke & Esere, 1998) and marital maladjustment, with its attendant problems.
Abstract:          Introduction:          Research Questions:          Discussion:          Implications for Counselling:          References:

Announcement: You must be 18+ to be eligible to use TGSFORUM.Goto-HomePage.