Who or what do young adults hold responsible for men’s drunken violence?

Abstract

Background

Men are more likely than women to perpetrate serious violence when they have consumed alcohol, but alcohol does not affect all men in the same way. This paper considers young adults’ attribution about agency (the capacity to act) in men’s drunken violence.

Methods

Interviews about alcohol use in night-time venues, streets or private parties were conducted with 60 young adults aged 18–24 in Melbourne, Australia, and analysed thematically. Participants included seven men who identified as having initiated violence when drunk.

Results

Some interviewees stated that men chose to be violent, or that men’s violence when they were drunk was purposeful and therefore involved some component of choice. However, much alcohol-related violence enacted by young men was understood (both by men who reported violence and by other young adults) as impelled by forces outside their control. These forces were: diffusely defined effects of drinking alcohol; proclivities of men and masculinity, and the interaction of alcohol and men’s bodies to override capacity for judgement and produce an irresistible urge to fight. The latter was at times explained as caused by the mutually reinforcing actions of alcohol and testosterone, providing a particularly persuasive account of men’s violence as biologically-determined.

Conclusion

These categories encapsulate a set of discursive resources that contribute to the rationalisation, naturalisation and production of men’s violence. Participants tended to regard alcohol, masculinities and testosterone as inciting violence predictably and consistently, suggesting that men themselves had relatively little agency over its occurrence. In contrast, research evidence indicates that these actors do not cause violence in any uniform way and that their effects are contingent on changing configurations of factors. Highlighting discrepancies between young adults’ understandings of responsibility for men’s drunken violence, and those expressed in research, presents additional opportunities for intervention.

Introduction

Young people’s net alcohol consumption has declined over the past two decades in western countries such as Australia (Pennay, Livingston, & MacLean, 2015) yet alcohol-related harms such as assault remain all too prevalent. Significant increases in alcohol-related ambulance attendance and hospitalisation, and night time assaults (likely to involve alcohol) were recorded in the eight years prior to 2006/2007 in the state of Victoria, where the study we report on here was conducted (Livingston, Matthews, Barratt, Lloyd, & Room, 2010).

Men are more likely to become violent than women when they are drunk, with violence in drinking venues often directed at other men (Graham & Wells, 2003). There is some suggestion that men’s involvement in behaviours such as these is determined by physiological factors such as the action of testosterone on their bodies (Mehta & Beer, 2010), yet the relationship between being male and proclivity to violence is complex. Similarly, drinking does not result uniformly or consistently in violence, for either men or women (Kuendig et al., 2008; Room, 2001). It seems, therefore, that how men and women behave when drunk is produced through a complex interplay of cultural expectations and physiological effects (Heinz, Beck, Meyer-Lindenberg, Sterzer, & Heinz, 2011; MacAndrew & Edgerton, 1969).

In contemporary cultures with a strong temperance history (Levine, 1992), men’s drunkenness is understood to involve rowdiness, aggression and dominance (de Visser & Smith, 2007a; Hart, 2016; Peralta, 2007; Törrönen & Roumeliotis, 2014). Men’s aggressive and controlling practices, including drunken violence, are part of what has been termed ‘hyper’, ‘hegemonic’ or ‘toxic’ masculinities. For example, Peralta (2007) argues that men in the United States demonstrate powerful masculinity (involving whiteness and heterosexuality) through heavy alcohol consumption. While hypermasculinity is a model of selfhood which men are understood in relation to, and also through which some men understand themselves (Bengtsson, 2016), masculinities are diverse. Just as testosterone does not make all men aggressive, hypermasculinity is not the primary logic that governs all men’s demonstrations of self. It is salient to remember that only a proportion of men become involved in drunken violence, and most do their best to avoid it (de Visser & Smith, 2007a; Lindsay, 2012). Many men are highly ambivalent about whether alcohol’s correlates of drunkenness and sometimes also violence make drinking attractive at all (de Visser & Smith, 2007b).

Thinking about men’s violence as a function of alcohol consumption, of hormones or of hypermasculinity does not push us to interrogate its complex aetiologies, including the extent of men’s own responsibility for it. Indeed, previous studies show that intoxication is used to excuse men’s violence (see, for example, Abrahamson, 2006; Graham & Wells, 2003; MacAndrew & Edgerton, 1969; Peralta, 2007; Room, 2001). It is important to understand how these excuses are configured. Extending these studies, we consider young adult’s attributions of agency in men’s intoxicated violence. In other words, we explore who or what young adults regard as the force or forces which drive, and are hence responsible for, men’s violence when they drink alcohol.

In this paper we draw on interviews conducted with 60 young adults aged 18–24, living in Melbourne, Australia. Where most qualitative studies of men’s alcohol-related violence focus on the perspectives of those who perpetrate it (for exceptions see Lindsay, 2012; Törrönen & Roumeliotis, 2014), we start, as explained below, from the presumption that men’s alcohol-related violence is produced though engagements with discourses that circulate within their social worlds. Hence, we are interested in how men who have themselves participated in violence talk about it, and also how it is understood by other young men and women who frequent the places where violence occurs. While male violence directed against women is also of great concern, this paper focuses on accounts our participants told of men’s aggression in the night time economy, at parties and travelling to social events. These stories usually (but not exclusively) involved fights between men.