Domestic Violence, Children’s Rights, and Partnership Systems

Riane Eisler, an Austrian-born American systems scientist, futurist, attorney, and human rights advocate, is renowned for her influential work on cultural transformation and gender equity. Best known for “The Chalice and the Blade,” she introduced the partnership versus dominator models of social organization. She has received many honours, including the Republic of Austria’s Cross of Honour for Science and Art, the Nuclear Peace Leadership Award, earlier awarded to the Dalai Lama, the Center for Compassion Humanitarian Award, the Humanist Pioneer Award, and induction into the California Hall of Fame. She is President of the Center for Partnership Systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. The three books of hers of note that could be highlighted are The Chalice and the Blade, now in its 57th U.S. printing with 30 foreign editions, The Real Wealth of Nations, and Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (Oxford University Press, 2019). These contributions amount to a second series with Eisler.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Riane Eisler about marital rape, domestic violence, children’s rights, trauma, and partnership systems. Eisler explains how domination cultures normalize abuse within families and extend violent thinking into politics, war, and social institutions. Drawing on neuroscience and developmental research, she emphasizes humanity’s capacity for care and connection. She argues that protecting women and children requires deconstructing inherited patriarchal systems while reconstructing legal, educational, political, and family institutions around partnership principles for future generations.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There are at least two common extremes, although one can always find other examples.

Two issues frequently raised in legal contexts and research on harmful behaviour are marital rape and domestic violence. With domestic violence, newer peer-reviewed research has expanded public understanding of abuse beyond physical assault. It can include sexual, emotional, psychological, coercive, and financial abuse.

I have also encountered people who define infidelity only as sexual intercourse. They might say, “I did not sleep with someone else, so I did not cheat.” They reject the concept of emotional infidelity. There can therefore be a gap between public opinion in some communities and contemporary research concerning abusive, coercive, or harmful conduct within relationships.

Could you discuss the partnership studies analysis of marital rape and domestic violence, including how these issues relate to divorce and the conditions under which people leave marriages?

Riane Eisler: Domestic violence was long minimized. I remember a time when the police might simply take the man, and it usually was a man assaulting a woman, for a walk around the block until he cooled off and then return him to the home. Children who witnessed or experienced the violence were often barely considered. That was common during the 1950s, although police practices varied by place.

In our virtual forum, Peace Begins at Home, we examined how the normalization of violence experienced or observed by children is connected to the normalization of war within domination systems. Violence is treated as inevitable. We are told that human beings are naturally bad and will always behave this way.

My most recently published book, Nurturing Our Humanity, which Oxford University Press published in 2019, draws heavily on neuroscience. It challenges the story that human beings are innately bad. Neuroscience and developmental research show that humans have a profound capacity and need for connection and care.

Caring connection is evolutionarily essential because human children are highly dependent and require prolonged care to survive and develop. Yet our conventional political and economic categories pay very little attention to the family.

That will change. There is finally a movement not only against physical violence, but also against emotional and psychological violence, which can be deeply traumatizing.

Many people in my generation experienced trauma to some degree. I certainly did through the Nazi persecution of Jews and my family’s escape.

My calling has been to find new categories and identify the connections between areas that conventional analysis leaves out, particularly childhood, family, gender, and the larger social system.

As I have said many times, we are interconnected not only through technologies of communication and transportation, but also through technologies of destruction, such as nuclear weapons and biological warfare. Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, that is another major factor. We either shift toward partnership or risk catastrophic consequences, even threats to the long-term survival of our species.

That is difficult for people to understand. Strangely, though, more and more people are beginning to grasp it. They are searching for alternatives, and there is now a renaissance of interest in my work. I have been speaking with people in movements for ecological regeneration who are using it. This is a time of great crisis, but also of opportunity.

Jacobsen: Marriage can be understood as a legal contract between two adults. Some people frame it as a transaction, almost as a business arrangement. But if we are discussing an assumed partnership, with rights and obligations between two parties, there may also be a third group with distinct interests: the children.

Children have rights independent of their parents, although that was not always recognized. As far as I understand, children were sometimes regarded almost as miniature adults rather than as people passing through a distinct developmental stage.

Could you break this apart for me? There are many concepts involved. I feel as though I am entering a horse farm for the first time and learning what terms such as mare, broodmare, gelding, stallion, stud, filly, and colt mean in different contexts, depending on the horse’s sex, age, reproductive capacity, and role.

Leaving the horse analogy aside, could you clarify how these ideas fit within the partnership model? To what extent does partnership studies provide a basis for the independent rights of children?

Eisler: The recognition of children’s independent rights is one of the more recent movements against domination. You are quite right that, for much of recorded history, the idea of children possessing rights separate from those of their parents would have seemed absurd. Children were often treated as being under the near-total authority of their fathers or families.

There was little outside scrutiny of how children were treated except in the most extreme circumstances, and even then intervention was inconsistent. If you read biographies and historical accounts from the eighteenth century, for example, you find many descriptions of children being severely beaten, neglected, exploited, or even killed, sometimes with few or no legal consequences for the adults responsible.

The children’s rights movement is therefore extremely important. It has no natural place within a domination system, just as the women’s rights movement has no natural place within such a system.

Today, however, there are renewed efforts to restrict women’s rights and to control what children are allowed to learn. There are campaigns to remove books from schools and libraries, and parent organizations and school boards are sometimes used to censor educational material.

At the same time, even what was once considered conventional education taught children many distorted stories. History often focused on violence, on who conquered whom, and on so-called great men. Those figures were usually men, and many were military rulers, conquerors, or political leaders responsible for enormous violence. So, yes, we have a great deal of work to do.

The political conflict between Democrats and Republicans in the United States is also shaped by this domination model because it is framed so strongly in terms of winners and losers. In many European parliamentary systems, parties frequently have to form governing coalitions. That does not eliminate domination, but it can require negotiation and power-sharing rather than allowing one side simply to defeat the other and govern alone.

There is much to consider. A consciousness of the need for both deconstruction and reconstruction is fundamental. We have to deconstruct what we have inherited.

The more closely we examine our inherited institutions and normative stories, both secular and religious, the more we see how much deconstruction is necessary. But we also have to reconstruct.

Unfortunately, reconstruction is like the metaphor from popular culture: flying an airplane while you are still building it. People often do not realize that.

Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Riane.

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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is a Writer-Editor for The Good Men Project with more than 2,000 publications on the platform. He is the Founder and Publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343; 978-1-0673505) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN, 0018-7399; Online: ISSN, 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), Humanist Perspectives (ISSN: 1719-6337), A Further Inquiry (SubStack), Vocal, Medium, The New Enlightenment Project, The Washington Outsider, rabble.ca, and other media. His bibliography index can be found via the Jacobsen Bank at In-Sight Publishing comprised of more than 10,000 articles, interviews, and republications, in more than 200 outlets. He has served in national and international leadership roles within humanist and media organizations, held several academic fellowships, and currently serves on several boards. He is a member in good standing in numerous media organizations, including the Canadian Association of Journalists, PEN Canada (CRA: 88916 2541 RR0001), and Reporters Without Borders (SIREN: 343 684 221/SIRET: 343 684 221 00041/EIN: 20-0708028), and others.