Brenda Geiger

Western Galilee College, Israel

Title: Going Insane: Battered Muslim Women Reclaim a Positive Identity

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Biography

Brenda Geiger was a political refugee from Egypt in Paris, France, and immigrated to Israel after graduating high school.  She has completed two PhD, one in Legal philosophy and the other in Educational psychology at the University of New York, Albany.    Prof. Geiger is a professor of Criminology at Western Galilee College and a licensed educational psychologist. The main topics of her research focus on women’s resistance to violence inside and outside the family, and on the protection of children against verbal and sexual abuse. She has conducted interviews with convicted child sexual offenders, with battered women from various ethnic groups, and with children on verbal abuse in the classroom.  Prof Geiger serves on the prison authority Parole board and the prison review board and is committed to changing poor and single women's status in society. 

Abstract

This study examines the process of identity negotiation of 15 Muslim women who resisted severe abuse by their husbands and extended family by becoming mentally ill and thereafter, divorcing. Content analysis of the interview narratives shows that these women were poor, married young, and endured years of battering, isolation, and silencing for the sake of family honor and children’s well-being. Entrapped within a web of sociocultural norms legitimizing wife beating, and abusive extended family relationships that annihilate their voice by branding them as maj’nuna/insane, these women explained that they were terrorized helpless victims fearing the stigma of being labeled insane and the resultant harm to their children. With the deterioration of their health, threat of annihilation, and imminent danger to themselves and their children, these women broke through the normative oppressive framework by becoming maj’nuna/mentally ill. Detached from the extended family and no longer caring to endorse a label that discredited what they said or did, these women overtly resisted by escaping to the family of origin and/or mental health clinic to reveal the abuse, divorce, and seek treatment. Severing all family ties, and now residing in public housing, these women felt safe to renegotiate a favorable identity and reclaim the right to live with dignity. Implications/recommendations: (1) The criminalization of battering and prosecution of batterers is not enough to deter when cultural norms sanction battering, (2) additional diagnostic categories are needed to identify the precursors of battering within the strategies of overt and covert resistance battered women adopt in collectivistic cultures such as mental and neurophysiological dysfunctions, and (3) it is necessary to transcend the individualistic model titling battered women within the false dichotomy of victimization or agency as it fails to reflect battered women’s experience in collectivistic cultures and their resistant strategies to abuse in the extended family.