Restraining orders are about shunning, bullying and relational aggression

The term restraining order is a legal one. It’s a cool term—and if one does not practice law, it sounds bearable. It’s a word like writ or tort or mandamus. Something on a dry and yellowing sheet of paper. When we read the term, if we don’t know the reality, we are inclined to think that it involves a judge leaning down, somewhat kindly, and saying to someone, “By the way, have a little restraint.”

An early step toward the return of sanity in our culture would be to use other words, more emotional words, plainer words about this situation. Psychologists have them.

Restraining orders involve state-mandated shunning. Shunning is a highly destructive form of psychological attack. Carried to extremes, shunning is a form of psychological torture that breaks down the minds and the emotions of its victims. Anyone concerned about the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay ought to be protesting these use of torture in American courtrooms via restraining order abuse. This is from a Wikipedia article on shunning.

“Shunning is often used as a pejorative term to describe any organizationally mandated disassociation, and has acquired a connotation of abuse and relational aggression. This is due to the sometimes extreme damage caused by its disruption to normal relationships between individuals, such as friendships and family relations. Disruption of established relationships certainly causes pain, which is at least an unintended consequence of the practices described here, though it may also in many cases be an intended, coercive consequence…Extremes of this cross over the line into psychological torture and can be permanently scarring.”

Another word for shunning is ostracism. Since all human beings are social creatures, to ostracize someone is to attack them in the core of their being and self-esteem. The ostracism of a black sheep from some family gatherings is one thing—family life, sometimes. But the use of the state’s public justice system to carry out personal family vendettas—that’s the definition of Third World justice. Many would say that’s what is happening in today’s family courts with rubber-stamp restraining orders.

The latest term for this—and a useful one—is the phrase relational aggression. The idea here is that while boys aggress by punching each other, girl aggression is through destroying social bonds. Feminism has brought this term to the fore, and we should be glad it’s here. In several books published since 9/11, certain feminist writers have identified and painted a full picture of the way girls between ten and 14 bully each other though exclusion, back-biting, and other ways to destroy the victim’s relationship with her friends. Among the key books on relational aggression are Odd Girl Out, by Rachel Simmons, and Queen Bees and Wannabees by Rosalind Wiseman.

To quote Simmons:

There is a hidden culture of girls’ aggression in which bullying is epidemic, distinctive, and destructive. It is not marked by direct physical and verbal behavior that is primarily the province of boys. Our culture refuses girls access to open conflict, and it forces their aggression into nonphysical, indirect and covert forms. Girls use backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulation to inflict psychological pain on targeted victims. Within the hidden culture of aggression, girls fight with body language and relationships instead of fists and knives.

I question Simmons’ knee-jerk blaming of the culture. Who is to know why females aggress indirectly? But it is a fact that they do. Her book brilliantly and convincingly shows it. She also makes clear that male aggression is overt and simple, and that boys do not have the faintest idea what females are doing to each other. It’s not much of a stretch to extend Simmons’ argument. She clearly shows, through many paragraphs of direct interview quotation, that from seventh grade on, angry girls choose consciously to hurt their friends through sly and covert campaigns of ostracism, back-biting and rumor-spreading.

When these women are grown, and married and become angry enough at their husbands, they choose the same indirect forms of aggression they may have used in seventh grade. They ostracise, bully, blackball, and ruin relationships. Only now, during our advanced and progressive age, they can use the court system. The courts are a relational aggressor’s wet dream–to produce an odd metaphor. There is no more powerful tool a woman can use to ruin their former husbands, to turn their children against them, to inflict so much torture on them they cannot think straight, and sometimes wish to die.

As I said earlier, the use of the state’s public justice system, including restraining orders, to carry out personal family vendettas—that’s the definition of Third World justice. Restraining orders often carry forward personal vendettas and as such they are shameful. That they carry on a particularly female form of aggression, as Simmons and Wiseman’s work suggests, is just something we should know about and talk about openly.