Comparing Burgess and Drapers Theory of Family Violence and the Film,

Comparing bourgeois and Drapers Theory of Family rage and the Film, The Burning Bed I. Introduction Burgess and Draper argue coercive prototypes of family interaction represent the principal causal pathway that connects ecological instability to wildness within families. They maintain this raises the possibility that most of the common correlates of such hysteria are themselves reactions to sudden or chronic ecological instability. For example, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety may be responses to ecological stresses in the family, such as loss of employment, spendthrift financial debt, or divorce. Burgess and Draper suggest that violence towards ones mate or children may consequently be a direct result of ecological instability. They argue that certain individual traits (e.g. problem drinking), which have previously been assumed to precipitate violent behavior, may actually be the result of the kindred factors that lead to family violence itself. The word picture, The Burning Bed, is a made for TV movie centered on the issue of family violence. The main characters were Francine and Mickey Hughes, a buffet wife and abusive husband. In the story, Francine struggled with Mickeys violence and intimidation for the better deviate of twenty years and finally ended up killing him in his sleep. It is a vivid and realistic movie about domestic violence and the way society viewed such violence in the not so distant past. By comparing the movie to Burgess and Drapers hypothesis, some agreements and some disagreements become apparent. Do Burgess and Draper adequately explain and predict the Hughess pattern of domestic violence? II. Ecological Instability Ecological instability describes when a... ... beaten(a) and afterwards when she was scarred and bruised, I feel that Mickey Hughes deserved what he got only he should have suffered more. The compassion I feel towards either woman who is victimized by a man probably makes me sloped in that way. Af ter reading Burgess and Drapers article, I feel redden more justified in my position. They make the reader look for the own of the abuse somewhere other than with the woman or the mans drinking. The way Burgess and Drapers article mirrors the abusive relationship in the Hughes family helps to put the violence in the right perspective where an adult can still be held amenable for his own actions. Works Cited Burning Bed, The (1984) (TV). Directed by Robert Greenwald. Writing attribute Rose Lieman Goldemberg. Ohlin, Lloyd and Michael Tonry, eds. Family Violence. University of Chicago Press, 1989.