On Infidelity and Punishment

Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

I’ve got a new paper – “Infidelity, Liability, and Violence” – available in the journal Qualitative Criminology. Unlike a lot of academic journals, Qualitative Criminology is not paywalled. You can read the whole article for free on their site.

If you’re curious but impatient with academic articles, this post provides a condensed version.

As sociologist Donald Black observed, much criminal violence in modern society is rooted in social conflict and is moralistic -- a punishment for perceived wrongs.

But who exactly has to suffer punishment? If we study a wide array of conflicts – including conflicts across different cultures and historical periods – we see that there is much variation in who is held liable. For example, sometimes a person might be punished for wrongs they did not cause, as when people are punished for the crimes of their friends, relatives, or people belonging to the same ethnic group as them.

Of all the variable features of conflict, the question of who must suffer sanctions for a wrong has received the least attention from sociological research and theory. Here I propose a strategic research site for studying this: Conflicts over infidelity in intimate partnerships.  

Romantic rivalry and sexual jealousy cause conflict everywhere. And the offense of infidelity is theoretically interesting in that it involves at least two actors – an unfaithful partner and a romantic rival – and there is variation in which of these actors bears the brunt of responsibility. Consider how this plays out in violent retaliation by a jealous spouse.

Some who kill over jealousy limit themselves to attacking their romantic rival. For example, in a case from my study of domestic homicides in West Virginia, a man found his wife and her paramour in bed. His wife tried to calm him down while her lover fled, but her husband ignored her and chased down his rival, who he shot in the head before turning the gun on himself. A suicide note in his pocket revealed that this outcome had been his intention all along: “I’m on a mission to kill [my wife’s lover], then myself because he poisoned a beautiful perfect relationship.”

In other cases, though, the violent reaction of a jealous person is directed only at the supposedly unfaithful partner. For example, in another West Virginia case, a male homicide offender was upset at his cohabiting girlfriend’s involvement with other men. After the police responded to a domestic violence call at their home, his partner went to stay with another man, who the offender had known for years. The offender was reportedly jealous of him, and he had previously complained to an acquaintance that his girlfriend was “whoring around.” When the girlfriend returned to their home days later, he argued with her and shot her with the pistol and hid her body. He later lied to the police about her whereabouts and seemed to have planned on getting away with the killing. He did not attempt violence against the man his partner had been staying with and did not appear to have such plans.

In other cases, jealous individuals attack both their partner and their rival. For example, in a West Virginia case, a young man and woman had been in an unstable relationship for about six years. Though she had ended the relationship months prior, he refused to accept it was finally over and continued to describe her as his girlfriend and to tell others he suspected her of “cheating” on him with another man (actually her fiancé). Because of these suspicions, he armed himself with two guns and waited outside of her apartment one night while she was gone. She and her fiancé arrived together in a car and parked outside the apartment. The jealous man approached them as they sat in the car and fired several shots through the windshield, killing them both.

We can also see these patterns in the cross-cultural ethnographic literature. Among the Pueblo Indians, the social norm was that in cases of adultery, a husband could beat his wife but not maim her or his rival. Among the Bedouin of Libya, on the other hand, none of the 14 cases of infidelity examined by an ethnographer led to the killing of an adulteress, but three resulted in the killing of a rival. And among the Pashtun of Pakistan and Afghanistan, honor codes prescribe killing both the unfaithful wife and the rival.

The problem is not limited to unilateral violence. In many times and places, infidelity is a matter for settlement by the authorities, with aggrieved spouses bringing their allegations before a local chieftain, a council of elders, or a state court. And here too there’s variation in who must face sanctions.

We see partners held liable among the Zapotec of Mexico. Here accusations of infidelity were taken to court, and men filing cases against allegedly unfaithful wives was a common source of litigation. Rivals were not named in these suits, but a wife (or less often, husband) found guilty of adultery would be ordered to pay a fine for the misconduct. Among the Ainu of Japan, too, only the unfaithful spouse was made to pay fines. In older times, they were subject to harsher sanctions. Unfaithful wives might be executed by being thrown from cliffs into the sea, while both wives and husbands who were unfaithful might have their hair publicly torn out as a ritual humiliation.

In other societies, legal code liability attaches to the rival. Such codes are mainly concerned with the infidelity of women, which they treat as an offense by one man against another. Legal codes in early medieval England ordered a man convicted of sex with another man’s wife to pay compensation to the aggrieved husband. The Nuba people of Africa use rival liability in a combination of dual-like violence and legal settlement. A cuckold would challenge his rival to a fight with sticks and, after both had proved their manliness through combat, might then take his rival before the chief, who would make the rival swear an oath to leave the man’s wife alone.

Still elsewhere, legal codes proscribe punishment for both parties to adultery. In the ancient Near East, the legal codes of Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, and the Hebrews proscribe death for an unfaithful wife and her paramour. For example, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi specifies that “If the wife of a man is seized while lying with a man, they shall be bound and thrown into the water.” The code, like that of the Hittites, even explicitly forbade forgiving the wife but punishing the rival: Either both lived or both died.

These examples illustrate three ideal-typical kinds of liability for infidelity: partner liability, rival liability, and dual liability. Unfortunately, there is presently no systematic study of these types, and there is also no theory that adequately explains them.

I have so far failed to come up with much of a theory, and mostly wrote this piece to draw attention to the question in the hopes that better minds would solve the problem. But I can suggest a few avenues for trying to come up with an explanation.

One thing to consider is how much variation is driven by opportunity factors. There’s a difference between knowing or believing your spouse is cheating and knowing the identity of your rival and where to find him. Many who might wish to hold a rival accountable are simply unable to do for the practical reason of not being able to identify him. Cases where someone catches the rival in the act would thus be more likely to generate the killing of a rival than other cases. And places where it is easy to find out a rival’s identity and location – such as a small gossipy village – might have more punishment of rivals than places where this is more difficult.

Another consideration is that some variation will be driven by the nature of the spousal relationship, especially whether it is close and egalitarian versus distant and hierarchical. Donald Black’s theory of domestic violence argues that the more distance and inequality there is between spouses, the greater the likelihood and quantity of violence. So we might expect wives accused of adultery to face violent or legal punishment in more harshly patriarchal relationships and in more harshly patriarchal societies.

Still another consideration is the extent to which local codes of honor orient men (or less often, women) toward viewing the rival as a threat. Maintaining a reputation not to be trifled with can be extremely important in some settings, especially those with stable social networks but no reliable system of settlement by authorities. This might make it socially desirable or even necessary to attack a rival, instead of or in addition to attacking an unfaithful spouse.

In any case, the subject needs more thought and research. I’ve only located a handful of cases and my main goal here is to establish that this variation exists and is worth studying. But someone sitting on bigger samples of homicide and homicide-suicide cases can probably make some headway in measuring the relative frequency of these different outcomes and what sort of circumstances leads to each.

Sources:

(See the published version for proper citations)

Ahmed, A. S. (1980) Pukhtun Economy and Society: Traditional Structure and Economic Development in a Tribal Society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Black, Donald. (1983) “Crime as Social Control.” American Sociological Review 48: 34-45.

Black, Donald. (1998) The Social Structure of Right and Wrong. San Diego: Academic Press.

Black, D. (2018). “Domestic Violence and Social Time.” Dilemas: Revista de Estudos de Conflicto e Controle Social 11(1), 1-27.

Mohsen, S. K. (1974) The Quest for Order Among Awlad Ali of the Western Desert of Egypt. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms.

Nader, L. (1990) Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 

Nadel, S. F. (1947) The Nuba: an Anthropological Study of the Hill Tribes in Kordofan. London: Oxford University Press.

Nisbett, Richard E., and Dov Cohen. 1996. Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder: Westview Press.

Takakura, S. (1960) The Ainu of Northern Japan: A Study in Conquest and Acculturation translated by J.A. Harrison. Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society.

Weinstein, J.D. (1986). “Adultery, Law, and the State: a History.” Hastings Law Journal, 38(1), 195.

Westbrook, R. (1990). “Adultery in Ancient Near Eastern law.” Revue Biblique, 97(4), 542-580.

Whitman, W. & Whitman, M. W. (1947). The Pueblo Indians of San Ildefonso. New York: Columbia University Press.