CYCLICAL TYRANTS
ESSAY
by Leah Pirone (LAH)
Power and control operate as quiet undercurrents. Socialisation occurs early, with the home functioning as a primary site where authority, entitlement, and hierarchy are first demonstrated and absorbed. These dynamics are rarely overt. They accumulate through repetition and familiarity, learnt through observation rather than instruction. What is normalised in private does not remain contained; it seeps outward, shaping how power is later understood, exercised, and justified elsewhere.
Research consistently demonstrates that domestic and family violence (DFV) is patterned rather than incidental. Children raised in households marked by violence internalise behavioural norms through proximity and repetition, reinforcing rigid power differentials and gender hierarchies. Within these environments, control and aggression are normalised as mechanisms for regulating conflict (Stark 2019). These frameworks persist across time; they loop, imprint, and replay across generations, confirming DFV as learnt and cyclical rather than anomalous (Graham-Bermann and Brescoll 2000).
The socialisation of violence cannot be reliably attributed to biology or evolutionary determinism; rather, male violence is largely shaped through cultural conditioning that frames aggression as a legitimate masculine resource (Pinkett and Roberts 2009). Childhood play is one of the earliest sites where power is rehearsed. In the commercial coding of childhood spaces, boys are disproportionately cued toward militarised narratives that reward domination, emotional suppression and physical force, further normalising hierarchy and the early alignment of aggression and masculinity (Rivers & Barnett (2011). These environments do not produce violence in isolation, but they do narrow behavioural scripts without functioning as a singular cause of violence.
Research into callous–unemotional traits (CU), marked by low empathy, shallow affect, lack of guilt or remorse, and reduced sensitivity to others’ distress, indicates that some children (aged 7 – 11 and into adolescence) (Frick et al. 2014; Waller and Hyde 2017) derive enjoyment from mutilating toys and dolls, using play to practise domination and cruelty without consequence (Nathanson, Music, and Sternberg 2022). Additionally, this rehearsal extends beyond the symbolic: cruelty to animals is disproportionately present in children and adults with CU traits, where it functions as practice in domination and desensitisation, while also appearing in domestic violence contexts as intimidation, punishment, and coercive control. This shows violence extends beyond human relationships, moving across bodies and species according to perceived vulnerability (Faver and Strand 2003; Johnson 2018).
Outside the home, private norms meet public permission. Latent scripts are activated as power and violence converge across peer cultures, media, institutions, and algorithmic systems that do not invent violence, but rather rehearse it, reward it, excuse it, or render it intelligible. Importantly, violence does not require visible injury to be operative. Coercive control destabilises autonomy while remaining culturally legible as relational norms, allowing harm to persist without leaving physical trace (Delaney 2021). Control circulates through repetition, sanctioned through silence, and sustained through what is excused or deferred.
DFV occurs across all relationship types but its impacts are uneven. Indigenous women and women from racially marginalised communities experience significantly higher rates of violence, surveillance, and lethal harm, produced through intersecting regimes of gender, race, and colonial power (ANROWS 2020). Male-to-female violence results in significantly higher rates of injury, lethality and death, reflecting broader structural asymmetries rather than individual pathology (Graham-Bermann and Brescoll 2000). In same-sex relationships, abuse remains closely tied to performances of authority and control rather than gender identity alone (Bailey 2021).
At its most extreme, these dynamics culminate in gender-related killings. Globally, women are far more likely to be killed by intimate partners or family members than by strangers, with such acts emerging from cumulative patterns of coercive control, surveillance and possession rather than isolated incidents (UNODC 2018). In Australia and across Oceania, this pattern is particularly pronounced. These deaths expose the lethal endpoint of systems that repeatedly fail to recognise danger until it becomes irreversible.
Cyclical Tyrants emerges from sustained research into these systems of inheritance and denial. The works draw attention to interiors, thresholds, and private spaces—sites where violence unfolds without witnesses, where escalation is familiar, and where recognition is routinely deferred. What remains unspoken when disclosure itself carries risk, and silence becomes a condition of survival? What continues inside private spaces when harm is familiar, escalation is predictable, and recognition arrives only after irreversibility?
REFERENCE LIST
ANROWS (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety). 2020. Accurately Identifying the “Problem” of Domestic and Family Violence: Indigenous Women’s Experiences. Sydney: ANROWS.
Bailey, Rahn Kennedy. 2021. Intimate Partner Violence. New York: Springer.
Delaney, Aimee. 2021. Norms of Violence: American Perspectives on the Origins of Violence. New York: Routledge.
Faver, Catherine A., and Elizabeth B. Strand. 2003. “Domestic Violence and Animal Cruelty: Untangling the Web of Abuse.” Journal of Social Work Education 39 (2): 237–253. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23044063
Frick, Paul J., Essi Viding, Rolf Loeber, and Jeffrey D. Burke. 2014. “Callous–Unemotional Traits and Developmental Pathways to Severe Conduct Problems.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 55 (6): 532–548. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.12165
Graham-Bermann, Sandra A., and Victoria L. Brescoll. 2000. “Gender, Power, and Violence: Assessing the Family Stereotypes of Preschoolers from Violent and Nonviolent Homes.” Journal of Family Psychology 14 (4): 600–612. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.14.4.600
Johnson, Scott A. 2018. “Animal Cruelty, Pet Abuse & Violence: The Missed Dangerous Connection.” Forensic Research & Criminology International Journal 6 (6): 403–415. https://doi.org/10.15406/frcij.2018.06.00236
Nathanson, Ariel, Graham Music, and Janine Sternberg. 2022. From Trauma to Harming Others: Clinical Work with Complexly Traumatised Children. London: Routledge.
Pinkett, Mark, and Mark Roberts. 2009. Boys Don’t Try? Rethinking Masculinity in Schools. London: Routledge.
Rivers, Caryl, and Rosalind C. Barnett. 2011. The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children. New York: Columbia University Press.
Stark, Evan. 2019. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). 2018. Global Study on Homicide: Gender-Related Killing of Women and Girls. Vienna: United Nations. https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/GSH2018/GSH18_Gender-related_killing_of_women_and_girls.pdf
Waller, Rebecca, and Luke W. Hyde. 2017. “Callous–Unemotional Behaviors in Early Childhood: Measurement, Meaning, and the Influence of Parenting.” Child Development Perspectives 11 (2): 120–126. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12218