Domestic Violence Rages On

     One of my guiding principles in life is that, oftentimes, no news is good news.  But I don't mean that in the usual way.  What I mean is that, if you really want to be happy, don't watch the news. 

     Don't misunderstand me...I like to be informed.  I don't want to be completely ignorant of what is happening in the world around me.  But there is so much going on that is so unpleasant and that I have no control over, that sometimes, not watching the news is the best option.  In fact, therapists will often recommend this to patients who are anxiety-ridden or depressed.  Being bombarded with messages of doom and gloom over which you have no control is enough to drive anyone to the brink of suicide.

     Occasionally though, I forget.  The other day, I tore myself away from the computer, made myself some lunch and sat down in front of the t.v. to enjoy it.  It was exactly 12 noon, so of course the noon news was just beginning.  By nine minutes past the hour I had heard about a fire that gutted someone's home, an accident involving two trucks, a robbery or two, a home invasion, another fire, and two stories about two separate men in two separate places in our viewing area beating women with baseball bats. Not one positive story to give me any hope that life was still worth living.  Just a flood of destruction and violence.  Beginning to feel myself being sucked down into the old vortex of doom that is the local news, I quickly turned off the t.v. and attempted to finish my lunch.

     The two stories that continued to torment me long after the television screen went blank were the last two.  The first bat-wielding man participated in his court-ordered anger management meeting and promptly went home and beat his girlfriend and her five-year-old with his bat.  The other man gave his girlfriend a beating in front of her two daughters after being served with a Protection from Abuse order (PFA) that she had filed the day before.  These incidents bring into question the effectiveness of PFA's and court-ordered anger management training as means of protecting women from domestic violence,  but they also beg another question -  What the hell is going on with men?

     It's true that women aren't always the victims in cases of domestic violence.  In about 15% of the cases, men are victimized.  But this still means that 85% of the time, women are the victims.  Domestic violence is a huge problems for women and the remedies are often ineffective.  Women who are battered find it easier to talk to friends and family than to trained domestic abuse counselors as a rule, and many are embarrassed, or too afraid, to speak to anyone.  PFA's offer no real protection and often add fuel to the fire, giving abusers one more reason to fly off the handle.

     So far, we have no real answers for the millions of women who suffer at the hands of the men in their lives.  And the problems isn't likely to go away on it's own.  Stories like those on my local news program are all too common.  In fact, it is estimated that in America between 1 and 3 million women a year are abused by husbands or boyfriends.  Three women are murdered by the men in their lives every single day. 

     Pain and misery and lives cut short are just the most obvious of the costs of domestic violence.  Health-related costs due to abuse are estimated to total over 4 billion dollars per year.  Lost productivity and lost income must also be accounted for.  The emotional toll taken on women is enormous and they are not the only victims here.  The pain and fear that children who witness such abuse feel most also be factored in.  Children who witness battering in their own homes are 5 times more likely to commit violent acts as adults, or to become victims themselves.

     So what is going on here?  Why do we have so many men who are hell-bent on harming or even killing the women they supposedly love?  No one knows for sure, but certain factors seem to contribute to the likelihood that a man will become a batterer:

• Alcohol or drug abuse
• Job loss or inability to find employment
• Financial problems
• Witnessing or suffering abuse in childhood
• Mental illness
• Low self-esteem

     These are just a few of the things that may contribute to a man's desire to beat or belittle the woman in his life.  I wonder too about how our socialization of males contributes as well.  Men are taught to be tough, unemotional and to resolve issues by exerting power or control, using physical force if necessary.  They are led to believe that their worth is determined by their financial success, their physical strength and how powerful and in command they appear to be.  If men were socialized to determine their self-worth in other ways, wouldn't they be less likely to feel the need to make their mark by controlling women when these other, external criteria of manliness fail them?

     Short of totally revamping our culture, what do we do about the abusive men that are already out there?  Your guess is as good as mine.  Nothing we've come up with so far seems to work.  Filing a PFA seems to increase the liklihood of violence instead of controlling it.  Court-ordered sensitivity or anger management programs are also unlikely to meet with success.  We all know that you can't change anyone who doesn't want to change.

     As a society, we have yet to find effective ways of discouraging this kind of behavior and in fact, our culture might actually encourage it.  So for now, the best defense may be avoidance.  The only way for women to protect themselves from these type of men may be to avoid getting involved with them in the first place.  While there is no fool-proof method for judging a man's potential for physically or verbally abusive behavior, there are some signs that can help to identify abusers before they get there hooks into you too deeply.  Here are some warning signs:

• The tendency to always blame others for failures or feelings
• Narrow-mindedness
• Cruelty to animals, children
• Extreme jealousy
• The use of guilt trips to manipulate others
• Having rigid sex roles or stereotype
• Threats of violence.
• Verbal attacks, abusiveness, name-calling etc.
• Attempts to isolate from friends or family or to control the actions of the woman in his life

     What do you do if you see these signs in the behavior or your current boyfriend or future husband?  Make sure others know about the behavior and do whatever it takes to get this man out of your life.  His jealousy isn't cute, his desire to be with you all the time and to know where you are at every moment will grow tiresome and his anger, complaints and verbal attacks will only get worse. The controlling behavior that you think will ease up over time as your relationship develops and your man learns to trust you, won't ease up.  Quite often, this type of behavior gets much worse and usually after the wedding or, worse yet, when you are pregnant or just after you have given birth.

     Until our society and our culture shifts, we will continue to create men who attempt to gain their self-worth at the expense of the women they are supposed to love.  The plague of violence against women will rage on and we will all stand around scratching our heads wondering why.  For now, prevention is the best medicine.  Women who arm themselves with knowledge and learn to recognize abusers before the abuse actually begins are the only ones who will truly be safe. 

    

    

Comments

[Laura Lee Carter]

Hello Lori:
Much of what you speak about on your blog is like my own...esp. your recent one on midlife crisis.

You sound like a woman of experience!
I also wrote one about emotional abuse, because I experienced it for years in my marriage without recognizing it!

Tell your readers to check out the very personal book: "I closed my eyes: Revelations of a battered woman" by Michele Weldon to know if they are experiencing abuse right now!
-Laura Lee "The Midlife Crisis Queen"

[Barbara Swafford]

Hi Lori,

Years ago, I had a friend who was abused, and her husband was extremely controlling. At first she said it was cute as he wanted her to call him when she got home, or went out, but after many years of marriage and abuse, he was so obsessed, if she was 3 minutes late coming home, he thought she had stopped somewhere to meet up with a guy.

Women need to know they can find/get help and not fear being hunted down and/or harmed. It's so sad when there are children involved, and they are exposed to the abuse.

I agree with you, the news is depressing to watch.

[Karen]

You are so right about the news!! I now limit myself to 1/2 hour of the Today Show and occasional peeks at NYT online while I'm working. As for the issue of abuse, I'm like Laura in that I experience emotional abuse in my marriage without really realizing that's what it was. I'm basically a positive upbeat person so I thought this was something I could fix. One day I looked at the stack of self-help relationship books I had bought and realized "It's not me". So I threw the books away and ended up getting out of that relationship. Sometimes as women we take far more crap than we should.

Karen

[Shilpan]

Lori -

I'm very emotional person. I feel guilt being a man when I hear these atrocities that happen every day by other man. Life is too short and it shall never allow anything but selfless love and respect for our alter ego.

Shilpan

[Lori]

Laura,

Thanks so much for the book recommendation! I hope that women who are afraid they might be in an abusive relationship will check it out. Meanwhile, I'll have to check out your site.

Barbara,

It is important for women to know that they can and should get help. No woman, person or any living thing for that matter deserves to be tormented and abused.

Karen,

You're right, we do take too much crap sometimes! Thanks for sharing your personal experience...I hope that it will help motivate someone who is suffering to get the help they need and deserve.

Shilpan,

Thanks, as always, for commenting but don't you dare feel guilty. Guilt is for the men who actually commit such hateful acts. You are not guilty be association. If more men had the sensitivity and compassion that you espouse, it would be a different world.

[Evelyn Lim]

I've often felt saddened when I read or hear about the plight of women in domestic violence. And I would often be on their side.

However, in my local news recently, I was most surprised to learn that it was the other way round in some cases: the men were the ones who got abused.

Domestic violence should be discouraged at all costs, nonetheless.

[Richard]

Yep, the news is depressing, but it's also so skewered that it isn't an effective means of perceiving reality. I barely ever watch it and it's extremely rare that I feel I ought to.

As for the domestic abuse stuff:
I'm going to make the argument that stats are just not worth much at all in these subjects.
Presuming the number of abused husband cases really makes up 15% - that number is based on how many abused husbands have actually gone to the authorities.
Of all the battered husbands in America, what percentage of them do you think go as far as reporting their wives?

Next up, as for first-world societies creating powerful traditionally masculine men. No way. Society has weakened men to the point that sexism has become something that's okay if women do it - and people such as Shilpan are actually okay with this.
If women talk about what's wrong with men today and they're all liberated, intelligent feminists.
If I were to write an article on my blog about what's wrong with women today I would be a misogynistic pig. See how this works?

Michael Crichton wrote a great essay on the subject of male-female equality and such items as domestic abuse.
http://www.crichton-official.com/essay-playboy-menshearts.html

The signs to tell that your boyfriend could be abusive seem pretty good to me though.

[Lori]

Evelyn,

True, men are sometimes the victims of domestic abuse and, although they may be in the minority, we shouldn't minimize their suffering.

Richard,

I see your point. While women are often too embarrassed or too afraid to report abuse, men are perhaps too embarassed to report their victimization as well. Stats can be deceptive sometimes.

I also agree that women shouldn't male-bash any more than men should female-bash. I wasn't trying to say that all men are evil in my post...I apologize if it came across that way.

You have to agree though, that most societies are male-dominated and throughout history women have been considered property in many of them. Things have changed but old habits die hard, as they say, and there are some men who are still resistant to the independence of women. They, not all men, are the likely abusers.

[Bill]

Let me share a bit of what I have learned producing training videos for court staff on Domestic Violence.

DV is all about Power and Control. Everything an abuser does is aimed at either keeping or gaining control. Anger management is one component, but it is really not about anger.

What's more important are "batterer intervention" programs. They aim to help the abuser (male and female) discover why they do what they do. Domestic violence also occurs in same sex relationships.

Those who abuse need to discover why they get angry, and it's because they need to be in control and when they are not in control the anger rises and they try to gain or re-gain that control.

It can start as one earlier poster said, simply enough..."call me when you get home" but many times it progresses from there. It can be verbal abuse, emotional abuse in addition to the physical abuse. Many victims wrongly don't even consider it Domestic Violence until there it is elevated to the physical realm.

Speaking with Clinical Psychologists can be enlightening when they describe sessions in which the abuser will denigrate their partner." She doesn't clean the house right, she doesn't come home on time, she can't cook, she doesn't care for the children properly.." Then ,when asked why they want this person back, they respond "Well I do love her." Kind of incongruous don't you think?

I won't ramble on, but also when watching the news one must realize that now that more women are reporting abuse than ever before it seems like a larger problem. It's the same problem, we're just hearing about it more.

To leave on a lighter note (I hope), the videos I produce are often referred to as "Domestic Violence Training Videos." Rest assured we are NOT training people on how to be an abuser. ;-)

[Lori]

Bill,

Thanks for your comments and all of the additional information. That's how I understand domestic violence as well - as an issue of control. Anger management is only one small part of the treatment that is needed and larger societal changes are needed as well.