A regular reader who also works in book publicity sent me a copy of Why Do They Kill by David Adams, and it took me a long time to get through it, because it’s so sad, but it was fascinating and well worth the effort of muscling through one banal tragedy after another to learn what Adams and his research team found out about men who kill their wives or girlfriends. Adams and his team conducted in-depth interviews with 31 men who killed their wives or long-term girlfriends, and as a counterbalance, interviewed 20 women who were victims of attempted homicide by husbands or boyfriends. They also went back and read all the court transcripts, police reports and any other evidence about the murders, attempted murders, and preceding relationships in order to fill out a bigger picture of what exactly leads men to try to kill their wives.
Most of what they discovered violates cultural assumptions, but only some of it will surprise feminists. The biggest non-surprise (to feminists) is that the mythological wife-killer—a man who is generally a good husband but snaps when he discovers an infidelity—is a myth in every sense of the word. To the last one, the murders and attempted murders were the finale of a long history of increasingly violent domestic violence. In pretty much every situation, the man was attempting to control his wife or girlfriend through violence. Since it was an attempt to control, the violence escalated when the victim showed resistance, so unsurprisingly, most of the murders or attempted murders occurred after the victim left her abuser, made plans to leave him, or threatened to leave him. There were a few infidelities, but they were never the direct cause of the crime—most of the jealous killers made up the infidelity in their minds (some even accused their wives of having sex with male relatives like uncles or fathers, they were so out of their minds with paranoia) or attacked their ex-wives after the women terminated the relationship and moved on. Some of the killers were not jealous, but just killed or tried to kill because they were irate at losing their wives and the services/money they saw provided by their wives, but regardless of the nuances, across the board Adams paints a picture of men who feel that women are their property and who try to control their property through violence. Only one man seemed sincerely sorry at all that he’d objectified his wife repeatedly throughout their marriage in such a way.
Adams was interested in seeing how men who make the move to murder differ from the majority of abusers who don’t, and his research mostly points to the conclusion that the difference is in degree more than kind. Murder-minded abusers take the beliefs that they are entitled to control women further than most abusers, and they tend to be more violent than most and abuse more often than most. There are some surprising differences, but on the whole, men who try to kill their wives after a long period of abusiveness are just what you’d expect.
What surprised Adams was that women who are the victims of such severe abuse do differ significantly from women who are victims of lesser kinds of abuse in one big way—they’re all very realistic about what’s going on. Adams has a long history of working as an anti-DV activist and researcher, and he says that a lot of battered women are in denial about the situation, making excuses for their abuser and blaming themselves. But the women at this upper end of severely violent abuse all have a highly accurate take on the situation, which is that their abusers are the sole cause of the abuse, the abusers were trying to control them, and the women mostly report staying in the relationship out of a rational fear that their abusers would try to kill them or family members if they left. From the victim interviews, Adams paints a picture of a group of women that were basically kidnapping victims, held in captivity by their abusers and a society that all too often values saving marriage over saving women, and like kidnapping victims they cultivated a series of survival strategies that were a mix of compliance and resistance that varied according to the situation.
A lot of the women admit that they were in denial at the beginning of the relationship—since people still blame women for staying with abusers, it’s hard on the ego to admit that yours is a genuinely abusive relationship—but after awhile and it became more obvious that they weren’t in control of their situation, the women came around to blunt fear-and-survival mode. They still concealed their situation from others, but as much out of fear for the safety of others as out of shame. Many of the women pointed to the fact that their abusers quit apologizing for the abuse as the turning point for them in admitting that they were basically victims. Interestingly, once a woman admits that she’s not in control of her situation, it’s probably easier for her to start taking measures to leave and regain control over her situation, which can make the abuser freak out and start seeking other ways to control her, possibly through death threats or threatening her family. So being in denial is in itself a survival strategy.
The book is depressing but the microcosm of the dance between an individual man oppressing an individual woman has some larger implications that are worth examining, so even if you have to muscle through the depressing nature of the book, it’s well worth a read.
87 Responses to “The end game of control”
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I like this sentence because it’s so often true.
Sounds like a good book, but like you say, takes emotional courage to read. Not sure I’m up to that right now.
Time for my Completely WRONG comment of the day: The more I read about situations like these, the more It seems to me that the only safe alternative for women in situations like this is to kill their abuser first. (Naturally, I mean in a way that is less likely to be detected. There is no perfect way to kill your spouse, at least I haven’t heard of one yet).
But expecting women to just go ahead and let the guy kill you, or your kids, that’s just insane. They are likely to get murdered whether they stay or go.
Adams points out that a significant percentage, probably a majority, of wife-on-husband murder is precisely the situation you describe, Kathy. Which is why the murder rate of women killing their husbands has plummeted as more attention is paid to this problem—if men get arrested for wife-beating and women get help, then women have less need to kill. However, men killing women has not declined, and in fact, I think it’s gone up. Because women do try to escape now and escaping is dangerous.
I used to work with a woman whose ex-husband was both abusive and bipolar. Everyone in the office had to be trained on how to deal with him if he called or came by because he was known to be extremely violent and unpredictable. The poor woman had to be on her guard at every moment . . . she lived in an “undisclosed location” because he had previously stalked her, and she was afraid to marry her live-in boyfriend because if her jealous ex were to discover this sort of public record, he would get even crazier.
The REALLY sad thing was that she had kids with her ex, and they had to live this clandestine existence so their father couldn’t find them. He was always petitioning for custody and trying other legal maneuvers to have visitation, and he always managed to seem relatively sane when meeting with judges and court-ordered psychiatrists, so they would always have to drag out the police reports, etc.
My coworker also confided that she was afraid the kids would develop the same mental illness as their father.
So this was a woman who was indeed very realistic about her situation. Even surviving victims of these psychopaths can have their lives utterly destroyed.
A bit off topic, but I think still relevant.
What, in your opinion, would be the approximate year that courts started taking domestic violence more seriously? (I did say more seriously, please; I’m not implying that it is even now taken as seriously as it deserves.)
The reason that I ask is that during a dispute over the possible influence of FPS video games on youth violence, I googled up a graph that showed the youth violence rate started trending sharply downwards around 1994. This was interesting at the time because the iconic FPS game, Doom, was released in 1993.
Of course many other things changed during that time: drug use, police policies and so on. But if there was a more severe line taken on domestic violence starting around the early 1990s, might that also not influence the rate of violent crime among youth? Can you think of a better way to teach a youth that violence is acceptable than to have him watch his father beating up his mother every night? If there were less of that around, wouldn’t there be almost automatically less youths who were inclined to violence?
I’ll attempt an answer and say that it depends on jurisdiction. It depends on the strength of the DV movement in a particular jurisdiction and what kinds of relationships it has to police, prosecutors, the judiciary, legislators, the media, etc. There’s no single answer because the way we do things is localized. Some states have longer histories of taking it seriously, and some jurisdictions withint states are better than others.
Additionally, sunsin, one of the things we’ve seen in the 1990s through today are attempts to do intervention work among youth in order to prevent violence…and these intervention programs have a couple of things going on: 1) How do you recognize abusive relationships? 2) How do you get yourself out of an abusive relationship? 3) How do you help your friend get out of an abusive relationship? 4) How do you avoid being an abuser?
There’s too much for a simple answer to your question.
I’ve been so familiar with the facts for so long that I don’t even know how it “violates cultural assumptions”. What assumptions?
The assumptions that it was just a guy who lost his temper rather than someone who uses violence as a technique of control would seem to be the biggest. Yeah, it’s a lie, but it’s deeply held and used as an excuse to blame women. Read the news surrounding a DV murder some time…everyone will talk about how shocking it is, and what a loving family man he is, and it must have been stress that drove him over the edge. The media is complicit in the lies.
Yeah, I used to work in the field, and still work with some folks who do work in the field.
Another assumption is the one that men only kill women who cheat, as Amanda points out.
Even when abuse is clearly ongoing, people tend to assume the men who abuse cannot control their emotions or react poorly to stress (and often alcohol) as opposed to systematically (coldly and calculatingly) using violence and fear/manipulation as a means to an end. Even the alcohol is a lubricant to help them beat those wome into submission, not an accident.
KMT - I don’t think your comment is wrong at all. If there is ever a time when homicide is justified it is in self defense, all the more so when one is defending children as well. Other options are preferable, but given that I haven’t walked a mile in her shoes, I’m not going to judge any woman who kills an abuser in order to end the abuse.
What MAJeff and Nothip said. At this point, the myth about men who kill their wives has been modified enough that people probably expect some wife-killers to have been longtime abusers, but I’d bet most people would be surprised to find out that the wife killer was not a wife beater is vanishingly rare. The OJ case clarified that the beater-to-killer wife profile exists, but I’m sure most people don’t realize that it’s the dominant paradigm to the point where others basically don’t exist. For instance, the Scott-and-Lacey Peterson case was reported without any inquiries that I know of into whether or not Scott beat Lacey, but I’d be shocked if he didn’t on a regular basis.
This is from the Boston Globe about a month ago. A Cape Cod grand jury refused to charge the wife who killed her abusive husband.
Yeah, it’s a lie, but it’s deeply held and used as an excuse to blame women. Read the news surrounding a DV murder some time…everyone will talk about how shocking it is, and what a loving family man he is, and it must have been stress that drove him over the edge. The media is complicit in the lies.
There was a murder of a woman and her teen son recently where a major city paper portrayed the episode as “he just snapped because of her religion”. The story essentially portrayed him as long-suffering and her as a mormon nutcase who drove him to it because she wasn’t paying enough attention to him.
Interesting that this Murdoch Rag “corrected” the web version to paint HIM as the aggressor and nutjob killer by mid-afternoon. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one emailing them using terms they could understand - like “you must be really soft on criminals” - to bracket the essentially feminist message that HE was the problem and SHE was the victim!
I don’t think it’s a myth at all. People mostly know what’s going on.
I think it’s mostly confabulation, and they actively find intellectual exercises that excuse their moral obligation to exercise restraint on violent people or people with authority. It’s the same with violent children when people value their potential “contribution” to society over any obligation to offer justice to the victims.
There are “myths” and then there are “myths of social understandings”
What, in your opinion, would be the approximate year that courts started taking domestic violence more seriously?
As others said, it depends on the jurisdiction. But I think the key legal change (well, after taking the basic step of making it illegal for a man to hit his wife) is when the law changes so that a man can be prosecuted for assault whether or not his wife agrees to press charges. One of the standard ways in which wife-beating was made invisible was by resting the system’s responsibility to prosecute a man who had been committing violent assault on his wife or girlfriend, on the woman he had been abusing.
One of the classic “surprises” when women start talking about abuse is that it’s not class-related and it’s not income-related and it’s not drug-use related and it has nothing to do with the woman’s behavior: sober, respectable, wealthy men beat their quiet, mousy wives.
Well, the book is a true account of what goes on in these men’s mind.
But, spousal murder is more common than ever and it is going up in both instances (men who murder wives and women who murder husbands). Which means that still about six to eight percent of all murders (depending on which crime stat sheet you look at) are committed by women, a precent rate unchanged since 2001.
In 2005, 37 women were killed in South Carolina by an abusive man, seven men were slain by an abusive wife — making the percentage of all women who actually kill their husbands skyrocket to about 17% in my home state, almost triple the national rate. The weapon of choice for male killers are guns, for female killers it is a knife. Keep that in mind.
As for killing by self-defense, women and men do it to escape an abusive relationship. Women still kill to defend themselves more often than men. In self-defense cases, women who used guns were acquitted nearly 100% of the time. Conversely, women who used poison were almost always found guilty of kiling a man. Men are more likely to be acquitted of killing women in cases that don’t involve firearms or blunt objects than in cases that involve firearms or blunt instruments.
But in that case, the murder is just the “culmination” of a “long and tumultuous relationship.”
Yeah, a better description would be “the final attempt to control a person who continues to resist domination”. Adams found that some of the murderers made sure to rape or have sex with their victims before killing them, to satisfy themselves that they were the last to “have” her. (How did they ever come to believe that sexual intercourse is domination of women without having had Andrea Dworkin to teach them? Huh, it’s almost as if she was observing a pre-existing phenomenon instead of creating it.)
Shah, I think the term you’re casting for is “social fiction”? There’s a lot of social fictions to excuse patterns of male dominance. A lot of social fictions are relatively harmless—pretending that someone is just powdering her nose instead of taking a shit, for instance. But the ones where we pretend there’s not violent domination of women when there is lead to some ugly situations.
37 women were killed in South Carolina by an abusive man, seven men were slain by an abusive wife
Wait a minute. Your sentence needs clarification, it’s imprecision makes it ambiguous.
Do you mean 37 women were killed specifically by an abusive spouse/boyfirend? Or just a random abusive man? Do you mean specifically that the 7 men were killed by a wife (not girlfriend or random woman) who actually abused them?
Are you talking about the contrast between male and female victims of domestic violence murder? Or are you selecting a subset of that? Were none of the 7 male victims killed in self-defense - is there another number for those who were?
I think at this point most people would look at a wife who murdered her husband and pretty much assume that she did it because it was kill or be killed. Even people who don’t read feminist blogs or watch Television for Victims. I don’t even think most people have a problem with the wife murdering the husband.
And I think this was why that Scott Peterson thing got so much attention: he was pretty persuasive, at least at first, that he wasn’t an abuser, and there was no record thereof. Once it became clear that he was a philanderer and a liar, people convicted him long before the jury did.
Some people are willing to cut abusive men a break because they think of it as generalized stress or a response to an abusive childhood environment. As usual, they have more empathy for the abuser than his victim.
“Some people are willing to cut abusive men a break because they think of it as generalized stress or a response to an abusive childhood environment. As usual, they have more empathy for the abuser than his victim.”
Interesting. Amanda, does the book address if abuses are abused first? And does it discuss how children affect the abuse, and any misconceptions about that?
He looks into the history of abusers and finds that it’s all over the place. Whether or not children are abused is statistically insignificant as a factor in whether they grow up to be abusers. However, there’s a reason to believe that young men who grow up watching their fathers abuse their mothers are more likely to absorb the message that women are male property and grow up to abuse. The most consistent feature of abusers is they believe that women are male property that they are entitled to control/use/dispose of as they see fit. Also, Adams found that most abusers feel towards their wives and girlfriends how you might against a VCR that you bought at the store and didn’t record your favorite show when you programmed it to—you’re angry and want to dropkick the VCR for not performing as expected.
Except escalate the expectations. Abusers put more expectations on women than women can perform, even if they divested themselves of all personality. It seems that abusers often find excuses to hit women, and from the sexual behavior of the men, it seems a lot of them were outright sadists. The female interviewees reported not only that their abusers raped them repeatedly, but that they enjoyed beating them during sex, enjoyed sex more if the women suffered during it, and often were sexually aroused by beating women and demanded sex right afterwards. So. It’s not just that these men objectify women and therefore are easily frustrated by women being humans with their own needs and motivations. They also get a rise out of seeing women cower beneath them a lot of the time and get off on their power and control over women.
I’ve known of emotional abusers who deride women until they cry and then take pictures of the crying woman as keepsakes, as well. It’s fucking weird.
No shit? That completely defies my expectations. I had always followed a model of abuse as being akin to an infection: people raised in abusive environments tend to pass it on.
But I guess we could both be right: the question I’d like to see answered is whether children raised in environments where their fathers abused their mothers grow up to be abusers — not whether children who were themselves abused grow up to be abusers.
I’m a little intrigued by this:
Does this refer only to the victims of attempted murder or to the victims of murder as well? If the former, could their realism have been a factor in their survival?
Well, it’s hard to tell with murder victims since they’re dead and can’t speak, but since most of the victims of murder had extensive police records showing that they spoke to family, police, and clergy about their problems, it appears they had the same realistic take on the situation. Also, most of the murder victims were killed because they were trying to leave, which indicates that they had in fact moved past a denial stage and into escape mode. A lot of them had pretty extensive escape plans, in fact.
The significant difference between situations that resulted in murder and those that resulted in just attempted murder was mostly luck, it seems. The major difference was the successful murders were more likely to involve a gun than unsuccessful murders. Men who tried to beat a woman to death or run her over with the car or stab her were more likely to fail for obvious reasons—she can escape, others can intervene, etc. The victim’s reactions had almost nothing to do with the success or failure of the attempt. It’s hard to face up to this, but if someone wants to kill you, the probability of them succeeding has more to do with their nerve and competence than anything you could do.
felagund, South Carolina’s DV fatality count from 2005 was posted in the Aiken Standard last October. Thirty-seven women were ultimate victims of abuse by their husbands and boyfriends, and seven men were killed by abusive wives and girlfriends.
They only count cases in which the abuser killed his/her victim. The total also included murder-suicides, which has become far more common than just an abuser killing the victim in recent years.
After I left my children’s father, I endured a year of escalating violence in which I knew he would end up killing me. I will say outright that he was assisted by the police who fulfilled their role by “looking the other way” and refusing to charge him despite having enough evidence that he was stalking and assaulting me. I also knew that, should I ever lift a hand to defend myself, my crime of self-defense would be severely punished. I would be charged if I did so much as scratch his little finger. Because - that is what happened! The charge was thrown out of court - but it was made. I am not surprised at all that there is a significant number of women who are presently incarcerated for life because they commited the crime of self defense.
Sounds like a really useful (if depressing) book. I happened just a couple weeks ago to pick up Gavin De Becker’s book The Gift of Fear on the advice of a friend. It purports to be a practical guide to predicting and dealing with potential violence at the hands of husbands, boyfriends, stalkers, family, co-workers and strangers, and he includes plenty of statistical data along with his own horrific childhood experiences of violence within his family.
The guy’s supposedly an expert, and it surprised me at first, but he takes a pretty dim view of restraining orders for exactly the reason that Amanda relates in her post about how violence tends to escalate at the first sign of resistance from the woman. He thinks they’re useful in a limited number of cases, but for a lot of these guys the act of seeking an RO represents the ultimate public humiliation and results in a seriously increased risk of death for the woman seeking it. He provides some supporting data but also presents case after case of women being killed at the courthouse, before or after the hearing.
If guns are the difference between life and death, it might just, now and then, be worthwhile to make it a wee bit harder to get ahold of a piece.
A few fewer handguns might mean a few more lives. Not that that’s a always a good thing.
bad Jim,
By pointing out that preventing handgun deaths might not always be “a good thing” I suppose you are thinking here of women who shoot abusers in self-defense (and then get thrown in prison for it).
Or you might also mean those men who murder women using guns. I’m not at all sure that eliminating guns would save all these latter lives. While I reject the notion that the reason men get away with abusing women is because “men are stronger than women,” since in general the strength of individuals shouldn’t matter since in a reasonable society people could always appeal their differences to their friends, kin, and society at large–in the society we live in, insofar as people, men especially, refuse to hold the stronger accountable for their abuse of the weaker, the physical strength (and associated cultural, perhaps biologically based, differentials in agressiveness and ruthlessness) is made relevant again. And so, abusive men in a society that condones it or makes space for it will probably escalate eventually to murder by whatever technology is ready to hand, including their bare hands.
Trying to regulate lethal weapons is not pointless, but I think the basic situation here is one of social values and structures, not the nature of the arsenal.
To be sure–this variable is subject to empirical investigation. We might for instance compare the death rates from abusive relationships in other countries with tighter gun control to that here in the USA, but bear in mind one would need to try and control for related variables; if for instance one reason Americans are so armed and trigger-happy is a pervasive sense of being in a society under siege, and this mentality derives in part from displaced resentment at being economically under siege by our social “betters,” then comparing to another society where that tension might be less needs to factor that in. I think there is a clear correlation between our notions that guns represent a solution and the problems we variously try to solve.
And to the point–the same quirks that make us trigger-happy probably also connect directly to abusiveness in general, as well as the pattern of response of the authorities who are supposed to be there to keep a humane order generally.
How in the HELL do you figure that 20 victims of attempted homicide is a COUNTERbalance to 31 actual victims of homicide? See, that’s what you might call supporting evidence, it’s sure as hell not what you call a “counter” balance. What you’d want as a counter balance would be women who murdered their husbands/boyfriends. Which certainly exists, and not in insignificant numbers. What on EARTH leads you to call it a counterbalance? Are you seriously that daft? I had thought better of you thus far. But then I’m a noob.
Amanda,
I figured someone would react sooner or later as Stormy did.
Well, Stormy, there are always lots of ways to look at anything. If the point is to try and jealously estimate who is worse to whom, men versus women, then yep, the things to balance would be “women murdered by men” versus “men murdered by women.” (BTW–would you expect these to be similar magnitudes? I don’t!)
But the point here is to understand what goes on in abusive relationships, and so it is interesting to get both sides of those interactions–the abuser and the abused.
There is no obligation to try to mitigate, counterbalance, or apologize for the abuses these men inflicted on these women by going out hunting for chilling tales of women abusing men. I suppose there are such cases, but I for one, based on my experience of the basic power dynamics in this society, doubt they compare in numbers or intensity to the routine abuse of women by men–and anyway, that’s not the point.
I mean, if we want to talk about prisons in the USA, is it mandatory to also talk about them in Russia, Argentina, and Tasmania? Or can we just focus on the American ones if we have a mind to?
I think a certain self-describe “noob” has got some trigger issues about discussing the basic fact that abuse of women by men is the default in this country.
To be fair–Amanda, I wonder if “balance” was quite le mot juste for the inclusion of the survivor women’s accounts along with those of the semi-successful aggressors (successful in killing the women, apparently not so successful in dodging the scrutiny of the law).
There is no balance here, that’s the point really. There’s something having to do with the male culture that results in a very significant number of people believing that your SO is a piece of property to be used as you will. This ALSO applies to when women abuse men.
Both sides are caused by that culture (the patriarchy) which seems to view everything as a cut-throat competition, everything as winners and losers, and everything as objects to be exploited.
The word “tragic”, English majors know, is horribly over used in general, in the media and particularly in these very predictable endings to patterns of domestic abuse and violence. Labeling it as “disease” or “mental illness” won’t make people any more comfortable about discussing this but the lurid attraction of these cases WHEN IT HAS GOTTEN TOO LATE TO DO ANYTHING ought to be viewed with the same disgust as a society that prefers to see untreated addicts and uneducated teenagers. The killers come to resent the state if it interferes in the sick relationship but that is too damn bad. A few judges have been shot by these same sick bastards.
We are supposed to tolerate a little craziness in people as a cost of having a free society.
The freedom, in this case, is a myth as much as the comforting lie that “he just snapped”.
The minute the threats and dysfunction come to the notice of the justice system, a more radical intervention is needed, and a more radical therapy. That or as society we should just own up to it: we like pathetic senseless murder stories. It is a story for the rest of us. It is only a death for the woman and sometimes her children.
It *is* balancing to have the abused interviewed as well as the abusers. Otherwise, the men could have just said their wives were dumb bitches who provoked them. Kind of like when reporters report that “White House sources say…” without bothering to mention THE FACTS that would indicate the White House sources are big liars. Fortunately, the guy writing this book was clearly not writing a book about “Men Are Totally Justified In Killing Their Disobedient Wives”, nevertheless, it’s balancing to have the wives’ perspective.
Stormy
September 16, 2007 at 5:34 am
Somebody doesn’t understand social research.
The voice of victims is a counterbalance to the voice of murderers. The voice of women is a counterbalance to the voice of men.
It made perfect sense to me.
Right, thinking about the context makes Amanda’s choice of the word “balance” make even more sense.
To compare these abuse cases to hypothetical women-on-men cases would be a different discussion. And one that would put us into MRA territory, based on what I’ve seen of all previous such discussions. And from what I’ve seen of the New Stormy on other threads, I think that’s where this person wants to go.
Please, Stormy, don’t throw us into that briar patch…
and down the line, we say:
“Born and bred in a briar patch, Stormy!”
94% of the victims of murder/suicides in intimate relationships are women; the percentage for simple murder is a bit less, but not too far off, I think.
And yes, the murder/suicide option does seem to be becoming more popular; in part, I think, because abusers are actually facing more consistent penalties for what they do.
Stormy, they were limited severely by the number of people they could get to agree to interviews. Don’t ascribe malicious intent straightaway, especially to generally good people. Makes you look like an ass. DV victims are notoriously jumpy about talking to authorities, since they’ve had the equivalent of a malicious Big Brother watching their every move and severely punishing any attempts as escape or resisting the patriarchy.
As for the women-killing-men thing, that’s been done in other studies detailed in the book. If you read it, you won’t find what you want to hear, though. Turns out that a significant, quite possibly a majority, of husband murderers killed in self-defense.
BTW, spousal murder has declined significantly in the past few decades, with male murder victims plummeting faster. The Bureau of Justice attributes the improved responses to DV for the decline in male deaths—if women have options to escape abusers, they murder them less. It’s weird that one of the groups that benefits the most from anti-DV activism is abusers, many of whom owe their very lives to the fact that they were separated from their victims, so that they weren’t killed by victims defending themselves.
One of the myths I think which is still quite widespread is that domestic violence in whatever form is a “relationship problem” (ie., somehow created by two people together) rather than an individual problem with the abuser- who, in fact, is incapable of being in a relationship any other way. And this kind of perception just plays into the abuser’s own sickness, where somehow he’s not 100% responsible for his own choices.
(”Sickness”, there, meaning the lies he tells himself)
Dammit, amanda, now I am going to have to read this book, although it will depress the hell out of me.
You’re being kind. How about a society that most often values saving ANYTHING over saving women?
Not that I am bitter, or hyperbolic.
This shit just sends me into red rage, though.
I can’t recommend de Becker’s book strongly enough. You won’t like some of what you read, maybe, but it’s better to know the truth. He’s the first male author I ever read who acknowledged up front that women can’t and don’t live and move about freely in society, because they have to be constantly vigilant about men who may hurt them.
Not to turn you even redder, but…
“Prior to the 1990s, it was not unusual for women to recieve forty-five years to life sentences for killing their partners. In stark contrast, abusive men who kill their partners serve an average of two to six-year terms.”
That’s from “When Violence Begins At Home”, the bible of the DV movement. The passage goes on to say that things have gotten better, but I’ll never forget the first time that passage, and how I felt I’d been laid out by a sledgehammer.
felagund:
I’d have to disagree. I think that if a woman kills her husband directly after being abused (meaning, he had just been hitting her), then people will believe it was in self-defense. But if she waits to murder her abusive husband when it’s safer (like when he’s sleeping), then I wouldn’t say most people would assume it was kill or be killed.
Look at the Mary Winkler case. Lots of people (the type who don’t read feminist blogs) were up in arms that a woman who murdered her husband in cold blood got off so easily. Here’s a link to Dr. Helen’s (Mrs. Instapundit) many posts on the subject. She was incredulous that Mary’s friends and neighbors were supportive of her, obviously not getting that it’s probably because they were aware of the abusive and controlling nature of her husband.
Things have definitely improved, but I don’t think most people assume self-defense when a woman kills her husband.
And I don’t recommend reading the comments on Dr. Helen’s posts if you want to have a pleasant Sunday afternoon.
So now I’ve read a few more comments and the notion that its a
Once an abuser reaches adulthood, probably not. It’s sad to say, but as I mentioned above, intervention programs have incredibly high failure rates. Once a man starts to abuse, odds are he’s not going to stop. Ever.
Maybe we need a domestic violence registry similar to sexual abuse registries, to warn people to stay the hell out of relationships with these people. (Only half facetiously offered as a suggestion.)
A.M. However, there’s a reason to believe that young men who grow up watching their fathers abuse their mothers are more likely to absorb the message that women are male property and grow up to abuse.
I myself have reason to believe that if a father who abused his wife also regularly did a lot of pounding on his son, then that son, provided he survives to adulthood, will be more willing to gouge out his eyes with a teaspoon than ever to raise a hand against his own wife or children. But perhaps I’ve generalized too much from the single data point I’ve got.
well, its possible to unlearn, but very few abusers seem to have the courage to face up to themselves. The most effective “batterer intervention programs” try to make them take complete responsibility for their thoughts, feelings and actions; but that’s not something you can force on someone against their will. Most abusers find it much easier to continue viewing themsleves as the victims, and projecting all of their rage and insecurity onto another person.
Tinfoil, I was rereading some Dworkin last night because people were debating what she really said and I laughed bitterly out loud at one statement she made, where she said she started out by investigating why it was that men feel they own women and realized that they feel that way because they do in our society. Now, obviously we’ve made progress, but still. The stereotype that women are hysterical goes a long way towards giving male dominance cover. There was a thread on street harassment at LGM recently, men who were defending the practice (in the sense of rejecting women’s right to complain or agitate against it) basically denied that street harassment exists in significant amounts to justify calling it a problem. I pointed out that I get harassed on average 7-10 a week. The counterpoint? That I’m a kuh-razy female who’s either lying or hallucinating. Of course, I get harassed more because I go out more, which goes to show that harassment is in fact functionally a tool to limit women’s freedom of movement, as you say.
What I’d love to find out is what harassers are fucking thinking. I mean, I know what they say (that their victims should enjoy being harassed, since it’s a “compliment” even when there’s threats of violence or insults like “cunt” being wielded), but I’d like to know what they’re really thinking. Probably they just have a subconscious angry reaction to women who dare leave the home unaccompanied and wish to make those women sorry for offending their misogynist sensibilities.
W, Adams does detail that a lot of young men do reject their father’s model. It’s not a given that seeing abuse=becoming an abuser. Just ups the chances. Free will does kick in, though as Jeff says, once a man starts abusing, his chances of stopping go low. Adams talks some in this book about his work trying to rehabilitate abusers, and the major issue working against them is that in order to change, an abuser has to really, truly feel his behavior is wrong. Since most abusers go to counseling only when coerced by the courts or by wives who threaten to leave them, you’re not talking about a highly motivated crowd.
I’m remembering a conversation I had a year or two ago with someone who works in the DV movement. They’d done some focus group work with victim/survivors about what they wanted, what their needs were. Overwhelmingly, they didn’t want to leave, they didn’t want their men arrested, they didn’t want to go to a shelter. They wanted their men to quit beating them.
The truth is, though, their men most likely will not stop beating them. One of the questions i asked, which we couldn’t come up with an answer for, is how do we deal with the discrepancy between their desires and the reality?
If he beats you, he’s not going to stop.
If he beats you, he doesn’t love you.
There was a case a few years in the Northwest of a man who’d been very active in his local shelter killing his wife and himself seemingly (to everyone around them) out of the clear blue sky. He’d gotten involved in the movement, originally, because his father (the “prominent local businessman”) did the same thing to his mother in front of his own eyes. Its not any kind of superficial habit that can be changed overnight; these guys are are seriously disturbed.
I’d like to know what they’re really thinking.
There goes another bitch who will never sleep with me. Cunt.
“Overwhelmingly, they didn’t want to leave… They wanted their men to stop beating them.”
Its more understandable when you realize that no abusive relationship starts off that way; if anything, many of these guys seem over-the-top wonderful at first. When the emotional abuse starts, and he tells you its all your fault, its extremely confusing; your impulse to try to find out what’s wrong with you, or what you you could change to not “force” him to act that way again. And it just goes downhill from there.
I think the point at which many women leave is when they finally accept the fact that the man they thought they knew at first is never coming back.
Oh, but the original guy does come back. There’s the honeymoon period to get her to stay after the “explosions”…and then we get back into the cycle of escalation all over again.
I think what we really need to stress over and over and over again, in every instance we can is that if someone beats you they absolutely do not love you. No matter what they say, they do not love you.
Yeah, sometimes (not always) that’s true- there is a honeymoon phase. What I meant to say is simply that victims hold out a hope that the abuse will end, that they have some potential control over it. You don’t have control, because its coming from inside the abuser. And as I said before, its not a superficial problem to be solved by learning better habits, or “anger management”. These guys are psychologically messed up, and its very very unlikely they’ll do what’s necessary to heal that.
What I’d love to find out is what harassers are fucking thinking.
If I relax, try to stop thinking for myself, and just allow society’s messages to men to wash over me, I think I can get close.
1) “Men and women are different. Specifically, men are creatures of rationality and action, women are creatures of emotion and nurturing.”
2) “I have been place on this Earth to be the head of a woman, and she should serve me and do what I say.”
3) “She keeps making decisions for herself instead of doing what I want. That unsettles me. Doesn’t she know her purpose is to nurture my feelings?”
4) “Nothing I say to her seems to fix the problem! Oh, wow. Slapping her around a little sure made an impression! I should have done that years ago. I’ll have to keep that in mind.”
5) “Hrm, the slapping isn’t working for as long as it used to. Well, if I get mad enough, I guess I’ll just burn her with cigarettes or something.”
6) “How could she do that to me? Now I look like a queer in front of all the guys. Well, I’ll show everybody who’s the boss, here.”
And so on. Sorry if that was disturbing. Half of it is selfish unconcern about anybody but himself. The other half is the calculated use of violence to enforce behavior, as you’ve identified.
It doesn’t seem all that alien to me, but then I grew up in the kind of conservative church community that fosters these attitudes. I wonder, perhaps, if it’s just that women in our society are so constantly expected to be thinking about other people’s feelings than it’s hard to imagine the mindset of someone who doesn’t.
Those are some real sick bastards who abuse and kill those they supposedly love.
I’m thinking the best way to deal with this is to get the message to kids while they’re still deciding the type of people they want to date. If your boyfriend makes all your decisions, or if your girlfriend pouts every time she doesn’t get her way, they are maybe not the best choice.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20724150/
And speaking of abusive men who want to kill based on (possibly) imaginary people. This poor woman, she escapes only to suffer a horrible, horrible fate. And the man’s only reaction is “I just lost it.” No, you asshole, you didn’t just lose it because let’s face it, this was premeditated and you are a fuckjob.
That’s the thing though, they’re not really. They are products of our patriarchal, misogynistic society, and aspects of their behaviour are present in many of the expectations and behaviours of relationships that don’t present as abusive.
Unless we stop distancing ourselves from people like this, we refuse to take responsibility for our culture producing them.
What I’d love to find out is what harassers are fucking thinking.
I think it’s something along the lines of “How dare she ignore me. I must make her not ignore me!” It’s total narcissism. It’s only cute in cats.
I think part of the dynamic in some of these cases involves the man idealizing his partner, projecting his vision of perfect womanhood onto her. When she inevitably falls short he gets angry and frustrated, not just because of her perceived failure, but because of the direct challenge to his subconscious worldview - it’s a twofold strike, once against his worldview and once against his manhood (after all, a real man ought to be able to attain a real woman, right). Given that patriarchy forbids men to examine their emotions or question themselves, and that the only manly emotion is anger, abuse is inevitable.
I dunno, togolosh. I’ve just seen too many abusers with the basic notion that “she’s mine and I can do what I want with her.”
Of course, there are going to be a lot of dynamics going on, and every situation is not the same. But, the basic thing in these abusive situations is that the abuser sees the abused as something to be controlled. The victim/(sometimes) survivor is a piece of property and not a human. That seems to me the biggest problem. When I see a man who says, absolutely, “women belong in the home and nowhere else” I see a controller who if he doesn’t abuse is very close to it. These men disgust me (that’s why the DV registry was only half-facetious….these men should not ever be in intimate relationshihps.)
Referring to the street harassment comment, Amanda, I found myself wondering more than once WHY it was such a horrible “crime” for Larry Craig to touch the feet of another man in the next bathroom stall, but not when men harass women. Why is it “soliciting” when you tap your feet and nudge the guy in the next stall, but not “soliciting” when some creep says, “Hey, baby! Come get some of this!” while grabbing his crotch?
Yeah, I know. Rhetorical question.
But if touching a man’s feet in the next stall (with a nice metal wall between you) is considered lewd behavior, and is an arrestable offense, why isn’t the harassment of women treated the same way?
And Sarah in Chicago, you’re absolutely right that men who abuse aren’t “sick” per se. They’ve been trained that it’s not only ok for them to do so, but almost expected in some circles.
Also, I hate that it’s called “Domestic” violence. “Domestic” means things like hanging curtains and regrouting the bathroom tile. “Domestic” really softens what it is, doesn’t it? How about “partner abuse” or “partner violence” or “men killing women who won’t fucking do what the men want them to do”?
Whew! I AM bitter today!
Sorry for the spew.
Sarah, I certainly didn’t mean to encourage distancing oneself. Obviously, there’s a difference between “out of the ordinary” and pathological, and much of what we define as “domestic violence” overlaps with what most cultures have considered normal for male-female relationships since recorded time. Patriarchal societies produce more domestic violence because they produce more warped and frustrated men, incapable of being in a relationship in any loving way.
tinfoil hattie,
No apologies necessary. When I worked at a battered women’s program, we could not keep a victim advocate for longer than a year. The stress of going into court and dealing with the violence and the system simply burned people out too much. It’s fucked, and it’s systemic and we should all be angry and bitter.
It’s so weird as a man to write about these things. I caught shit occassionally when I was working at the program, things like “Oh, now the man has to speak” during staff meetings. Never mind I was trying to do the same work everyone else was.
This is why violence plays a role in my Gender classes. Maybe not as large a role as it should (there’s so much to cover in a survey class), but it’s definitely there. One of the things I teach about it is that society/ies approves of or overlooks certain forms of violence. And when I teach these courses, I take as my own starting point something said by the great German sociologist Theodor Adorno: “Sociology’s task is to determine the direction in which this process [society] is seeking to move and to determine whether and when we might intervene in those tendencies” (paraphrased pretty close, but in the book Introduction to Sociology, which is actually a series of lectures from the last year of his life)
Anger ain’t the problem? We should be angry. How do we channel it. I do it through my teaching. (Wish I could get my writing going)
Last year, on the last day of my race and ethnicity class, I did my usual verbal evaluation. One of the things I’m very well aware of is my white privilege, and I use it. I know that white students are more likely to listen to me than a professor of color, so I use that to really challenge them on these issues (and I’m also quite proud that I’ve developed a following among students of color). We were discussing that and one student said something to the effect that a professor of color might deal with these issues and be accused of bitterness. One of my favorite students, a young Latino man from inner-city Boston who wrote in some of his work about having friends shot, said, “Oh, I heard bitterness.”
How can I not be? When I read about that student’s friends being murdered, or when other students come in and tell me about dating violence, or about being pulled over for driving while black, or about being denied an apartment for being black. You’re fucking right I’m bitter.
I wouldn’t be human if I weren’t bitter about the stories my students tell me. How do I channel it, though, seems to be the next question.
Be bitter. Don’t let it eat, though. Use it.
oops….
“anger ain’t the problem?”
should be
“anger ain’t the problem.”
Very recently, and it may have been off of an AP report, and I believe it was out of research programs in Tennessee…new research questioned the efficacy of current therapeutical policies in batterer programs.
The gist was that traditional group therapy approaches in batterer programs simply do not work…that batterers can rarely be brought to experience a sense of shame and remorse for their behaviors…even with the legal consequences.
I’m hoping that this rings a bell for folks here…I’d like to follow up, in part because out here in rural podunk, there are heavier “pressures” on people to “stay and resolve” rather than get out and build a life.
My sense, and I honestly refused to lead such programs where I was working, is that often group settings allow batterers to reinforce each others’ attitudes. As we’ve alread said, batterer intervention tends to not work. In settings where they can support each others fucked up ideas, it would seem even less successful (though I’d have to dig into the research to be really sure)
Batterers and MRAS just despise The Duluth Project, which doesn’t offer traditional therapy and in fact treats the men like they’ve comitted a crime and need to shape up. No whining, no bullshit, no reinforcing attitudes. The last thing these guys need is to be is coddled.
Oops! Did I not agree with you Amanda? Is your position so weak you can’t post anything that doesn’t support it? Whatever.
I think togolosh makes a good point. I know there were many dynamics to my abusive relationship, but one of those was being elevated onto a pedestal and when I failed or was not perfect enough, he hurt me.
Also, hear hear tinfoil hattie! I hate the use of the term “domestic” as well. I think it’s limiting for all of the situations of partner violence that people experience.
WTF are you talking about KellyMac?
Did a comment not show up? Happens to all of us because of the spam filters, and it will show up eventually.
Is your ego so huge you assume it must be about you?
Sarah,
“That’s the thing though, they’re not really. They are products of our patriarchal, misogynistic society, and aspects of their behaviour are present in many of the expectations and behaviours of relationships that don’t present as abusive.”
Yeah, I tend to be a bit of a broken record and bring this up in threads about rape and sexual assault a lot. It’s part of why so many people don’t notice the whole “blame the victim” cycle. If such people are just sick - end of story, and society has no ability to influence them, then rape (and partner violence) prevention that focuses on changing the abuser/rapist doesn’t make any sense.
The common response you get to “why is the focus always on the victim’s behavior?” is something along the lines of “Rapists/abusers are sick bastards. You aren’t stupid enough to think you can change the mind of sick bastards, do you?” The absolutes make it really hard to point out the difference between taking reasonable precautions and being consious of the possibility of sexualized violence practically 24/7. It makes it even harder to start any kind of dialogue about how we can stop and reverse the patriarchy’s training. “I teach my boys to respect women!” is hardly useful. Especially since, as others have pointed out, a lot of abuse gets excused internally by abusers who have put their partners on a pedastal, and then get angry when they act like real people.
I am a survivor of the “woman as property” abuse cycle. My former husband never laid a hand on me until after we were married, although in retrospect there were hints in his behavior prior to marriage. I survived 14 months of abuse and escaped after having a loaded gun pushed into my temple. My palms get sweaty thinking about it, nearly 30 years later. Amazingly, even after that incident, he simply couldn’t believe I was leaving him and I was forced into hiding for nearly a year. All of our friend sided with him, assuming I had done something to deserve the beatings. The road from domestic violence victim to survivor was long and painful - my heart goes out to the women trapped in the deadly cycle of abuse.
“My former husband never laid a hand on me until after we were married, although in retrospect there were hints in his behavior prior to marriage.”
One the mistakes I think has been made by a few people in this thread is to simply equate “domestic violence” with physical violence. A pattern of emotional and verbal abuse (controlling behavior, isolation from friends and family, relentlessly cutting you down) is domestic violence in itself, and the effects in many ways can be worse. Any abusive personality, also, whatever they’ve done in the past, is always potentially capable of turning violent in the future.
Some comments above seem to be coming from such feminist subcultures, or such nonviolent subcultures, as to have the luxury of being surprised by the assumptions of the common culture where I grew up. Where my family and my colleagues still live.
Most of what they discovered violates cultural assumptions, but only some of it will surprise feminists.
I know those cultural assumptions. *sigh* I hate them. But I know them very well. I had a disturbing phone conversation with my mother this summer. She was telling me about a young man she works with; how this bright and talented young man had been touched by family tragedy.
A: “Oh. I’m sorry to hear it. What happened?”
M: “It was terrible. His father was a doctor, and he worked long hours the way doctors do. And his mother was having an affair with another man, for years.”
A: “How sad. Did they get a divorce?”
M: “No! [Young man]’s father shot his mother and her lover. She died and he was badly hurt, and the father went to prison for 6 years. It was horrible for the whole family.”
A: “I’m sure it was very hard for [young man].”
M: “The worst of it is that he is still so isolated from his father. His father has been out of prison for years now, but he won’t even speak to him. Can you believe carrying a grudge that far?”
A: “Well, murder is pretty extraordinary. I’m not surprised [young man] reacted strongly.”
M: “After his mother made him shoot them, so he wound up in prison, he didn’t have any contact at all with his father-”
A: “Wait a minute! She did not ‘make him shoot them,’ at all. He shot them because he was a criminal who likes shooting people who offend him.”
M: “Sure, sure, whatever. I was trying to say [young man] and his father didn’t have any contact for 10 years, since his father was in prison because his mother had made him–”
A: “No. She did not make him do anything violent. When non-violent people discover their spouses are committing adultery, they might scream and cry and file for divorce, but they don’t shoot anyone.”
Aaarrgh. I feel sorry for the young man. I wish him well in his attempt to build a peaceful, happy, life and raise a child with no contact with his father (the child’s grandfather). It’s too bad he has to do it surrounded by patriarchy.
i’m super late to this conversation, but i’d be interested in hearing about the details of whatever amanda was referencing that suggests that abuse during development years is not predictive of abusive/violent/maladaptive behavior in adulthood.
i’ve had the opportunity to attend some mitigation conferences in the last couple of years and what i’ve been learning from the neuropsych community is that it actually takes substantially less than outright physical or severe emotional abuse to inhibit frontal lobe brain development and that we are learning that this is totally predictive. as little as non emotional engagement from the caretaker, no caretaker, and not enough nurturing touching casues stresses and elevations in certain enzymes/hormones in the brain and stops or interferes with the frontal lobe from developing normally. i have never heard or read anything that has suggested that violence during early development without intervention is not predictive of of future maladaptive behavior.
my non scientific opinion based on my own rexperience with violent criminals is that, violence/abusive behavior is caused by brain damage and brain disorders which is why w/o early intervention it’s nearly impossible to rehabilitate adults. pedophiles are the most depressing examples of this. brain’s just not that elastic anymore.
the cooey case is probably the most awful example of this i’ve seen in a long time. low iq/mental retardation together with severe physical and sexual abuse in early development. what made the case so aggravating was also mitigating in my mind. he kidnapped her b/c he didn’t want to be alone, buried her alive b/c he cdn’t bear to kill her but knew what he did was wrong and gave her, her teddy bear b/c he knew that she really liked it and didnt’ want her to be scared. it’s fucking awful. tragic doesn’t begin to decribe it really. a broken person committing such awful acts, not being able to stop himself, and knowing what he did was disgusting. the victim and her family, it’s indescrible that kind of pain and suffering. it makes you want to scream.
my own armchair opinion on abuse, is that i think that abuse exacted agaisnt women and children is cultural. i def agree that women and children are on the receiving of the violence b/c of misogyny/patriarchy. but if the cultural pressures to, or perhaps cultural privileges is more appropriate, beat women weren’t there, the men would be beating someone else. their brains don’t work right. and i think this issue crosses genders. i think women are just as likely to commit violence for the same reasons. take a typical family that is coming through the criminal justice system. more often than not, both parents and children have been coming thry system for various charges of battery. both partners have battery charges against each other at various times and/or abuse charges against their children. the children are coming thru juvenile system for hitting their parents, kids at school, etc. etc. just hang out the courthouse for a few weeks, you see the same pattern over and over again.
bottom line, you put people who have experienced physical abuse as kids in a family of their own where there are extreme amounts of stress: unemployment, children, no air conditioning, lack of food, etc. etc. etc. and everyone is going to be yelling, screaming, and hitting each other. those of us who didn’t experience violence and have better higher order thought processes will be having a really tough go of it too yelling and screaming but probably not beating the crap out of each other.
and i think if we really want to stop violence we need to be trying to learn and treat the causes of violence. which means on some level we need to stop dehumanizing the perpetrators.
@ MAJeff: If a comment appears, and then disappears, is that the work of a spam filter?
Re: shameless defense attorney
I’m morbidly curious, but my googlefu turned up nothing, even when I combined Cooey with “teddy bear” and “buried alive”.
I think the point is, evil people have hearts too, human weaknesses, but it certainly doesn’t make them good or a get-out-of-jail-free card.
I heard a story on public radio last week that was about the latest statistical report for deaths in the workplace (can’t find it online, but I’ll keep looking).
The report stated that the #1 cause of workplace deaths for men was auto accidents.
For women: workplace violence.
(Off-topic: MAJeff, everything you write makes me love you more and more. I wish I could take a class of yours!)
Aha! Found it.
http://www.kut.org/items/show/9883
Quote: The cause of death is different between two genders. For men, it’s typically transportation. For women, it’s actually assaults on the job where women are attacked physically. That’s typically the leading cause of deaths for women on work related fatalities.”
Of course, this is not surprising to anyone familiar with domestic violence.