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June 17 - July 9, 2020
nonfiction was a more direct source of change.
An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.2 This does not include men. Or children.
Our homes and families are supposed to be sacred territory,
the physical violence is far less damaging than the emotional and verbal violence.
The most common aphorism in the world of domestic violence is “hurt people hurt people.”
“Everyone asks why the victim doesn’t just leave,” he said to me. “But no one asks why an abuser stays.” Here’s another one, the paradox of domestic violence, he calls it: that the literature on intimate partner abuse and advocates all say abusers are about power and control, but to Websdale, abusers are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Both in control and out of control.
The variety of red flags are things everyone in domestic violence has seen before: the quick courtship, the isolation and control, the unemployment, the medications, the narcissism and lying and stalking.
It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.
Men who yell are being men; women who yell are shrill or they’re drama queens or they’re hysterical.
“You’ve heard the saying ‘hurt people hurt people,’ ” she says to the men gathered. “Well, I also think healed people heal people.”
he was in the middle of the story of how he and his homies called women “bitch.” Girlfriends, yes, but even sisters and mothers were bitches. Sometimes, “my old lady.” No woman had an identity; no woman had a name. “By calling her a ‘bitch’ all the time,” he said, suddenly, “what I was really doing was taking away her humanity.”
How do you stop a thirty-year-old from beating his wife? Talk to him when he’s twelve.
awareness plus action equals change.
Donte was a young Black man facing a system that did not give lucky breaks to young Black men very often, if ever.
His chances, as I saw them, were nil. He’d wind up just another violent man fated to the life he’d always known, carried along by forces he couldn’t fight alone. As far as I could tell, Donte had been honest with me. He didn’t pretend to be a good guy. He knew he’d fucked up. And he’d told me, too, how impossible it was to live on an intern’s paycheck in San Francisco. When his time at the halfway house was over, he’d planned to move back to his mother’s house, smack in the middle of the neighborhood that set him on his troublesome road so many years earlier, not because he wanted to, but
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The tapes went on for more than an hour in court that day, far more than what I’ve included here, and in that time I noticed this, too: he failed to use her proper name even once.
I remember saying to him, on so many occasions when he’d claim I wasn’t listening to him, that I was indeed listening. What I was doing was disagreeing.
He minimized the abuse he’d perpetrated on his former partner, telling me that yes, while he had choked her until she nearly lost consciousness, he had only done it once, after she’d come at him and scratched him. His view was that they were both responsible for the violence done to each other, but only he was having to pay the price for it. He failed to see that scratches didn’t carry the lethality of strangulation and so he saw his behavior as simply quid pro quo.
Power and Control Wheel.7 The Wheel highlights the eight ways a batterer maintains power and control: fear, emotional abuse, isolation, denial and blame, using children, bullying, financial control, and brute force and verbal threats.
He talks about how he grew up believing women served men because he watched his grandmother and his female cousins all make the food and bring the food and clean up the food, and the boys sat watching the ball game. What were they all being taught? And now he’s a grown man and he knows, because he had to learn, how to feed himself, how to make his own damn omelet. “I had no concept of appreciation,” he says of his past girlfriends, of Kelly. “I never had a bad partner. I had a bad attitude.”
must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else’s mean something? Can’t we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy?
Calvin Coolidge: Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.
Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.”
Van der Kolk believes that while post-traumatic stress in soldiers garners the most attention these days, victims of trauma, including domestic violence, are “arguably the greatest threat to our national well-being.”
The United States is the most dangerous developed country in the world for women when it comes to gun violence.10 This is not an issue of partisanship, liberal versus conservative, though I understand many people view it that way; to me it is a moral imperative. Why are our guns more important to us than our citizens?
“In some ways, men have been the biggest beneficiaries of the women’s movement,” she said. “Look at all the men who have a very different relationship [today] with their children. They go to school events; they talk to their kids. In my neighborhood, the guys are always walking their kids to daycare, to school. Look at how involved young fathers are. It’s not perfect, and women still bear the burden in many ways, but they have experienced a change.”
He apologized to me that day and for the next weeks every time he broke down for “not being stronger.” Here was a man who’d just lost his second wife to cancer and yet he didn’t feel he had a right to public tears. Why? I told him his tears made him stronger, in my eyes, as a man, as a husband, as a father, that he didn’t fear his full range of human emotion. It’s a lesson I wish I could impart to all men.
“Domestic violence, rather than being a private problem, is a most urgent matter of public health.”
