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April 9 - April 19, 2020
For nearly a decade Michelle and Rocky were together, but Paul can only remember having one conversation with Rocky, about that Mustang.
Foreshadowing?
In the United States, it wasn’t that there were no problems—poverty, disease, and natural disasters all happened here, too—but I’d forgotten how possible it was to live where, if you had the desire and the means, you could fairly easily insulate yourself from a lot of these problems.
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.
Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners.
Domestic violence health and medical costs top more than $8 billion annually for taxpayers and cause victims to lose more than eight million8 workdays each year. It is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half our homeless women and is overall the third leading cause of homelessness in our country.
Macro effects
overwhelming majority of incarcerated men today first witnessed or experienced violence as children in their own homes,
VAWA funds meant victims no longer had to pay for their own rape kits and if an abused partner was evicted because of events related to her abuse, she could now receive compensation and assistance; victims with disabilities could find support, as could those in need of legal aid.
Outcomees of VAWA
I’ve found, in the face of overwhelming tragedy, that women often talk and talk, and men fall silent.
They can’t escape the fact of what Rocky did. That final act eclipsing entirely who he was, whatever good he had in him.
In the endless constellation of ways we feel we can mess up our kids, which are those that will inflict the least damage?
how much these men strain to keep such colossal pain inside them. How unfair it is that we live in a world in which they’re made to believe their tears are shameful.
He didn’t need to hit her. He had all the control he required.
They stay because they have developed tools, over the years, that have sometimes worked to calm down an angry partner: pleading, begging, cajoling, promising, and public displays of solidarity, including against the very people—police, advocates, judges, lawyers, family—who might be the only ones capable of saving their lives.
In New York, for example, two-thirds of incarcerated women in 2005 had been abused beforehand by the person they killed.
Dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months, then dipped only slightly for the next nine months. After a year, the dangerousness dropped off precipitously.
It’s an emotional brume of regret and guilt and how they can’t unlearn what they know now, but they wish they’d had a chance to learn it sooner.
Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.
When Rocky bailed himself out it was an even more crucial message to Michelle. This time, it’s Not only am I stronger than you, but the system prioritizes my freedom over your safety. Rocky
Short courtships—let’s call it love at first sight—are a hallmark of private violence.
I also consider how ceding power to another person does not happen in a vacuum. It’s a slow erosion over time. Step by step, moment by moment, whittling away until a person no longer feels like a person.
violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed.
“men learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority, be it spousal abuse, gang turf wars, street assaults, armed robbery, and all the other crimes that men in the jails had been charged with. Men … had learned that it was normal to use force and violence in all of the forms above to enforce their social obligation to be superior.”
It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.
Schwartz began to see the children of the men she knew from her early days in corrections. And then the grandchildren. There had to be a better way, she thought. Violence isn’t supposed to be genetic.
Locking up men punitively wasn’t doing anything to change the reasons they got locked up in the first place.
This nudging, the language, the gentle urging to keep with the story is part of the curriculum. It shows how language matters, how much we can lie to ourselves, take ourselves off track to avoid responsibility, how we use words to frame our guilt or innocence, how easy it is to manipulate and how so often that manipulation starts inside our own minds, how we can minimize our impact on someone else.
What would this look like to someone else in that room? This fist-clenching, heart-racing, stiff-postured person? It would look intimidating. It would look scary. It would look bad. That’s the beginning: notice your body.
Please don’t kill me. See how polite we women are? We say “please” when we’re begging for our lives.
Donte’s case never went to trial. He pled out, like so many others in his position. Young. Black. Broke. Criminal histories.
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.
The fact that only 55% of the men who go through Emerge actually complete the program is a sign of its rigor and efficacy, Adams says.2 “I’m always distrustful of programs that complete higher numbers. It’s like bad schools. They graduate everybody.”
One of the hallmarks of domestic violence, Adams told me, is this false idea that abusers are somehow angry generally; rather, their anger is targeted—at a partner or at the partner’s immediate family.
“When you find yourself in a class like that, you can’t lie to yourself about the decisions you made,” he said. “My life has taken me to a point where I can’t tell myself I’m not that bad.”
Websdale calls it the great paradox of domestic violence, how an abuser can be both controlling over his or her partner, while simultaneously unable to control that dependency.
Thirty-three thousand domestic violence firearm incidents occur annually in the United States—far exceeding the number of intimate partner homicides.18 Guns take away any bargaining power a victim may have once had.
So I must concede that these two realities uneasily coexist: that shelter is necessary and saves lives, but it is also an abysmal fix.
Since they began, Dubus and Dunne have not had a single homicide in their caseload. What is of equal importance to Dunne, though, is that they have had to put fewer than 10% of the survivors in shelter; before 2005 that number would have been above 90%.
a study released in October 2018, the researcher April Zeoli looked at states where anyone served with a restraining order is automatically required to relinquish guns, and found there was a 12% drop in intimate partner homicides, yet only fifteen states required that guns in such instances be turned in.
The United States is the most dangerous developed country in the world for women when it comes to gun violence.
“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.”
We cannot address homelessness without addressing the fact that domestic violence accounts for so many homeless families. We cannot successfully address educational disparity or poverty without addressing how much domestic violence can be a root cause of such problems.
