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January 15 - February 7, 2023
Like many people who hold a casual acquaintance with a problem, I believed all the common assumptions: that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave.
Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Orlando Pulse nightclub in June of 2016, had strangled his first wife—an act that is a felony in the state of Florida, where he lived, and could have put him behind bars for a decade according to federal law. Yet he was never charged.
With domestic violence, often there is no end date for the victims. Women who do manage to break free of their abusers still spend their lives negotiating with them if they share custody of children. And even if children are not involved, many victims remain on the lookout long after they escape abuse—particularly if incarceration was a result of the abuse.
The most common aphorism in the world of domestic violence is “hurt people hurt people.”
They stay in abusive marriages because they understand something that most of us do not, something from the inside out, something that seems to defy logic: as dangerous as it is in their homes, it is almost always far more dangerous to leave.
In the blinding glare of hindsight, the horror they now live with, how could they have once believed that an open, honest conversation about something as common in this world as divorce or remarriage or moving to a new state was so bad it could not be addressed aloud?
They live in this suspended state of grief. A kind of emotional purgatory.
Evan Stark, author of the book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, coined the phrase “coercive control” to describe the ways an abuser might dominate and control every aspect of a victim’s life without ever laying a hand on her.
Victims who side with their abusers during police calls do so not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety.
She was determined that her children would not grow up in what she called a “broken home.” And this is one of those impossible equations that every parent tries to calculate in some measure: is it worse for the kids to have an imperfect parent—in Rocky’s case abusive, addicted to meth—than to have no parent at all? In the endless constellation of ways we feel we can mess up our kids, which are those that will inflict the least damage?
What Ivan didn’t know and Michelle didn’t share was that Rocky would sometimes take the kids away from Michelle if he was angry at her. He’d disappear with them for hours, take them to the movies, camping, or wherever, and Michelle would be stuck there at home, worried, frantic that maybe this time he wouldn’t come back, and the kids became pawns, a way for him to keep her obedient, conciliatory. A way for him to make sure she didn’t leave. By the time he’d return, she’d just be thankful they were okay. 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.
Love is what makes domestic violence different from any other crime. That the people involved have said to each other and to the world, You are the most important person to me. And then, in an instant, for that relationship to become lethal? It requires us to mentally, intellectually, and emotionally hurdle beyond what we can imagine.
Others were more specific: threats to kill, strangulation, and forced sex. Isolation from friends and family,
Strangulation is one of those danger signs that Campbell pointed out in her early research, but it turns out that it is a much more significant marker than, say, a punch or a kick. Sixty percent of domestic violence victims are strangled6 at some point during the course of an abusive relationship—often repeatedly, over years—and the overwhelming majority of strangulation perpetrators are men (99%).
There are offenders who kill without any history of strangulation, just as there are those who strangle but never kill.
Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.
he believes abusers are as stuck as victims. “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.
Timothy’s tendency to fabricate stories of his own fake heroics spoke to a deep feeling of inadequacy and insecurity, and probably a clinical narcissism.
It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.
If men are taught not to cry, women are taught crying is acceptable. If men are taught anger is their sole allowable emotion, women are taught never to be angry. Men who yell are being men; women who yell are shrill or they’re drama queens or they’re hysterical. (Many before me have pointed out that there is no greater “drama” than a mass shooting, but the term “drama kings” hasn’t yet captured the popular lexicon, however accurate.)
and the law specifically said that the intervention had to be gender-based, not therapy-based.
They couldn’t just be sent to anger management. They couldn’t have a few sessions with a therapist and be done. They had to learn about gender roles and expectations as part of their curriculum; they had to study the role of gender in their own acculturation.
One day, early on, Adams told me the story of a woman who brought in a recording of her abusive husband to his group. On the tape, the husband said things like, “I wouldn’t have such anger and rage if I weren’t so crazy in love with you.” It was the first time he really heard and understood how manipulative abusers could be. How they romanticized both their abuse and their jealousy. The “I love you so much you make me this way” excuse. The “I wouldn’t do X if you didn’t do Y” rationalization. Blame and denial.
Anger management is often conflated with batterer intervention as if they are equivalent
In the early 1980s, Ellen Pence, a domestic violence advocate in Minnesota created the 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 says masculinity exacts a heavy burden on men who cannot accept feminism.
Domestic violence theory points to an abuser’s need for power and control and asks why the victim doesn’t just leave. But Websdale argues that abusers are just as vulnerable in a sense by their own inability to live without that victim. “My question isn’t ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ ” he says, “It’s ‘Why does he stay?’
In a now-famous TED talk called “Listening to Shame,” Brené Brown, who calls herself a “vulnerability researcher,” talked about the correlation of shame with violence, depression, and aggression, among others. She said shame is “organized by gender.”
Then he told me how God keeps a jar for all the crying we do in our lifetimes; our tears collected and held by Him.
Nesbitt starts in now with a Danger Assessment on Grace. Has he strangled you? Beaten you while pregnant? Does he have access to a gun? Is he a substance abuser? Is he unemployed or underemployed? Are there children in the home that aren’t his? Has he threatened to kill you? Threatened to kill himself? Threatened to hurt the children? Has he ever avoided being arrested for domestic violence? Have you left him after living together? Does he ever choke (strangle) you? Does he control all or most of your daily activities? Is he constantly jealous? Do you believe he is capable of killing you? Yes,
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“The environment we put our children in will have a profound effect on who they are when they grow up,” Martina says. “So these little boys, they may start to do this to others.”
