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May 19 - July 5, 2024
In so many cases, including hers, we mistake what we see from the outside as her choosing to stay with an abuser, when in fact it’s we who don’t recognize what a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving actually looks like.
(Pet shelters in the 1990s outnumbered domestic violence shelters by nearly three to one.21)
“We don’t say to bank presidents after a bank’s been robbed, ‘You need to move this bank.’
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.
that victims often side with their abusers publicly, to family, to police, to prosecutors. Because long after the police leave, even after charges are filed and a sentence meted out, it is with the abuser that a victim must continually negotiate her life.
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.
Her response was autonomic: fight or flight? What do you do if a bear is coming at you? Do you rear up and scream to make yourself big or do you play dead? You certainly don’t sit and consider the wildlife protection services that might be available to you if the bear would only give you a little time to gather yourself together.
Why victims stay isn’t the question we need to be asking. Rather, I think a better question is: how do we protect this person?
Originally written to help healthcare workers identify potential victims of domestic violence in emergency rooms, the Danger Assessment is probably the single most important tool used in intimate partner assault, treatment, and awareness today. How a victim answers the questions on any given Danger Assessment will determine what comes next: whether a perpetrator is arrested, tried, found guilty, and whether a victim will press charges, be taken to a shelter, walked through the court system.
Strangulation turned out to dramatically increase the chances of domestic violence homicide. But only 15% of the victims in the study turned out to have injuries visible enough to photograph for the police reports. As a result, the officers often downplayed the incidents, listing injuries like “redness, cuts, scratches or abrasions to the neck.”
many victims spend their lives grappling with the consequences of an unseen, undiagnosed, untreated, unsupported injury in which the narrative almost inevitably turns hostile—that they are crazy, or somehow they are to blame.
the poor recall, the recanting, the changing details, along with other markers, like anxiety, hypervigilance, and headaches, can all be signs of TBI.
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.
Fatality reviews act, then, in much the same way an NTSB investigation is run. Team members build a timeline of a case, gather as much information as they can about the victim and the perpetrator and gradually try to look for moments where system players could have intervened and didn’t or could have intervened differently.
Why is it not okay that he filmed her over and over and over in her underwear? Because she asked him to stop. And he didn’t. And eventually she gave up asking. This is loss of power at its most elemental.
The world blasts you with some unpredictable horror and then what? No one escapes the blast. If you’re someone like Jimmy, you get mean. And the meanness means you get blasted again, because you’re daring the forces around you to do it again. Go ahead. I can take it. I’m tough. I’m a fucking man. And it works. The angrier you get, the more things happen to you. The more things happen to you, the angrier you get. A real-life infinity symbol.
men are taught violence, but they are not taught intimacy.
It is men who are violent. It is men who perpetrate the majority of the world’s violence, whether that violence is domestic abuse or war. Even those relatively few women who are violent, he says, are most often violent in response to men’s violence. Indeed, this is the single most effective argument I know for why it doesn’t make sense to arm women with guns to protect them against men with guns: because arming a woman with a gun is asking her to behave like a man, to embody the somatic and psychological and cultural experience of a man while simultaneously quelling all that women have been
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I asked her why RSVP hadn’t migrated to other prisons, she told me that unlike a lot of other prison populations, violent men just don’t have their own “champion.”
But the most prominent voices around domestic violence are the survivors who, naturally, prioritize their own needs over abusers’.
looking to the future rather than just surviving the present was a whole different way of moving through the world.
Women around the world, in a thousand languages, across the centuries, the span of human existence. Please don’t kill me. See how polite we women are? We say “please” when we’re begging for our lives.
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.” If it takes the average victim seven or eight times to leave an abuser, why do we expect offenders to get it right the first time?
Over and over, the men talk about how their mothers had provoked their fathers. When I speak to Adams later about it, he isn’t at all surprised that the men excused and contextualized the bad behavior of their fathers, while demonizing their mothers.
Victims’ lives are messy. Often they are substance abusers, or they live in extreme poverty. Many have suffered traumatic, abusive childhoods. Such cases are the most difficult to prosecute, not least because the victims can be unreliable witnesses. “This is why batterers are so often able to fool the system,” one domestic violence advocate told me. “They’re so charming, and the victim comes off as very negative.”
Like many children who grow up in homes with domestic violence—verbal or physical—O’Hanlon did not describe his father as violent. O’Hanlon fit the mold of the men I’d seen in David Adams’s group the night they discussed their fathers. He downplayed the violence of his father and talked more often about his mother’s behavior. “My mother was no angel,” he told me. “If she had been less provocative, more respectful of his position as a husband …”
He cites the knife incident as proof that his father wasn’t abusive. “Another [more] violent man would have used that knife,”
It appears that in both cases—and many others—the wives had no idea of the financial ruin facing their families. Such secrets are another hallmark of these killers, Websdale said. “I’m astounded at the level of secrecy in these men’s lives.”
A third of women in the United States today live with guns in their homes, yet fewer than 20% say those guns make them feel safer,
intimate partner homicide decreased by 25% in cities where the restraining order laws were clear and enforced.
Guns] increase women’s danger exponentially,” she told me. “Until a gun comes into the relationship, she still feels like she has some capacity to deal with what’s going on, whether it’s to run, to lock the bedroom door, or whatever.”21 The pro-gun argument that asks women to arm themselves is asking them to behave as their abusers behave, Gruelle notes. Such views have conscripted the narrative, putting the blame on victims for not doing all they could to protect themselves.
“It’s not a character flaw if [women] don’t have a natural tendency to turn and fire on the father of [their] children,”
It’s that thing, right, where men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn’t extend to their partners. This view has always sat uncomfortably with me; must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else’s mean something?
Years later, when she did finally work up the courage to leave him, she said people told her she was “giving up” on him. She felt a lot of guilt,
The very fact that intimate partner violence is so often addressed in civil court, rather than criminal court, gives insight into how we as a society still view it.
Dunne was able to explain how victims who appear hostile and show solidarity with their abusers when the police show up are often taking a safety measure, sending a message not to police but to their abusers. See my loyalty? Please don’t kill me when the cops leave.
Kelly Dunne once told me the “dirty little secret” of shelter was that it was a “ticket to welfare.” If a woman needed shelter and the closest bed was across the state, she had to take it immediately, even if that meant leaving a job or a kid’s school and friends behind.
Imagine any other crime where the impetus for change, and the loss of civil liberties, lies with the victim,
“If you care about the long-term health of a victim, not having them killed is not enough,” Dunne says. “When that offender goes to jail, her physical safety may be okay, but her life might unravel [with] the loss of support. You have to restore that victim back to the state they were in before that violence occurred.”
The first is to try to charge an abuser with as many allegations as possible in order to negotiate some kind of plea deal, even beyond the violent incident. Are there possible drug charges? Is there an illegal weapon or firearm in the house? This also offers a better chance that at least some of the charges might stick. The other element Wile is referencing is called evidence-based prosecution. Meaning “evidence” rather than “witness” based. A prosecutor can offer up enough evidence in court that a witness wouldn’t have to come and testify in front of her abuser. Such evidence may include
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He came to fervently believe that if we could prosecute murderers without a victim’s cooperation, we could prosecute batterers.
The orders of protection they do here are all civil. Unlike High Risk Teams, or larger community coordinated responses, they focus on the very short term—just days, usually—in the hopes of getting a victim to a place where he or she can make clear-headed decisions for the longer term.
Natalia Otero, the cofounder of DC Safe, along with Elizabeth Olds, told me that in the throes of a crisis, victims are not in a position to make the kinds of informed decisions they often need to make to ensure their safety.
the biggest difference she sees when a victim has basic needs met for a day or two or a week is “their level of competence. They’re in such a better position to make longer-term decisions.”
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.8 Similarly, Zeoli found that in California, where broader restrictions for anyone—including both life partners and dating partners (California calls it closing the “boyfriend loophole”)—convicted of a violent misdemeanor had to relinquish guns, there was an astonishing 23% drop in domestic violence homicides.
“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 struck me how often I came upon such seemingly small changes that wound up making the difference between life and death, between a good decision and a bad one. A bag of diapers and grocery money, a laminated order of protection rather than paper, an afternoon court time rather than early morning, visiting a victim’s house rather than waiting for a visit,
disrupt it in the misdemeanor phase before it becomes something bigger.
But my philosophy, having written it now, is that we ought to try everything, every idea, all of it, leaving nothing off the table, because this problem is so enormous, and lives so fragile, that we simply cannot afford to lose any more—not more time, and certainly not more lives.
