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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.
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.
In other words, it’s not that domestic violence predicts mass shootings. It’s that mass shootings, more than half the time, are domestic violence.
drilled into me. (Her class was the first place I’d ever heard the phrase.) This is part of what makes it so untenable. It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims
I came to learn that there is a high incidence of narcissism in perpetrators.
We live in a culture in which we are told our children must have a father, that a relationship is the ultimate goal, that family is the bedrock of society, that it’s better to stay and work out one’s “issues” in private than to leave and raise kids as a single mother. Michelle Monson Mosure said this over and over when she insisted to her mother that she didn’t want to raise her children in a “broken home.” As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness. The messages are insidious and they are consistent.
that we held our dogs in higher regard than we held our wives. (Pet shelters in the 1990s outnumbered domestic violence shelters by nearly three to one.
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. Sally eventually saw this up close with her own daughter, though she didn’t know at the time what she was really seeing.
Victims stay because they know that any sudden move will provoke the bear. 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.
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? No qualifiers. No musing about why she stayed or what she might appear to be doing or not doing. Just one simple question: how do we protect her?
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.
“That trauma of knowing someone you love is willing to take your last breath?” asks Gael Strack, a leading domestic violence advocate in San Diego. “How do you live with that?” Over
Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.
Look at Michelle Monson Mosure. Look at any intimate partner homicide anywhere in any given year and it will be the same: she tried every which way she could. She tried and tried, but the equation, or rather, the question, isn’t a matter of leaving or staying. It’s a matter of living or dying. They stay because they choose to live. And they die anyway. Michelle Mosure stayed for her kids and for herself. She stayed for pride and she stayed for love and she stayed for fear and she stayed for cultural and social forces far beyond her control. And her staying, to anyone trained enough to see the
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(“More women talk to their pastors than police or domestic violence advocates,” Websdale told me once.)
I’ve yet to meet any victim anywhere who doesn’t say some version of this to me: I’m not your typical victim.
What is the worst thing you ever did? What is the worst thing to happen to someone you love?
It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.
“You’ve heard the saying ‘hurt people hurt people,’ ” she says to the men gathered. “Well, I also think healed people heal people.”
“I am grateful, because I am not like you.”
fatal peril,
“Listen, man, in order for me to put my hands on her, she’s not Ashley anymore. She’s a slut. You gotta rename her, see what I’m sayin’?”
Please don’t kill me. (She says her letter was in response to one from him in which he allegedly refused to pay her child support.) He tells this story with a shake of his head, the remorse threading itself through his body language. How many women across time? I think. How many have pled this same sentence? 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.
either RSVP or ManAlive
The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming.
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?
And what strikes me immediately—in fact, deeply unsettles me in a way—is how incredibly normal they all seem. Like a bunch of guys I’d go have a beer with. They are charming. They are funny, gregarious, shy, high-strung. Good-looking or not, well-dressed or not. They are Everyman. 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. As a result, friends and acquaintances of abusers are often surprised to hear that they committed an assault. “The
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The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers. Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t lose their kids.” In fact batterers often see themselves as saviors of a sort. “They feel they’re rescuing a woman in distress. It’s another aspect of narcissism … And there’s a sense of wanting to be eternally appreciated for that.” In contrast, he said, “a lot of victims come across as messed up. Because that’s exactly the point for him: ‘I’m going to make it so
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Indeed, Gondolf’s book talks about domestic violence as a process, rather than a single incident, and yet our entire criminal justice system is set up to address incidents, not processes. This particular woman had a social work background, and I spent
Women are given the message over and over that we are the holders of the emotional life and health of the family, that the responsibility for a man to change lies, in fact, with us. “The only way that I can really describe what happened to me is like part of me, like, died, and then part of me got ignited in terms of, like, my love will heal us,” she said. “But I had to stop loving myself and only love him.” His narcissism, in other words, didn’t even allow the room for her to care for herself. She was ashamed by the turn her life and marriage had taken, so much so that she didn’t admit it to
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“If you have this outsized sense of yourself, and you suffer narcissistic injury, you’ll lash out,”
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.
study from Florida between 2008 and 2012 noted that while only about 1% of officers remained on the job following a failed drug test, and 7% remained after a theft, nearly 30% of officers with domestic violence complaints were still employed in their same positions a year later.
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
“I had to make some serious decisions,” he tells them. “Either I go and knock this motherfucker’s head off, because I had all the right reasons, you know? Do some time for the next thirty years, but it’s not a big deal. I’m a gangbanger anyway. I live comfortably in every facility, any facility. Do I kill this motherfucker or do I not do a thing?” That’s what he thinks his decision was in the moment when he received the news. Kill the guy, or not. But really, he says, he realized that wasn’t his decision at all. The decision was actually “Do I make it about me and go kill this motherfucker? Or
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Dorothy had been in and out of shelters all over New England; she’d even gone as far as Pennsylvania. And every time she eventually returned, because she couldn’t hide forever. William would never just let her go. He’d never willingly agree to a divorce. Her kids needed to be enrolled in a school no matter where she was or what she was running from. Her own family lived in Massachusetts. How could she leave her mother and her sister? Her closest network of support? She’d someday have to have a job that could cover expenses for her daughters and herself.
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.
Did Dorothy have time to remember that fateful day when she was fifteen years old and she met a boy who claimed to fall in love with her at first sight? Did she blame that young version of herself? Did she consider how her culture pushes little girls toward love, tells them love conquers all? Did she ever wonder why we don’t tell more stories of love’s defeat? I don’t believe love conquers all. So many things in this world seem more powerful than love. Duty. Rage. Fear. Violence.
The danger remains high for three months after a couple splits, dips slightly for the next nine, and drops significantly after a year.
This is top of the line: play areas are provided, security is tight, conditions are decent. And yet even at their best, shelters represent a total disruption. Still, speaking out against shelters has cast advocates like Dunne outside the mainstream. “It’s not a popular opinion to be putting forth in the domestic violence world,” she said. This despite the fact that most shelters remain chronically underfunded, opening and closing at the whim of state or county budgets, and that the evidence suggests that shelters provide victims and their families neither an easy respite nor a long-term
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Dunne, too, concedes that shelter is necessary sometimes. She described an ongoing case in which the assailant had been ordered by the court to wear a GPS bracelet so that his movements could be monitored. He failed to appear at probation for the fitting and was effectively on the run and at large; for his victim, shelter was the safest option. Often shelter can be helpful even just for a night or two to let tempers calm down. But Dunne also characterizes shelters as prisons for women, with strict rules and curfews, and says that children, removed from the familiarity of home and friends, can
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(Domestic violence didn’t become a crime in Washington, D.C., until 1991.
Anywhere from 25 to 80% of homeless women, depending upon which study is cited, have domestic violence histories.
empowerment comes with sovereignty.
“The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.” The day I attend, Dunne and Johnson have
There is almost nothing more terrifying to a child than seeing an adult—who is meant to be in control, who is meant to have all the answers—break down sobbing.
She lived with him all during that week, obeying him, listening to him, pretending it was all okay, she was okay, what he had done was okay. Her love was bigger than his violence for a long time, but this time—when he bought her flowers the next day for the first time ever—scared her just enough. She spent five days making him believe that love was still enough to forgive him (and maybe she wanted to keep on believing it, too, for another minute). She pretended to love him to stay alive and to keep her children alive. And the moment she had a window of freedom—the very next time Byron left for
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No victim of domestic violence—man or woman, adult or child—ever imagines that they’re the type of person who would wind up in such a situation. Whatever we envision when we envision a victim, there is one universal truth to each and every one of those images: none of us ever picture ourselves.
battered men, who comprise anywhere from 15% to 40% of the victims in America (depending upon which study you read6), the stigma is even greater. Men rarely seek out shelter. They rarely call law enforcement. The culture that tells women to keep the family intact, to find love and be loved at all costs, is the same culture that emasculates and shames men in abusive situations, that tells men if they are victims, it is because they are weak and not real men. It is the same culture that tells them violence is acceptable as a response to any external threat or internal pain, but tears are not. It
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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.”3
