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January 17 - January 20, 2020
all shared a common privation, what domestic violence victims across the world lacked: agency in their own lives.
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.
“Most tactics used in coercive control have no legal standing, are rarely identified with abuse and are almost never targeted by intervention.”
The abuser has, over the years, slowly cut off whatever escape routes—family, friends, community—may have once existed for them. And ultimately, coercive control is about stealing someone’s freedom entirely.
And so the entirety of her professional life has been learning what to ask.
Suddenly, Campbell could quantify what had been largely theory until then: that the single biggest risk for domestic homicide, for example, is the prior incidence of domestic violence.
Over the years, Campbell eventually identified twenty-two high risk factors that, when put together in an almost endless series of combinations, portended a potential homicide. Some of the risk factors were broad: substance abuse, gun ownership, extreme jealousy. Others were more specific: threats to kill, strangulation, and forced sex. Isolation from friends and family, a child from a different biological parent in the home, an abuser’s threat of suicide or violence during pregnancy, and stalking all added lethality. Access to a gun, drug or alcohol abuse, and controlling daily activities are
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Like so many others in the field, they asked themselves what they’d missed.
“Statistically we know now that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide,” says Sylvia Vella, a clinician and a detective with the San Diego Police Department in the domestic violence unit at the San Diego Family Justice Center. “They don’t go backwards.”
What researchers have learned from combat soldiers and football players and car accident victims is only now making its way into the domestic violence community: that the poor recall, the recanting, the changing details, along with other markers, like anxiety, hypervigilance, and headaches, can all be signs of TBI.
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.
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.
She knows it’s a battle she’ll never win in this state, but that doesn’t deter her from fighting it.
“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.
but they were all also fighting the same systems with their other priorities, and with racism and classism embedded into their architecture, with limited resources and limitless need.
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 no one wants you.’ ”
One of the questions that is so difficult to really explain is how abuse slowly erodes a person, how often survivors talk about emotional abuse being so much worse than physical abuse.
all other forms of homicide steadily declined over the past several decades in the United States, familicide appears to be on the rise.
At the same time, I am living and reporting in a country in which the media is deemed an “enemy of the people” by its commander in chief. We are insulted, threatened, sued (and, yes, even killed) for the work we do, and so such decisions cannot be made lightly. Admittedly, one also does not want to run afoul of a person who has killed his whole family.
“What we miss in the ‘he just snaps’ theory is the accumulation of emotional repression,”
They’re often religious compared to the general population, with a fundamentalist outlook, and they can be rigidly constrained in their emotional range, all of which fit with Patrick O’Hanlon.
“I think there is a definitely a relationship between unemployment and the DOW and the familicide rate, particularly with civil reputable offenders,” Websdale says. “I would describe it as a lag inverse relationship.”
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 today’s interpretation of Christianity, God literally sacrifices his own son, the ultimate filicide, so that the world can be saved. The Romans may have committed the act of putting Jesus on the cross, but it was all part of God’s master plan.
In a religion in which family killing is not only rationalized, but also celebrated as the ultimate form of love, devotion, and faith, perhaps the connection is not a stretch today. O’Hanlon himself says it took three lives to save his: Jesus Christ, Dawn O’Hanlon, and April O’Hanlon.
One of the first questions I ever asked O’Hanlon was whether or not he thought he was going to heaven. “Absolutely,” he said. Dawn and April, of course, were already there. 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. He paused a moment, then said, “I think when I go to heaven, I’ll be welcomed with open arms.”
