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November 8 - November 23, 2023
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.
Michelle recanted. This is one of the most profoundly misunderstood moments in any domestic violence situation. Michelle did not recant because she was a coward, or because she believed she had overreacted, or because she believed Rocky to be any less dangerous. She did not recant because she was crazy, or because she was a drama queen, or because any of this was anything less than a matter of life and death. She did not recant because she had lied. She recanted to stay alive. She recanted to keep her children alive. Victims stay because they know that any sudden move will provoke the bear.
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“The criminal justice system,” Tenney told me, “isn’t set up for uncooperative witnesses.” And Tenney had enormous gaps in her knowledge, just as they all did then about Rocky and Michelle’s history. I’ll hear this same thing from prosecutors around the country over the years. But I’ll also hear this: murder trials happen every day in this country without victim cooperation.
Campbell’s slideshow lists grim domestic violence statistic after statistic: second leading cause of death for African American women, third leading cause of death for native women, seventh leading cause of death for Caucasian women. Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 That figure does not count children. And it does not count the abusers who kill themselves after killing their partners, murder-suicides we see daily in the newspaper. And it does not count same-sex relationships where one or the other partner might not be “out.” And it does not
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There is good news, Campbell says, and several in the room laugh, because, really, up until now it’s been pretty grim. Campbell says that states where “we have good domestic violence laws and resources” are states where both men and women, though especially men, are less likely to be killed by their partners. Yes, men. The gender distinction is where they find the causal relationship. The states with fewer men’s deaths, Campbell tells the audience, are the states with good police responses, with good laws of protection, with decent resources for victims. In other words, Campbell says, “Abused
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Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.
It is a failure to understand these critical moments in context that makes the “Why didn’t she leave?” question so maddening. 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
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An expansive book by Edward W. Gondolf that looks at the current state of batterer intervention, The Future of Batterer Programs, says essentially that we are still in an early phase of such treatment and he cautions against putting too much stock in the idea of a predictive risk assessment: “The tough question facing batterer programs, and the criminal justice field in general, is how to identify the especially dangerous men … The shift, therefore, has been from prediction to ongoing risk management that entails repeated assessments, monitoring compliance, and revising interventions along the
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Anger management is often conflated with batterer intervention as if they are equivalent—indeed courts across the country today still often sentence abusers to anger management courses, as happened with Ray Rice in 2014. After he clocked his girlfriend—now wife—in an elevator so hard he knocked her unconscious, a New Jersey judge tossed the domestic violence charges and sent him to anger management counseling.4 Such outcomes speak to a deep misunderstanding of the nature of abuse. (The NFL, despite public promises, has made almost no progress when it comes to domestic violence. In the fall of
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Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent. In a 2002 paper he cowrote with Susan Cayouette, the codirector of Emerge, on abusive intervention and prevention, he wrote, “Many batterers conduct some, if not most, of their nonfamilial relationships in a respectful manner, which indicates that they already know how to practice respectful treatment of others when they decide to.” For Adams this extreme narcissism is at the root of understanding batterers, and while we may think of narcissists as conspicuous misfits who can’t stop talking about themselves, in fact they are
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He and other researchers I spoke with often talk about our collective vision of criminals, especially murderers; how we tend to picture rageaholics when the reality is that they are impossible to divine from the general population. 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
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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.” Even in court, a detective named Robert Wile told me some years ago how he has come to understand that “the majority of [victims] who we’re going to bring into court are going to be
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Many researchers, including Websdale and Adams, also talk about the incendiary possibilities of extreme shame. 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.” For women, it’s about a competing set of expectations around family, work, relationships; for men it’s simply, “do not be perceived as … weak.” Calling shame “an epidemic in our culture,” Brown cites the research of James Mahalik at
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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. Other examples abound in the Bible. Abraham brought his son, Isaac, to the altar, prepared to sacrifice him, but God stopped him at the eleventh hour, the knife at Isaac’s throat, his arms and legs bound up. God said Abraham had passed the test, had proven his love. O’Hanlon refers to Isaiah 53:8–9: He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who
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Kit Gruelle told me this was the most significant misunderstanding about guns and domestic violence. “[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
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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? Can’t we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy?
Jimmy told me once about how he knows women want to “fix him.” That he recognizes a certain fetish women have with a survivor story, a formerly violent man who’s been reborn as a man who doesn’t fear his own vulnerabilities and feelings. Nothing sexier than a man in touch with his emotions, right? When I look at his Facebook page, I can see that he’s not lying. With every post, women are dripping with platitudes, inspired by his story of survival. He said one woman once flew across the country to meet him. And it makes me a little uncomfortable. It might even piss me off a little. Men like
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All of these critical gaps in the system often make the biggest difference between who lives and who dies—including the lack of communication between criminal and civil courts—and it still persists not only in this particular county in Massachusetts, but also in states and counties across the nation. 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. The country’s first “family court,” as it was called, began in Buffalo, New York. At the time, it seemed a great judicial innovation
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I agreed to not identify anyone from Dunne’s caseload, and not to quote any healthcare team members who are barred by HIPAA confidentiality. If a detail was part of a public record, say a police report, then I’d use that, but otherwise, the primary way I was able to include specific details from any one case was if the detail is present in multiple cases; for example, there is a case where an abuser threatened to break CDs and slit his wife’s throat with them. Seems incredibly specific, identifiable to a certain couple, but as it turns out, Dunne sees this particular threat frequently (though
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Grace mentions again the flowers he bought the next day. That’s when she got really scared. Because he’d never bought her flowers before. He didn’t apologize. But he bought her those flowers. It reminds me of a poster in Martina’s office: He beat her 150 times. She only got flowers once. The pink and white flowers are atop a casket.
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. What we might conjure, if anything at all, is a punch. Someone we’re dating, one punch, and we’d be gone. But that’s not how it happens. It evolves over time. A partner who might not like your makeup. Or a suggestive outfit. Maybe he’ll say it’s for your own protection. Then a few months later, maybe he
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For 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
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“So for the next couple years we call [the police] to do checks,” Martina says. “They question her in front of him. She doesn’t say anything.” This is the long-term fallout from a lifetime of violence directed toward you: the rewiring of a brain geared solely and entirely toward survival. A brain that reacts to being under constant attack will continue to send danger signals; increased levels of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones, contributing to a vast constellation of physical and mental health issues. Disassociation is one of the more common issues, but victims of chronic
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It’s a common argument, that if someone wants to kill, he’ll find a way. But eleven of those men said no, they wouldn’t have killed if they hadn’t had access to a gun.7 In 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.8 Similarly, Zeoli found that in California, where broader restrictions for anyone—including both life partners and dating
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Rosenthal had just finished a listening tour called Youth Leads in high schools around the United States when she met me for lunch one day to talk about the broad view of all this. The aim of the listening tour, she said, was to try to determine best practices for addressing teen dating violence. A 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control found that more than eight million girls experienced rape or intimate partner violence before the age of eighteen; for boys, the number was about half that.19 Experts across the field note that the time to address dating violence starts as young as
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Rosenthal said something surprising to me in that moment, something I’d not really quite thought about until she said it. “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.” How a matter like family
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