See What You Made Me Do: The Dangers of Domestic Abuse That We Ignore, Explain Away, or Refuse to See

by Jess Hill

Men don’t abuse women because society tells them it’s okay. Men abuse women because society tells them they are entitled to be in control.

When an abusive man says he loves his new partner, he probably means it. But it’s not the kind of love nonabusive people feel—it is defined and distorted by his deeply held sense of entitlement.

I used to think I didn’t know anyone who’d been through domestic abuse. Now I know that was never true. Now I see its traces all around me.

Now many of us see just one logical binary: if your partner abuses you, you should leave. If you don’t leave, there’s obviously something wrong with you. That’s just common sense, right?

Allan Wade, who has consulted closely with Enmark, says Stockholm syndrome is “a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence” by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.20

Once intimacy is established, the perpetrator has everything he needs to hold his partner captive: trust, unique insights into her flaws and vulnerabilities, and her belief that the true him is the one she fell in love with, while the abusive him is just something to be fixed.

But it’s important to note that men with histories of intense trauma don’t necessarily start a relationship with the explicit goal of controlling their partner. Some do, but many others are terrified of being abandoned (or of being revealed as fundamentally flawed), and can be triggered into controlling and even sadistic behavior in part by the vulnerability that comes with close emotional attachment.

On average, leaving an abusive partner is estimated to take around 141 hours and cost around $18,000.48

No matter how clearly we depict what domestic abuse is like for women living underground, most people will resist understanding it.

All of them had this ethos: ‘I’m an undiscovered talent, and the world has abused me by not recognizing my great talent.’

There is no hard and fast border between these typologies. Just because a man fits a family-only batterer description now doesn’t mean he won’t develop over time into a coercive controller.

They began to formulate a theory that would apply to all abusive people, no matter their gender: namely, that domestic abuse is rooted in the entitlement some people feel over their intimate partners, a sense of entitlement that is formed by society and connected to patriarchy.

Since they’ve already been attacked, the thinking goes, they are well within their rights to strike back—either in the moment, or by devising an ever-tighter regime of control to stop their partner hurting or disrespecting them again.

The victimhood of abusive men can be astonishing.

This kind of “trauma-based entitlement” is common in people who become abusive—the notion that I had to go through so much, so fuck you, you just have to deal with whatever I do to you.

The essence of patriarchal masculinity, says Kimmel, is not that individual men feel powerful. It’s that they feel entitled to power.

Patriarchy trains into men a deep, shame-ridden urge to put women in their place, and to prevent them from exposing male tenderness.

The unifying trait among abusers is a radioactive sense of entitlement. The animating force behind their violence is the belief that their feelings are more important than those of their partners and children.

In believing themselves to be at fault, children actually create what they need in an otherwise helpless situation: a sense of agency.

In chronic abuse, incidents are just fragments: they rarely give precise shape to the whole. It’s the atmosphere victims live in that keeps them in a state of high alert.

There are many factors that differentiate the experiences of male and female victims. Primary among them is that male victims generally have the financial resources to leave, and they are not usually afraid of being killed. Nevertheless, just like women, they will hide the abuse from themselves with a set of similar rationalizations: they believe they can “fix” her, for example, and will excuse her behavior as the result of substance abuse or mental illness.

Hodgson says he spends half the time protecting his clients from perpetrators and half the time protecting them from police.

British laws regulating domestic abuse were designed to protect marriage, not women. Perpetrators of serious violence were commonly either exonerated or given a light sentence.

Revolutions are impossible until they are inevitable.