Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (33 page)

H
OW
C
HILDREN
L
OOK AT
T
HEIR
A
BUSIVE
F
ATHERS

In his children’s eyes, the abuser is simultaneously hated and revered. They resent his bullying and selfishness but are attracted to his charm and power. They soak up the delicious moments when he is kind and attentive, partly because they may be so few. They may have an active fantasy life about getting big enough to stand up to him, and often dream of hurting him. If he is depressed or alcoholic, they worry about him. They observe that when their father is happy peace reigns in the family and that when he is unhappy he makes everyone else miserable, too, so they invest themselves in keeping him content. These many powerful mixed feelings are confusing and uncomfortable for children.

Children also are subject to traumatic bonding with the abuser, just as their mothers are, even if he does not abuse them directly. When child protective workers or custody evaluators assess a family in which there is partner abuse, they commonly conclude that the children are highly bonded to their father—as I find in their written reports—without examining whether or not that attachment is the result of trauma and manipulation rather than of extensive positive time spent together.

The abuser shapes how the children
and the mother
see him as a parent. It is common for a partner of one of my clients to say: “He treats me terribly, but he’s a good father.” But when I then ask detailed questions about the kinds of behaviors I have reviewed in this chapter, three times out of four the woman reports multiple important problems; she just hadn’t been able to sort them out. You therefore may be finding that uncomfortable questions are arising for you about your own partner’s parenting as you read along. When you are already struggling with how you are being treated yourself, it can be painful to consider that your children may be at risk of mistreatment as well. In the pages ahead, you will find suggestions for helping your children meet their own challenges.

T
HE
A
BUSER AS
P
ARENT
P
OSTSEPARATION

What happens to the parenting of abusers when couples split up? Some abusive men simply vanish from their children’s lives, taking the attitude, “The children are her problem. If she wanted help with them, she should have treated me better. I don’t want restrictions on my freedom.” He thinks of having children as a reversible process, reminiscent of jokes about recovering one’s virginity. He may pay little or no child support, and the children may not even receive birthday cards from him.

Children may actually fare better in the long term from having the abuser drop out of their lives rather than having him continue his manipulations and divisiveness for years, but these are both poor choices. When an abusive father disappears, children feel rejected and abandoned. In one of my current cases, the child keeps insisting that the reason for the disappearance of the father is “because he didn’t like me,” although the mother tells him that isn’t so. Depending on their neighborhood or community, children also may suffer from the stigma of having a father who “ran off.”

When abusive fathers stay involved, a different set of problems typically arise. First, the mother is generally the one who ended the relationship, and abusers do not take well to being left. They may use the children as weapons to retaliate against the mother or as pawns to try to get her back. I had a client named Nate, for example, who moved into an apartment when he and his wife separated and kept his new place as dingy and depressing as possible. He threw a bare mattress on the floor, put no pictures on the walls or rugs on the floors, and acquired little other furniture, although he could have afforded to make the place look decent. When the children came to visit him on weekends, they were shocked by his living conditions. He cried in front of them about how much he missed them and their mother and how bad it felt to be alone and outside of the family. He dressed sloppily, barely combed his hair, and rarely shaved, giving himself a pathetic mien. The children were crushed and could think of nothing other than their father’s pain and loneliness. Naturally they began pressuring their mother to let him come back home.

Children can be used even more directly as weapons. A partner of one of my clients told me that she had left him about a year earlier but then got back together with him, “because he told me if I didn’t let him back in the house he was going to sexually abuse our daughter.” She had not reported this threat to a family court, because she assumed she would not be believed—family courts are widely reputed to treat women’s sexual abuse allegations with strong disbelief.

Abused women have reported to me countless ways in which their ex-partners try to hurt or control them through the children, including:

• Pumping them for information about the mother’s life, especially about new partners
  
• Returning them from visits dirty, unfed, or sleep-deprived
  
• Discussing with them the possibility of coming to live with him instead
  
• Continuing to drive wedges between them and their mother
  
• Undermining her authority by making his house a place where there are no rules or limits, permitting the children to eat whatever junk food they want, watch movies that are inappropriately violent or sexual, and ignore their homework, so that they chafe against normal discipline when they get back to her house
  
• Hurting the children psychologically, physically, or sexually in order to upset the mother
  
• Threatening to take the children away from her
  
• Seeking custody or increased visitation through the courts
  
• Insisting on taking the children for visitation only to leave them most of the time in someone else’s care, usually his mother’s or new partner’s
  

W
HY
H
E
U
SES THE
C
HILDREN AS
W
EAPONS
P
OSTSEPARATION

What is going on in the abuser’s mind as he hurts his ex-partner through the children?

1. He wants her to fail.

The last thing an abuser wants is for his partner to thrive after they split up, since that would prove that he was the problem. So he tries to make her parenting life as difficult as possible so that her life will stay stuck. She ends up feeling like she was never really permitted to leave him, feeling his presence around her all the time through his maneuvers involving the children. Many abusers cause more damage to mother-child relationships after separation than they did before.

2. He is losing most of his other avenues for getting at her.

Separation means that the abuser doesn’t get his daily opportunities to control the woman and cut her down. He may still be able to get at her through various financial dealings, and he can stalk or assault her if he is willing to risk arrest. But the children become one of his only vehicles to keep a hook into her for the long term.

3. He considers the children his personal possessions.

While the abuser may believe that the
work
of raising children is his partner’s responsibility, he assigns the
rights
regarding them to himself. He feels outraged postseparation that he is losing control not only of his ex-partner but of the children as well. This ownership mentality was illustrated neatly by a client of mine who went to court seeking sole legal custody but requesting that the mother retain physical custody; in other words, he wanted
her
to look after the child, but the right to make the decisions would be
his.
(Fortunately, his request was denied.)

An abusive father may go ballistic if his ex-partner begins a new relationship because, as clients often say to me: “I don’t want another man around
my
children.” In my experience, abused women often get involved with a more respectful man on the next go round, because their painful experience has taught them some signs of abuse to watch out for. Her children may then gravitate to the new man as if toward a magnet, thrilled to discover that they can get caring and appropriate male attention, a situation to which an abusive man may have a hostile reaction.

4. His perceptions of his ex-partner are highly distorted.

Many of my clients genuinely believe that they are doing what is best for their children by driving them away from their mother, because they have swallowed their own propaganda about how bad she is. An abuser strives to prove that his ex-partner is a poor mother by pointing to symptoms that are actually the effects that his cruelty has had on her: her depression, her emotional volatility, her difficulty managing the children’s disrespect of her. He feels that
he
needs to save them from
her,
a stark and disturbing distortion.

D
O
A
LL
A
BUSERS
H
ARM
T
HEIR
C
HILDREN
E
MOTIONALLY
P
OSTSEPARATION?

Fortunately not. I have worked with abusers who have substantially more compassion for the children than they have for their partners and who do not use them as weapons postseparation. These men tend to be:

1. The ones who behaved the most responsibly toward the children
   prior to
   separation:
   The divorced or separated abuser who is kind to the children, cares for them responsibly, and does not try to damage their relationships with their mother is a man who was also operating this way while the couple was together. He generally didn’t degrade her right in front of the children and didn’t abuse her during a pregnancy. He is usually less selfish and self-centered than the average abuser.
   The parenting of abusive men rarely improves postseparation, unlike that of some nonabusive fathers. I have had clients who put on a big show of being nicer to their children and spending more time with them
   because they were seeking custody,
   or because they were trying to turn the children against their mother. These are not genuine improvements in parenting; once their campaign is over, win or lose, they revert to their old ways. The only question about an abuser’s treatment of his children postseparation is “Will it stay the same or will it get worse?”
   
2. The ones who are not intent upon settling old scores:
   If he is willing to move on with life without having to punish you—or get back together with you—the picture for the children can brighten somewhat.
   
3. The ones who do not use the legal system to pursue custody or increased visitation:
   For a variety of reasons, many abusive men do not choose to use family courts as a venue for taking power over the woman and her children. Once the court becomes involved, the road to peace can be a long and painful one.
   

T
HE
A
BUSER IN
F
AMILY
C
OURT

I have frequently served as a custody evaluator, or
guardian ad litem.
A custody evaluator is appointed by a court to investigate the children’s circumstances in cases of divorce or separation and to make recommendations to the judge regarding custody and visitation. In my first case of this kind several years ago, a man named Kent was seeking to win custody of his three-year-old daughter from his ex-partner, Renée. Kent was in the military, so he did not have “flex-time” options; he told me that if he gained custody, his parenting plan was to put Tracy in day care forty hours a week. Tracy was currently in the full-time care of her mother. Kent was not critical of Renée’s parenting; he said simply that he wanted Tracy to live with him because he could care for her even better. More important, he was offering to allow Renée liberal visitation, whereas Renée was restricting his contact with Tracy to a set schedule. “That way Tracy could have both parents,” he said.

Kent informed me with audible outrage that Renée was accusing him of having been abusive, “but she has never provided one shred of evidence of her laughable allegations.” He then went on, in response to my detailed questions, to describe
thirteen
different occasions on which he had
physically
assaulted Renée, including repeated incidents of pushing her down and one time when he kneed her so hard in the pelvic area that she got a large dark bruise. He claimed never to have punched or slapped her; apparently this is why he considered her reports of abuse such a joke.

That isn’t all. Kent went on to tell me that he had participated only minimally in Tracy’s care during her first year of life and not dramatically more during the subsequent two years. (Most abusers in custody disputes are craftier than Kent was. His entitlement was so severe that he didn’t think I would see anything wrong with this picture.)

Why did Kent want to take a little girl out of the full-time care of a competent mother in order to put her into full-time day care? I was forced to conclude that he craved power over Renée, wanted contact with her and saw winning custody as the way to put the cards back in his hands.

Unfortunately, few custody evaluators or judges understand the nature of an abusive man’s problem. If they find him likable, they assume the abuse allegations must be greatly exaggerated. And once they adopt that stance, it can become extraordinarily difficult to get them to listen carefully to what has gone on or to investigate the evidence.

The world of family courts, where legal struggles over custody and visitation take place, is a nightmare in the lives of many thousands of abused women across the United States and Canada. A woman who has overcome so many obstacles to finally free herself from abuse can suddenly find herself jerked back into the abuser’s grip, because he is the legal father of her children and chooses to continue his abuse through the legal system.