Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (40 page)

If you choose to use the police or courts for protection—or if you are cast into the legal system because of a call made by a neighbor or relative—here are some principles to tuck away in your survival kit:

•
Ask for help, ask for help, ask for help.

I can’t say it enough. Dealing with the police and courts can leave you feeling isolated, afraid, and disempowered. Some women decide, after getting a taste of this cold and sometimes hostile system, that they will never reach out for official assistance again. One antidote is to draw upon every resource available to you. Is there a program for abused women near you that provides advocates to accompany women to court? Does the county employ victim/witness advocates, and are they available at the courthouse? Is there a friend or relative who could accompany you to request a restraining order? Does your police department have a specially trained domestic-violence officer with whom you could discuss your case? Remember, anyone who specializes in “domestic violence” is there to help you deal with a scary or intimidating partner, even if he has never hit you. Involve as many of these people in your case as possible; emotional and logistical support can make an immense difference.

•
Cooperate with the prosecution unless it is too dangerous for you to do so.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that abusers who are prosecuted are more likely to stop their violence than those who are not. If your partner suddenly seems serious about changing, it is not a reason to drop legal action; on the contrary, it is another reason to
continue
it. Court involvement will help give him the structure and incentives he needs to carry through with his good intentions. Without that extra push, an abuser’s thoughts of change almost always fade with time.

Some women say to me: “But if I go forward with testifying, he is going to be furious, and then he’ll never be willing to look at his problem.” This is a common misconception: You cannot get an abuser to change by begging or pleading. The only abusers who change are the ones who become willing to accept the consequences of their actions; if he is unrelentingly angry about prosecution, you can be 100 percent sure that he wouldn’t have worked on himself anyhow. You also may be concerned that a criminal conviction will burden him with a humiliating stigma and make it harder for him to find jobs in the future. However, few employers do criminal record checks, and even fewer turn down a man because of an offense related to domestic abuse. As for the stigma, he needs it; he may seem to have snapped out of his denial for the moment, but you will be surprised by how quickly he leaps back into it once the threat of court action has passed.

•
Avoid dropping a restraining order.

Stay away from your partner until the court order expires, even if you are missing him very much and he seems like a completely different person. Courts unfortunately often develop prejudices against women who seek restraining orders and then drop them, just as police and prosecutors can look negatively upon a woman who does not want to go through with testifying. I understand the fear you may have that he will do something extreme if you don’t back off, the challenge of surviving without his financial support (especially if you have children), the pressure you may be getting from other people to give him another chance, and numerous other weights on your shoulders. But courts sometimes do not consider these issues and can be reluctant to assist a woman the next time she reaches out for help. Stick with it through the whole period unless your situation becomes too dangerous.

•
Don’t give up prematurely.

Most police departments have some officers who handle domestic abuse cases well and some who don’t, just as most courts have judges who hold abusers accountable and others who let them skate. Just because things went badly this time doesn’t mean they always will. Some abusers get sick of dealing with the legal system after awhile, and some public officials decide to finally take action if a case erupts in front of them enough times.

There are exceptions to what I have just said, however. You may know for a fact that in your community legal recourse is stacked against you. If the abuser is on the police force or has close buddies who are, calling 911 can make things worse rather than better. If the abuser is a judge—and I have talked to a few women who were in this sad circumstance—relief may not be available at the courthouse. There is a point at which it does make sense to scrap the legal system and start considering what other strategies you might try. Begin always with a call to an abuse hotline.

•
Advocate for yourself.

If the abuser is on probation, ask for a face-to-face meeting with the probation officer; it will make it harder for your partner to paint a distorted picture of you and may make the probation officer feel responsible for your safety. If the prosecutor is considering a plea bargain, demand to be included in the process of negotiation, so that your needs are considered before any deal is made. If the abuser is mandated to attend an abuser program, communicate frequently with the abuser program and make sure that they are on your side, not his. (Chapter 14 offers guidelines for determining whether or not a particular abuser program is a good one.)

T
HE LEGAL SYSTEM
cannot solve the problem of abuse by itself, but, when it is working properly it can be an important ally in defending your rights. The better that you and anyone attempting to help you understand the abuser’s tricks for turning the legal process to his advantage, the better you can pressure the system to hold him accountable.

• Abusers rarely change if they aren’t forced to suffer any consequences. A man should be required to complete an abuser program
  in conjunction with,
  not
  instead of,
  legal consequences.
  
• Many abusers see the legal system as another opportunity for manipulation. Whether or not he succeeds in that approach will depend largely on how well trained the crucial public officials are on the subject of abuse—and on how many of them think as he does.
  
• A woman who wants the legal system to help protect her rights needs to seek out assistance for herself and to be prepared to advocate for her own needs and interests. Her first call should be to a program for abused women.
  
• The legal system will tend not to contribute well to your safety unless you use it
  in conjunction with
  other self-protective steps (see “Safety Planning” in Chapter 9).
  
• Any form of physical aggression, including a push, poke, shove, or threat, is illegal in most states and provinces. You do not need to wait until you are severely injured to seek police assistance.
  
• There is no such thing as a “minor” violation of a law or a court order by an abusive man. If the legal system does not hold him accountable, he will escalate to more serious violations under the assumption that the system does not mean what it says.
  

Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand
anything,
really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.

In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to come there without his permission, they refused to leave and insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.

In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area.

The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer. He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area, he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.

One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the documentary record.

When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only grew. He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.” Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.

I
N ORDER TO
know how to foster change in abusive men, individuals and communities need to understand not only how abusive thinking
works,
which has been my focus so far, but also
where it comes from.
Overcoming the scourge of relationship abuse demands attention to the root causes of the problem.

The story I have just told is a metaphor for the childhood social process that produces an abuser. As I have explained in earlier chapters, abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with values and beliefs. Where do a boy’s values about partner relationships come from? The sources are many. The most important ones include the family he grows up in, his neighborhood, the television he watches and books he reads, jokes he hears, messages that he receives from the toys he is given, and his most influential adult role models. His role models are important not just for which behaviors they exhibit to the boy but also for which values they teach him in words and what expectations they instill in him for the future. In sum, a boy’s values develop from the full range of his experiences within his
culture.

Each boy’s socialization is unique. Even two siblings close in age do not learn identical values. Culture is thus transmitted on a
continuum.
In a culture that is fairly religious, for example, some children will grow up to be devout believers; others will reject the faith completely; and most will fall in with the average level of religious observance for their community. Where a child will land on this continuum partly depends on how strong a set of messages he or she receives from the social environment and partly on his or her personal predispositions. The family rebel, for example, might become an atheist, while the child who is most focused on pleasing the parents might become even more religious than they are.

H
OW A
B
OY
L
EARNS
A
BUSE

Children begin at a very young age—certainly by the time they are three and probably sooner—to absorb the rules and traditions of their culture. This learning continues throughout their childhood and adolescence. The family in which children grow up is usually the strongest influence, at least for their first few years, but it is only one among many. Children’s sense of proper and improper ways to behave, their moral perceptions of right and wrong, and their beliefs about sex roles are brought to them by television and videos, popular songs, children’s books, and jokes. They observe behaviors that are modeled by friends and relatives, including adults to whom they are close. They watch to see which behaviors get rewarded—by making people popular, for example—as opposed to those that are condemned. By age four or five they start to express curiosity about laws and police, both of which play an important role in shaping their moral sense. During their adolescence, young people have increasing access to the wider culture, with less and less filtering by adults, and are subject to the rapidly growing influence of their peers. Even after reaching adulthood, people continue to read the social messages that surround them in the culture and to adjust their values and beliefs in response to what is socially acceptable.

Let’s look now at how society influences the development of a boy or a young man’s attitude toward abuse. Some of what I describe here dates back many hundreds of years, while other messages are more recent arrivals on the cultural scene. I give examples from child-oriented culture, such as children’s books and movies, and others from adult culture, which trickle down to children from the models they observe of adult behavior and from what adults tell them directly about right and wrong.

•
Laws and the legal system have colluded with the abuse of women.

Until well into the 1800s, it was expressly legal for a man in the English-speaking world to physically abuse his wife. She had no recourse to the police or the courts, and, if she chose to divorce him because of his abusiveness, he was legally entitled to custody of their children. In the late nineteenth century some legal consequences were finally legislated for some of the most extreme beatings of women, but they were rarely enforced
until the 1970s
and were not enforced consistently at all until the 1990s! For hundreds and perhaps thousands of years the domestic assault of women has been considered a necessary tool for a man to maintain order and discipline in his home, to make sure that his superior intelligence rules, and to avoid the mushrooming of the hysterical, short-sighted, and naive qualities that men widely attribute to women. It was only with the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially with the work of those activists focusing specifically on battering and sexual assault, that the intimate oppression of women began to be taken seriously as a crime.

This legal history plays an important role in shaping today’s cultural views among males—and females—about the abuse of women. It is likely to take a number of generations to overcome the accumulated impact of hundreds of years of destructive social attitudes. The culture that shaped these laws, and was in turn shaped by them, is reflected in people’s continued willingness to blame women for “provoking” abuse, to feel sorry for men who face legal consequences for intimate violence, and to be highly skeptical of women’s reports of abuse. These are all attitudes that children can absorb from the behaviors and comments of the adults around them.

Children also notice responses by the legal system. A boy who grows up in a home where his father assaults his mother may observe over the years that his father never seems to get in any serious trouble, indicating to him that his father’s behavior is not viewed as wrong by the community. (In fact, any male who is older than ten or fifteen years of age today is unlikely to have ever seen his father prosecuted for domestic violence, since such prosecution was uncommon before 1990). When a woman asks me, “Why does a physically abusive man believe he can get away with it?”, I have to answer that until very recently he
could,
and even now legal consequences are less serious for men who assault partners than for those who assault strangers. This historical condoning of the physical abuse of women has also played a critical role in making it difficult to address and overcome emotional abuse, as it has created an atmosphere of impunity regarding men’s conduct in partner relationships.

•
Religious beliefs have often condoned the abuse of women.

The most influential religious scriptures in the world today, including the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and major Buddhist and Hindu writings, explicitly instruct women to submit to male domination. Genesis, for example, includes the following passage: “Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children: and thy desire
shall be
to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” I have had numerous clients over the years who explicitly rely on quotations from scripture to justify their abuse of their partners. Similarly, religious prohibitions against divorce have entrapped women in abusive marriages. The book
When Love Goes Wrong
(see “Resources”), published in 1985, describes a study of conservative Protestant clergy that reported that 21 percent said that no amount of abuse would justify a woman’s leaving her husband, and 26 percent agreed with the statement “a wife should submit to her husband and trust that God would honor her action by either stopping the abuse or giving her the strength to endure it.”

Children who are raised in a faith tradition are commonly taught that the rules of their religion are the ultimate guide to right and wrong, superior even to civil law. A boy’s early religious training can be formative in the development of his image of appropriate behaviors in intimate relationships, the status of women, and the entitlements of men. If the more destructive aspects of his religious background are the ones that are given the most emphasis in his family or community, some dangerous seeds may have been sown.

•
Popular performers both reflect and shape social attitudes.

The white rapper Eminem won a Grammy Award while I was writing this book. At the time of his award, one of his newest popular songs was “Kim,” the name of Eminem’s wife. The song begins with the singer putting his baby daughter to bed and then preparing to murder his wife for being with another man. He tells his wife, “If you move I’ll beat the shit out of you,” and informs her that he has already murdered their four-year-old son. He then tells his wife he is going to drive away with her in the car, leaving the baby at home alone, and then will bring her home dead in the trunk. Kim’s voice (as performed by Eminem) is audible off and on throughout the song, screaming with terror. At times she pleads with him not to hurt her. He describes to her how he is going to make it look as if she is the one who killed their son and that he killed her in self-defense, so that he’ll get away with it. Kim screams for help, then is audibly choked to death, as Eminem screams, “Bleed, bitch, bleed! Bleed!” The murder is followed by the sound of a body being dragged across dry leaves, thrown into the trunk of a car, and closed in.

Even more horrible than Eminem’s decision to record this song glorifying the murder of a woman and child is the fact that it did not stop him from receiving a Grammy. What is a teen boy or a young man to conclude about our culture from this award? I believe I can safely say that a singer who openly promoted the killing of Jews, or blacks, or people in wheelchairs would be considered ineligible for a Grammy. But not so, unfortunately, for encouraging the brutal and premeditated murder of one’s wife and child, complete with a plan for how to escape consequences for it.

And, unfortunately, Eminem has plenty of company. The extremely popular Guns ’n’ Roses recorded a song that goes: “I used to love her / But I had to kill her / I had to put her six feet under / And I can still hear her complain.” The singer (Axl Rose) goes on to sing that he knew he would miss her so he buried her in the backyard. This song supports a common attitude among physical abusers that women’s complaints are what provoke men to violence. Another outstanding example is the comedian Andrew Dice Clay, whose repertoire of “jokes” about the beating and sexual assault of females has filled performance halls across the country. Fans of these kinds of performers have been known to state defensively, “Come on, it’s just humor.” But humor is actually one of the powerful ways a culture passes on its values. If a man is already inclined toward abuse because of his earlier training or experience, he can find validation in such performances and distance himself even further from empathy for his partners. In one abuse case that I was involved in, the man used to play the above Guns ’n’ Roses song on the stereo repeatedly and tell his wife that this was what was going to happen to her, laughing about it. But in the context of verbal assault and physical fear that he created, what was a joke to him was a blood-curdling threat to his partner.

•
Popular plays and movies romanticize abuse of women.

Several years ago I saw the play
Frankie and Johnny Got Married
in Boston. The story line goes like this: Johnny is in love with Frankie and knows that she is the right woman for him. One evening he comes to her apartment to express his love and convince her to get involved with him. She is not interested, and tells him so. Johnny then begins a relentless pressure campaign that lasts for the remainder of the play. He criticizes her and puts her down, telling her that her fears of intimacy and commitment are the reasons why she avoids being with him. He lets her know that, whatever knowledge she may have about who she is and what she needs, his judgment is better. Frankie remains unimpressed.

So Johnny’s coercion escalates. At one point Frankie, who is exhausted after hours of this pressure, attempts to go to sleep, but Johnny blocks her path to the bedroom, grabbing her arms. She then goes to the kitchen and makes herself a sandwich, figuring that if she can’t sleep she might at least eat. It is not to be, however, because Johnny grabs the plate away from her and heaves it into the sink, sandwich and all.

Exasperated, Frankie orders Johnny to leave her apartment. He refuses. She threatens to call the police to remove him, to which he replies with words to the effect of: “Go ahead, bring them over. In an hour they will have released me, and I’ll be back on your fire escape. Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with me.”

So now that Frankie has discovered that she can’t succeed in having
any
of her rights respected at all, what happens next? Lo and behold, she has an epiphany! A life-changing breakthrough! In a flash, she overcomes her fear of deep connection—it turns out Johnny was right about her fear of intimacy as well as everything else—and she falls enraptured into his arms. Frankie and Johnny are in love.
The curtain falls.
(Presumably Frankie is now permitted to eat and sleep, though we have no way to say for sure.)

The most astounding part of the evening was still to come, however. To my amazement, the roughly two hundred and fifty well-educated, economically privileged adults who were packed into their Huntington Theater Company seats rose in a roar of delighted applause, smiling from ear to ear. Not a person in the auditorium remained seated—except me. I had been working with abusers for over five years at this point and knew perfectly well what we had been witnessing. No one else seemed to notice anything amiss in the physical grabbing, sleep and food deprivation, threats, superiority, and other forms of coercion we had just watched. Was Frankie reluctant to be with Johnny because she feared intimacy? Or could it perhaps have been because he was arrogant, coercive, and physically violent? Who
wouldn’t
fear intimacy with this bully? One ought to.