The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals that Protect us from Violence (28 page)

“What is the difference between you and your daughter?” I asked. Janine, who had a fast explanation for every aspect of her husband’s behavior, had no answer for her own, so I offered her one: “
The difference is that your daughter has you—and you don’t have you. If you don’t get out soon, your daughter won’t have you either
.” This was resonant to Janine because of its truth: she really didn’t have a part of herself, the self-protective part. She had come out of her own childhood with it already shaken, and her husband had beaten it out completely. She did, however, retain the instinct to protect her children, and it was for them that she was finally able to leave.

Though leaving is not an option that seems available to many battered women, I believe that
the first time a woman is hit, she is a victim and the second time, she is a volunteer
. Invariably, after a television interview or speech in which I say this, I hear from people who feel I don’t understand the dynamic of battery, that I don’t understand the “syndrome.” In fact, I have a deep and personal understanding of the syndrome, but I never pass up an opportunity to make clear that
staying is a choice
. Of those who argue that it isn’t, I ask: Is it a choice when a woman finally does leave, or is there some syndrome to explain leaving as if it too is involuntary? I believe it is critical for a woman to view staying as a choice, for only then can leaving be viewed as a choice and an option.

Also, if we dismiss the woman’s participation as being beyond choice, then what about the man? Couldn’t we point to his childhood, his insecurities, his shaky identity, his addiction to control, and say that his behavior too is determined by a syndrome and is thus beyond his choice? Every human behavior can be explained by what precedes it, but that does not excuse it, and we must hold abusive men accountable.

Whoever we may blame, there is some responsibility on both sides of the gender line, particularly if there are children involved. Both parents who participate are hurting their children terribly (the man more than the woman, but both parents). Children learn most from modeling, and as a mother accepts the blows, so likely will her daughter. As a father delivers the blows, so likely will his son.

Though I know that dedicated, constructive people want to educate the public as to why so many women stay, I want to focus on how so many women leave. Helen Keller, a woman in another type of trap said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”

▪ ▪ ▪

Many batterers control the money, allowing little access to bank accounts or even financial information. Some control the schedule, the car keys, the major purchases, the choice in clothes, the choice in friends. The batterer may be a benevolent control freak at the start of an intimate relationship, but he becomes a malevolent control freak later. And there’s another wrinkle: He gives punishment and reward unpredictably, so that any day now, any moment now, he’ll be his great old self, his honeymoon self, and this provides an ingredient that is essential to keeping the woman from leaving: hope. Does he do all this with evil design? No, it is part of his concept of how to retain love. Children who do not learn to expect and accept love in natural ways become adults who find other ways to get it.

Controlling may work for a while, even a long while, but then it begins not to work, and so he escalates. He will do anything to stay in control, but his wife is changing, and that causes him to suffer. In fact, the Buddhist definition of human suffering applies perfectly: “clinging to that which changes.” When men in these situations do not find out what is going on inside them, when they do not get counseling or therapy, it is a choice to continue using violence. Such men are taking the risk that violence will escalate to homicide, for as Carl Jung said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.”

Working closely with the Domestic Violence Council, I’ve learned that for every battered woman who makes the choice to leave, we as a society must provide a place for her to go. In Los Angeles County, where eleven million people live, there are only
420
battered women’s shelter beds! On any given night, 75 percent of those beds are occupied by children.

In Los Angeles we have a hotline that automatically connects callers to the nearest shelter. Through that number, established by Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti, battered women are taught how to get out safely. They learn to make duplicates of car keys and identification papers, how to hide these items from their husbands, how to choose the best time to run, and how not to be tracked when they escape into the modern-day underground railroad that shelters have become. I believe so strongly in the value of this hotline that my company funds it. I mention it here because every city in America needs such a number, and needs to get it prominently displayed in phone booths, phone books, gas stations, schools, and hospital emergency rooms.

An 800 number like ours, answered by people who have been there and understand the dilemma, is often more likely to be used than the alternative number (which I also recommend): 911. The reason for some women’s reluctance to call the police is eloquently expressed by the case of Nicole Brown Simpson.

In one episode not revealed during the criminal trial, Simpson pushed Nicole out of a moving car in a parking lot. A police officer who happened on the scene told Simpson, “Take your wife home.” In another incident (well after they were divorced) Simpson broke down the door into Nicole’s home. A responding police officer told Nicole his conclusion of what had happened: “No blows were thrown, he didn’t throw anything at you; we don’t have anything other than a verbal altercation.” Nicole responded correctly: “Breaking and entering, I’d call it.” “Well,” the officer countered, “it’s a little different when the two of you have a relationship; its not like he’s a burglar.” Absolutely wrong, officer. It’s very much like he’s a burglar, and it
was
breaking and entering, and trespassing. After assuring O.J. Simpson that they’d keep the incident as quiet “as legally possible,” the officers left. (By the way, the LAPD and the L.A. Sheriff’s Department are now leading the nation in new ways to manage domestic violence cases.)

Earlier I noted that America has tens of thousands of suicide prevention centers but no homicide prevention centers. Battered women’s shelters are the closest thing we have to homicide prevention centers. There are women and children in your community whose lives are in danger, who need to know how to get out, and who need a place to escape to. Los Angeles, the home city of the nation’s most notorious wife abuser, is, I am proud to say, also the city with an escape plan for battered families that other cities can use as a model.

▪ ▪ ▪

Just as there are batterers who will victimize partner after partner, so are there serial victims, women who will select more than one violent man. Given that violence is often the result of an inability to influence events in any other way, and that this is often the result of an inability or unwillingness to effectively communicate, it is interesting to consider the wide appeal of the so-called strong and silent type. The reason often cited by women for the attraction is that the silent man is mysterious, and it may be that physical strength, which in evolutionary terms brought security, now adds an element of danger. The combination means that one cannot be completely certain what this man is feeling or thinking (because he is silent), and there might be fairly high stakes (because he is strong and potentially dangerous).

I asked a friend who has often followed her attraction to the strong and silent type how long she likes men to remain silent. “About two or three weeks,” she answered, “Just long enough to get me interested. I like to be intrigued, not tricked. The tough part is finding someone who is mysterious but not secretive, strong but not scary.”

One of the most common errors in selecting a boyfriend or spouse is basing the prediction on potential. This is actually predicting what certain elements might add up to in some different context:
He isn’t working now, but he could be really successful. He’s going to be a great artist—of course he can’t paint under present circumstances. He’s a little edgy and aggressive these days, but that’s just until he gets settled
.

Listen to the words:
isn’t
working;
can’t
paint;
is
aggressive. What a person is doing now is the context for successful predictions, and marrying a man on the basis of potential, or for that matter hiring an employee solely on the basis of potential, is a sure way to interfere with intuition. That’s because the focus on potential carries our imagination to how things might be or could be and away from how they are now.

Spousal abuse is committed by people who are with remarkable frequency described by their victims as having been “the sweetest, the gentlest, the kindest, the most attentive,” etc. Indeed, many were all of these things during the selection process and often still are—between violent incidents.

But even though these men are frequently kind and gentle in the beginning, there are always warning signs. Victims, however, may not always choose to detect them. I made these points on a recent television interview, and a woman called in and said, “You’re wrong, there’s no way you can tell when a man will turn out to be violent. It just happens out of nowhere.” She went on to describe how her ex-husband, an avid collector of weapons, became possessive immediately after their marriage, made her account for all of her time, didn’t allow her to have a car, and frequently displayed jealousy.

Could these things have been warning signs?

In continuing her description of this awful man, she said, “His first wife died as a result of beatings he gave her.”

Could
that
have been a warning sign? But people don’t see the signs, maybe because our process of falling in love is in large measure the process of choosing not to see faults, and that requires some denial. This denial is doubtless necessary in a culture that glorifies the kind of romance that leads young couples to rush to get married in spite of all the reasons they shouldn’t, and 50-year-old men to follow what is euphemistically called their hearts into relationships with their young secretaries and out of relationships with their middle-aged wives. This is, frankly, the kind of romance that leads to more failed relationships than successful ones.

The way our culture pursues romance and mating is not the way of the whole world. Even here within our nation is another nation, of Native Americans, whose culture historically involved arranged marriages. The man and the woman were selected by elders, told to live together, and quite possibly without a scintilla of attraction, told to build a life together. For such relationships to succeed, the partners had to look for favorable attributes in each other. This is the exact opposite of the process most Americans use, that of
not
looking at the unfavorable attributes.

The issue of selection and choice brings to mind the important work of psychologist Nathaniel Branden, author of
Honoring the Self
. He tells of the woman who says: “I have the worst luck with men. Over and over again, I find myself in these relationships with men who are abusive. I just have the worst luck.” Luck has very little to do with it, because the glaringly common characteristic of each of this woman’s relationships is her. My observations about selection are offered to enlighten victims, not to blame them, for I don’t believe that violence is a fair penalty for bad choices. But I do believe they are choices.

Though leaving is the best response to violence, it is in trying to leave that most women get killed. This dispels a dangerous myth about spousal killings: that they happen in the heat of argument. In fact, the majority of husbands who kill their wives stalk them first, and far from the “crime of passion” that it’s so often called, killing a wife is usually a decision, not a loss of control. Those men who are the most violent are not at all carried away by fury. In fact, their heart rates actually drop and they become physiologically calmer as they become more violent.

Even the phrase “crime of passion” has contributed to our widespread misunderstanding of this violence. That phrase is not the description of a crime—
it is the description of an excuse
, a defense. Since 75 percent of spousal murders happen after the woman leaves, it is estrangement, not argument, that begets the worst violence. In the end, stalking is not just about cases of “fatal attraction”—far more often, it is about cases of fatal inaction, in which the woman stayed too long.

Of all the violence discussed in this book, spousal homicide is the most predictable, yet people are reluctant to predict it. A man in Los Angeles was recently accused of killing his wife, three of his children, and three other family members. News reporters questioning neighbors about the accused murderer were told, “He always seemed normal.” Another said, “He must be crazy,” and another said, “I can’t imagine that a father would kill his own children.” As you know, if you cannot imagine it, you cannot predict it. When will we have seen this story often enough to realize that if several members of a family are killed, it was probably done by another member of that family? In this case, the man who neighbors couldn’t imagine was responsible for the murders had already tried to kill his wife three other times. He had also been arrested twice on domestic violence charges. Sounds predictable to me.