Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (34 page)

The typical abusive man enters the court with self-assurance, assuming that court personnel will be malleable in his charming and manipulative hands. He typically tells lies chronically and comfortably. He looks and acts nothing like the social stereotype of an abuser and plays on the prevailing myths and prejudices concerning abuse. Imagine how Tom, the father in the scenario that opened this chapter, would appear in the courthouse; would anyone believe that he could be an abuser?

T
HE
A
BUSER’S
T
ACTICS IN
C
USTODY
D
ISPUTES

Here are just a few of the strategies an abuser tends to use in custody and visitation disputes:

Taking Advantage of His Financial Position

Most men are in a better economic position than their ex-partners for at least the first few years following separation. This imbalance is greater for abusers because they may control and manipulate the finances while the couple is together and sometimes make dramatic attempts to destroy their partner economically as the relationship dissolves. An abuser can often afford to spend a great deal more than the woman on legal expenses, or he can get himself into a nice house to sway both the children and the custody evaluator. He may be able to completely ruin his ex-partner’s financial position by dragging her back into court over and over again.

Asking for Psychological Evaluations

Most abusers do not show significant psychopathology on psychological tests, but their partners often do as a result of enduring years of abuse. The evaluating psychologist may report that the woman is depressed, hysterical, or vindictive; few evaluators take the abused woman’s actual past experience or current circumstances into account. If she reports that she is being followed, for example, because the abuser is stalking her, she is likely to be labeled “paranoid” and her reports of abuse discredited on that basis. A psychologist’s report on the abusive man may be based on a related set of misconceptions. I have read several evaluations that state that the man is unlikely to have perpetrated the reported acts of abuse because he is not mentally ill or because he doesn’t show signs of aggressiveness in the evaluator’s office. (On this erroneous basis,
most
abusive men could be declared to be victims of false accusations.) Unfortunately, many psychologists who take court appointments have been slow to accept that their standard array of theories and tests can lead to serious errors when applied to domestic-abuse cases.

Playing the Role of Peacemaker

A great number of my clients use a routine that goes like this: “There was a lot of fighting and bad feeling in our relationship, and I can understand that she is bitter about some things, but we need to put that all behind us for the good of the children. She is so focused on getting revenge against me that she is forgetting about the children’s needs. That’s why I’m asking for joint custody, so that the children would get lots of time with each of us, while she’s asking for me to have only every other Saturday.”

This piece of acting seeks to take advantage of the myth that women are more vindictive than men when relationships end (in the case of abuse, however, the reality is very much the opposite) and that men are frequently victims of false accusations of abuse by women who want to keep them away from their children. The abuser’s goal with this and all other strategies is to get court personnel to disbelieve his ex-partner and ignore any evidence she presents.

Feigning Remorse over the Abuse

A surprising number of judges and custody evaluators consider a man’s abuse of his partner irrelevant to custody and visitation decisions. They are either unaware or uninterested in the role that an abusive man plays as a role model for his children, the damage he can do to mother-child relationships, and the way he may use the children as weapons. So if an abuser says he regrets his verbal or physical assaults on the mother, that can be enough to manipulate court personnel into saying, “Let’s leave all that in the past.”

Confusing the Court with Crossaccusations

Most of my clients can lie persuasively, with soulful facial expressions, good eye contact, and colorful details. Court personnel have trouble believing that such a pleasant-seeming man could simply be inventing most or all of his accusations against the abused woman. In various cases of mine, court personnel have told me, “He accuses her of the same things, so I guess they abuse each other.” In such cases, the court may accept his counteraccusations at face value, rather than look closely at the evidence.

Accusing Her of Trying to Turn the Children Against Him

Some abusive men do not succeed in turning children against their mother, and some don’t even try. Children sometimes see the abuse for what it is and take whatever steps they can to protect themselves, each other, and their mother, including perhaps disclosing the abuser’s treatment of her (or of them) to outsiders. The abusive man’s typical response to this is to claim that the mother is turning the children against
him.
Some prominent psychologists have, unfortunately, contributed through their writings to the myth that it is unhealthy for children to distance themselves from an abusive father and that the mother is probably the cause of their desire to do so. Family courts tend to be unaware of how important it is to children not to be exposed to the negative role modeling of their abusive father and to his hostility and contempt toward their mother. Regrettably, a growing number of abusive men succeed in using such claims of “parental alienation” to win custody or ample unsupervised visitation, even in cases where there is extensive evidence that the man has abused not only the mother but the children as well.

The reality is that a mother who attempts to restrict her children’s contact with the man who abused her is generally acting as an appropriate protective parent. She is also supporting healthy
self-protective
instincts in her children; children who are not supported or encouraged in this way to protect themselves from exposure to abuse will be at greater risk for accommodating abuse by others as they go through life.

I have noticed that charges of “parental alienation” are sometimes leveled against the most competent mothers, because of their strong and supportive bonds with their children—which the abuser terms
enmeshment
or
overdependence
—and because the children have learned to see through the abuser’s facade and therefore choose to try to keep away from him.

Appealing to Popular Misconceptions

Several misleading arguments appear repeatedly in statements that abusers make during family court litigation. First is the claim that fathers are widely discriminated against by family courts in custody disputes. The research actually shows the opposite, that in fact fathers have been at a distinct advantage in custody battles in the United States since the late 1970s, when the maternal preference went out of vogue. Next often comes the myth that children of divorce fare better in joint custody, when the research shows overwhelmingly that they in fact do
worse,
except in those cases where their parents remain on good terms after the divorce and can co-parent cooperatively—which is almost impossible for a woman to do with an abusive ex-partner. Abusive men also assert falsely that there is a rampant problem of women’s false allegations of abuse, that child support obligations are unfairly high, that domestic abuse is irrelevant to custody decisions, and that men are abused in relationships just as much as women.

T
HE SUCCESS OF
these strategies relies heavily on the ignorance, and sometimes gender bias, of court personnel regarding women who disclose histories of partner abuse and on their stereotypes regarding men who are “just not the type” to be abusers. Prejudicial attitudes often take the place of careful investigation and consideration of the evidence. Unfortunately, family courts have generally not made the kinds of progress in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse that many other social institutions, such as the police and criminal courts, have (though serious work remains to be done in those arenas as well, as we see in Chapter 12).

M
IXED
S
OCIAL
M
ESSAGES TO
A
BUSED
M
OTHERS

What should a mother’s role be in protecting her children from exposure to their father’s abusiveness? Abused women can get caught in the profound societal ambivalence that exists regarding this question. While couples are together, professionals and other community members are highly critical of a mother who continues to live with an abusive man. They say things to her such as, “You are choosing your partner over your children,” or “You must not care about what things are like for them.” Child protection officials sometimes threaten to take a mother’s children away from her for “failure to protect” if she won’t leave a man who is abusing her. If she believes that the man has the potential to change, they are likely to say she is “in denial” or “unrealistic” for harboring such fantasies. These critics ignore the huge challenges she faces as a parent and how difficult it is to leave an abuser.

But when an abused mother
does
break up the relationship, society tends to do an abrupt about-face. Suddenly she hears from court officials and from other people:

In other words, a woman can be punished for exposing children to a man in one situation but then punished for
refusing to expose them to the same man
in another situation. And the second case is potentially even more dangerous than the first, because she is no longer able to keep an eye on what he does with the children or to prevent the postseparation escalation that is so common in abusive fathers.

Abused mothers are typically required by family courts across the United States and Canada to send their children on unsupervised visitation—or into custody—with their abusive fathers. When the children then begin to show predictable symptoms such as school behavior and attention problems, sleep disorders, unwillingness to respect their mother’s authority, or emotional deterioration, court personnel and court-appointed evaluators commonly declare that these are normal reactions to divorce or that the children are actually responding to their
mother’s
emotions rather than to their own. I have been involved in several cases where the abuser has physically or sexually abused the children in addition to abusing the mother, and the court
still
forced the mother to allow visitation with no professional supervision. Abused women across the continent report that it can become extraordinarily difficult to persuade the court to examine the evidence objectively once the mother has been labeled “vindictive” or “overemotional” or has been accused (however baselessly) of having influenced her children’s statements.

The treatment that protective mothers so often receive at the hands of family courts is among the most shameful secrets of modern jurisprudence.
This is the only social institution that I am aware of that so frequently
forbids mothers to protect their children from abuse.
Fortunately, over the past few years, women and men (including
many
nonabusive fathers) across the United States and Canada have been waking up to the severity of this problem with the result that there are multiple initiatives currently in motion to demand family court reform. I have been part of one such effort, assisting a well-funded organization that is preparing a human rights report for the international community on the revictimization of abused women and their children through custody and visitation litigation. (For more information, see “Battered Mothers Testimony Project” in the “Resources” section in the back of this book.)

P
REPARING FOR
C
USTODY
B
ATTLES
J
UST IN
C
ASE

If you have not experienced custody litigation, or at least not yet, please bear the following points in mind:

• It is important to keep records of your partner’s abusive behaviors toward you or the children. If he writes scary or twisted letters to you, keep them. If friends or neighbors see him mistreat you or the children, ask them to describe in writing what they witnessed. If you have ever called the police, try to get a record of the call, whether they came or not. If he leaves abusive or threatening messages on your answering machine, keep a copy on tape.
  
• Seek legal representation if you can possibly afford it. If you have no resources, apply for a legal services attorney. In choosing an attorney, try to find one who is experienced in domestic abuse and who treats abused women with patience and respect. The fact that a lawyer is well known does not mean that he or she necessarily understands the issues involved in disputing custody or visitation with an abuser.
  
• Move cautiously. Avoid abruptly denying him visitation, for example, even if you have concerns about how your children are being affected. Courts can be quick to accuse women of trying to cut the children’s father out of their lives even if she has good reason to be worried.
  
• Involve your children with a therapist if you can find a good one in your community. It is important to have professionals involved so that you are not the only one reporting the distress that your children’s relationship with their father is causing them. In situations where it is just your word against his, he may be able to charm court personnel with his skillful lying and winning manner.
  
• If one of your children discloses to you sexual abuse by their father—which is an extraordinarily upsetting experience—it is especially important that you approach the court and your local child protection agency with as calm an appearance as you possibly can. If you get labeled as “hysterical about sexual abuse,” no matter how justified your reactions, your reports may be discredited. If you are in this situation, read the excellent book
  A Mother’s Nightmare—Incest,
  listed in “Resources,” for further guidance on managing the legal system.
  
• Most abused women do succeed in keeping custody of their children. But the better you plan, the more likely you are to avoid a horrible surprise. For a free packet of information for abused women and their attorneys regarding custody and visitation litigation, call the Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody at 1–800–527–3223.