Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (48 page)

R
EMEMBERING THE
C
HILDREN

Amid the screaming and insults, behind the cascade of accusations and counteraccusations, lost in our panic as we see a woman being repeatedly psychologically hammered or physically beaten, we can forget that the abuser has other victims too. The children can become invisible. The police who go on a domestic abuse call sometimes have been known to forget to even ask whether there are children in the home. These children recede into the corners, trying to keep themselves safe, and may remain unnoticed until they are old enough to try to jump in to protect their mothers.

As is true with almost every approach to abuse, we have to begin by breaking the silence. Ask the mother privately how she feels her children are being affected by the man’s behavior and by the tension it creates. Does he abuse her in front of them? How do they react? What are her concerns about them? What does she feel they need? (Remember, think
with
her, not
for
her.)

Break secrecy with the children as well. Let them know that you are aware of what is happening and that you care about their feelings. Ask:

Even if the child answers no to all of your inquiries, you have demonstrated that he or she matters to you and that you understand that the abuse—without calling it that—can be hurtful or frightening. Then leave the door open to future communication by saying: “You can tell me about your life at home any time you want. It’s okay to talk about it. Children can get upset sometimes when their parents argue.”

Notice that I recommend using soft terms that neither name abuse nor assign responsibility for it until you find out how much the child knows. This language is important to avoid alerting children to painful dynamics of which they may not be aware. This guideline should be
reversed,
however, if the child does disclose abuse directly to you or if you know that he or she has directly witnessed explicit verbal or physical abuse toward the mother. Then it becomes important
not
to use neutral terms; children of abused women already feel that they themselves and their mothers are at least partly at fault, and you do not want to reinforce those hurtful misconceptions. So once the secret is out, avoid evenhanded language such as
the problems between your parents
or
the mean things they sometimes do to each other.

Children do need to hear the following messages:

• “It’s not your fault if someone in the family says mean things or hurts someone.”
  
• “It’s not your mother’s fault if someone treats her badly.”
  
• “No one should ever blame you for being mean to you or hurting you.”
  
• “A child can’t really protect his or her mother, and it isn’t the child’s job.”
  

The term
abuse
doesn’t mean anything to children younger than ten or twelve but may be useful in speaking with teenagers. In general, descriptions work better than labels.

If the abuser is the children’s father or father figure, take particular caution not to speak badly of him as a person but only to name and criticize his
actions.
Children do not want to hear that their dad is mean, selfish, or bad. In cases where the abuser is dangerous, it is helpful to discuss the risks with the children, both to help them protect themselves and to validate their reality. However, even a violent, dangerous abuser is a human being, and children tend to be acutely tuned in to the humanity of anyone they know well. Don’t talk about him as if he were a monster. You can say, for example, “Your dad has a problem that makes him unsafe sometimes, doesn’t he?” These are terms that make sense to children.

Those community members who work with the children of abused women in a professional capacity, such as teachers, police officers, therapists, or court employees, can increase their effectiveness by being sensitive to the family dynamics that partner abuse creates and by remembering how manipulative abusers can be. Too many children of abused women are labeled “ADD” or “ADHD” and given medication instead of receiving the assistance they need. Children need us to take an interest in their predicament, help them to learn positive values, and support their crucial connection to their mothers.

I
NFLUENCING
Y
OUR
C
OMMUNITY’S
R
ESPONSE TO
A
BUSE

One-on-one approaches to overcoming abuse work well only when the wider community pulls together to create an environment in which the victims are supported and the abusers held accountable. You can play a role in making your community an abuse-free zone, a haven where abused women know that they can count on complete support and where abusers know that they will not succeed in gaining sympathy for their excuses or in avoiding the consequences of their actions.

Here are just a few of the many steps you can take:

• Offer to help your local program for abused women as a volunteer, fund-raiser, public speaker, or board member. These programs are always short of both help and funds, because the number of abused women needing assistance is so tragically high. Many programs offer free or low-cost training for volunteers.
  
• Get involved with an abuser program if there is one in your area. You can be trained to be a counselor for abusers or to be an advocate for abused women within the abuser program. Use your influence to guide the program to keep improving the support it offers abused women and their children and the quality of education and counseling it provides the abusers. If no local program exists, contact one of the abuser programs listed in “Resources” in the back of this book for guidance in starting one up.
  
• Join or start an organization devoted to education and activism regarding the abuse of women. Such groups distribute literature, hold protests, promote more effective laws, sponsor artistic projects related to domestic abuse, and take many, many other forms of courageous and creative action to end abuse. Your local program for abused women may have a “social action” or similarly named committee, but efforts to promote social change are sometimes more effective when they come out of a separate organization that is not trying simultaneously to provide services.
  
• Bring programs into your school system that teach respect and equality for females and that make children aware of relationship abuse.
  
• Join your local domestic abuse task force, or start one if none exists. An effective task force (or “roundtable”) includes representatives from as many community institutions as possible that deal with families affected by abuse. Invite therapists, clergypeople, school personnel, police, personnel from the district attorney’s office, and court personnel as well as staff from programs for abused women and for abusers. Such task forces have been multiplying rapidly over the past ten years, with countless laudable accomplishments in coordinating services, launching new programs, and educating the public.
  
• Help to get services going in your area for children of abused women, especially counseling groups. Press therapists who work with children to educate themselves on the issue of partner abuse and its effects on children who are exposed to it. Participate in public education efforts regarding the reinjuring of abused women and their children through custody and visitation litigation. For more information on all of these suggestions, see “Resources” at the back of this book.
  
• Join educational efforts in secondary schools regarding abuse in teen dating relationships, in order to stop abuse before it starts. See the section on teen issues in “Resources”.)
  
• Advocate for expanded welfare benefits and other forms of public economic support for abused women. The cuts in public assistance over the past decade have often made it much more difficult for abused women to leave their partners, especially if they have children. Women can’t leave abusive men if they are economically trapped.
  
• Protest TV and print media portrayals that glorify abuse and sexual assault or that blame victims, including news coverage.
  
• If you are a former abused woman who is no longer with her abuser, consider telling your story in public. There is a tremendous need for women who have had personal experience with abuse to go to social service agencies, schools, police departments, and other groups and help people to grasp more deeply what abuse looks like and what tremors it sends through so many lives. I have often seen professionals and other community members transformed by hearing the account of a real-life woman who has lived with psychological or physical assault.
  
• Support women who are survivors of abuse to take leadership in your community, and make sure that they are represented on all task forces and policy-making bodies addressing domestic abuse.
  

C
HANGING THE
C
ULTURE

Abuse is the product of a mentality that excuses and condones bullying and exploitation, that promotes superiority and disrespect, and that casts responsibility on to the oppressed. All efforts to end the abuse of women ultimately have to return to this question: How do we change societal values so that women’s right to live free of insults, invasion, disempowerment, and intimidation is respected?

One way is simply to declare out loud to people in your life that women
have
these rights unconditionally. Much of modern society remains regrettably unclear on this point. I still hear: “Well, he shouldn’t have called her a ‘slut,’ but she did dance all night with another man.” I hear: “He did keep hassling her at her job even when she told him to stay away, but he was
heartbroken
over their breakup.” I hear: “He did use some force in having sex with her, but she had really led him on to believe that they were going all the way that night.” You can influence your friends, your religious group, your bowling club, your relatives by having the courage to stand up and say: “Abuse of a woman is wrong—period.”

Next, put on pressure against songs, videos, “humor,” and other media that aid and abet abusers. The flood of complaints regarding Eminem’s Grammy award succeeded in pressuring CBS to run a public-service announcement about domestic abuse during the broadcast and led the Grammy’s president to read an antiviolence statement from the podium. A stream of complaints flowed into Simon & Schuster for distributing a video game in which the object was for the male character to successfully rape a female, who was a tied-up Native American woman. When the public decries the cultural agents that teach or excuse abuse, the culture receives another strong push in the right direction.

Refuse to go along with jokes that insult or degrade women. If you are a man, your refusal to fall in step with destructive jokes and comments can be especially powerful. When someone tells you, “It’s just a joke,” answer by asking, “How do you think an abuser reacts when he hears this joke? Do you think it helps him realize the harm he is doing? Or do you think that his sense of justification gets even more solid than it was?”

Encourage the women in your life—your friends, sisters, mothers, daughters—to insist on dignity and respect, to have faith in themselves, to be proud. Expect boys and men to be respectful, kind, and responsible, and don’t settle for less. Again, men have a particularly important role to play in cultural change. When a father tells his son, “I don’t want to hear you saying bad things about girls,” or “No, I’m not going to let you have a ‘boys only’ birthday party, that’s prejudiced,” the boy sits up and takes notice. The “Resources” section includes some organizations that are particularly involved in helping men take leadership against the abuse of women. Vocal leadership by men makes it much more difficult for abusers to claim that the battle over abuse is one between men and women rather than between abusers and everyone else.

Finally, promote alternatives to abuse and oppression by recognizing how intertwined different forms of abuse and mistreatment are. The opposite of arrogantly defining reality is listening respectfully to each person’s perspective. The opposite of placing yourself above other people is seeing them as equals. The opposite of establishing a hierarchy in which the top few people lounge comfortably while everyone else gets squashed is sharing resources. The opposite of madly scrambling to the top, whether it’s the top of the corporate ladder, the top of the softball league, or the top of the household pecking order, is building communities devoted to cooperation and support, where everyone wins. To consider a world without relationship abuse is to open up to even more profound possibilities, to the potential for human beings to live in harmony with each other and with their natural environment.

Anger and conflict are
not
the problem; they are normal aspects of life. Abuse doesn’t come from people’s inability to resolve conflicts but from one person’s decision to claim a higher status than another. So while it is valuable, for example, to teach nonviolent conflict-resolution skills to elementary school students—a popular initiative nowadays—such efforts contribute little by themselves to ending abuse. Teaching equality, teaching a deep respect for all human beings—these are more complicated undertakings, but they are the ones that count.

Some people may feel that I am unrealistic to believe in a world that is free of abuse. But words like
unrealistic, naive,
and
impractical
come from voices of superiority who use them as put-downs to get people to stop thinking for themselves. Abuse
does
affect us all. If you haven’t been involved with an abusive partner yourself, even if no woman that you love has ever suffered chronic mistreatment, the quality of your life is still dragged down, your horizons still circumscribed, by the existence of abuse and the culture that drives it. The voice of abuse takes so many different forms. You can hear it each time a child’s dreams are shot down by an adult who thinks he or she knows it all. It rings in the ears of anyone who has ever been ridiculed for crying. It echoes through the mind of each person who has dared to put a name to his or her own mistreatment, or to the cruelty directed toward someone else, and then has been derided with stinging words such as
sissy
or
mama’s boy
or
hysterical
or thousands of others.