SL/RL Connections

Wow. Um, wow. Looking back at this I started commenting here pretty much right after this post and now that I’m going back and reading stuff that was put up in the past this is the first post I’m having problems with. I’m coming at this as an ally, so I’m doing my best not to be silencing, but if I am please let me know and I’ll try to fix that.

I’ll read it with that intent and please, kick me if I say something rude. I’m a complete idiot when it comes to having a good discussion and coming off like a jerk. My social skills are very retarded (in the dictionary definition) and while I do better verbally, my writing still gives me trouble. I try to phrase things with “I believe” so you understand that this is ONLY my opinion and not a reflection on you personally.

I disagree with this statement. There are many people who don’t believe that Domestic Violence is a problem. It gets minimized through victim blaming when it comes up at all.

That’s why I said “and it could be because I grew up surrounded by it”. I am aware I could be wrong, I just find it hard to believe. The fact that I have been immersed in it will skew my perceptions and I admit that.

My problem is that there is a contradiction in this statement. You don’t blame the victim, but you blame the victim for making a choice to have a partner that abuses them?

It’s not blaming the victim to acknowledge that how they feel about themselves is what keeps them in these relationships. How we feel about ourselves influences our behavior a lot. Self confidence and self worth are extremely important. If you have those things it’s a very tiny step to “hey, I don’t have to put up with this, I’m worth more”. If you don’t have it, it’s a mountain to climb. They ARE making those choices, but not because of themselves, but because of they don’t feel they deserve more. If you have choices a and b and both are awful it’s not your fault whichever you choose, you just don’t have another choice. If we can’t address the honest fact that they choose, we can’t figure out WHY they choose the way they do. Thus we don’t help the problem. The first time you get hit you are faced with choices. Those choices are already limited based on circumstance and your own feelings about yourself. When my first husband hit me, I had self confidence and courage to draw on as well as the support of my grandmother, so my choices were good ones. When some women first get hit, they may not have those things, and that limits their choices. But we cannot deny the choice is there. What is limiting their choices is a great thing, IMO, to identify and seek to fix.

Abusers get partners not because they’re abusive to start, but because they seem to be great people. In fact, if you were to check out When Love Hurts, an excellent resource on abuse, this is often something that works in their benefit in the community. If their partner were to start talking about the abuser as an abuser, they’re met with disbelief because he’s such a nice guy.

First of all, I admit I just skimmed that book, but what I see in that book it is…questionable. According to that book my husband is abusive and he’s not. I’ve lived in abuse and he is NOT it. If anyone is close to abusive in my relationship it’s me and I hope I’m not. I expect he would say so because he won’t put up with it either. Anyhow, the minute I saw it discount the violence done upon a child and how it affects you as an adult I had to stop reading. It actually made me angry, considering I had to wrestle with something quite similar as an adult. This is no reflection on you, only that I cannot put any faith in a book that discounts something so intimately connected to who you are and that I myself had to struggle with. You do what you’ve learned. If you’ve learned to respond to frustration with violence, then when you’re frustrated you do violence. This is why we stop children from throwing fits when they are angry and teach them other ways to handle that anger. So they learn the right way. If we do not teach them, then we’d see 30 year old people throwing fits in the store.

I understand the “nice” guy thing. My stepfather was viewed as such, so is one of my uncles. However, the other uncle is a well known abuser and he still gets girlfriends, as have others I’ve seen. It seems to go both ways.

This is such an oversimplification of a very difficult situation that it needs to be addressed. Yes, frequently getting women into shelters isn’t the final solution, but it is an important step.

I don’t know about shelters except what I’ve seen on tv and well, that’s tv so I take it with a tiny grain of salt. I’ve seen women get out without shelters, so that’s what I know. That makes me think that shelters aren’t as important a step.

There are also many reasons why abused women go back to abusive spouses. There are often threats of violence to other family members, or pets, or anyone that might have been left behind. There are suicide threats. There are financial reasons. Sometimes, the support just runs out as a lot of Women’s Shelters have a limited time frame with which they can keep people because of horrendous underfunding.

I never used a women’s shelter, I don’t know any woman that’s gotten out that has used one. To be honest with you, I could never attest to the effectiveness of them. I know that every woman I’ve watched return to an abusive relationship did not go back for any of those reasons. They went back with that justification. My aunt said for years that as soon as the children were grown she would leave him. The children have been grown for 5 years and she left. For 3 months. The children do not live at home, do not see their father…why did she return? Now they won’t even see her. When those..not excuses..justifications no longer apply, they still go back. That’s just one example in an entire family of them. My mother controlled all the money, my grandmother had us kids a majority of the time (until my stepfather), he couldn’t threaten any of us because my grandmother shot her first husband, she would hardly worry about shooting him (to be honest, every man in our family is scared of my grandmother on my mother’s side). Most of it is justification. Remove the justification and you get down to the true reasons. While I cannot say that’s the case for ALL women, in my experience it has been. They don’t believe they are worth more.

This is another example of victim blaming. Abuse happens because the abuser is constantly keeping the abused individual off guard and off balance by changing the rules and through outbursts of violence and aggression mixed with moments of tenderness and ‘affection.’
It’s not an “allow” situation as more as this is something intentional that the abuser develops. As you state below this line, “If the abuser can’t exert control over it, you don’t get it.” The problem is that this doesn’t happen right away, but slowly as water wears away at a coastline.

Actually that’s not accurate. Much of the abuse I’ve seen starts up quite quickly once the victim is “trapped”, ie marriage or moving in or pregnant. While I admit the off balance thing is used quite effectively as a method of control, it’s not as planned out as it seems. That kind of intentionally methodical behavior is more often seen with the higher class abusers (financially) than with those I grew up around. They require that kind of approach in order to “keep up appearances”. It gets far more complicated than that. It’s a matter of profiling different types of abusers. While you will find a few methodical types in the lower class, the majority of them are impulsive. You rarely see tenderness and affection at all in the lower class abusers. Of course, you get the few that “beg for forgiveness” but that’s not an intentional “keep them off balance” thing, that’s more of a “if she leaves me I’ll be all alone” thing. Purely selfish.

If you get a fraction of fraction of people you have still changed enough minds to make it worth while.

This is solely my opinion, but I feel in order to be the most effective, then I feel we should develop far more stringent policies. They can be counseled in prison or house lockup (without their families) or enforced removal, but to try to help them all first just leaves the women (and children) living in the situation until he either changes or establishes he won’t. Too many times I’ve seen permanent harm done in those situations. Yeah, they can be good for a few weeks, but one day it’s back to that behavior and it only takes one time to kill someone.

This is a very true statement. Men can be the subject of Domestice Abuse. However, when compared to the rates with women it’s a way smaller fraction.
Also, men tend to be more financially stable and able to leave relationships.
Also, men tend to get injured at a far lower rate then women do when dealing with Domestic Abuse.
Also, men tend to call the police more frequently and tend to make sure charges are laid.
Why is this? I blame the patriarchy
Domestic Violence against women is such a larger issue that you do have to focus on that, while acknowledging the issue of Domestic Violence against men.

I feel that is unfair and sexist. Domestic violence should be focused on its entirety. All abused people deserve help and to say that women deserve more focus than men seems rather mean and serves to silence male victims (I do not mean that is your intent, only how it sounds). All victims should be equal. Just because they aren’t the majority doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a voice. There are more men than we know of living in an abusive situation because they will be seen as “not a man” or “weak” because a woman hits them, therefore they don’t report it in order to not be demeaned. Because of this, by focusing on women we are allowing these men to continue to suffer.
This is a sexist thing, since 1. a woman hits her abuser back and she’s “taking control” , if a man does it he hit a woman and he’s awful 2. since women are smaller and weaker, they deserve the right to fight back but men are stronger so they don’t (a statement so full of sexism I don’t know where to begin). We are contributing to their situation. I believe that any victim is allowed to fight back regardless of sex and that it is our responsibility to change the minds of those that feel that men are “weak” or “not man enough” so that NO abuse victim continues suffering. Otherwise we aren’t tackling domestic abuse, we’re only tackling female abuse.

But to answer your question, activism in any capacity is still an effort to try to change the minds of people around you. If you can change one or two of them, then you’re on your way to changing the world one teaspoon at a time.

I don’t know, I think awareness should be secondary to policy changes. The current way we handle abusive calls is to go out, maybe arrest someone overnight and IF she files charges he gets in trouble (briefly). Why not after x amount of calls, he goes to jail no matter what they both say? Obviously he’s a repeat offender. I mean, you ask most people to vote for a law that would make abusers go to jail after x domestic calls for a year or some such, I don’t think awareness would be needed. Most decent people could get behind that. However, I’ll admit there could be something I’m not considering in that idea.

Other references
Why Does He Do That which has a creepy spot where the doctor shows a group of abusive men he is counseling a sketch they are working on for a project and they provide information on how he can be more intimidating. It totally blew the whole, “He’s angry and doesn’t know what he’s doing” myth right out of the water for me.

That’s not entirely a myth. It depends on the abuser. Remember I stated that I was an unintentional abuser. I didn’t know what I was doing was abuse and was simply what I learned of how to handle things. It took a lot of therapy for me to see what I was doing as abusive and retrain my initial reactions from abusive ones to the right ones. However, I see what you’re saying and I appreciate you pointing me to that book. It looks like a good read, and I’m ordering it.

I have to admit, I generally discount books on domestic violence. They are rarely written by a victim and many of them completely deviate from my entire life experience, leaving me very little faith in them. For me, nothing can measure against the inner knowledge that comes with having lived with it. Things are both more simple and more complicated than those who write the books know. It’s like going to another country, sure you can speak the language, but you don’t know the culture in a way that the person who lives there does.