Camille Hayes believes that before we can solve the problem of domestic violence, we have to better understand it.
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I started working in domestic violence in 2005, and spent my first year on the job with my mouth hanging open in shock. There I was, well-educated, a feminist, politically engaged, and still I found that I knew next to nothing about this huge and very scary social problem. From the moment I read my first federal report from the Department of Justice citing prevalence rates, I was floored. One in four. A quarter of American women will be battered in their lives, and that’s only the official number—the real one is higher. Why wasn’t this headline news? People were being terrorized and beaten; gunned down in broad daylight; strangled, left for dead. Where were the protesters storming Washington? Didn’t America care? WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH EVERYONE?!?
I’ve calmed down a bit since then, but eight years on I’m still dogged by that first, most basic question I asked about this issue: What the hell is wrong? It’s actually a pretty good place to start when you’re talking about domestic violence, because something is clearly wrong not just with the couples experiencing battery, but in the way we, meaning society, are responding to them. There seems to be something fundamental about the issue that we haven’t yet grasped; consequently the way we talk about it in the public sphere is sometimes confusing or seems contradictory. Domestic violence is an extremely common crime that’s seriously underreported, so a lot of what’s happening we can’t talk about in absolute terms, but only as statistical estimates. Another problem is that when domestic violence cases do make it into the news they’re often not labeled as such, so you’re left to deduce it for yourself. You learn to recognize the signs; e.g., many parental kidnappings, murder-suicides and cases of kids killing a parent have a domestic violence component, even if you have to read all the way to the end of the story to find the telling reference to restraining orders or previous arrests. The trail of domestic violence is muddied and hard to follow, which has made the anti-violence movement less effective than it might be if it were facing an adversary less covert.
However, the hard truth is that there’s a disconnect between the amount of work we put into solving this problem and the results we’re getting. We’ve built this massive retaining wall of shelters and criminal laws and advocacy organizations that do a solid job of protecting existing victims, but don’t seem to be able to change the fact that those victims just keep coming. I’ve come to believe that there’s something missing in how we have defined domestic violence. There’s a hole in our basic conceptualization, and that hole has created other holes, in our data sets and laws and intervention strategies. It’s like we have a blind spot, and the main reason the blind spot exists is that we classified domestic violence as a “women’s issue” from the start, and I don’t think that’s the best way to understand it. It’s certainly a women’s problem, in that it affects us disproportionately as victims, but seeing the issue exclusively from the victims’ perspective can only take us part way toward comprehending it—and how can you hope to change something you don’t fully comprehend?
But if domestic violence isn’t a “women’s issue,” considering how often women are victimized, then what is it? As much as anything, partner violence boils down to the psychological problems of batterers; in other words, it’s really more a men’s issue. If you look at battery statistics across all groups—gay, straight, men, women—it’s uniformly the case that men are much more likely to be the aggressors. The only group that comes close to having a victimization rate as high as straight women’s is gay men. So even when the sex of the victim changes, the sex of the likely perpetrator stays the same. Still, despite the defining role men play in this problem we haven’t managed to gather much useful information on them or their motives, because we reserve our resources and attention, and most critically our understanding, for victims. But because we don’t really understand those victims’ perpetrators, we’re fated to be eternally caught off-guard and under-prepared for the havoc they wreak.
Take the case of Jovan Belcher, the NFL player who murdered his girlfriend last December, then drove to the Kansas City Chiefs’ stadium and shot himself in the head. All I had to read was the headline of the first news story to know that this was the awful but predictable outcome of an abusive relationship. There may not be a paper trail of arrests or restraining orders to prove it, but it’s rare for incidents so catastrophic to be the first violent encounter. People went on record saying that Belcher’s relationship with his girlfriend was “strained” and that they fought. But mostly the couple’s friends expressed shock that Belcher was capable of such horror. Everyone seemed to agree that he was a quiet guy, a family man. Probably the only people in America NOT surprised when a quiet family man kills his girlfriend are domestic violence professionals. Given how common partner violence is, we shouldn’t still be so surprise when it plays out to its ultimate conclusion, but until we start to accumulate more batterer-centered knowledge, we’ll remain prone to misunderstanding and miscalculation of these highly volatile relationships.
Most of what we know about batterers we’ve learned while trying to protect their victims from them. So for example, we know things like when batterers are likely to increase their violence (e.g., during pregnancy), when they’re prone to start stalking, and when they’re most likely to kill. But here’s what we don’t know: what is it about pregnancy that drives batterers to violence? What are they trying to accomplish when they stalk their estranged partners? How are they feeling, what are they thinking? Just what on earth do they think they’re accomplishing with all this? Because batterers aren’t just violent, they aren’t just criminals, they’re also human beings who are trying very hard to do something, to solve a problem, to alleviate some internal state that’s painful for them. But they’re doing it in a way that’s incredibly destructive to their families, and to their own lives.
In abusive relationships, victims aren’t the only ones suffering. Batterers persist in their violent behavior at tremendous cost to themselves. They’re arrested, imprisoned, they lose their jobs and their homes, their families leave them. They’ll pursue violence to the point of killing their partners and themselves. And as horrible as it is to imagine, it’s not unheard of for batterers to kill their own children. To all of which I say: what the f*ck? I mean seriously, what is going on here? What’s happening in batterers’ heads that’s so terrifying, so painful, that destroying the people closest to them seems like a reasonable alternative to feeling it for one minute more? Asking that kind of question, which is a question about individual psychology, is very different from asking “At what point in the divorce proceedings is he likely to stalk her?” Batterer behavior is so deeply pathological that we will never be able to fix this mess without asking some pretty specific questions about what’s going on with them psychologically. And trying to understand their psychology means that we’ll need to find a way to have empathy for their pain, which is a pretty tall order given the nature of their crimes. But just as a practical matter, I don’t see how we can make more progress toward ending domestic violence until we gather more batterer-centered information, to fill in our knowledge gap and make the blind spot visible. This is the next task on the horizon for the anti-violence movement, and we need to get on it fast—the last thing anyone wants is more Jovan Belchers, shocking us all with their entirely predictable tragedies.
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photo: abulic_monkey / flickr
This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, at Camille Hayes’ blog Lady Troubles: www.ladytroubles.com.
Once again another article that ignores male victims.
It be that men report abuse less……Hell I didn’t even see my wife’s abuse as abuse till I opened up about it to a friend who is a social worker. My wife’s therapist suggested a police report be filled and was willing to witness my wife’s statements about the incidents made in front of her .
Hi Camille You write: Most of what we know about batterers we’ve learned while trying to protect their victims from them. So for example, we know things like when batterers are likely to increase their violence (e.g., during pregnancy), when they’re prone to start stalking, and when they’re most likely to kill. But here’s what we don’t know: what is it about pregnancy that drives batterers to violence? What are they trying to accomplish when they stalk their estranged partners? How are they feeling, what are they thinking? Just what on earth do they think they’re accomplishing with all this?… Read more »
I’m disappointed that comments went immediately to ideology instead of evidence, when it was explicitly proposed that ideology was part of the problem.
Prairie Mary
When a lot of the evidence is filtered through ideology it is somewhat hard to not bring that into the discussion.
Tamen, the real question is which ideology is this filtered though? The one that suggests all men are guilty until proven innocent? Or the one that suggests that all women are victims?
Since this is a man’s site, perhaps a man can explain.
Mary, Who died and made you PC police? Why did you shame him for his opinion? He put together a very articulate argument about what’s really happening in the legal world, and you discounted it as hogwash.
I posted the link on LISTENING to give a major hint, but obviously women need a wake-up call.
Nothing personal, but we have real issues going on with men.
Pope Joan was a legendary female pope who allegedly reigned for a few years some time during the Middle Ages. She died.
I dont understand the point of your answer????
Sorry. Wrong crowd. I’m gone.
Supertypo, I understand Mary’s answer. I’ve been listening and talking to men quite a bit. Women are very entitled today and are disrepectful to men to point that many refuse to listen. Occasionally, women need to reminded that men have opinions, brains, concerns, and hearts. If it takes a rude smack in nose from someone, then so be it. The tone of this article is inflammatory and anti-male We don’t need that, the media shaping up a witchhunt against men. That last thing we need is more anti-male DV laws. Actually we need to start redacting some of these oppressive… Read more »
why? it enriches the debate, it gives more room for understanding. We need to expand the awareness, not reducing it.
Most_123, Are you suggesting that the hostility and litigious landscape is brought to us from none other than the Feminist (anti-patriarch/anti-male) theory? How dare you question HERstory?
Women have been in a sound chamber…
https://goodmenproject.com/comment-of-the-day/its-become-obvious-how-little-men-and-women-are-actually-listening-to-each-other/
Here’s a somewhat radical thought from someone who is admittedly not a criminologist, statistician, psychologist, or feminist- It seems to me like much of the dialogue over the last twenty years has been incredibly focused on making the public at large acquiesce to a narrative that insists domestic violence is both pervasive (even ubiquitous), and, more significantly, rooted in gender (that is, to many, ‘overwhelmingly biased universal societal misogyny’). I can’t speak to the reliability, quality, or impartiality of any given statistic, so one must be inclined to give it and its proponents the benefit of the doubt. But,… Read more »
Excellent comment, especially this:
Mostly_123 and guys on this site,
Please be aware of what this hyper-vigilant environment creates. Hysteria turned into a fully comprehensive anti-male law. Please see if any women would like to volunteer their efforts to get this repealed and start doing something to help men.
H.R.11 — Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:H.R.11:
Which became Public Law 113-4 on 3/7/2013
I have three relatives with closed skull concussions in their backgrounds. ALL violent or at least hot-tempered. A cousin would wake his wife up beating her with no trigger she knew of. They had a strange look on their faces when they got that way, like being hypnotized. I was an animal control officer for five years and a few really vicious dogs got that same expression. I think it is a state of dissociation that is deep in the brain. Some restraint is missing: knocked out. No morality to it — some kind of functional loss. I read a… Read more »