A blueprint for creating a culture of respect.
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The numbers cited in a recent Huffington Post article are staggering—as staggering as the searing pain of an unexpected hook to the jaw, the shock of having your back slammed against a wall, or the terror of your partner’s hands tightening around your neck and choking off your breathing.
We may be trying to end domestic violence in the U.S., but we’re failing—miserably.
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I purposely put the chart with all the numbers at the end of this article. But I’ll share two shocking statistics here.
1. 60% of Americans know a survivor of domestic violence.
2. One in three women (30%), and one in seven men (14%) report living with intimate violence.
That’s 22% of American adults—or about 60 million people who live with violence in their homes. If 60 million or 50 million or 40 million or 20 million or even five million Americans were suffering from a life-threatening but preventable disease, we’d be massively mobilized to find a cure. And yet …
And yet … the “No More” study commissioned by the Avon Foundation for Women that underlies the HuffPo article found that “There is basically no discussion about domestic violence taking place in this country.”
Meaning, we’re not even talking about a problem that directly affects a quarter of our population and has touched more than half. The Avon study reveals that:
2 out of 3 Americans (67%) have NOT talked about domestic violence with their friends.
– 75% of men have not talked about it with their friends.
– Nearly 60% of women have not talked about it with their friends.
– More than half (57%) of Americans say they have never had a conversation about domestic violence or sexual assault with their friends.
Oh, there’s lip service on Facebook and other social media channels; there are sites and support groups for survivors; and there are law enforcement officers and EMTs and doctors and, unfortunately, also morticians and funeral home directors who all get involved after the fact.
We’re almost as terrified of this conversation as the woman who hides in the bushes when her husband storms out of the house after her … but no, not quite.
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The Avon study concludes the obvious, that talking about something helps us do something about it, but it stops there and doesn’t tell us how to have the conversation, which frankly is a conversation we’re terrified of having. We’re almost as terrified of this conversation as the woman who hides in the bushes when her husband storms out of the house after her, or the man who cowers at the bottom of the stairs as his wife hurls down everything in sight, or the child who sees the bottle on the table and knows the belt is coming. Almost as terrified, but no, not quite.
The HuffPo article suggests that “The solution lies in dismantling cultural entitlements to violence, confronting victim blaming, teaching people why domestic and sexualized violence are not inevitable and giving them the tools to intervene.”
True, but none of that is happening. It’s not happening because collectively, as a country, we suck at ending domestic violence. And it’s not because we don’t care. We suck for the seven real reasons below, and because we haven’t developed a blueprint for building the culture of respect we need to stop domestic violence before it starts.
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1. We stereotype both perpetrators and survivors of domestic violence as “the other” instead of ourselves.
Domestic violence is not specific to sex, race, social class, or income level. How could it be if so much of the population is affected? No, it’s everywhere, and yet we continue to treat our neighbors who live with domestic violence as the anomaly and not the rule.
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People who do this stuff are stupid assholes, right? Mean men with big biceps and ugly tattoos. Callous jerks who smoke and drink and cuss and talk about pussy all day and call women “pretty little things.” Leeches who have no stable work. Grown-up boys who were juvenile delinquents. Idiots who get caught and arrested and sent to jail for their crimes. We mostly leave out women as perpetrators, while we pathologize them in the victim role as dumb, uneducated girls who made bad choices or got in with the wrong crowd. But women are violent, too, and many smart, educated, professional women are domestic violence survivors. So think again. Domestic violence is not specific to sex, race, social class, or income level. How could it be if so much of the population is affected? No, it’s everywhere, and yet we continue to treat our neighbors who live with domestic violence as the anomaly and not the rule. Twenty-two percent of the population is not an anomaly. It’s enough people to decide an election. Clearly, our view of domestic violence and who the people involved on either side of it really are doesn’t add up.
2. We live in a culture of entitlement to violence.
Every relationship we have in our life constitutes a responsibility and an implicit agreement to treat another human being with respect, even when they’re wrong, even when they disappoint us.
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I often say to friends that I am continually amazed at the horrible things people feel they have a right to do to each other because they are in a relationship—an intimate partnership, a parent-child relationship, even an employer-employee relationship. Most perpetrators of violence don’t feel the need to justify violent conduct. Entitlement is self-righteous and therefore self-justifying. The truth is, we’re not entitled to anything. Every relationship we have in our life constitutes a responsibility and an implicit agreement to treat another human being with respect, even when they’re wrong, even when they disappoint us. And every relationship gives us the right to demand better treatment or walk away and terminate it when a partner violates the agreement through disrespect. Entitled violent abusers rely on two deeply pervasive beliefs to support their actions. First, they believe the relationship gives them the right to punish their partners for what they see as transgressions, when in fact no adult has the right to punish another—except within the confines of the justice system, which is the last place they want to be. Second, they convince themselves that the person they’re hurting deserves to be hurt, that they’re only doing what “has to be done,” that they are “stepping up to the plate” when in fact they are abandoning the table. The time has come to call out these lies and eliminate them from our cultural lexicon.
3. We blame men in disproportionate numbers for domestic violence by stereotyping them as the aggressors and because their superior physical strength in fights results in more women being injured.
If we train men to feel outrage when they are dissed or crossed, we’re creating dangerous triggers and sanctioning rage as a response.
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Bear with me on this one. I’m not giving men a free pass, and some men are just violent. But many men who strike their partners are themselves surprised and horrified at how it could happen and afterwards sincerely apologetic, though also unaware of the series of events inside their heads that led them to use their fists. Here’s what’s happening. Men are wired to lead, to be in charge. And this is a good thing. We need leaders. Women are equally capable of leadership and often lead in more persuasive and less argumentative ways, but that’s a different subject. Men are also inundated with messages about how to handle insurrection, to respond with force when someone disobeys and treats them with real or perceived disrespect. Then there is the message that failure to “control your woman” diminishes your manhood. When a woman expresses a contrary opinion, men are conditioned to clamp down rather than speak up and participate in a discussion; when a woman disagrees, men are trained to put down the insubordination rather than question the validity of their orders; and when men feel attacked, they are trained to counterattack rather than try to make peace. These methods may work in the military, but relationships aren’t war. (While we’re at it, can we please retire the phrase “battle of the sexes”?) The result of all this brainwashing is what I call the four Ds: men become detached from their feelings, disempowered as communicators, demonized as lacking understanding, and ultimately dependent on force to accomplish their objectives. If we train men to feel outrage when they are dissed or crossed, we’re creating dangerous triggers and sanctioning rage as a response. True understanding requires humility—something our culture too often equates with weakness. True understanding requires the ability to accept that we may be wrong and that being wrong doesn’t diminish or humiliate us. On the contrary, learning from being wrong makes us and our relationships stronger. The fact is, being wrong is an inevitable outcome of being in a relationship. No two people are going to agree on everything, and someone will be wrong at least some of the time.
4. We give a ton of lip service to stopping domestic violence, which is tantamount to remaining silent.
Statistically, there are people in your friend pool for whom domestic violence is personal, but they’re not likely to come forward on Facebook and discuss their experiences in a comment on your post.
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Facebook has thriving communities of both female and male abuse survivors, where the information posted is helpful and empowering and the participants serve as crucial sources of encouragement and support. Some of the messages, particularly those on posters, are extremely compelling and get posted in turn on personal pages by people I will call sharers. Sharers share messages to get the word out but also to settle their own anxiety and frustration—often a substitute for actually doing something proactive. We feel even better when friends echo our sentiment and in turn share our message. Ah, there. News flash: There’s nothing wrong with sharing a message about domestic violence in your feed, but ask yourself honestly, who are you impacting? Statistically, there are people in your friend pool for whom domestic violence is personal, but they’re not likely to come forward on Facebook and discuss their experiences in a comment on your post. Sharers are carers, but sharers, you need to become darers or barers—by daring to reach out directly and privately to someone who needs help or by baring your own story if you have one. Neither action is easy. The shame and humiliation attached to victims of domestic violence are the primary cause of silence; shame and humiliation that flow from the pathetic misbeliefs that they somehow brought it on themselves by choosing to be with a violent person or didn’t do enough to stop it or didn’t walk away soon enough. If you haven’t stood in a survivor’s shoes, don’t pretend to know what their life is about. You don’t know. And you don’t want to know it firsthand. One of my goals is to create both a body of literature and a public forum for real stories, and if you’re interested in helping, please email me at [email protected].
5. We take an after-the-fact approach to the problem.
No one takes an anger management class just for the heck of it; this only happens after someone’s gotten angry enough to hurt someone else.
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It’s not just that we treat the symptoms and fail to cure the disease, a disease that is rooted in our culture. We do engage in attempts to prevent domestic violence. But even our preventive actions tend to be post-incident. No one takes an anger management class just for the heck of it; this only happens after someone’s gotten angry enough to hurt someone else. Restraining and protective orders are granted by the courts after a violent incident, and while these clearly can’t be implemented in the absence of an incident, few people are trained to recognize the warning signs and hear the ticking time bomb in a relationship that is about to explode into violence. A survivor may say it came out of nowhere, but it didn’t. It was triggered. And the genesis of the trigger is the culture of disrespect that must be dismantled and dispensed with—in our parenting, in our schools, in our role models, and in our media. It’s not enough to declare war on domestic violence and blast the Internet with public service videos. Relationships are gardens anyway, not battlefields. We have to get down on our hands and knees and dig deep and root out the causes of domestic violence. As a nation, we must plant seeds through universal education on domestic violence and train our youth by staking respect in our schools. We must exhort and apply pressure on our media outlets to stop poisoning our fields by treating violence as a solution to problems on television, in movies, and in games, where its ubiquitous presence suggests its necessity. And we must ensure through individual and collective efforts that people of note who engage in violence feel the full force of the public’s rebuke, that they lose the privilege of celebrity and their stature as role models, and that domestic violence becomes the misstep that will inevitably and irreparably destroy a career.
6. We may say we have a zero-tolerance policy for domestic violence, but we are lying; our tolerance for it is enormous.
We need to call the police when we hear the couple next door fighting, to ask the woman whose date pounds his fist on the table if she needs a ride home, to contact family services if we suspect a child is being beaten, to get involved and stay involved and turn the tables on fear.
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The UK’s population is about one-fifth of the U.S. So how is it that they have only 5% of our number of murders, and only 10% of our murders by firearms? One could reasonably conclude that the UK has a primarily non-violent culture, a culture in which violence is the exception, not the norm. Here it’s different. Violence is everywhere. And to stop it in our homes, we need to get our hands dirty. We’re all accountable for what we tolerate collectively, and responsibility starts with the individual. We need, as individuals, to stand up when we see disrespect, to say something and do something, to call the police when we hear the couple next door fighting, to ask the woman whose date pounds his fist on the table if she needs a ride home, to contact family services if we suspect a child is being beaten, to get involved and stay involved and turn the tables on fear. Sure, it’s scary to take a stand, and I’m not suggesting we risk our own lives in the presence of armed and dangerous people. But imagine a day when instead of getting a slap on the back, the guy in the bar who tells his friends he showed his wife who’s boss is counseled to stop or shunned; when a woman who hurls household objects at her partner is seen as dangerously violent, not just overly emotional; when instead of a bystander being afraid to speak up or act when witnessing violence, people are actually afraid to be violent because of the swift and decisive response their violence will bring. Zero means zero, and while we may never get there, we can get a lot closer than we are now.
7. We need to advance alternative methods of dispute resolution.
We need to model non-violence to our children and make it clear that violence is never the answer, that violence in the home is not a private right but a public menace.
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Violence is a tool of war, and we can’t declare war on war. We can only resolve war with peace. Returning to the importance of a culture of respect, we need to show people everywhere they turn how the disputes, arguments, and conflicts within relationships can be addressed and resolved effectively with non-violent means. We need to model non-violence to our children and make it clear that violence is never the answer, that violence in the home is not a private right but a public menace. We need to build new, less competitive social structures that emphasize the value of cooperation and the virtue of conciliation. We need to reward humility instead of aggression and greed. We need to remove the winner-loser dynamic from relationships. We need to remove contempt and snark from our daily diet. And we need to develop new definitions of strength, of courage, and ultimately of leadership. A leader carries water for his troops. He doesn’t dump it on their heads in rage. People are getting hurt every day by domestic violence. People are dying. Someone you know is suffering. If we want to stop sucking at this, we have to act. And we have to act now.
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Here is a selection of statistics from the Avon study, as presented by The Huffington Post.
22 percent of Americans report being victims of domestic violence; that’s one in three women (30 percent), one in seven men (14 percent). Almost twice as many women as men report being a victim of domestic violence. In total, 54 million Americans are victims of domestic violence.
13 percent of Americans report being victims of sexual assault. That’s 20 percent of women, 6 percent of men or 32 million people.
60 percent of Americans know a victim of domestic violence or sexual assault
“Only 15 percent think it is a problem among their friends.”
73 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 said that they have not talked with them about domestic violence or sexual assault
67 percent of Americans “have not talked about domestic violence with their friends.”
73 percent “have not discussed sexual assault with their friends.”
Even though 75 percent of Americans say that they would step in and help a stranger being abused, the reality is most people do not help.
Of the 70 percent of women who’ve experienced domestic violence and then told someone about it, 58 percent said that no one helped them.
64 percent of Americans say if we talk more about domestic violence and sexual assault, it would make it easier to help someone.
Men are less likely to discuss domestic violence than women.
Photo—No More Campaign “Anthem” :60/YouTube
Number 7 is extremely important. Many people don’t learn healthy ways to deal with conflict and revert into a more primal instinct it seems.
Here is more information on the Please Unbreak My Heart initiative: a national conversation on ending domestic violence by building a culture of respect. http://news.hamlethub.com/westport/life/40807-hamlethub-editor-tom-fiffer-starts-national-dialogue-on-domestic-violence
#3
“3. We blame men in disproportionate numbers for domestic violence by stereotyping them as the aggressors and because their superior physical strength in fights results in more women being injured”
I am utterly confused by this one, you write this sentence then you go on to explain that men are agressors and WHY they are agressors. Did you mean to write that series of paragraphs or did the editors remove what you had.
Jack, It’s not that men are always the aggressors; I understand firsthand that we are not. Women both incite and commit acts of domestic violence. The point of the paragraphs on men is to explain how men are wired and how the pervasive culture of entitlement to violence both leads to violence and is used to justify it. That culture also sanctions women’s violence against men, but differently, and I approached that in another piece: The Time Has Come for All Good Men … (https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/time-come-good-men-fiff/).
I mean ISN’T GENDERED.
This is a good piece but you left out one thing. Though for the life of me I simply can’t understand the statement that we don’t talk about DV. There are laws specifically about DV (even though it is already a crime, it is called assault), there are 100s or 1000s of services for victims of it (if the victims are female of course)., there are commisions setup to talk about this , study and millions are spent each year to combat it. I am at a loss to understand why you can say we don’t take it seriously. But… Read more »
“and when men feel attacked, they are trained to counterattack rather than try to make peace.”
And sometimes men are actually physically attacked. It’s called reciprocal violence, which women start about 50% of the time. His violence is usually condemned, her violence is often excused.
John, That is true. And no violence should be excused, by either sex, ever.
A side note for those specifically concerned with violence against women. Domestic violence against women can be reduced by about 50% by teaching women not to hit. How popular do you think that concept would be with the white ribbon campaign?
John, I would reframe your point as domestic violence can be reduced substantially by teaching both men and women non-violent means of addressing and resolving conflict. DV against women is not women’s fault, nor is DV against men men’s fault. Yes, people trigger and incite, and that needs to be stopped, too, but violence is never an acceptable reaction from either side.
Sorry about 33% of domestic violence against women assuming women commit about 50% of DV and about 50% of DV is reciprocal with about 50% of reciprocal DV initiated by women. Still a very significant percentage.
Thank you so much for writing this. It is one of the biggest secrets that we as a society seem to keep.. I grew up in a home where violence and anger were an ever present undercurrent. In fact for years I downplayed the impact that it had on me because it wasn’t that bad, it didn’t happen daily or even weekly but the undercurrent of tension, of wondering when it would happen again was an insidious daily reality. I now realise that my mother has also been hit although I never saw it, its just that she has suffered… Read more »
Caitlin, Your post is one of the most moving pieces on domestic violence I’ve ever read. Let’s hope we can open this dialogue up and do some real work on the problem.