By Garda Ghista
1. Introduction
2. Why Men Batter Women:
Pathology of the Abuser
a.
Physical Violence
b.
Verbal Abuse
c.
Economic Abuse
d.
Psychological Abuse
e.
Moral Abuse: Guilt Trips and Emotional Blackmail
f. Emotional
Abuse
g.
Social Abuse
6.
Why Remain?
a.
Crisis Centers
b.
Police Response
c.
Therapy
a.
Abuse and the Law
b.
Police Cooperation
c.
Corporate and Institutional Cooperation
d.
Revamping the Educational System
e.
Questionnaires
f. Preventive
Measures
g.
From Macro to Micro
h.
Broadening the Fight
9. Conclusion
“I propose
that the core of sadism, common to all its manifestations, is the passion to
have absolute control over a living being, whether an animal, a child, a man,
or a woman.”
Eric Fromm
Four women
are battered to death every day in
“Battering
is a pattern of behavior used to establish power and control over another
person through fear and intimidation, often including the threat or use of
violence. Battering happens when one person believes they are entitled to
control another. Assault, battering and domestic violence are crimes.”
In all countries, it is men who are generally the
perpetrators, and women who are the victims. Battering includes many forms:
emotional abuse, economic abuse, sexual abuse, using the children, threats,
using male privilege (in a patriarchal structure), intimidation, isolation –
all forms to keep their women in a perpetually fearful state, thus putting the
men in maximum control. Psychological battering can include constant (daily)
verbal abuse, harassment, excessive possessiveness, isolating the woman from
all other human beings, depriving her of physical and economic resources, and
destruction of her personal property. This battering, or domestic violence, as
a rule escalates with time. It may never go away or lessen over the
years. It usually increases. Name-calling in private turns into name-calling in
public, or social abuse. Threats begin to be more than threats with the start
of physical violence. Typically, abusive husbands are (1) authoritarian, (2)
emotionally withholding, (3) overprotective, (4) unresponsive to the wife’s
feelings, (5) controlling of the finances, (6) demanding of the wife’s
attention at any time of the day or night, (7) casting blame on her for any and
all problems, and (8) manipulating in his means of compelling her to accept all
his decisions. If another man talks to his wife, he will silently seethe, and
after the man has gone he will often accuse his wife of flirting or being
unfaithful. Abuse occurs daily, not because he hates his wife but solely
to exert dominance and control.
This paper was originally called “Domestic Violence in
US”. However, after researching, it became clear that the term ‘domestic
violence’ is simply a euphemism for “wife abuse”. According to Dr. Mary Miller,
in 95 percent of all abusive relationships the wife is the victim. According to
the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), during the period 1987 to 1991,
the victim in more than 90 percent of recorded domestic violence cases was a
woman. Due to visible wounds, physical abuse is easily identifiable. But
emotional, verbal and psychological abuse are much harder to discover,
especially as many women hide it or do not even realize that what is happening
to them should never happen. Brown, Dubau and McKeon, in their book
Stop Domestic Violence: An Action Plan For Saving Lives, write the following:
“Before any physical violence is ever employed, the power
imbalance and control are established. The situation “creeps up” on the woman,
so she simply doesn’t see how she is coming under tighter and tighter controls
and more and more abuse. This is the point where common sense breaks
down. Most people who have never been abused this way can’t understand why the
victim doesn’t see what’s happening to her and doesn’t just leave. Ignorance
regarding this specific point is massive. We need to put away all gut-level
reactions and think the matter through. This is a critical point. Close
attention is needed if we are to understand the dynamics involved.”
In
the movie, Dolores Claiborne, we see a revolting portrayal of wife abuse –
violent physical and verbal abuse. When the wife Dolores laughs at her
husband’s pants which have split from behind, he suddenly picks up a thick
piece of wood, comes from behind and whams it with full force on her
back. She screams in shock and then bursts into tears from pain and then
from rage. He then sits down with his bottle, and proceeds to verbally abuse
her, “Fat ass - lousy cooking - Bitch! Make yourself useful,
woman!’ The violence increases drastically when the husband’s attention shifts
to his daughter and he begins to violate her sexually. The day his wife’s
employer, Vera, makes her understand what is happening, that is the day the
wife realizes he must be stopped once and for all. Vera tells her, “Sometimes
being a bitch is the only thing you have to hang on to.” It would seem as if in
the seventies, when this movie was made, an abused woman had no alternative but
to take the law into her own hands. .
Brown, Dubau
and McKeon describe the issue of wife abuse with chilling accuracy:
“The world of
domestic violence resembles fantasy or science fiction. Once you start reading
about and walking vicariously into the lives of battered women and batterers,
you enter into a kind of twilight zone. In this environment, the air is
poisoned with lies. This is not a place where normal human life can exist. Both
the victim and the batterers are infected with toxic levels of deception. They
lie to themselves about the fact that they lie; they think they’re telling the
truth. Lies are constantly wrapping themselves around lies as those involved
try to convince everyone that they’re telling the truth…. In this land, where
lies are everywhere, the batterer begins to look like a victim, and the victim
begins to look like a batterer….. You meet intelligent and capable women who
are reduced to brainwashed… faded copies of themselves. … You see a victim
explaining that it is her fault.”
The more
recent film, Sleeping with the Enemy, starring Julia Roberts, is another case
of terrorizing wife abuse. The husband, an educated man, has his wife isolated
in a house on the beach. Despite the fact she is already alone, he regularly
inflicts both mental and physical torture on her, leaving her covered with
welts, bruises and black eyes. He can see the wild fear in her eyes. Her
listening skills are heightened like a dog’s, due to the element of fear. She
manages to escape from him, but eventually he tracks her down, and then it is
kill or be killed. As with Dolores Claiborne, she has to take the law into her
own hands. This movie was made in the early nineties. It speaks shamefully for
the present American legal system in that she also believed her only recourse
was to kill her husband to save her own life!
“In
1996, the New York City Police Department received 217,236 emergency calls for
family disputes.” (NYPD). Thirty percent of
American women report being physically abused by their partners. (Lieberman
Research, Inc.) Forty-two percent of murdered women are killed by their
boyfriends or spouses (FBI, 1988-91 Uniform Crime Reports). A
Victims of abuse are married women of all ages as well
as women living in common-law relationships. However, teenagers involved with
boyfriends also suffer. It is estimated that one third of high school and
college relationships end in violence, including date rape. In all cases, the
abuse and/or the violence is about control and power by the male over the
female. It is tremendously harmful to teenage girls who are in the process of
growing up and establishing their self-esteem and self-confidence. Abuse
destroys both, and many girls are not strong enough to fight for their rights
and dignity. There is also less chance that young girls can distinguish between
abuse and love, if in their homes abuse has been called love by their fathers.
If there are problems in their own home, they will often settle for any kind of
relationship, even one characterized by jealousy, possessiveness and control.
Another tragic statistic is that separated or divorced
women (perhaps thinking they had escaped their tormenter) are 14 times more
likely than married women to be a victim of ex-spousal violence. Although they
constitute ten percent of all women, they report 75 percent of spousal abuse.
It is further disturbing to note that in a large study conducted in
Domestic violence has significant effects on the
children from abusive relationships. The children sadly also end up victims
along with the mother. The mother may be able to survive for a period, even for
years. But the child is by nature dependent on the mother and father for
emotional well-being and nurturance. When the source of their emotional
dependency is in brutal chaos, the children become terrified. They suffer from
many symptoms, including nightmares, insomnia, anxieties, confusion regarding
parents, especially fathers, and guilt. Tremendous work is involved to undo the
damage to children created by domestic violence.
There is a significant correlation between domestic
violence and welfare mothers, the reason being that their abusive partners do
not allow their women to work because they do not want to lose control over
them. Employment would give women the chance to make links with the outside
world and form friendships, and even obtain help to leave their husbands.
Husbands will not risk this. Even then, to find and keep a job is highly
difficult when a woman’s life is constantly disrupted by shouting, screaming,
continual threats by the spouse to commit suicide and/or harm his wife. Even
without physical violence, it is a miracle if a woman can hold on to her job
while maintaining an aura of normalcy to her co-workers.
Many women do not understand that abuse by the husband
is not an act of random violence. Abuse is “systematic behavior following a
specific pattern that is designed to gain, secure and exercise control.”
It happens so subtly and gradually over time that it is often hard for a wife
to pinpoint that this is abuse. Some wives never understand it. They only know
that they are terribly unhappy and may blame only themselves until death, never
thinking that the fault may lie entirely with the husband. As the years go by,
abuse escalates. It usually does not decrease. Thus one finds women who after
thirty or thirty-four years leave their husbands as, when they were young they had
the emotional and moral strength to handle the abuse, with age they become less
resilient and the abuse is escalating or reaching unbearable, intolerable
heights. For this very reason one sees women finally leaving their
husbands after several decades of marriage. After leaving they may feel lonely,
but at least they have a chance to live in peace.
Why does the abuse escalate? Generally it is because
she has dared to defy him. With each act of defiance, his rage increases, his punishments
become worse, and tensions rise to breaking point. If there is a physical
wound, one can put a bandage on the wound until it heals. But if there are
emotional and psychological wounds, one cannot even find them. Hence those
internal wounds take years or lifetimes to heal. I remember one lady who loved
to cook. Her husband never praised her tasty and healthy meals which others
loved. By the last year of their marriage, he was criticizing and condemning
her carefully cooked meals every single day, often refusing to eat. Such
men are highly proficient in verbal abuse. Very often their fathers were
similarly abusive. There are two paths that an abused child can take: (1) he
can turn his repressed feelings of helplessness against the world and be a despot,
or (2) he can become an artist who is able to recount the pains and sufferings
of his own and of humanity. According to Alice Miller, it is pointless to
appeal to such a man’s empathy or compassion, because he has none. Very violent
abusers will often completely deny their real nature. They will describe
themselves as calm and relaxed and easy-going. They will describe themselves as
directly opposite of what they really are. Even when they are arrested, often
the abusers will still not recognize themselves as abusive. There is
total denial taking place. For the same reason, abusers almost never apologize.
As Fleming wrote,
“A strong
person can acknowledge weakness; a confident person can acknowledge mistakes.
One who really feels weak and inferior inside cannot do so… Since abusive men
secretly feel very weak, they work even harder at denying their feelings,
projecting them onto available others, the most available being their wives.”
There are clear ‘symptoms’ or indications of the personality
type that can become a batterer of women. (1) Such a man does not consider
women as human beings. He does not respect women. Rather, he sees women
as possessions or as sexual objects, nothing more. (2) A batterer generally has
low self-esteem and feels powerless in society. He may be externally
successful, but internally he feels a failure or inadequate. (3) A batterer
externalizes the causes of his battering. He will blame it on stress, a bad
day, or his partner’s behavior. (4) A batterer is often very charming and
pleasant (even humorous and the focus of attention) between abusive sessions.
He is generally seen as a ‘good guy’ to neighbors and others. (5) The
biggest warning signs of a potential batterer are jealousy, possessiveness, bad
temper, unpredictability of mood, cruelty to animals and verbal abusiveness.
For these men, their wives become the object of their control. This control
becomes the source of her daily oppression and mental torture. Their need to
control stems from deep feelings of inadequacy often originating from their own
childhood. They trivialize, undermine, yell at and threaten their wives – all
to repress their own feelings of inadequacy. An abuser is someone who
perpetrates abuse, who engages in behavior that diminishes or violates another
person. “Abuse” refers to that behavior that tries to put down or hurt
another person, including her interests, her actions, her thoughts, her ideas,
and the feelings close to her heart.
Beverly Engel, in The Emotionally Abused Woman,
identifies ten types of emotional abusers. They are (1) the possessor, (2) the
Napoleon who tears others down to make themselves look good; (3) the bulldozers
who mow people down without conscience to fulfill their needs; (4) the
controllers who want to control everything just for the sake of controlling;
(5) the sex addict who insists on having sex every day or even more often; (6)
the antisocial personality who makes up his own rules to justify all sorts of
illegal acts due to extreme selfishness and who always says, it’s us against
the world’; (7) the narcissist who has enormous ambition, craves constant
attention/adulation, possesses a tremendous feeling of entitlement to even be
welcomed by kings and a total lack of empathy except as a form of self-pity;
(8) the misogynist who devalues all women and manifests deep prejudice and
hostility towards all women; (9) the blamers who continually are blaming others
for their mistakes and inventing false stories to cover up their crimes; (10)
the destroyers who are totally out to destroy their victims in all ways:
economically, socially, emotionally and mentally. Often such abusers were
spoiled, deceitful, sadistic children who themselves later experienced abuse in
their early teens.
Jeffrey Edleson in his book, Intervention for Men Who
Batter: an Ecological Approach, talks about three types of personalities. The
first type is borderline mental disorder, as characterized by being asocial,
moody, hypersensitive to comments and engaging in frequent bursts of anger.
The second type is narcissistic and anti-social, completely self-focused,
self-centered and selfish in thinking, always taking from others and giving
only to boost his external reputation in the society. The dependent, compulsive
personality has low self-esteem and requires continual support from his wife or
girlfriend. Renata Vaselle-Augenstein and Annette Ehrlich, in their paper
“Male Batterers: Evidence of Psychopathology”, have also identified types of
abusers: (1) men whose personality follows a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde pattern, (2)
men who demand strict adherence to rules and give punishment to anyone who
breaks the rules, (3) men who are aggressive and antisocial; (4) men who
are outwardly pleasant or charming but who become aggressive if they think
their wife has let them down; (5) men who appear to have nothing wrong with
them at all – except that they beat their wives. The German psychiatrist Alice
Miller attributes men’s violence towards wives as pent-up rage leftover from
childhood. She wrote, “Contempt for those who are smaller and weaker thus is
the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness.”
The Roman writer Seneca explained the violence very simply. “Cruelty springs
from weakness.” Men will be less likely to abuse their children. The media
gives far more coverage to child abuse than to wife abuse. Second, he generally
will use his children as additional weapons of abuse against their mother. This
means he will use all his charm, intellect and spiritual sermonizing to
convince his children that their mother deserves all the abuse he metes out to
her. As they get older, he will encourage them to join in the abuse, to be his
partners. It is also documented by Sanders and Baron (1977) that the
verbal expression of pain and suffering by the victim causes the man to behave
less punitively. This means, when they hear their victims express anguished
crying (due to either physical pain or mental torture) this calms them down and
hearing this, their sadism and violence often decrease.
When
batterers are with a therapist/counselor, they will show a constantly cheerful
external persona; they will attempt to ingratiate the counselor, will reveal
chronic resentment, an abnormally high, chronic state of jealousy, be fearful and
angry over many issues, and exhibit violence mainly in their intimate
relationships. The most frequently cited reason for spousal homicides is
jealousy. The jealousy of these men is completely irrational, leading
them to increasingly monitor their wife’s movements, whom they talk to, and in
particular which men they talk to. If any man talks to their wife, they become
suspicious, reflected by a glaring angry face. Some men are suspicious even if
priests or ministers talk to their wives. Such mentally imbalanced
husbands/spouses assume that “all anyone would see in her would be sex.”
Is there a more insulting way to look at women? These men are
extremely emotionally dependent on their wives. They complain non-stop
about them, partly to hide their own abusiveness and partly to hide their own
dependency on those very wives whom they abuse. Such men who are secretly
very dependent on their wives are actually terrified of being alone.
While most typically socialized men (or those with
borderline personality disorders) will have some pangs of conscience or feel
some remorse for abusing their wife, psychopathic men do not feel anything. The
wife will say, he “becomes irritable for no apparent reason”. Such men are
pathologically jealous. It is a sickness that creates a living hell for the
wife. He will create ludicrous conclusions in his mind about the non-existent
sexual affairs of his wife – even going back thirty years into her past, even
before the marriage – and then he will torture her with these non-existent
facts. He is never wrong. She is always to blame. In his environment, in his
home, minor incidences become major earthquakes, and tragically the spouse is
the victim through no fault of her own.
The wife will try to explain to non-believing friends,
“He’s like two different people. He’s like Jekyll and Hyde.” In the house such
men are moody, jealous and irritable, ready to flare up in rage at any time.
The spouse has to be continually in survival mode, she caters to his every
whim, and swallows her own anger at the injustice of his. He on the other hand
is hypervigilant for any sign of defiance in the wife. The husband loses the
ability to imagine the dreadful results that might follow abuse. Some, whom we
call psychopaths, have permanently lost this ability, and there is a complete
split between their public and private selves.
Standard traits of abusers can be listed as
follows: They are arrogant, calculating, cold-hearted men who tend to be
narcissistic and self-absorbed, who feel they are special and superior to all
others. They expect others, even highly placed politicians, to look up to them.
They are chronically dissatisfied with their partner – regardless of whether it
is a wife or daughter. Their complaints never cease. They go into frequent
shouting rages, become irrationally indignant and insulted if anybody even
mildly disagrees with their stated opinion, and are abnormally demanding of
those around them. These men are chronic abusers but usually only inside
the home and not outside. And if anything goes wrong in his life, it is her
fault. He will always find fault with her appearance, will convince her that
nobody else wants her, and will take total control of her time and her space,
and how she uses it.
Twenty-six percent of female suicide attempts are preceded by some kind of
abuse. Fifty percent of black women who attempt suicide are abused beforehand.
There are several reasons why men abuse women. They include (a) family
dysfunction, (b) poor communication between partners, (c) provocation by the
woman, (d) stress, (d) addiction to drugs or alcohol, (e) economic hardship,
and (f) lack of spirituality. But finally, abuse and battering are a way
for a man to control his wife. By engaging in this conduct, he usually does not
suffer any adverse external consequences. He is not punished by society. There
is rarely imprisonment or financial penalty for such men. They are not even
ostracized in the society. Does this not mean that something is terribly
wrong in the country? In fact, it means that the country, the culture, is
sick, and needs to be healed and made well, through relentless
consciousness-raising and through education. It needs to be made well through
the passing of harsh laws for offenders. In
Abusers exist in all strata of society – across all
classes and economic backgrounds. From a historical standpoint, violence
against women is not considered as a real crime. We can find origins of the
persecution of women in the New Testament where it says for example, in Timothy
2.11-12, “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not
a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’
Sexism was an integral part of both the Christian and Judaic societies of early
days. In fact, Christianity became strongly supportive of patriarchal
despotism. Donald Dutton, in his book The
Batterer: A Psychological Profile, writes:
“This view
of woman guided Christian ethics and laws throughout the Middle Ages, including
the infamous Inquisition and the witch trials in
In those days, men were allowed to beat, torture and
kill their wives. It is true today in some countries, including U.S.
Legally they may not be allowed, but society permits it to happen without
taking any action. In the Book of Common Prayer, the prayer book of the
Anglican Church, the following was stated until recently: “A wife, an
ass, and a walnut tree. The more they’re beat, the better they be.” Marilyn
Frye writes in her book, The Politics of Reality, the following:
“The Bible says that all of nature (including woman) exists
for man. Man is invited to subdue the earth and have dominion over every living
thing on it, all of which is said to exist “to you” “for meat.” Woman is
created to be man’s helper. This captures in myth Western Civilization’s
primary answer to the philosophical question of man’s place in nature:
everything that is, is resource for man’s exploitation. With this world view,
men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to
themselves and their own interests.”
In fact, one can find these same attitudes in the
scripture of all world religions. We continue to live in a patriarchal world, which
means men control women and the society, with few exceptions. Women’s place is
beneath men’s. Even female judges, conditioned by a patriarchal environment
since birth, will often support the man over the woman in a rape case, or will
deny legal support for women’s reproductive rights. One hundred years ago when
settlers first came to
In
the final analysis, abusers must themselves want to no longer be abusive. The
desire must come from within. They must develop the desire to not be an abusive
person. If they do not develop this desire, and continue, for example, to
live in permanent denial of their conduct, there is no hope for their recovery
or change in conduct. Even if they do desire to change their conduct, it
is difficult, because habits get firmly ingrained, and much time and effort are
required to retrain a person’s mind after years of a particular behavior and
each time remind it to adopt new kinds of positive behavior.
Typical
traits of the abuser are that he is irritable, never fails to blame the
spouse/victim for all problems, he is unpredictable, angry perhaps on a daily
basis, intense, does not express warmth and affection to his wife, always
refutes his wife’s opinions, is highly argumentative – because it is not about
finding the truth, it is only about winning the argument. He is often sullen,
jealous, quick to criticize and quick to ridicule. His habit in the house is to
be often explosive in his demands, explosive in his hostility to and complete
intolerance of any sign of defiance or stepping out of line. He will often be
highly secretive regarding family finances. He will regard them not as family
finances but rather as his private finances. He will often be highly
manipulative – be ‘nice’ only to get something from her, or to get labor out of
her. If she expresses a desire or wish, he will comment that it is unfeasible
or will be disastrous. He will frequently say that ‘they’ have agreed when in
fact they never did. He decided on his own. Perhaps the easiest way
to recognize a verbal abuser is that he never takes responsibility for his
actions. He will never admit that 50 percent of the problem is his and 50
percent of the problem is hers, that they need to share the responsibility and
both work towards solutions. If they meet with a therapist, he will declare
with conviction, it is 100 percent her fault. She has to take 100 percent
responsibility to change and ‘become good’. Abusers are usually pathologically
jealous men with low self-esteem, reeking with self-pity, and an abnormal need
to control those around him. Abusers are never satisfied, never happy. As Dr.
Miller writes,
“So
self-convincing is the man’s skill at justifying his abuse that even when his
wife struggles to please him by always agreeing and having sex on demand and
not asking for money or visiting friends and never serving him broccoli, he
will find a score of other areas in which she fails. And he will know he is
right in punishing her.”
Dr. Miller gives us another potent analogy as follows:
“The crippled
little boy in Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, finding strength
in the stories the Wise Men tell, dares to drop his crutch and, with no
assurance other than his faith, takes a first unsupported step. In the same way
an abuser must drop his crutch of phony manhood and dare to walk side by side
with his woman as a real man.”
Harvey Wallace, in his book Family Violence (2002)
lists likely characteristics of the abuser: (1) there was violence in his own
family; in many instances his own father was violent; (2) he has a
negative self-image, and low self-esteem; (3) he is emotionally inexpressive,
although he expresses very well his anger and his jealousy. (4) the abuser has
difficulty maintaining social relationships; (5) he has employment problems. He
may be unemployed or underemployed, leading to dissatisfaction, which he takes
out on his wife; (6) He has authoritarian personalities. He is moody, swinging
from jovial to angry and back to jovial within minutes. (7) He has excessive,
hostile attachment to the wife. He makes abnormal demands on her and responds
with anger when those demands are not met. (8) He wants power and control over
the wife. (9) His jealousy is pathological, or sick. It is not
normal. Wallace points out rightly that all forms of violence should cease in
an ideal society. At present the American society glorifies violence rather
than condemns it. Hence it is also a problem of the larger culture, not
just of men.
In some cases it is seen that the abused partner
becomes abused because it happened in her own childhood, so she is ready to
accept it in the marriage. It is repetition of familiar events. In some
instances the wife had a father who was indifferent, cold, often absent and
often angry when present. She may not remember a single time when he hugged her
– so distant was the relationship. These scenarios make her an easy victim to
abuse by her husband. Women are abused and they are blamed as being the cause
for that abuse. It is the worst kind of persecution. How does the victim
feel? She feels hurt because he is hurting her. She feels like nothing because
he is making her feel like nothing. She feels ignored because he is ignoring
her – her thoughts and her feelings. She feels ridiculed because he ridicules
her on a regular basis. She feels closed off, ex-communicated because he does
it to her. Sometimes he causes the entire family to ex-communicate her.
Whatever she expresses to her husband, he will invalidate it, he will scoff, he
will discount it, he will deny it and he will oppose it. She has no self-esteem
because he destroys it every chance he gets. In a balanced and mutually loving
relationship, there is the following scenario: both will love to hear the
other’s thoughts. Both will express enthusiasm and delight in the other’s
enthusiasm. Both will open their hearts and souls to the other. Both will
nurture the other’s physical, intellectual and spiritual growth. Both
will help the other. Both will live peacefully and let the other live in peace.
Patricia Evans says that the wife has the right to expect respect, dignity,
esteem, appreciation, warmth, empathy, an open communication, attentiveness,
caring and equality in the relationship.
Generally,
the wife (meaning, the victim) always blames herself for all the problems. She
does this because he is telling her that she is to blame and she believes him.
She believes she is not expressing herself well enough. She feels she is
inadequate in every way. It is due to his endless accusations. What is
noteworthy is that the more the wife gives up on getting any closeness from her
husband, and the more she finds friends outside the marriage for companionship,
the angrier and more abusive her husband becomes. Due to jealousy, due to his
personal insecurities, he cannot tolerate that she becomes happy through other,
albeit completely innocent friendships.
Let
us again summarize what are the typical traits we can identify in the victim of
an abusive relationship. She ceases to be spontaneous. She loses her
enthusiasm for life. She is always on guard. She has lost her self-confidence
and is often afraid to speak in public or to anyone outside the family, because
she has been attacked so many times inside the family for what she has said.
She is full of self-doubt. At times she may feel she is going crazy. She
is deeply confused as to why her marriage is not a happy marriage. She feels
sometimes like running away but due to her now completely codependent nature
she is afraid to take the step. If the present relationship ever ends,
she will be afraid or even terrified to begin a new relationship. These
are the traits of an abused woman, of a victim.
Eventually,
the wife feels a constant shame and humiliation at his treatment of her.
Eventually he abuses her anywhere, even in front of their friends, work
colleagues, at religious functions, and in public places. Her shame becomes
unbounded. With this kind of humiliation, she begins to reach a breaking point,
and all this while sometimes still not realizing why this is happening – that
she is a victim of now extreme verbal violence. There is no other word for it.
Daily a minimum of four women are murdered by their husbands in the
Beverly
Engel in her book, The Emotionally Abused Woman: Overcoming Destructive
Patterns and Reclaiming Yourself, describes six categories of abused women. They
are: (1) the selfless woman, (2) the pleaser, 3) the sinner or people who abuse
themselves, (4) the codependent or the obsessive rescuer, (5) the drama junkie
or people addicted to crisis situations, and (6) the victim or martyr.
In
cases where the husband is highly educated, it becomes even more difficult for
the wife to extricate herself from his clutches. His education serves to
completely intimidate her and it becomes a simple matter to convince her that
he is a logical, rational man speaking with his superior intellect, backed up
by higher degrees. How many wives will have the self-esteem or the moral
courage to object to torturous verbal abuse coming from such an educated man?
Lenore
E. Walker, in her ground-breaking research which became her book, The Battered
Woman, was the first to develop some important concepts in the study of
battered women. It was she who coined the term “cycle theory of
violence”. She identified three stages in the cycle of battering. The
first stage is the tension-building stage, where for a variety of reasons
stress and tension build up in the man’s mind. The second stage is the
explosion stage where the man will lose his temper, begin shouting, screaming,
gesticulating, verbally abusing, threatening and perhaps finally punching his
wife in the eye or jaw or stomach. This stage will finally end, although it may
not seem so to the victim. Then comes the make up stage or what
The
first thing to remember about abusers is that they are full of insecurities.
Anything outside or inside the home can bring out these insecurities and cause
tension in the abuser. Any kind of perceived slight in the workplace or by a
friend or genuine problems in the workplace cause unbearable tension in the
abuser. Also the simmering resentment of the wife can manifest itself in small
acts of rebellion such as taking an unapproved outing, signing up for a course,
rearranging the house without permission, or neglecting the housework. If the
man is more intellectual and practices psychological abuse, then what generates
tension in him is any sign of the wife’s intellectual independence by having
even different ideas. Just as in the 30s and 40s any perceived independence of
African Americans in Southern towns in
The abuser then goes through the tension cycle of (1)
fear, (2) self-pity and (3) resentment. The husband’s aroused fear causes him
to wallow in self-pity, during which time he will go over all his shipwrecked
dreams, noble aspirations and intentions and then relive all the unjust
sufferings of his life. This is called the “Rumination phase” by Donald Dutton
in his book The Batterer: A Psychological Profile. This then bursts into a form
of resentment that may be partly expressed externally. Then the cycle spirals
into the more destructive form of (1) anxiety, (2) victimhood, and (3) anger.
The intense anxiety generated by the resentment leads the husband to consider himself
the victim of endless abuse from everyone despite all his loving intentions.
This will erupt into anger that is released by yelling, and the subsequent
abuse of animals or furniture. This causes the final spiral of the cycle into
(1) terror, (2) martyrdom, and (3) rage. The anger even after being expressed
does not die. Rather, the inability of the husband to express his anger fully
only reinforces his powerlessness in a hostile universe. The terror generated
by this mushrooms into a cult of martyrdom, a feeling that he is doomed despite
his innate strength, integrity and spirituality. This martyrdom, like all
sacrifices, causes an explosion of rage that starts the real abuse.
Abuse is done not merely to silence the wife, but to
silence the voices of self-doubt and humiliation processing in the husband’s
head. In the beginning this may take a minute of yelling or a single blow. Over
time more and more abuse is needed by the violence-addicted husband in order to
be emptied of self-doubt. This can result in violence lasting for hours or, in
the case of psychological violence, writing a detailed document (which he will
even sometimes claim is a message from God) analyzing the innate selfishness
and materialism of the wife. Another form of this is elaborate social
violence, such as in carefully planned public shaming of the wife. When the
wife sobbingly bows down to the husband, on her knees, on the ground, then one
will see such men give an involuntary grin of pleasure.
While the abusive stage is driven by the need to still
the voice of doubt, the honeymoon stage is driven by the need to silence the
guilt. The husband will do what he has to emotionally, and sometimes
financially, in order to remove his own suppressed guilt. The success of this
stage depends on the wife’s response to it. After years of abuse the wife is so
desensitized that she barely responds to the husband’s overtures. This
generates fear and allows him to feel self-righteous since, despite all his
affection, the wife doesn’t seem to care. Thus in long-term abuse, tension is
generated right away in the honeymoon stage. The speed of this cycle is
continually decelerating and accelerating at different times, but the overall
pattern is clearly visible.
“Nonphysical
abuse is the overlapping destruction of a woman’s emotional, psychological,
social and economic well-being.”
Twenty-five years ago the term “battered woman” had
not yet been invented. Battering, being beaten by their partners, is the
major cause of injury to women. The percentage is greater than accidents,
muggings and rape combined. According to FBI statistics, a woman is
beaten every 15 seconds. Twenty-one percent of women who end up in hospital
emergency rooms are battered. Annually up to 4000 women are beaten to death. In
nearly one third of marriages in US, there is severe violence. And most
importantly, in those cases where the woman has killed her husband, case
histories reveal that he had abused and tortured her for years and her killing
was in self-defense. One third of all women have been kicked, hit or punched,
choked or in some other way physically assaulted by their partner sometime
during their relationship.
In
the documentary, Defending Our Lives, four women tell their terrifying stories
of relentless verbal and physical abuse until, when their death became
imminent, they killed their husbands. These were all four clear-cut cases of
self-defense. Yet, each of these women speaks to us from the confines of her
prison cell, where she has been sentenced to remain for the next 10-20 years,
often separated from the children she sought so desperately to protect. Is this
justice in
The
abuser beats his wife not merely to silence her physically but to silence her
voice in his head. He wishes to live free from any reminder of his failure to
fulfill his obligation to care for his wife. As the relationship progresses,
the husband’s ego becomes more and more sensitive and frayed. Hence even the
smallest signs of disagreement or independence by the wife will provoke vicious
bullying. As long as the wife remains cowed by the bullying, most of the time
the man will not erupt into violence. It is when the man believes that the wife
is not completely subjugated psychologically by the bullying that he erupts.
Each time the violence increases as the man needs more and more brutality to
empty his mind of guilt and the memory of his wife’s non-subservience. While
traditional
In
the book A Woman Like You: The Face of Domestic Violence, photojournalist Vera
Anderson presents us with the photos of 36 women, and next to their photos are brief
heart-breaking statements describing what they endured at the hands of their
batterers. Looking at the photos, we ask the question, who are these
women, who fall in the category of battered women? Vera Anderson writes that
her friends were surprised to find out she was a battered woman. They would say
to her, “I never knew. You don’t look like a battered woman.” So what
does a battered woman look like? The answer is, they are sisters,
mothers, daughters, grandmothers, nieces and cousins, neighbors, work
colleagues. They are the checkout clerks in our supermarket. They are the
hard-working women in Kmart and Walmart. They are everywhere. They are the
women all around us. So many of them remain silent. Yet, every nine seconds, a
woman in the
“Towards the end it was like waiting for a pat on the
head. He had me reduced to a child, I was so brainwashed. I think it was
the repetitiveness of hearing how stupid and useless I was, that I was never good
enough. What I thought didn’t matter. What I wanted wasn’t important. I
was never right. I was always wrong. ….I just stayed at home, my whole life
revolved around him walking through the front door. It was as though I had lost
my personhood.”
Another
example is Mary. Mary was one of the luckier victims. She was acquitted in 1983
after killing her husband in self-defense. She writes:
“The thing is, you’re so cut off from the real world.
I guess I had never honestly thought of myself as a battered woman. I thought
of myself as not having the best marriage…. And then the state comes in, and
they make you ashamed for saving your own life. How is it a crime to save your
own life?”
Another victim, Peggie, writes:
“I don’t remember exactly what happened; I do remember
his motorcycle boot connecting with my face. I woke up in the hospital, with
doctors and nurses and lights everywhere. But there wasn’t any sound. I didn’t
hear any sounds again for two and a half years. I had to go to school to learn
to sign, and to learn the deaf culture…. But my husband only went to jail
for four hours.”… I decided to turn what had happened to me into something
constructive and began teaching self-defense classes and creating community
support groups for deaf abuse
victims.”
On
still another page we see the photo of a sweet-looking Filipino woman and her
chubby baby. She writes,
“I realized there are many stories worse than mine,
many more years of pain, but the cycle is the same. And even though all the
stories are different, they are also all the same…Sometimes I feel, ‘Oh, poor
man, he needs my help. My love can heal him.’ I know now that it’s not my
problem to fix, it’s his problem.”
Sexual Abuse
Sexual
abuse is a sub-section of physical violence, and is something not often
discussed. It includes marital rape, beating of the body’s sexual parts, forced
bestiality, forced prostitution, unprotected sex, sodomy, and using
pornography. It also includes sexual insults to the woman and unfounded
accusations of infidelity, screaming at her that she an adulteress when she is
nothing of the kind! Sexual abuse is frequently an integral part of physical
abuse. Simply defined, it is ‘any unwanted intercourse obtained by force,
threat of force, or when the wife is unable to consent’. According to a study
done by Diana Russell in
Calling
her dumb, an idiot, stupid is verbal abuse. Putting her down, criticizing
her, defeating her in argument for the sake of defeating, not for the sake of
mutual enlightenment – this is verbal abuse. Threatening and intimidating by
use of words is verbal abuse. If he is angry almost daily, this is verbal
abuse. If he is constantly trying to convince her that something is wrong with
her, this is verbal abuse. If he further tries to convince her that something
is psychologically amiss with her and that she needs therapy, this is moving to
extreme verbal abuse. Verbal abuse may be indirect or covert, and it may
be direct – shouting slanderous slogans – the same ones she has heard over and
over. Verbal abuse is wanting power over the woman, and completely misusing the
power. Verbal abuse constantly undermines the woman, it constantly denies her
reality, her very existence. In many cases, she is not supposed to exist.
She is to be an extension of her husband and nothing more. She is to parrot his
words, his ideas, and to predict his needs and desires at every step. This is
her function. And despite whether she succeeds or not, abuse will rain on
her head. There is no escaping it, and there is no escaping its
escalation over time.
There are clear symptoms of verbal abuse. Generally,
verbal abuse will be secretive. Only those inside the home will know about it.
Second, it increases with the passing of time, and the wife adapts to this
increase. Third, the abuser repeatedly denies and discounts the wife’s
perception of his treatment of her. Verbal abuse always hurts. It attacks
the abilities of the wife and erodes her self-confidence. Verbal abuse fills
her with doubts regarding herself. Verbal abuse may comprise of angry shouting
or it may be subtle brainwashing, or both. Abusers with developed intellect
will use every form of manipulative cunning to brainwash their wives, to
convince them their value is nil. Verbal abuse is insidious because many times
it is indirect, roundabout and filled with devious cunning which the spouse
cannot even begin to comprehend but which leaves her feeling horrible. While
the husband may create many so-called issues of dispute in the marriage, in
fact the real issue in the marriage, the real problem, is his never-ending and
escalating abuse. It is very hard for the victim to recognize this simple fact.
Anger is another category of verbal abuse. If a man uses anger, there is
nothing the wife can do or say to mitigate the anger, because it is nothing she
has done. His anger is irrational, unpredictable and explosive. It is his trait
of character, it is a part of his personality makeup. Generally, it
cannot be changed.
In
her book, Verbally Abusive Relationships, Patricia Evans lists the
types of verbal abuse:
1.
withholding: rejecting the wife.
2.
countering: saying the opposite, arguing without real cause.
3.
discounting: discrediting what she says. (‘You’re too sensitive.’ ‘You can’t
take a joke.’ ‘You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’)
4.
joking: using jokes to abuse. In the joke, she is the victim, she is the
object of ridicule.
5.
blocking: not allowing the wife to communicate. (‘You know what I meant. You’re
talking out of turn.’ ‘Quit your bitching.’ ‘It’s too complicated for you to
understand.’ ‘Just drop it!’. ‘You heard me. I shouldn’t have to repeat
myself.’)
6.
converting dialogue into fights. When the wife tries to accommodate him,
he blows up in anger. He frequently takes her words as a personal attack.
7.
Judging: constantly condemning over issues big and small.
8.
Trivializing: making fun of what she says and what she does, her
accomplishments.
9.
Undermining: continually eroding the wife’s enthusiasm about subjects and
interests not related to the husband, thereby sabotaging her social life.
10. Threatening: threats of
loss or punishment
11. Name calling: from violent
attacks to patronizing contemptuous nick names to sarcastic affection, name
calling is used to keep the wife in her place
12. Forgetting: declaring that
abusive events or where the husband was exposed never happened.
13. Ordering: treating the
wife as a servant. This dehumanizes the wife to a machine with no needs. Some
men continuously talk in the imperative even when there is no conflict.
14. Denial: refusing to accept
responsibility for abuse by accusing the wife of lying or being crazy.
15. Angry abuse: in the forms
of yelling, snapping back, raging, shouting, glaring, grimacing (clenched
teeth), argumentativeness, tantrums, explosions, long episodes of continuous
vicious sarcasms. This develops into an addiction so that the husband will need
a daily fix of raging in order to overcome his feelings of dependency,
inadequacy and powerlessness by shouting out his anger.
Still
another form of verbal abuse is interrogation. The interrogation begins with
throwing the wife into a guilty confusion by a cold inquisitional air. The
husband plays both the roles of the good cop and the bad cop, changing from
sorrowful, reproving affection to cold scientist examining a lab rat to a
vicious abuser that the wife cannot even recognize. Interrogation is an
addictive power game that gives thrills of power to the power-hungry husband
who yearns for greater power in society. The reason it is so thrilling is that
the husband can take a petty incident such as shopping and convert it into a
criminal act. The husband’s own anxiety and possessive insecurity merely adds
to the emotional high of tormenting the wife. Interrogation not only involves
making the wife feel she is sinful (materialistic) and selfish (not serving the
needs of the husband), but also establishes the husband as the omniscient lord
who will judge the wife in future whenever she may ‘fall’ from the path of
virtue.
One lady’s husband refused to let her have a
checkbook, saying men should take care of the money. She said,
“It killed
me having to ask for a few dollars to go marketing or buy the kids shoes – like
a beggar. But that’s the way it was….. I tried not to notice how he made fun of
opinions I expressed on anything, whether it was politics or an author… From
the very beginning, if (he) didn’t get his way, he would make me pay. Sometimes
he wouldn’t talk to me for weeks or wouldn’t eat, even when I cooked his
favorite dinner, and believe me, I tried. Oh, how I tried!”
If a woman (or her husband) is in a high economic
bracket, and she complains about not having any money, that she is penniless,
we should be alert. Some complain, but far more do not tell due to
shame. Some husbands will never confide in their wives regarding
financial matters, will be secretive for the entire marriage, will not tell
them their salary, will always give the impression they are poor or broke, will
force the wife to spend any money that she may have – either earned or
inherited, and will give her pittance to cover household operating expenses,
forcing her to grovel and beg him for more – which then gives him the chance to
say, ‘All she wants is my money.’ It is clear economic
exploitation. If a woman tries to question such a man, he will react in
anger, thus making the subject a taboo one for life. Can one blame a wife then
if she begins to steal from his wallet to obtain enough for basic necessities –
instead of having to grovel again and again? Some women have families to
assist them in these situations. But other women have no one, making them
completely dependent on this economically abusive husband. It is a terrible
situation. He purposely doles out the money in such meager amounts that she has
no option but to begin begging for more. This gives him the chance to further
humiliate, deride and scorn her for begging. Today there are all situations in
the society. In some divorces, the wives make millions from their
marriages. In other cases, they end up penniless. It is typical for economic
abusers to compel their wives to deposit their earnings into his account. He
tells her that he will handle the money. Maybe he tells her it will be easier
to keep track of the balance that way. Or he may tell her that she’s not
responsible enough to manage a checking account. Surprising that she is
responsible enough to earn the money but not mature enough to manage it!
Economic abusers generally want their wives to work and earn money, so that
they can increase their own wealth. Such men will easily tell their wives
that if they don’t ‘behave’, they will cut them off – kick them out of the
house without a penny, without food, without clothes. What can such women do?
What is the alternative for these women? It must appear to them as a very dark
abyss without any escape. According to Dr. Mary Miller, women are able to adapt
more easily to economic abuse as compared to social, emotional and psychological
abuse. Resourceful women in these circumstances will steal money here and
there, praying their husband will not notice.
“The most powerful weapon in the hands of an oppressor
is the mind of the oppressed.”
Steve Biko
The goal of psychological abuse is to undermine the