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Second, Van believed that it was unreasonable to expect a man to be nonabusive unless his partner never hurt his feelings or failed to cater to him. He felt that we were being unfair and unrealistic about a man’s inherent nature, as if we were asking a tiger to be vegetarian. Without saying so directly, he revealed his attitude that a woman needs to accept the fact that a certain amount of abuse just comes with the territory of being involved with a man, unless she can be perfect.
When a family affected by partner abuse splits up, some children discover how much more pleasant life is without their father in the home and may choose to distance themselves from him. This can be a sign of emotional health and recovery. The abuser then often claims, predictably, that the mother is turning the children against him; in his mind, what else could it be?
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Tom’s behavior communicates to his children that having power over other people is a desirable goal. The possibility that sharing, equality, cooperation, and mutual respect can lead to a fulfilling life may be beyond their conceptual reach. When the sons of abusers reach adolescence, for example, they commonly begin manipulating girls into relationships that are sexually or emotionally exploitative. They may lack empathy for their victims, having been conditioned by their fathers to shut themselves off to caring about the feelings of females.
Many of my clients are skilled spin doctors, able to distract children’s attention from what is before them and get them confused about the obvious. Consider the following scenario. A nasty argument breaks out between a mother and a father, with yelling and name-calling on both sides. Their children can barely follow what the fighting is about, partly because their stomachs are tied in knots from the tension. For the rest of the day, their mother is distant and depressed, snapping at them over trivial frustrations. Their father disappears for two or three hours, but when he turns up again he is in a good mood, joking and laughing with the children as if nothing had happened. (An abuser can naturally snap out of the bad effects of an abusive incident much more quickly than the abused woman can.) So which parent will seem to these children to have been responsible for shattering the calm of their home earlier? Probably the grouchy one. It is therefore not surprising that abusers are sometimes able to reverse their children’s perceptions so that they see Mom as the volatile or unreasonable one despite the abuse they witness.
Why does an abuser sow divisions in these ways? One reason is that his power is decreased if the family remains unified. I have had a number of clients whose partners and children have consistently supported each other, and the client is always bitter about it, griping, “They’ve all turned against me,” or, even more commonly, “She’s brainwashed the children to be on her side.” Many abusers take steps to avoid this outcome, using the principle of “divide and conquer”: If people in the family are busy fighting with each other, attention is diverted from the man’s cruelty or control.
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I have almost never worked with an abused woman who overlooked her partner’s humanity. The problem is the reverse: He forgets her humanity. Acknowledging his abusiveness and speaking forcefully and honestly about how he has hurt her is indispensable to her recovery. It is the abuser’s perspective that she is being mean to him by speaking bluntly about the damage he has done. To suggest to her that his need for compassion should come before her right to live free from abuse is consistent with the abuser’s outlook. I have repeatedly seen the tendency among friends and acquaintances of an abused woman to feel that it is their responsibility to make sure that she realizes what a good person he really is inside—in other words, to stay focused on his needs rather than on her own, which is a mistake. People who wish to help an abused woman should instead be telling her what a good person she is.
My clients support laws that prohibit domestic abuse—as long as they are applied only to other men. Each one has a mental image of what a “real abuser” is like, and it isn’t him. In his mind, the “real abuser” is more violent and scary than he is and has a partner who is “a nice lady” who doesn’t deserve abuse. Dozens of my clients have said to me: “I’m not like those guys who come home and abuse their partners for no reason, you know.” A man who minimizes and excuses his abuse in these ways is shocked when the police arrest him or when a court orders him to vacate his home. He feels outraged at the unfairness of the system. He thinks, With all those horrible batterers out there, why are they coming after me? This is ridiculous!
Anyone who believes that abusers lose control of themselves should peer through the window when the police enter a home. Hundreds of women have told me: “It’s as if he could flick a switch. The police arrive, and he’s suddenly cool as a cucumber. Meanwhile, I’m freaking out, so of course they think something is wrong with me. They don’t believe he could settle down that fast.” If abusers truly had tremendous problems managing their anger, if they were as emotionally vulnerable or deeply injured from childhood as they often maintain, they wouldn’t be able to shut themselves off like a faucet as soon as a cop knocks on the door.
The abuser’s distortions regarding the abuser program follow the same lines of his thinking about his partner. If I tell a loquacious client that he can’t dominate the entire group discussion and needs to be quiet for a while, he tells his probation officer, “The counselors say we can only listen and we’re not allowed to talk at all.” If I set limits on a man’s disruptiveness in the group, he turns in his seat, drops his head like a victim, and says sarcastically, “Right, I get it: We’re always wrong, and the women are always right.” If I terminate a man from the program after three warnings for inappropriate behavior, he says, “If we don’t tell you exactly what you want to hear, you kick us out, and you don’t give anyone a second chance.” His twisted reports on our statements provide important glimpses into how he discredits his partner at home—and why she may feel so angry, frustrated, and ready to scream.
Until well into the 1800s, it was expressly legal for a man in the English-speaking world to physically abuse his wife. She had no recourse to the police or the courts, and, if she chose to divorce him because of his abusiveness, he was legally entitled to custody of their children. In the late nineteenth century some legal consequences were finally legislated for some of the most extreme beatings of women, but they were rarely enforced until the 1970s and were not enforced consistently at all until the 1990s! For hundreds and perhaps thousands of years the domestic assault of women has been considered a necessary tool for a man to maintain order and discipline in his home, to make sure that his superior intelligence rules, and to avoid the mushrooming of the hysterical, short-sighted, and naive qualities that men widely attribute to women. It was only with the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially with the work of those activists focusing specifically on battering and sexual assault, that the intimate oppression of women began to be taken seriously as a crime.