He’s terrible to me, but he’s a really good father.

He took no interest in the children until I left him, and then right away he filed for custody.

My children are freaked out and don’t want to go on visitation with him, but the court won’t listen to me.

I couldn’t manage without him, because the children don’t listen to me.

IT’S SATURDAY AFTERNOON, and excitement is high in the Turner family. Randy, who is eleven, and his big sister, Alex, thirteen, are getting ready to go with their parents to a big birthday bash for their twin cousins. Their mother, Helen, is helping them get their presents wrapped and choose what to wear, and periodically intervening to sort out quarrels between the two of them, which seem to erupt every few minutes. Tom, the father, is in the

garage trying to fix Randy’s dirt bike and is covered with grease. Helen’s anxiety is mounting as the hour gets later, because Tom is doing nothing about getting ready to leave and keeps saying, “Get off my fucking back, I already told you I’d be ready on time. I can’t drop this in the middle.”

Tensions between Randy and Alex are also escalating, and Randy finally jumps on Alex and starts punching her. Helen hears Alex screaming, goes running in to pull Randy off her, and in the process gets punched twice by Alex herself. Randy yells at her, “You always side with Alex, you bitch,”

and goes into his room and slams the door. Alex is crying hard and says to

her mother, “You have to do something about him; I can’t take it anymore. I swear, if he hits me one more time I’m going to kill him. He’s out of

control!”

Helen stays with Alex for a few minutes, then starts to put things into

the car. The time to leave has passed. Tom finally comes in from the garage and starts to scrub his hands in a leisurely fashion. He then starts to look at the newspaper, and Helen snaps at him, “What are you doing? We need to go.” Tom cuts her with a glare that makes her heart stop and says, “I was just seeing what time the game is on tonight. But since you mention it,

maybe I should check out what else might be interesting.” Then, with a cold sneer on his face, he takes the newspaper to the couch, puts up his feet, and begins to peruse the pages in earnest. Helen storms furiously upstairs. Ten minutes later Tom is still sitting on the couch. Helen calls to him, “We’re already going to be nearly a half hour late; the children are afraid of missing the games.”

Tom’s lips form an icy smile, and he answers, “I guess you should have thought of that before deciding to give me a ration of your shit.”

Helen yells, “Oh, you asshole!”

At this point Randy emerges from his room and starts down the stairs. “I see you’re hysterical, as usual,” he tosses flippantly at his mother as he goes. When he gets downstairs, he sees that his father is nowhere near ready to go, and he looks at the clock. He considers saying something but thinks better of it; he recognizes the signs of his father’s anger, even when they are not outwardly obvious, and he doesn’t want to make himself the target. So

he goes back upstairs, tells Alex what is happening, and they both go looking for Helen, who is sitting crying on her bed.

Alex says urgently, “Come on, Mom, let’s just go without Dad. The party’s already started, we’re missing it.” Helen shakes her head no. Alex pleads, “Why not? Why can’t we just go?”

Helen responds simply, “We’re not going without him,” not wanting to explain to the children how their father would make her pay if they did.

Randy then says, “Please go and apologize to him, Mom. You know that’s all he’s looking for, and then he’ll get up and we can go.”

Helen’s tears stop, and her voice gets a hard edge. “I didn’t do anything to him, Randy. Why don’t you go ask him to apologize to me? What did I

do?”

Randy’s voice turns condescending, as if his mother is being stupid. “Right, Mom. When has Dad ever apologized for anything? Don’t be ridiculous. I guess we can forget going to the party—that’s basically what you’re saying.”

Then their father calls from downstairs, “Come on, let’s get going.” He has quietly put away his paper and cleaned himself up. Randy and Alex brighten and run off to grab their things. Helen can barely lift herself to her feet, feeling psychologically assaulted from all sides. She looks ashen for an hour or more afterward.

When they are almost out the door, Tom sees for the first time Alex’s outfit, which he considers too sexy, and he barks at her, “You go right back upstairs, young lady, and put on something decent. You aren’t going to the party looking like a prostitute.”

Alex is on the verge of tears again, because she had been excited about what she was going to wear. “But Mom and I picked my clothes out together,” she protests, a helpless whine in her voice. “She said I looked

fine.”

Tom glares at Helen, and his voice lays down the law: “If you aren’t changed in two minutes, we’re leaving and you’re staying here!” Alex runs crying upstairs to throw on a different outfit.

In the car on the way to the party, Tom snaps out of his grumpiness, joking with the children. His humor includes cutting references to Helen’s emotional outbursts and overanxiety, which are cleverly funny in their viciousness. The children can’t help laughing, although Alex feels resentful toward both parents and guilty toward her mother even as she giggles.

Helen is silent.

At the party, Tom acts as if nothing is wrong. Helen makes an excuse about being sick, since it is obvious to people that she is not herself. Tom is entertaining to both the adults and the children at the party, to the extent of giving each child a twirl around in the yard. Helen can see the impression that Tom makes on people and feels that it would be futile to attempt to

describe to anyone what transpired before the party.

There are a few unfamiliar people at the party, to whom Tom introduces Alex as his “girlfriend,” which he considers a charming joke. At one point he comments to some relatives on Alex’s appearance, saying, “She’s developing into quite an attractive young lady, isn’t she?” Alex is nearby and feels humiliated. Tom sees her discomfort and says, “What, can’t you

take a compliment?” and there is laughter all around. He then gives her a hug, kisses her on the head, and tells his amused audience, “She’s a great kid.” Alex forces a smile.

When they get home from the party and the children are upstairs, Helen mentions to Tom that Randy hit Alex again that afternoon and that this time he hurt her. Tom responds, “Helen, welcome to the world. Siblings fight,

okay? Or maybe you haven’t heard, maybe that hasn’t been on Oprah yet. Alex is two years older than Randy, and she’s bigger. She loves to really play up being hurt, because she knows Mommy will come running and feel sorry for her, and it will be Big Bad Randy who’s to blame, while Alex is all innocence. You’re so naive.”

Helen smarts from the series of barbs but forces herself to answer calmly, “I think we should talk to the school psychologist about it and get some suggestions.”

Tom rises rapidly to his feet, instantly transformed as if he had just caught fire. He takes two steps toward Helen, pointing his finger and yelling, causing her heart to race. “You get those people in our business and you’ll be sorry! You have no fucking idea what you are doing. You should use some damned judgment, you stupid idiot!” He stomps out to the garage, turns on the light, and goes back to work on Randy’s bike, listening to the

game on the radio. He does not come back in until after Helen has fallen asleep.

LIFE WITH AN ABUSER in the home can be as stressful and confusing for the children as it is for their mother. They watch the arguments; they feel the tension. When they hear screaming and name-calling, they worry about their parents’ feelings. They have visions of the family splitting up; if the abuser is their father or a father figure, the prospect of separation is a dreaded one. If the abuser is physically scary, sometimes punching walls, knocking over chairs, or striking their mother, then a sharper kind of fear

grips the children and may preoccupy them even during the calm periods in the home. Following incidents of abuse they may be wracked with guilt, feeling that they either caused their mother to be abused or should have found some way to have prevented it.

Witnessing incidents of abuse is just the beginning of what the children endure, however. Abuse sends out shock waves that touch every aspect of family functioning. Hostility creeps into mothers’ relationships with their children, and siblings find themselves pitted against one other. Factions

form and shift. Children’s feelings about each parent can swing to extremes, from times of hating the abuser to periods of idealizing him and blaming the mother for the fighting. Mothers struggle to keep their relationships with their children strong in the face of the wedges driven in by the abuser, and

siblings find ways to support one another and offer protection. These wild cross-currents make family life turbulent.

(For simplicity, I refer in this chapter to the abuser as the children’s “father,” but most of the themes I describe can apply equally to a stepfather or to a mother’s live-in partner.)

WHY ABUSIVENESS SO OFTEN EXTENDS TO PARENTING ISSUES

 

Question 14:

What are abusive men like as fathers?

 

Although I have worked with some clients who draw sharp lines around their mistreatment of their partners, so that their children neither see the

abusive dynamics nor get pulled into them, most abusers exhibit aspects of their abusive mentality in their role as parents. There are various reasons why a man’s abusiveness tends to affect his parenting choices, including the following:

1. Each important decision that parents make has an impact on

   everyone in the family. Consider, for example, the decision that many parents grapple with concerning whether a six-year-old is ready to start first grade or should wait a year. Delaying a year may mean another year during which the mother can’t work many hours outside the home, which affects the family finances. The child may have to be up and out early to catch the bus, which affects how much sleep the parents get. A younger sibling may suddenly not

   have the first-grader at home as a playmate anymore and so may be moody and demanding of attention during the day. How is an abuser likely to respond to this complex picture? He is likely to

   continue his usual tendency to consider his own judgment superior to his partner’s and to be selfishly focused on how any changes will affect him, rather than on what works best for the family as a whole. Just because there are children involved, is his entire approach to decision making going to suddenly change? Not likely.

2. At the core of the abusive mind-set is the man’s view of his partner as a personal possession. And if he sees her as his fiefdom, how likely is he to also see the children as being subject to his ultimate reign? Quite. If he is the children’s legal father, he sees them as

   extensions of himself; otherwise he tends to see them as extensions of her. Either way, his mentality of ownership is likely to shape his parental actions.

3. It is next to impossible for the abuser to keep his treatment of the mother a complete secret from the children the way he does with other people, because they are almost always around. So he

   chooses instead to hook them into the patterns and dynamics of the abuse, manipulating their perceptions and trying to win their loyalty.

4. Children are a tempting weapon for an abuser to use against the mother. Nothing inflicts more pain on a caring parent, male or female, than hurting one of his or her children or causing damage to the parent-child relationship. Many abusers sense that they can gain more power by using the children against their partners than by any method other than the most overtly terrorizing assaults or threats. To their destructive mind-set, the children are just too tempting a tool of abuse to pass up.

REVISITING THE ABUSIVE MIND-SET: PARENTING IMPLICATIONS

I return now to the Turners, whom we met at the opening of this chapter, to look piece by piece at the dynamics that are being played out. The central elements of the abusive mind-set act as our guide:

Control

From observing Tom’s behavior, we learn one of his unspoken rules:

“You do not tell me to hurry up. I get to take as long as I please. If you pressure me,

I will punish you by taking a lot longer.”

Tom is not about to abandon his system of rules and punishments— which are fundamental to an abusive behavior pattern—just because the children are bearing the brunt of it. In fact, he is somewhat pleased that the punishment falls largely on them, because he knows that makes Helen feel even worse.

We also see Tom control Alex directly, ruling dictatorially over her clothing and overruling Helen’s decision, thereby undermining her parental authority. He also seizes power over a process to which he has contributed nothing; if he wanted the right to have a say in what the children wore, he should have involved himself in the work of getting the family ready to go. The abuser does not believe, however, that his level of authority over the children should be in any way connected to his actual level of effort or

sacrifice on their behalf, or to how much knowledge he actually has about who they are or what is going on in their lives. He considers it his right to make the ultimate determination of what is good for them even if he doesn’t attend to their needs or even if he only contributes to those aspects of child care that he enjoys or that make him look like a great dad in public.

Like Tom, abusers tend to be authoritarian parents. They may not be involved that much of the time, but when they do step in, it’s their way or

the highway. My clients defend authoritarian parenting even though a large collection of psychological studies demonstrates that it’s destructive: Children do best when parents are neither overly strict nor overly permissive, providing firm structure but also allowing for dialogue, respectful conflict, and compromise.

The abuser’s coerciveness thus comes into his treatment of the children and his behavior regarding the children, including his bullying of decisions in which the mother should have an equal voice.

Entitlement

Tom doesn’t accept that a couple’s choice to have children requires major

lifestyle changes and sacrifices. He’ll work on Randy’s dirt bike because he enjoys it, but whatever else needs to be done for the children is not his

problem. Yet at the party he goes to great lengths to present himself as Mr. Dad, because he likes the image and status of fatherhood.

The selfishness and self-centeredness that his entitlement produces cause role reversal in his relationships with his children, in that he

considers it their responsibility to meet his needs. Tom behaves flirtatiously with his teenage daughter at the birthday party, introducing her as his

“girlfriend,” commenting obliquely on her sexual development and kissing her in the midst of her embarrassment. The discomfort he causes Alex is obvious, but he can’t be bothered to pay attention to that fact. He meets his own needs through the fantasy of having an attractive young partner while simultaneously taking pride as a parent in her attractiveness.

Children of abusers often find their father’s attention and approval hard to come by. This scarcity has the effect of increasing his value in their eyes, as any attention from him feels special and exciting. Ironically, their mother can come to seem less important to them because they know they can count on her.

The abuser’s entitled attitude that he should be above criticism makes it hard for his partner to intervene with him on her children’s behalf. When Helen tries to get Tom to hurry up for the children’s sake, he considers her efforts “a ration of shit” and punishes them all by deliberately taking even longer. Alex and Randy don’t realize the price that their mother pays, and that they themselves pay, when she tries to stand up for them against him, so they wind up feeling that she doesn’t care.

Externalization of Responsibility

Tom makes the children late for their party but then tells Helen it’s her own fault. He also says that her overly sympathetic responses to Alex are the reason why the children’s fights become a big deal. It never enters his mind that Randy’s behavior toward females might be related to what he himself has modeled. Everything that goes wrong in the family is someone else’s fault, usually Helen’s.

Children who are exposed to the abuse of their mother often have

trouble paying attention in school, get along poorly with their peers, or act out aggressively. In fact, they have been found to exhibit virtually every symptom that appears in children who are being abused directly. The abuser attributes all of these effects to the mother’s poor parenting or to inherent

weaknesses in the children.

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?

Manipulativeness

As the Turner family drives off toward the party, Tom abruptly shifts into good humor, joking with the children and inducing them to bond with him against their mother. It is hard to stay angry at him when he is being playful. The children are ashamed of laughing at their mother—consciously for Alex, less so for Randy—but they are also drawn into an alliance with their father.

In certain ways children actually have an easier time living with an

abusive parent who is mean all the time—at least then they know what they are dealing with and who is at fault. But the typical abuser is constantly changing faces, leaving his children confused and ambivalent and increasing the likelihood that they will identify with him in hopes of staying on his good side.

One critical category of manipulation involves the various tactics an

abusive man may use to keep children from revealing to outsiders that their mother is being abused. Your partner may reward the children for maintaining secrecy or may make them feel that they would bring shame on the family, including themselves, if anyone were to find out. In some cases the man uses more overt pressure, including threats to enforce secret- keeping. Children who do disclose the abuse going on at home sometimes suffer emotional or physical retaliation by the abuser. (Some children are also pressured by their mother not to tell, because she is afraid of what her partner will do to her or to them if word leaks out.) It is important to take

steps to relieve any burden of secrecy that your children may be carrying, as I discuss at the end of this chapter.

Superiority, Disrespect

Tom openly ridicules Helen for being concerned with Randy’s

assaultiveness toward Alex. Her parenting is thus one of the things about which he abuses her. Children growing up in this atmosphere can gradually

come to look down on their mother as a parent, having absorbed the abuser’s messages that she is immature, irrational, illogical, and incompetent. Even those children who take their mother’s side in most conflicts, as many daughters and some sons of abused women do,

nonetheless can come to see her as inferior to other people and to themselves. Randy’s behavior reveals this dynamic when he remarks condescendingly to his mother: “I see you’re hysterical as usual.” He has learned to see his mother through Tom’s eyes.

Possessiveness

Tom treats Alex like an object that belongs to him. When he makes her

change before the party, we might think, “He doesn’t want his daughter to get sexualized at such a young age, which is good.” But what we discover at the party is that he doesn’t object to her sexualization, he just wants to be in control of it, and he wants it oriented toward his gratification. His demand that she not show off her body is not based on the viewpoint of a

responsible parent but rather is more like the attitude of a jealous boyfriend.

Not all abusers perceive their children as owned objects, but many do.

A man who already considers his partner a possession can find it easy to see his children the same way. But children are not things, and parents who see their children in an objectified way are likely to cause psychological harm

because they don’t perceive children as having rights.

Public Image

It is confusing for children to see people responding to their abusive father as if he were a charming and entertaining person. What are Alex and Randy to make of how popular Tom is at the party? They are left to assume that his behavior at home is normal, which in turn means that they, and their mother, must be at fault.

THE ABUSIVE MAN AS CHILD ABUSER

Multiple studies have demonstrated that men who abuse their partners are far more likely than other men to abuse children. The extent of the risk to children from a particular abuser largely depends on the nature of his pattern of mistreatment toward their mother, although other factors such as

his own childhood also can play an important role. The increased risks include the following.

Physical Abuse

The abuser who is most likely to hit children is the one who is quite physically assaultive or threatening toward the mother. A battering partner is seven times more likely than a nonbattering man to physically abuse children, and the risk increases with the frequency of his violence toward the mother. However, there are also some abusers who hit the children but

not the mother. The man in this category tends to be: (a) a particularly harsh and authoritarian parent, (b) a controlling and dictatorial partner, and, (c) a man who was physically abused by his own parents while he was growing up.

Sexual Abuse

Incest perpetrators are similar to partner abusers in both their mentality and their tactics. They tend to be highly entitled, self-centered, and manipulative men who use children to meet their own emotional needs. Like Tom, they

are often controlling toward their daughters (or sons) and view them as owned objects and tend to use seduction and sweetness to lure their victims in. In fact, Tom exhibits many of the warning signs of a sexually abusive father, including his apparent jealousy toward Alex and his penchant for giving a romantic and sexual tone to his interactions with her.

As in cases of physical abuse of children, multiple research studies have found that men who abuse their partners perpetrate incest at a much higher rate than do nonabusive men. These studies suggest that the incest perpetrator is not necessarily severely violent to the mother, but some

degree of assault on her is common. The mentality and tactics of the incest perpetrator are very similar to those of the partner abuser, including self-

centeredness and demands that his needs be catered to, manipulation, cultivation of a charming public persona, requiring the victim to keep the abuse secret, and others. Although the percentage of outright sexual abuse appears to be fairly low, even among abusive men, partners of my clients frequently raise concerns about subtler kinds of boundary violations and

other sexually inappropriate behaviors along the lines of those exhibited by Tom at the party. A man who perceives his child as an owned object, as

Tom did, is likely to disregard her rights to privacy or to integrity in her own body.

Boys are at some risk of being violated by abusive men as well, although most incest perpetrators choose to offend against a girl if one is available. Boys appear to be at particular risk when they are very young, while the vulnerability of girls remains steady and may even increase during adolescence.

Psychological Abuse

Partners of my clients frequently share their distress with me over the mental cruelty the abuser visits upon the children. Name-calling, belittling, attacking their self-confidence, humiliating them in front of other people, shaming boys with regard to their masculinity, and insulting—or inappropriately complimenting—girls on the basis of their physical development and appearance are all common parenting behaviors among

the abusive men in my groups. They tend to hurt their children’s feelings further by failing to show up for important events, not following through on promises to take them on outings, or by showing no interest. Watching their children get rejected by their fathers in these ways is a source of pain for many of the abused women I speak with.

THE ABUSER AS ROLE MODEL

What are Randy and Alex learning from Tom’s treatment of Helen and from the messages he gives them about her? Parents’ statements and behaviors

are probably the single greatest influence on the development of children’s values and on how they perceive other people and themselves—at least as powerful as their parents’ words (which sometimes convey opposite messages). Children exposed to partner abuse learn the following lessons from the dynamics they are caught in the middle of:

“THE TARGET OF ABUSE IS AT FAULT, NOT THE ABUSER.”

Tom makes it clear to his children that Helen brings abuse upon herself by being too emotional, by questioning his decisions, or by being overly angry. Randy (and perhaps Alex as well) is likely to exhibit problems in

how he treats other people, because he has been taught how to blame others, especially females, for his actions. Alex may believe that other people, especially males, have the right to mistreat her and that it is her own fault if they do.

“SATISFACTION IN LIFE COMES THROUGH CONTROLLING AND MANIPULATING OTHERS.”

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.

“BOYS AND MEN SHOULD BE IN CONTROL, AND FEMALES SHOULD SUBMIT TO

THAT CONTROL.”

Unless they can find strong counter-examples among their friends or relatives, Alex and Randy run the risk of internalizing a rigid, abuse-prone view of what men and women inherently are. Children’s parents are their first and most important source of sex-role definition and identification.

“WOMEN ARE WEAK, INCOMPETENT, AND ILLOGICAL.”

Tom is teaching his children—whether intentionally or not—to perceive women in the same degrading light that he casts on Helen. He reinforces

these messages by treating Alex disrespectfully in public. Daughters of abusive men often have profound self-esteem problems. Why wouldn’t they? Look at what the abuser is teaching them about how valuable and worthy of respect females are. Sons of abusive men in turn tend to be

disparaging of and superior to girls and women, especially when the boys become old enough to begin dating.

“MOMMIES DO THE HARD, CONSTANT, RESPONSIBLE DAILY WORK OF PARENTING, WHILE DADDIES STEP IN TO MAKE THE KEY DECISIONS AND SHARE

THE FUN TIMES.”

Alex and Randy are led to regard their mother as the brawn of the family operation and their father as the brains. They associate Helen with

routine and structure, whereas they connect Tom with times that are special and exciting. Despite how grumpy he often is, Dad still comes out seeming like the fun parent; they notice how entertaining he is at the party, for example, while their mother is sullen and withdrawn.

“PEOPLE THAT LOVE YOU GET TO ABUSE YOU.”

Children who grow up exposed to an abusive man’s behavior learn that abuse is the price people pay if they want to receive love. This training can make it harder for children to recognize when they are being mistreated and to stand up for themselves.

As an abuser passes on his thinking to the next generation, he, in effect recruits his sons to the ranks of abusive men. He does not literally want his son to mistreat women—he doesn’t believe he does so himself, after all— but he wants his son to think as he thinks, including adopting his same

excuses and justifications, so the outcome is the same. And to a lesser extent he also recruits his daughters to join the ranks of abused women.

HOW ABUSERS AFFECT MOTHER-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

 

Question 15:

Why is everyone in the family mad at each other

INSTEAD OF AT HIM?

 

Tom’s behavior drives wedges between the members of his family that expand over time. Many of the divisions he has sown are already bearing

their poisonous fruit. How is he affecting Helen’s relationships with her children? And how is he shaping—and distorting—how they view her?

Undermining Her Authority

It isn’t hard for Alex and Randy to figure out where primary parental authority is vested in their family, because they see that Helen’s decisions can be overruled. Children who detect such an imbalance learn to play one parent against the other and try to curry favor with the one who has the

ultimate say. They also learn to defy the authority of the abused parent. Some abusive men further undermine the mother’s authority by speaking badly about the mother to the children, characterizing her as crazy, alcoholic, or uncaring.

Even when a man does not directly undercut the mother’s parenting as Tom does, his abuse undermines her authority by its very nature. Children who see or hear their father belittle their mother, silence her, walk away and ignore her, or physically intimidate her, learn that such behaviors toward her are both acceptable and effective. Most children of abused women are

aware that their father does these things—even if the parents don’t think they know—and they experiment with imitating his behaviors to see if it will help them get their way.

Children may also hope to win their father’s approval by joining him in the abuse of their mother. This effort succeeds in some cases, but other

abusers lay down the law quickly to establish that the privilege of disrespecting Mom belongs only to Dad. In this case the children may

repress what they are learning until Mom and Dad split up; then, with the abuser out of the house, they let loose, re-creating his put-downs and intimidation of her, sometimes rapidly making themselves unmanageable.

Children of abusers absorb his expectations of constant catering from the mother. The son of an abused woman tends, for example, to become enraged at her for not waiting on him hand and foot, for pressing him to

meet his responsibilities, or for challenging his inappropriate behaviors. His father is a direct model for his angry, verbally abusive responses in these particular circumstances.

Interfering with Her Parenting

The evening after the birthday party, Tom forbids Helen to involve the school psychologist in addressing Randy’s assaults on his sister. He doesn’t

say exactly what her punishment will be if she defies him, but she knows him well enough to not want to find out. She is thus forbidden to parent her children.

Dozens of abused women have complained to me of my clients’ direct interference with their parenting. The most common complaint is that of being prevented from comforting a crying or frightened baby or young child. The men sometimes admit the interference openly. A recent client of

mine, Jacob, told me that he was sick of the way his partner, Patricia, would pick up their eleven-month-old baby Willy when he cried and “fawn over

him,” and he blocked her from going into the baby’s room. That was just the beginning. An older daughter of theirs was hospitalized for weeks in a city that was nearly two hours away with severe hepatitis. Patricia would

rush to the hospital each night as soon as she got off work, visit briefly with her daughter, and then rush back home in hopes of seeing Willy before he fell asleep. However, if Patricia didn’t make it back home by the nightly

deadline that Jacob had set, Jacob would not permit her to go into Willy’s room to see him, even if Willy was still awake. On at least one occasion the boy realized that Patricia was home and started yelling, “Mommy,

Mommy!” and Jacob still blocked her from entering. His excuse to me? “I didn’t set that deadline,” he said. “We agreed to it mutually.” (This would have been an unacceptable excuse even if it were true, but Patricia told me she never agreed to such a deadline.)

I think it is important to mention that Jacob never hit Patricia in their ten years together and that he was a college professor living in an unusually

luxurious neighborhood. He provides a powerful illustration of the depth of the psychological cruelty an abuser can perpetrate with little or no physical violence and keep hidden behind the most impressive facade.

I SPEAK WITH some mothers who have developed psychiatric symptoms from being abused, such as nightmares, severe anxiety, or depression. Research

studies have found that these conditions and related ones, including

posttraumatic stress disorder, are not uncommon in women who have been abused by their partners. The abuser may have indoctrinated his children to perceive their abused mother as emotionally troubled, but he also may have actually caused her to become somewhat unstable. In either case, his behavior damages mother-child relationships, and it can take both time and

outside assistance for mothers and children to reestablish a strong and trusting connection.

Using the Children as Weapons of Abuse

One of my clients many years ago was a mousy and mild-mannered young father named Wayne who characterized himself as a feminist. He was upset one morning about some things his wife, Nancy, had said to him before leaving the home, and he stormed around itching to make her really regret her words. He was looking in the refrigerator for milk for their ten-month- old baby when he came across a bottle from a few days earlier that had spoiled. He recognized the bottle immediately as the ultimate weapon and proceeded to give the baby the spoiled milk to drink, making him violently

ill. Few other acts could have had an impact on Nancy as devastating as this one. The controlling effect was potent: Nancy was terrified for a long time after to defy Wayne or upset him in any way. She was also filled with anxiety as she left for work each morning.

Another client of mine described how he had told his wife during an argument, “If you don’t shut up, you’re going to be really sorry,” and when she continued yelling at him, he went into their teenage daughter’s closet and cut her prom dress to ribbons with a pair of scissors. The daughter’s pain, I learned from the mother, was indescribable. Fueling this type of cruelty to children is the abuser’s awareness that the mother’s empathy for her children’s emotional pain will hurt her more than anything he could do to her directly.

Shaping the Child’s Perceptions of the Abuse

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.

Placing the Mother in a Double Bind

When Tom punishes Helen by deliberately making the children late, Randy and Alex become upset with her for not capitulating. They feel that if she would just cater to their father and manage his emotions they would get what they need, so they see her as the one who is hurting them. They know it’s out of the question for him to do anything different. The abuser gets rewarded for his bullying behavior because the children give up on influencing his side of the equation and pour their energy into getting their mother to fix what’s wrong.

Yet this is only half of the problem. On some other issue, Helen may give in to Tom precisely to avoid the kind of abuse and retaliation that resulted this time, and then the children will feel critical of her for that.

They may say: “Why do you let Dad push you around like that? Why do you put up with that?” They may grumble: “When Dad is being mean to us, Mom doesn’t do anything about it.” Children of abused women thus feel angry and upset with their mother for standing up to the abuser and for not standing up to him. Their reactions in this regard are entirely understandable, but the mother can find herself in an impossible bind that

leads to more distance and tension between her and her children.

Child protective services sometimes accuse an abused woman of “failing to protect” her children from exposure to an abusive man, without understanding the many efforts she may have made to keep them safe and the many tactics the abuser may have used to interfere with her parenting.

HOW ABUSIVE MEN SOW DIVISIONS IN FAMILIES

Randy and Alex are bitter adversaries one minute and loyal allies the next. They are like pebbles at the edge of the sea, with each wave of abuse toward their mother washing over them and changing their position in relation to each other. Randy’s violence toward Alex is no surprise; boys

who are exposed to the abuse of their mother are often disrespectful of and aggressive toward their peers, targeting females in particular for their hostility. Sons of abusers learn to look down on females, so they feel superior to their sisters and mothers and thus expect catering from them.

Violence among siblings occurs at much higher rates in homes where there is partner abuse.

Abuse is inherently divisive; family members blame each other for the abuser’s behavior because it is unsafe to blame him. If an incident of abuse began with an argument over one child’s misbehavior, then an older sibling might say, “Daddy screamed at Mom and made her cry because he was mad that you were making so much noise. You should have listened to me when I told you to quiet down.”

Tom contributes further to divisiveness through his favoritism: He treats Randy like a buddy and fixes his dirt bike, while ignoring Alex except when showing her off in public. Favoritism is rampant in the parenting of

abusive men. They may favor boys over girls because of their own negative attitudes toward females. They favor children whom they see as siding with them and are rejecting of those who are sympathetic or protective of the mother. Children experience powerful emotional rewards from the abuser for distancing themselves from their mother and from any siblings who are allied with her.

My clients exhibit a range of other divisive tactics, including openly shaming children—especially boys—for being close to their mother, telling family members lies about each other, and making children feel like

members of a special and superior club when they are part of his team.

Finally, they use collective punishment, requiring all the children to pay a

price for one child’s behavior, which can be devastating in its ability to turn children against each other.

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.

RESILIENCE IN MOTHER-CHILD AND SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS

Almost miraculously, some family members of abusers manage to stay

close to each other and unified. Several factors play a role in helping family relationships rebound from the effects of the abuser’s behavior and grow strong:

1. Access to good information about abuse: When a mother receives assistance from a program for abused women, for example, she has an easier time unraveling the convoluted dynamics of abuse, and then can assist her children to achieve greater clarity. It also helps her not blame her children for how they’ve been affected by the abuse.

2. Access to children’s services: Many programs for abused women

   now offer free counseling for their children as well, and specialized counseling for children who have witnessed abuse is sometimes

   available through other sources such as hospitals or mental health centers. Family relationships benefit greatly when children get an opportunity to work through some of the dynamics we have been examining.

3. Safety from the abuser: Family members are more likely to stay by each other if their community stays by them, helping them to either leave the abuser or demand that he change. For the violent abuser, the police and courts can play a critical role in supporting the family, or they can drop the ball. The actions taken by family and

   juvenile courts can also be pivotal in protecting children from the effects of an abuser’s behavior.

4. Access to supportive community resources: I have observed, for example, that children tend to do better simply by having the good fortune to live in a neighborhood where there are plenty of children to play with. If children have the opportunity to participate in sports, drama, or other activities that give them pleasure and help them feel good about themselves, they are less likely to channel their distress into hurting their siblings and their mother. Adults

   outside the family who devote attention to the children and engage

   them in activities can help them unhook themselves psychologically from the abuser, even without any direct mention of the abuse.

   Support for the mother is as important as support for the children. Seek out a trustworthy friend or relative, and take the leap of talking about how you are being mistreated in your relationship. Breaking your isolation is critical to healing both you and your children.

5. A mother who works hard at her parenting and gets help with it: It is important for an abused mother to get community support and not to try to be a superhero. At the same time, there are helpful

   steps you can take. Try as hard as you can not to take your rage and frustration out on your children. Look for books or lectures about parenting and discipline strategies. Seek support for your parenting from friends and relatives, and try to be open to

   suggestions or constructive criticism from others. These are all extraordinary challenges for an abused mother; no one should

   blame you if you can’t do all of these things, especially all at once. But I find that many abused women discover ways to be the best mothers they can under the circumstances, and their children feel

   the difference in the long run.

6. An abuser who is a poor manipulator: Some abusive men simply aren’t as clever or persuasive in shaping the children’s outlook, with the result that the children don’t become as confused and ambivalent and cast less blame on to their mothers, their siblings, and themselves.

HOW CHILDREN LOOK AT THEIR ABUSIVE FATHERS

In his children’s eyes, the abuser is simultaneously hated and revered. They resent his bullying and selfishness but are attracted to his charm and power.

They soak up the delicious moments when he is kind and attentive, partly because they may be so few. They may have an active fantasy life about

getting big enough to stand up to him, and often dream of hurting him. If he is depressed or alcoholic, they worry about him. They observe that when

their father is happy peace reigns in the family and that when he is unhappy he makes everyone else miserable, too, so they invest themselves in keeping him content. These many powerful mixed feelings are confusing and

uncomfortable for children.

Children also are subject to traumatic bonding with the abuser, just as their mothers are, even if he does not abuse them directly. When child

protective workers or custody evaluators assess a family in which there is partner abuse, they commonly conclude that the children are highly bonded to their father—as I find in their written reports—without examining whether or not that attachment is the result of trauma and manipulation rather than of extensive positive time spent together.

The abuser shapes how the children and the mother see him as a parent.

It is common for a partner of one of my clients to say: “He treats me terribly, but he’s a good father.” But when I then ask detailed questions about the kinds of behaviors I have reviewed in this chapter, three times out of four the woman reports multiple important problems; she just hadn’t been able to sort them out. You therefore may be finding that uncomfortable questions are arising for you about your own partner’s parenting as you read along. When you are already struggling with how you are being treated yourself, it can be painful to consider that your children may be at risk of mistreatment as well. In the pages ahead, you will find suggestions for helping your children meet their own challenges.

THE ABUSER AS PARENT POSTSEPARATION

What happens to the parenting of abusers when couples split up? Some

abusive men simply vanish from their children’s lives, taking the attitude, “The children are her problem. If she wanted help with them, she should

have treated me better. I don’t want restrictions on my freedom.” He thinks of having children as a reversible process, reminiscent of jokes about recovering one’s virginity. He may pay little or no child support, and the children may not even receive birthday cards from him.

Children may actually fare better in the long term from having the abuser drop out of their lives rather than having him continue his

manipulations and divisiveness for years, but these are both poor choices. When an abusive father disappears, children feel rejected and abandoned. In

one of my current cases, the child keeps insisting that the reason for the disappearance of the father is “because he didn’t like me,” although the mother tells him that isn’t so. Depending on their neighborhood or community, children also may suffer from the stigma of having a father who “ran off.”

When abusive fathers stay involved, a different set of problems typically arise. First, the mother is generally the one who ended the relationship, and abusers do not take well to being left. They may use the children as weapons to retaliate against the mother or as pawns to try to get her back. I had a client named Nate, for example, who moved into an apartment when he and his wife separated and kept his new place as dingy and depressing as possible. He threw a bare mattress on the floor, put no

pictures on the walls or rugs on the floors, and acquired little other furniture, although he could have afforded to make the place look decent. When the children came to visit him on weekends, they were shocked by his living conditions. He cried in front of them about how much he missed them and their mother and how bad it felt to be alone and outside of the family. He dressed sloppily, barely combed his hair, and rarely shaved, giving himself a pathetic mien. The children were crushed and could think of nothing other than their father’s pain and loneliness. Naturally they began pressuring their mother to let him come back home.

Children can be used even more directly as weapons. A partner of one of my clients told me that she had left him about a year earlier but then got back together with him, “because he told me if I didn’t let him back in the house he was going to sexually abuse our daughter.” She had not reported

this threat to a family court, because she assumed she would not be believed

—family courts are widely reputed to treat women’s sexual abuse allegations with strong disbelief.

Abused women have reported to me countless ways in which their ex- partners try to hurt or control them through the children, including:

 

Pumping them for information about the mother’s life, especially about new partners

 

Returning them from visits dirty, unfed, or sleep-deprived

 

Discussing with them the possibility of coming to live with him instead

Continuing to drive wedges between them and their mother

 

Undermining her authority by making his house a place where

 

there are no rules or limits, permitting the children to eat whatever junk food they want, watch movies that are inappropriately violent or sexual, and ignore their homework, so that they chafe against normal discipline when they get back to her house

Hurting the children psychologically, physically, or sexually in order to upset the mother

 

Threatening to take the children away from her

 

Seeking custody or increased visitation through the courts

 

Insisting on taking the children for visitation only to leave them most of the time in someone else’s care, usually his mother’s or new partner’s

 

Why He Uses the Children as Weapons Postseparation

What is going on in the abuser’s mind as he hurts his ex-partner through the children?

1. He wants her to fail.

   The last thing an abuser wants is for his partner to thrive after they split up, since that would prove that he was the problem. So he tries to make her parenting life as difficult as possible so that her life will stay stuck. She

   ends up feeling like she was never really permitted to leave him, feeling his presence around her all the time through his maneuvers involving the children. Many abusers cause more damage to mother-child relationships after separation than they did before.

2. He is losing most of his other avenues for getting at her.

   Separation means that the abuser doesn’t get his daily opportunities to control the woman and cut her down. He may still be able to get at her through various financial dealings, and he can stalk or assault her if he is willing to risk arrest. But the children become one of his only vehicles to keep a hook into her for the long term.

3. He considers the children his personal possessions.

   While the abuser may believe that the work of raising children is his partner’s responsibility, he assigns the rights regarding them to himself. He feels outraged postseparation that he is losing control not only of his ex- partner but of the children as well. This ownership mentality was illustrated neatly by a client of mine who went to court seeking sole legal custody but requesting that the mother retain physical custody; in other words, he wanted her to look after the child, but the right to make the decisions would be his. (Fortunately, his request was denied.)

   An abusive father may go ballistic if his ex-partner begins a new relationship because, as clients often say to me: “I don’t want another man around my children.” In my experience, abused women often get involved with a more respectful man on the next go round, because their painful

   experience has taught them some signs of abuse to watch out for. Her children may then gravitate to the new man as if toward a magnet, thrilled to discover that they can get caring and appropriate male attention, a situation to which an abusive man may have a hostile reaction.

4. His perceptions of his ex-partner are highly distorted.

Many of my clients genuinely believe that they are doing what is best for their children by driving them away from their mother, because they have swallowed their own propaganda about how bad she is. An abuser strives to prove that his ex-partner is a poor mother by pointing to symptoms that are actually the effects that his cruelty has had on her: her depression, her emotional volatility, her difficulty managing the children’s disrespect of her. He feels that he needs to save them from her, a stark and disturbing distortion.

DO ALL ABUSERS HARM THEIR CHILDREN EMOTIONALLY POSTSEPARATION?

Fortunately not. I have worked with abusers who have substantially more compassion for the children than they have for their partners and who do not use them as weapons postseparation. These men tend to be:

1. The ones who behaved the most responsibly toward the children

   prior to separation: The divorced or separated abuser who is kind to the children, cares for them responsibly, and does not try to

   damage their relationships with their mother is a man who was also operating this way while the couple was together. He generally didn’t degrade her right in front of the children and didn’t abuse her during a pregnancy. He is usually less selfish and self-centered than the average abuser.

   The parenting of abusive men rarely improves postseparation,

   unlike that of some nonabusive fathers. I have had clients who put on a big show of being nicer to their children and spending more

   time with them because they were seeking custody, or because they were trying to turn the children against their mother. These are not genuine improvements in parenting; once their campaign is over, win or lose, they revert to their old ways. The only question about an abuser’s treatment of his children postseparation is “Will it stay the same or will it get worse?”

2. The ones who are not intent upon settling old scores: If he is willing to move on with life without having to punish you—or get back together with you—the picture for the children can brighten somewhat.

3. The ones who do not use the legal system to pursue custody or

increased visitation: For a variety of reasons, many abusive men do not choose to use family courts as a venue for taking power over the woman and her children. Once the court becomes involved, the road to peace can be a long and painful one.

THE ABUSER IN FAMILY COURT

I have frequently served as a custody evaluator, or guardian ad litem. A custody evaluator is appointed by a court to investigate the children’s

circumstances in cases of divorce or separation and to make

recommendations to the judge regarding custody and visitation. In my first case of this kind several years ago, a man named Kent was seeking to win custody of his three-year-old daughter from his ex-partner, Renée. Kent was

in the military, so he did not have “flex-time” options; he told me that if he gained custody, his parenting plan was to put Tracy in day care forty hours a week. Tracy was currently in the full-time care of her mother. Kent was not critical of Renée’s parenting; he said simply that he wanted Tracy to live with him because he could care for her even better. More important, he was offering to allow Renée liberal visitation, whereas Renée was restricting his contact with Tracy to a set schedule. “That way Tracy could have both

parents,” he said.

Kent informed me with audible outrage that Renée was accusing him of having been abusive, “but she has never provided one shred of evidence of her laughable allegations.” He then went on, in response to my detailed questions, to describe thirteen different occasions on which he had

physically assaulted Renée, including repeated incidents of pushing her down and one time when he kneed her so hard in the pelvic area that she got a large dark bruise. He claimed never to have punched or slapped her; apparently this is why he considered her reports of abuse such a joke.

That isn’t all. Kent went on to tell me that he had participated only minimally in Tracy’s care during her first year of life and not dramatically more during the subsequent two years. (Most abusers in custody disputes are craftier than Kent was. His entitlement was so severe that he didn’t think I would see anything wrong with this picture.)

Why did Kent want to take a little girl out of the full-time care of a competent mother in order to put her into full-time day care? I was forced to conclude that he craved power over Renée, wanted contact with her and saw winning custody as the way to put the cards back in his hands.

Unfortunately, few custody evaluators or judges understand the nature of an abusive man’s problem. If they find him likable, they assume the

abuse allegations must be greatly exaggerated. And once they adopt that stance, it can become extraordinarily difficult to get them to listen carefully to what has gone on or to investigate the evidence.

The world of family courts, where legal struggles over custody and visitation take place, is a nightmare in the lives of many thousands of abused women across the United States and Canada. A woman who has

overcome so many obstacles to finally free herself from abuse can suddenly find herself jerked back into the abuser’s grip, because he is the legal father of her children and chooses to continue his abuse through the legal system.

The typical abusive man enters the court with self-assurance, assuming that court personnel will be malleable in his charming and manipulative hands. He typically tells lies chronically and comfortably. He looks and acts nothing like the social stereotype of an abuser and plays on the prevailing myths and prejudices concerning abuse. Imagine how Tom, the father in the scenario that opened this chapter, would appear in the courthouse; would

anyone believe that he could be an abuser?

The Abuser’s Tactics in Custody Disputes

Here are just a few of the strategies an abuser tends to use in custody and visitation disputes:

Taking Advantage of His Financial Position

Most men are in a better economic position than their ex-partners for at least the first few years following separation. This imbalance is greater for abusers because they may control and manipulate the finances while the

couple is together and sometimes make dramatic attempts to destroy their partner economically as the relationship dissolves. An abuser can often afford to spend a great deal more than the woman on legal expenses, or he can get himself into a nice house to sway both the children and the custody evaluator. He may be able to completely ruin his ex-partner’s financial position by dragging her back into court over and over again.

Asking for Psychological Evaluations

Most abusers do not show significant psychopathology on psychological tests, but their partners often do as a result of enduring years of abuse. The evaluating psychologist may report that the woman is depressed, hysterical, or vindictive; few evaluators take the abused woman’s actual past

experience or current circumstances into account. If she reports that she is being followed, for example, because the abuser is stalking her, she is likely to be labeled “paranoid” and her reports of abuse discredited on that basis.

A psychologist’s report on the abusive man may be based on a related set of misconceptions. I have read several evaluations that state that the man is unlikely to have perpetrated the reported acts of abuse because he is not mentally ill or because he doesn’t show signs of aggressiveness in the evaluator’s office. (On this erroneous basis, most abusive men could be declared to be victims of false accusations.) Unfortunately, many

psychologists who take court appointments have been slow to accept that their standard array of theories and tests can lead to serious errors when applied to domestic-abuse cases.

Playing the Role of Peacemaker

A great number of my clients use a routine that goes like this: “There was a lot of fighting and bad feeling in our relationship, and I can understand that she is bitter about some things, but we need to put that all behind us for the good of the children. She is so focused on getting revenge against me that

she is forgetting about the children’s needs. That’s why I’m asking for joint custody, so that the children would get lots of time with each of us, while she’s asking for me to have only every other Saturday.”

This piece of acting seeks to take advantage of the myth that women are more vindictive than men when relationships end (in the case of abuse, however, the reality is very much the opposite) and that men are frequently victims of false accusations of abuse by women who want to keep them away from their children. The abuser’s goal with this and all other strategies is to get court personnel to disbelieve his ex-partner and ignore any

evidence she presents.

Feigning Remorse over the Abuse

A surprising number of judges and custody evaluators consider a man’s

abuse of his partner irrelevant to custody and visitation decisions. They are either unaware or uninterested in the role that an abusive man plays as a

role model for his children, the damage he can do to mother-child relationships, and the way he may use the children as weapons. So if an abuser says he regrets his verbal or physical assaults on the mother, that can be enough to manipulate court personnel into saying, “Let’s leave all that in the past.”

Confusing the Court with Crossaccusations

Most of my clients can lie persuasively, with soulful facial expressions, good eye contact, and colorful details. Court personnel have trouble believing that such a pleasant-seeming man could simply be inventing most or all of his accusations against the abused woman. In various cases of mine, court personnel have told me, “He accuses her of the same things, so

I guess they abuse each other.” In such cases, the court may accept his

counteraccusations at face value, rather than look closely at the evidence.

Accusing Her of Trying to Turn the Children Against Him

Some abusive men do not succeed in turning children against their mother, and some don’t even try. Children sometimes see the abuse for what it is and take whatever steps they can to protect themselves, each other, and their mother, including perhaps disclosing the abuser’s treatment of her (or of them) to outsiders. The abusive man’s typical response to this is to claim that the mother is turning the children against him. Some prominent

psychologists have, unfortunately, contributed through their writings to the myth that it is unhealthy for children to distance themselves from an

abusive father and that the mother is probably the cause of their desire to do so. Family courts tend to be unaware of how important it is to children not to be exposed to the negative role modeling of their abusive father and to

his hostility and contempt toward their mother. Regrettably, a growing number of abusive men succeed in using such claims of “parental

alienation” to win custody or ample unsupervised visitation, even in cases where there is extensive evidence that the man has abused not only the mother but the children as well.

The reality is that a mother who attempts to restrict her children’s contact with the man who abused her is generally acting as an appropriate protective parent. She is also supporting healthy self-protective instincts in her children; children who are not supported or encouraged in this way to protect themselves from exposure to abuse will be at greater risk for accommodating abuse by others as they go through life.

I have noticed that charges of “parental alienation” are sometimes leveled against the most competent mothers, because of their strong and

supportive bonds with their children—which the abuser terms enmeshment or overdependence—and because the children have learned to see through the abuser’s facade and therefore choose to try to keep away from him.

Appealing to Popular Misconceptions

Several misleading arguments appear repeatedly in statements that abusers make during family court litigation. First is the claim that fathers are widely discriminated against by family courts in custody disputes. The research actually shows the opposite, that in fact fathers have been at a distinct

advantage in custody battles in the United States since the late 1970s, when the maternal preference went out of vogue. Next often comes the myth that children of divorce fare better in joint custody, when the research shows overwhelmingly that they in fact do worse, except in those cases where their parents remain on good terms after the divorce and can co-parent cooperatively—which is almost impossible for a woman to do with an

abusive ex-partner. Abusive men also assert falsely that there is a rampant problem of women’s false allegations of abuse, that child support

obligations are unfairly high, that domestic abuse is irrelevant to custody decisions, and that men are abused in relationships just as much as women.

THE SUCCESS OF these strategies relies heavily on the ignorance, and

sometimes gender bias, of court personnel regarding women who disclose histories of partner abuse and on their stereotypes regarding men who are

“just not the type” to be abusers. Prejudicial attitudes often take the place of careful investigation and consideration of the evidence. Unfortunately, family courts have generally not made the kinds of progress in recognizing and responding to domestic abuse that many other social institutions, such as the police and criminal courts, have (though serious work remains to be done in those arenas as well, as we see in Chapter 12).

MIXED SOCIAL MESSAGES TO ABUSED MOTHERS

What should a mother’s role be in protecting her children from exposure to their father’s abusiveness? Abused women can get caught in the profound societal ambivalence that exists regarding this question. While couples are together, professionals and other community members are highly critical of a mother who continues to live with an abusive man. They say things to her such as, “You are choosing your partner over your children,” or “You must not care about what things are like for them.” Child protection officials

sometimes threaten to take a mother’s children away from her for “failure to protect” if she won’t leave a man who is abusing her. If she believes that the man has the potential to change, they are likely to say she is “in denial” or

“unrealistic” for harboring such fantasies. These critics ignore the huge challenges she faces as a parent and how difficult it is to leave an abuser.

But when an abused mother does break up the relationship, society

tends to do an abrupt about-face. Suddenly she hears from court officials and from other people:

“Well, maybe he abused you, but that’s no reason to keep the children away from him. He is their father, after all.”

“Don’t you think your own resentments are clouding your judgment about your children?”

“Don’t you believe that people ever change? Why don’t you give him the benefit of the doubt?”

In other words, a woman can be punished for exposing children to a man in one situation but then punished for refusing to expose them to the same man in another situation. And the second case is potentially even more

dangerous than the first, because she is no longer able to keep an eye on what he does with the children or to prevent the postseparation escalation that is so common in abusive fathers.

Abused mothers are typically required by family courts across the United States and Canada to send their children on unsupervised visitation

—or into custody—with their abusive fathers. When the children then begin to show predictable symptoms such as school behavior and attention problems, sleep disorders, unwillingness to respect their mother’s authority, or emotional deterioration, court personnel and court-appointed evaluators commonly declare that these are normal reactions to divorce or that the children are actually responding to their mother’s emotions rather than to their own. I have been involved in several cases where the abuser has physically or sexually abused the children in addition to abusing the mother, and the court still forced the mother to allow visitation with no professional supervision. Abused women across the continent report that it can become extraordinarily difficult to persuade the court to examine the evidence objectively once the mother has been labeled “vindictive” or

“overemotional” or has been accused (however baselessly) of having influenced her children’s statements.

The treatment that protective mothers so often receive at the hands of

family courts is among the most shameful secrets of modern jurisprudence.

This is the only social institution that I am aware of that so frequently

forbids mothers to protect their children from abuse. Fortunately, over the past few years, women and men (including many nonabusive fathers) across the United States and Canada have been waking up to the severity of this problem with the result that there are multiple initiatives currently in motion to demand family court reform. I have been part of one such effort, assisting a well-funded organization that is preparing a human rights report for the international community on the revictimization of abused women and their children through custody and visitation litigation. (For more information,

see “Battered Mothers Testimony Project” in the “Resources” section in the back of this book.)

Preparing for Custody Battles Just in Case

If you have not experienced custody litigation, or at least not yet, please bear the following points in mind:

 

It is important to keep records of your partner’s abusive behaviors toward you or the children. If he writes scary or twisted letters to you, keep them. If friends or neighbors see him mistreat you or the children, ask them to describe in writing what they witnessed. If you have ever called the police, try to get a record of the call, whether they came or not. If he leaves abusive or threatening

messages on your answering machine, keep a copy on tape.

 

Seek legal representation if you can possibly afford it. If you have no resources, apply for a legal services attorney. In choosing an attorney, try to find one who is experienced in domestic abuse and who treats abused women with patience and respect. The fact that a lawyer is well known does not mean that he or she necessarily

understands the issues involved in disputing custody or visitation with an abuser.

 

Move cautiously. Avoid abruptly denying him visitation, for example, even if you have concerns about how your children are being affected. Courts can be quick to accuse women of trying to cut the children’s father out of their lives even if she has good reason to be worried.

Involve your children with a therapist if you can find a good one in your community. It is important to have professionals involved so that you are not the only one reporting the distress that your children’s relationship with their father is causing them. In

 

situations where it is just your word against his, he may be able to charm court personnel with his skillful lying and winning manner.

If one of your children discloses to you sexual abuse by their father

 

—which is an extraordinarily upsetting experience—it is especially important that you approach the court and your local child protection agency with as calm an appearance as you possibly can.

If you get labeled as “hysterical about sexual abuse,” no matter how justified your reactions, your reports may be discredited. If you are in this situation, read the excellent book A Mother’s

Nightmare—Incest, listed in “Resources,” for further guidance on managing the legal system.

Most abused women do succeed in keeping custody of their children. But the better you plan, the more likely you are to avoid a horrible surprise. For a free packet of information for abused women and their attorneys regarding custody and visitation litigation, call the Resource Center on Domestic Violence: Child Protection and Custody at 1–800–527–3223.

 

THE SUBJECT OF abusive men as parents, including their behavior in custody and visitation disputes, is a complex one; I have only touched the surface here. Readers who wish to pursue a more in-depth discussion should see my book The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics (written with Dr. Jay Silverman), which addresses the full range of issues touched on in this chapter. Although that book focuses on the physically violent abuser, you will find that most of what we say

applies to psychologically abusive men as well.

The more you are aware of how your children may be affected by their exposure to your partner’s abuse of you, and to the problems in his style as a parent, the better able you will be to protect them from emotional harm. They need to know that you are a parent they can count on to be consistently kind and safe, since the abuser is unpredictable and at times intimidating. If they are giving you difficult behavioral challenges, are

having some problems focusing their attention, or are prone to withdrawal or depression, bear in mind that these are all normal responses in children whose mothers are abused. Your patience and understanding are critical to them, including your ability to show them that you do not believe they are bad. Remember that growing up around an abusive father or stepfather is very confusing and anxiety producing for children even if he does not mistreat them directly.

Make your own healing—as well as your emotional and physical safety

—a priority. Children of an abused woman can feel the difference when their mother starts to get help for herself and becomes more able to

recognize abuse for what it is, blaming neither herself nor her children for the abusive man’s behavior.

Here are some other actions you can take:

Insist on complete respect from your children. Children can absorb your partner’s rude or bullying approach to you and begin to exhibit behaviors toward you that they have learned from him. Try to put a stop to this behavior as quickly as possible before it gets a chance to snowball. You may not be able to be firm with the children in front of your partner if he actively undermines you, but put your foot down as much as you can, especially when he isn’t around.

Insist on respect for females in general. Your partner’s control or abuse toward you creates an atmosphere in which negative attitudes toward

females can grow like mold. Interrupt these whenever you see them appearing in your sons or daughters.

Confront your partner’s undermining of your parenting. Unless you are afraid of how your partner will retaliate, name his undermining for what it is and demand that it stop.

Don’t lie on your partner’s behalf or cover for his behavior. You may feel that you should protect your children’s image of your partner by making excuses for him, telling them what happened was your fault, or lying about what he did. Your relationships with your children will be damaged in the long run if your cover for him, however, and that is the

outcome you most want to avoid. In addition, you increase their vulnerability to him if you encourage them to deny their own self-protective instincts. (However, you may need to lie to him to protect them sometimes.)

Be the best parent you can. As unfair as it is, the reality is that an abused woman has to be an outstanding parent in order to help her children

process and heal from the abuse they have been exposed to. Draw on every resource you can, including parenting books and training courses, parent support groups, and play groups that may exist in your area. (For specific suggestions, see the “Resources” section in the back of this book.)

Consider leaving your relationship, at least for a while, if you can do so safely. One of the best ways to help children heal is for them to be free from witnessing abuse. As I discussed earlier, however, it is important to plan carefully in order to make it harder for your abusive partner to hurt the children through his visitation with them or through legal actions for custody.

If your partner has already succeeded in causing some distance in your relationships with your children, or has turned them against each other, it is still possible to heal those divisions and rebuild healthy connections. Make your relationships a priority and draw on counseling services in your community to help you work through the barriers that your abusive partner

has erected. Encourage your children to talk about the upsetting interactions they have witnessed in the home, with the help of counselors if necessary; it is especially important to relieve any burden the children have felt to keep

the abuse secret. Some abused women’s programs have group counseling for children, which is an excellent environment in which they can break the secret about the abuse, gain insight into their own emotional reactions, and learn that the abusive man’s behavior is neither their mother’s fault nor their own.

Above all, don’t give up. Healing ruptured relationships takes time and perseverance. In a case I am involved in currently in which the parents are divorced, the mother was on the verge of losing hope that she would ever be on good terms again with her teenage boy, who was allied with his abusive father and imitating his attitudes and behaviors—including threats of violence—toward the mother. But she persevered, despite many moments of despair over a three-year period, and now the boy has finally begun to

recognize his father’s bullying and manipulation and is gradually repairing his connection to his mother.

 

Key points to remember

 

 

An abuser in the home affects everybody.

 

A good father does not abuse his children’s mother.

 

Abusers drive wedges between people, by accident or by design. Abused mothers and their children should seek support to heal as individuals and to heal their relationships with each other (see “About General Parenting Issues” in “Resources” in the back of this book).

 

If you are preparing to leave an abuser with whom you have children, seek out legal advice regarding custody issues as soon as you can.