I used to feel close to his mom, but now she seems to hate me.

I can’t even call up our friends anymore, because they don’t want to get in the middle.

Sometimes I feel like I must be the one who’s messed up, because my own family sides with him.

I don’t bother to call the police when he gets scary, because he’s got buddies on the force who help him out.

The custody evaluator reported to the court that I’m hysterical and that the children should live with him.

IN EACH OF the following examples, all of which come from cases I have been involved in, something is happening that is very difficult to account for:

 

A woman flees into hiding because she is terrified of her abusive husband. He looks everywhere for her and cannot track her down.

When all else fails, he pays a visit to her parents. He tells them how sorry he is about how he treated their daughter and says he misses her terribly and is going to change. He cries and begs for

her address, “just so that I can send her a letter and tell her how I feel,” and her parents give it to him.

 

A man joins an abuser program that has been denied certification by his state’s Department of Public Health because it violates state regulations. While in the program, the man complains that his girlfriend sometimes hits him, too, and the counselor, who is a licensed psychologist, responds by encouraging the abuser to get a restraining order against the abused woman. The psychologist

admits this openly to me.

 

The daughter of a divorced abused woman discloses in explicit detail that she is being sexually abused by her father during visitation. The mother goes to court to request a professional evaluation of her daughter. The mother’s sister arrives at court that day with the abuser, with whom she has now become friends

despite the fact that she hated him before the divorce. The sister not only tells the judge that the sexual abuse allegations are lies but actually asks the judge to take custody of the girl away from the mother and give it to her. (Fortunately, the judge doesn’t allow the sister to take the girl. The evaluation goes forward and winds up confirming the sexual abuse.)

 

An abusive man’s therapist assigns a psychological diagnosis to the abused woman without having met her or even talked to her, relying entirely on the man’s descriptions of his partner, despite knowing that he is accused of abusing her.

 

A mother flees with her children to a shelter for abused women

because her house is vandalized. She can tell it was her physically abusive ex-husband who did it, and she takes the damage as a clear threat. Within several days of fleeing, she contacts the court- appointed custody evaluator to let him know where she is. The custody evaluator, however, shoots off a report to the court stating that the woman has no reason to be afraid of her husband, although she has told him of her partner’s history of violence and threats, and recommends that the children be taken away from the mother and given to the father. He does not mention the woman’s phone call to him from the shelter in his report. On the basis of the custody evaluator’s report, all three children, including a girl who

is only three years old, are sent to live at the abuser’s home, and

the mother is permitted only brief supervised visits, because she is now labeled a “flight risk.”

How are abusive men able to attract allies to their cause? And why do some people become such enthusiastic, and at times vicious, agents of the abuser? To answer these questions we need to look not only at the mind-set of abusive men but also at the socially acceptable attitudes and styles of interaction that an abusive man can use to prevail upon other people to do his dirty work.

WHY THE ABUSIVE MAN SEEKS ALLIES

Controlling and intimidating a partner is not that easy. A man has a better chance of dominating a woman than vice versa, but it is still a challenge. Very few people willingly consent to having their rights systematically denied. The abusive man thus is faced repeatedly with the problem—from his perspective—of his partner’s continued resistance to his control. Over time he gets tired of bullying her all by himself.

Certain other impediments can trip up the abuser. Changes in societal

attitudes toward abuse, including improvements in some important laws and policies, are making it harder to get away with. The physically frightening or sexually assaultive abuser, for example, is much more likely to be arrested than he would have been ten or fifteen years ago. His partner now has the option of seeking a court order to keep him away from her.

Perhaps most important is that the silence surrounding abuse is being broken. In a current case of mine involving a psychological abuser, close

friends of the woman sat her down one day and staged an “intervention,” in which they supportively pressed her to recognize the impact her husband’s abuse was having on her. Unlike the situation years ago, there are now

various ways in which an abused woman can find assistance—or assistance can find her, as it did in this case.

In this context, an abuser has to work harder than ever to keep his partner blaming herself and to fend off helping hands that might reach her. One great way to keep people off of her side is to win them over to his side first. Besides, he feels that he deserves allies, because he considers himself the victim.

You may wonder why, if abusive men feel so justified in their actions, they distort their stories so much when seeking support. First, an abuser doesn’t want to have to explain his worst behaviors—his outright cruelty, for example, or his violence—to people who might find those acts distasteful, and he may not feel confident that his justifications will be accepted. Second, he may carry some guilt or shame about his worst acts, as most abusers do; his desire to escape those feelings is part of why he looks for validation from other people, which relieves any nagging self-doubt. He considers his guilt feelings a weakness to be overcome. And, last, he may

lie because he has convinced himself of his own distortions. The narcissistic abuser, for example, considers his fabrications real, which is one of the

reasons why lie-detector tests are unreliable in cases of abuse (including child sexual abuse).

 

Question 16:

How come so many people side with HIM?

 

The list of people an abuser can potentially persuade to act as his agents is a long one: friends, relatives, teachers, psychologists, clergypeople,

police and judges, her relatives, and, following a breakup, his new partner. Let’s take a look at several of these people from the abused woman’s perspective, examining both how the abuser recruits them and why they are willing to be his front people.

THE ABUSER’S RELATIVES

“Sometimes he and his father rip into me together, putting me down and making fun of me. His dad is just like him.”

“His uncle abuses his aunt and everybody in his family can tell, but they never say a word about it.”

“He was arrested for pounding on my door when I had a restraining order against him, but his sister testified that he’d been over at her

house that whole night, so he got off.”

“His mother and I were good friends, but ever since he got arrested for hitting me she won’t talk to me, as if I were the bad one.”

As these statements by partners of my clients illustrate, one fundamental dynamic has changed little despite three decades of progress in social

attitudes toward abuse: No one wants to believe that his or her own son or brother is an abusive man. Parents don’t want the finger pointed at them, so they say: “Our child wouldn’t abuse his partner. We brought him up right.”

Allegations of abuse by the son can draw uncomfortable attention to the dynamics of the previous generation; abusive men are three times more likely than nonabusers to come from homes in which their father or

stepfather abused their mother. And if the father or stepfather is abusive, he shares the son’s entitled attitudes and victim-blaming tendencies.

Family loyalty and collective denial of family problems are powerful binding agents. The abuser shapes his relatives’ views of his partner over a period of years. They have perhaps seen with their own eyes how she

“overreacts” to certain things he does in public, because with no idea of what he has been doing to her behind closed doors, they can’t accurately judge her behavior. So they oppose abuse in the abstract, but they fight fiercely for the abuser when he is their own.

THE ABUSED WOMAN’S RELATIVES AND FRIENDS

As if the support an abuser receives from his own relatives weren’t bad enough, I keep encountering cases where the woman’s relatives also come to his aid. At a conference I spoke at recently, a lawyer stood up to ask: “Why do some of my clients find themselves in situations where their own families are helping the abusers win custody?”

Every family has tensions within it, and abusers use their manipulative skills to take advantage of those rifts. In one case, for example, an abuser named Ian heard that his ex-wife Tina had fallen out with her parents

because they were upset that she had stopped attending church. Ian made a

point of starting to make a regular appearance at Sunday services and one day found his way to “coincidentally” sit near Tina’s relatives. He engaged them in a conversation about his “concerns” about her loss of faith and how bad he felt that Tina wasn’t giving their children the benefits of consistent church attendance. He also slipped in a few assertions that he knew would bring to mind the kind of person who skips services, saying, “Our children tell me she’s been drinking heavily and bringing a lot of different men around the house.” Pretty soon a minor tiff had turned into a gigantic one.

It is uncomfortable for a woman to tell her family the details of her partner’s abuse of her. She feels ashamed and wants to avoid having them ask: “Well, then, why are you with him?” But the abuser can take advantage of how much her family doesn’t know. He is careful not to create the impression he’s bad-mouthing her, while subtly planting his poisonous seeds. He might say, for example: “She’s telling people now that I was

abusive to her, and that really hurts me. It’s gotten so I don’t want to show my face places ’cause of what she’s saying. I’m not keeping any secrets; I’ll tell you right out that I did slap her one day, which I know is wrong. She

has this thing about saying that my mother is a ‘whore’ ’cause she’s been divorced twice, and that really gets to me, but I know I should have handled it differently.”

When he leaves, her parents find themselves ruminating: “Gee, she didn’t mention anything about insulting his mother in that incident. That makes it a little different. She can have quite a mouth on her, I’ve noticed

that myself. He shouldn’t slap her, but he’s obviously feeling guilty about it now. And he’s willing to admit that it’s partly his fault, while she blames it all on him. She does that in conflicts with us sometimes; she doesn’t realize it takes two to tango.”

The part about the woman calling his mother a degrading name may never have even happened; my clients smoothly make up stories to cover their worst incidents. But whether or not he is telling the truth is almost

beside the point; he is playing to the societal value, still widely held, that a man’s abuse toward a woman is significantly less serious if she has behaved rudely herself.

There continues to be social pressure on women to “make the relationship work” and “find a way to hold the family together,” regardless of abuse. Since so many people accept the misconception that abuse comes from bad relationship dynamics, they see the woman as sharing

responsibility equally for “getting things to go better.” Into this context steps the abuser, telling his partner’s friends, “I still really want to work

things out, but she isn’t willing to try. I guess it isn’t worth the effort to her. And she’s refusing to look at her part in what went wrong; she puts it all on me.”

What her family and friends may not know is that when an abused woman refuses to “look at her part” in the abuse, she has actually taken a powerful step out of self-blame and toward emotional recovery. She doesn’t have any responsibility for his actions. Anyone who tries to get her to share responsibility is adopting the abuser’s perspective.

Despite the challenges, many, many friends and relatives of abused women stay by them. Their presence is critical, for it is the level of loyalty, respect, patience, and support that an abused woman receives from her own friends and family that largely determines her ability to recover from abuse and stay free. (People wishing to support or assist an abused woman they

care about should read To Be an Anchor in the Storm by Susan Brewster. See “Resources.”)

THERAPISTS AND EVALUATORS

We need to take a large step back in time for a moment, to the early part of Freud’s era, when modern psychology was born. In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female

patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his

patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.

Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus

complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of

incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.

Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some

psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative

behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious

—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual

encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.

I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can’t. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men’s violence by “resisting their control” or by “attempting to leave.” She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in “mutually seductive” relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such “research” that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.

Hoping to find that the mental health field was changing for the better, I recently reviewed the current catalogues for various graduate professional training programs in clinical and counseling psychology, including those from programs considered to be on the cutting edge. I was unable not only to locate a single course on any form of abuse, whether toward partners or children, but to locate any reference to abuse in the descriptions of courses on any other subject. I proceeded to call one of the schools that trains clinical psychologists and asked whether they ever offer any classes on abuse, and was told: “Well, if there is a particular interest in that subject among the students, they sometimes organize a student-led seminar.”

The influence of the history of psychological thinking remains particularly potent in the field of custody evaluation, where mental health professionals routinely ignore or minimize allegations of partner abuse and child abuse, assume that women are hysterical and vindictive, and treat all

problems as mutual in origin. Custody evaluators sometimes become fervent advocates for abusive men, joining them in accusing the women of alienating children from their fathers and refusing to consider the evidence of abuse.

Similar kinds of errors abound in the work of many individual and

couples therapists. I’ve had couples counselors say to me, for example: “He just isn’t the type to be abusive; he’s so pleasant and insightful, and she’s so angry.” Women speak to me with shocked voices of betrayal as they tell me how their couples therapist, or the abuser’s individual therapist, or a therapist for one of their children, has become a vocal advocate for him and a harsh and superior critic of her. I have saved for years a letter that a psychologist wrote about one of my clients, a man who admitted to me that his wife was covered with blood and had broken bones when he was done beating her and that she could have died. The psychologist’s letter ridiculed the system for labeling this man a “batterer,” saying that he was too

reasonable and insightful and should not be participating in my abuser program any further. The content of the letter indicated to me that the psychologist had neglected to ever ask the client to describe the brutal beating that he had been convicted of.

Outside the mainstream of psychological thinking there are many, many excellent practitioners and theorists, ones who take the impact of trauma and abuse seriously and who believe that most victims are telling the truth. The writings of theorists and practitioners such as Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Jaffe, Angela Browne, John Myers, Susan Schechter,

Anna Salter, Beverly James, and countless others serve to counter the hostility toward the oppressed of the prevailing professional atmosphere. I have come to know dozens of therapists who treat female clients with respect and play an empowering role in women’s recovery from abuse. But psychologists who are trained in the area of trauma remain exceptional, and the battle to reform psychological thinking has just begun. Before selecting a therapist for yourself or for your child, be sure to interview possible

choices carefully, exploring their knowledge of and values concerning trauma and abuse. As for conjoint counseling for you and your abusive

partner, I recommend that you strictly avoid it, for reasons that we will see further ahead.

AN ABUSER’S NEW PARTNER AS HIS LEADING ALLY

Back in the first chapter, we met a man named Paul who had divorced his wife and was now seeing Laura. Laura felt terrible for Paul because he was such a sweet man and his ex-wife was accusing him of having abused her. Laura was determined to “be there” for Paul, and even hoping to help him win custody because his ex-wife was “out of control.” Dozens of ex-

partners of my clients have described how the abusive man’s new partner takes on a role similar to Laura’s: “His girlfriend is worse than he is. She talks to me like I’m dirt and she spreads bad things about me. I’d almost rather deal with him. I think she puts him up to some of the stuff he does. She’s a bitch.”

Perhaps his new partner really is a mean, hostile woman, but there is an equally good chance that she isn’t. Look through her eyes for a moment.

The abuser is re-creating the same dynamic he set up with you, beginning with loving, attentive treatment in the early months of dating. He speaks to her with downcast eyes that well up with tears as he recounts how mean and unreasonable you were and how you called him abusive whenever he refused to bow to your control. If you have children with him, his girlfriend’s heart is bleeding because he cries in front of her about how much he misses them and says that you are keeping them away from him out of pure vindictiveness or out of a desire to turn them over to another man to be their dad. I currently have a case, for example, where the abusive father decided not to see his son for six months—he even put his decision in writing, in a document that I read—and then complained publicly that he

was being denied visits. Paul has probably misled Laura in some similar ways. His girlfriend sees a kind, loving parent whose desire to maintain a relationship with his children is being thwarted; how could she not hate you?

He may remain on good behavior with his new girlfriend even longer than he did with you because he is motivated by his campaign against you. Of course, his other side will slip out sooner or later, but by that time he can blame it all on how badly you have hurt him. His girlfriend thus gets sucked into breaking her back trying to prove that she’s a good woman—unlike you. She hopes that if she demonstrates her loyalty to him, he’ll become loving and available to her once again, as he was at the beginning. So she

wants to show him she is really there for him by joining with—or even outdoing—his hostility toward and blaming of you.

By the time his selfish and abusive side finally gets so bad that his new girlfriend can’t rationalize it away any more, she’s in pretty deep. She may even have married him by that time. For her to accept that he is an abuser,

she would have to face what a terrible wrong she did to you, and that would be quite a bitter pill to swallow. So what tends to happen instead is that his new partner becomes angrier and angrier at you for the way she is being treated by him, believing that you “made him this way” by hurting him so badly.

A couple of years ago I worked with a woman who said to me, “I really hated his ex-girlfriend, but now I’m realizing he must have done the same stuff to her he’s doing to me.” Her guilt weighed heavily upon her. Women tend to need a long time before they can accept having been used in this way.

In the story of Paul and Laura we never meet Paul’s ex-wife, but I have talked to two dozen or more women in her position among the ex-partners of my clients. It is difficult to capture the pain I hear in the voices of women whose abusive ex-partners are attempting to take their children away from them through the legal system, and the fact that they have a female ally helping them carry out that nefarious plan is almost too much to bear. The mothers ask me: “Does she realize what she is doing? Has she bothered to think about what it’s like for a mother to be threatened with losing her

children? What if he turns around years from now and does the same thing to her?”

At the same time, I believe it’s important not to judge the new partner too harshly. I sometimes say to women, “You know how manipulative he can be, and he is sure to be feeding her carefully crafted distortions. I’m not saying you should excuse her actions, I’m just reminding you that the one behind it all is him, not her. If you pour energy into hating her, you are inadvertently serving his interests.” We do, however, need to create a social ethic that makes it clear that anyone who chooses to go to bat for a man accused of abuse has a responsibility to get all the facts and not just the

view that he promotes. The abuse of women is simply too rampant for anyone to assume that an allegation is false or exaggerated without checking it out very, very carefully.

Finally, I have had several cases in which the abuser’s new partner was a man who became a gunner for the abuser against the abused woman just as a new female partner sometimes does. Some peer groups of gay men

have negative attitudes toward women and become cheerleaders for abuse just as straight male peers can.

OTHER ABUSERS OF POWER AS ALLIES OF ABUSIVE MEN

You have undoubtedly come in contact at some point in your life with a person driven by a deep attraction to exercising power over others. Partner abusers have no monopoly on the desire to intimidate or manipulate, or on the skills for accumulating power and using it for selfish purposes or emotional gratification. Among professionals, for example—including

those who are expected to respond constructively to abusers and their

partners—there are some individuals who are motivated not by caring and respect but by hunger for control. Not everyone who enters police work

wishes to be a public servant; there are those who look forward primarily to carrying a gun, pushing their weight around, and being above the law. I

know many humane judges who take an interest in the challenges that

people face and seek fair and practical responses. But I watch others who appear to get satisfaction out of insulting those who come before them, dismissing their concerns and perspectives, and acting with impunity.

Among therapists there are plenty whose goal is teamwork, while others look down on their clients and speak condescendingly, making

pronouncements about what each person “really” thinks, feels, and needs to do. There are custody evaluators who are eager to lend a hand through the painful process of divorce, but a tragically large number appears to be enamored with the power over the lives of men, women, and children that their custody recommendations give them.

People who are attracted to power and tend to abuse it have important common ground with a man who abuses women. For example, a dictatorial boss is bound to encounter some occasions when an employee finally gets fed up enough to swear at her, stomp out of the office, and quit. A manager who coerces his female subordinates into sexual contact with him may get reported for sexual harassment sooner or later. The abuser of power feels outraged when his or her victims attempt to defend themselves in these

ways and considers them to be the unreasonable or aggressive ones. So it is not surprising that such a person, when looking at a woman who is complaining of abuse by a man, might have the following thoughts: “This

woman is another one of those people who likes the role of victim. I know what they’re like because I have to deal with them myself: They are never grateful no matter how much you do for them; they don’t know their place; and everything turns into an accusation of mistreatment.” The abuser of power thus may personalize the woman’s resistance to oppression and feel a strong desire to retaliate on behalf of the abusive man, and in fact I have often observed this disturbing eagerness among some professionals to jump on abused women with both feet. Their statements have sometimes confirmed to me that they do indeed have the kind of thought process I have just described—coupled of course with the usual myths regarding women’s hysterical exaggerations and their provocation of men’s abuse.

A professional who is drawn to abusing power seems to have particularly strong reactions if the woman challenges his or her actions in any way or attempts to explain the effects the abuser has had on her. The underlying attitude sometimes appears to be: “How dare you continue to attempt to think for yourself when I am here before you with my obviously superior knowledge, status, judgment, and insight?” An abused woman can walk away from an interaction with such a professional feeling like she has just been beaten up, re-creating the ugliness of the verbal or physical abuse she has suffered from her partner. A number of abused women have said to me, for example, “The police came to my house one time after he pushed me around, but they were angry and insulting to me and kind of buddied up to him, and when I complained about how they were treating me they told me if I didn’t shut up they would arrest me.” I have been involved in cases where some judges and custody evaluators—both male and female—go out of their way to discredit and demean women who report abuse and request protection for themselves or their children, and if the woman protests the professional response they explode into verbally abusing her or retaliating

against her. In this way the mentality and tactics of certain professionals can closely parallel those of abusers, and the result is revictimization of the woman.

In some institutions whose own power dynamics have tended to fall badly on abused women in these ways, such as police departments, courts, and child protective services, social pressure has brought about the creation of positions for abused women’s advocates or domestic-violence specialists whose job it is to make sure that the abused woman is not revictimized by

the system that should be there to protect her rights. If you are involved

with one of these systems, find out whether an abuse specialist is on staff and, if so, request to bring that person into your case.

ATTORNEYS

Some attorneys for abusers are in a class by themselves. I have rarely seen anyone become as vicious and unprincipled in the role of coabuser of a man’s partner as certain lawyers do. Woman after woman has described to me the way her heart begins to race when she sees the abuser’s attorney at court or the jolt she feels when court papers prepared by the attorney arrive at her home.

An abuser or accused abuser of course has the right to legal representation, as anyone does. But does offering proper legal counsel mean that the attorney needs to insult and deride the woman, make far-fetched

accusations against her, treat every allegation made by the man as gospel truth, and even lie at times to promote his goals? Of course not. However, such conduct is disturbingly widespread among certain defense attorneys who represent accused abusers as well as among some family law attorneys handling custody and visitation cases. Some of this behavior appears to be motivated by economics: Attorneys can build a successful practice if word gets around that they specialize in representing accused abusers. Abusers

love it when they hear that a certain attorney has a reputation for “really going for the woman’s jugular,” since that ruthless orientation is in keeping with their own. Women are sometimes as traumatized by their ex-partner’s attorney as they were by him.

There is an urgent need for the creation of legal standards for attorneys who represent accused abusers, so that a sharp line is drawn between giving a man a proper chance to have his side heard in court, which is his legal right, and acting as a weapon of the man’s abuse, allowing him to cause financial and psychological damage that would have been impossible for him without the lawyer’s assistance.

THE MYTH OF NEUTRALITY

It is not possible to be truly balanced in one’s views of an abuser and an abused woman. As Dr. Judith Herman explains eloquently in her

masterwork Trauma and Recovery, “neutrality” actually serves the interests of the perpetrator much more than those of the victim and so is not neutral. Although an abuser prefers to have you wholeheartedly on his side, he will settle contentedly for your decision to take a middle stance. To him, that

means you see the couple’s problems as partly her fault and partly his fault, which means it isn’t abuse.

I was speaking with a person one day who was describing the abusive relationship of a man and woman, both of whom were friends of hers. “They each want me to side with them,” she explained to me, “but I refuse to take sides. They have to work out their own dynamics. I have let both of them know that I’m there for them. If I openly supported her, he would just dig his heels in harder.” She added, “People need to avoid the temptation to choose up teams” in a tone that indicated that she considered herself to be of superior maturity because of her neutrality.

In reality, to remain neutral is to collude with the abusive man, whether or not that is your goal. If you are aware of chronic or severe mistreatment and do not speak out against it, your silence communicates implicitly that you see nothing unacceptable taking place. Abusers interpret silence as approval, or at least as forgiveness. To abused women, meanwhile, the

silence means that no one will help—just what her partner wants her to believe. Anyone who chooses to quietly look the other way therefore unwittingly becomes the abuser’s ally.

Breaking the silence does not necessarily mean criticizing or confronting the abuser regarding his behavior. It certainly doesn’t mean going to him with anything you have learned from her, because the abuser will retaliate against her for talking about his behavior to other people. It does mean telling the abused woman privately that you don’t like the way he is treating her and that she doesn’t deserve it, no matter what she has

done. And if you see or hear violence or threats, it means calling the police.

HOW SOCIETY ADOPTS THE ABUSER’S PERSPECTIVE

Almost anyone can become an ally of an abusive man by inadvertently adopting his perspective. People usually don’t even notice that they are supporting abusive thinking, or they wouldn’t do it. Let’s examine some of the most common forms of accidental support:

• The person who says to the abused woman: “You should show him some compassion even if he has done bad things. Don’t forget that he’s a human being too.”

  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.

• The person who says to her: “But he’s the father of your children.”

  The abusive man uses the children to entrap the woman in the relationship, saying that she is depriving them of a father by splitting up the family. But he is the one who is keeping those children from having the father they need, by forcing them to grow up with a father who abuses their mother.

  Children need an abuse-free home.

• The person who says to her: “You made a commitment, and now you need to stick with it through hard times.”

  The abusive man believes that chronic mistreatment, overt disrespect, intimidation, and even violence are not good enough reasons for a woman to want to stay away from a man. When people say to her, “You made your bed; now lie in it,” they are supporting the abuser’s value system.

• The person who says to her: “You are claiming to be a helpless victim.”

  If the abuser could hear these words being spoken to his partner, he would jump for joy. He may have said the very same thing to her. The abuser’s

  perspective is that the woman exaggerates the hurtfulness of his conduct

  because she wants the status of victim, attributing to her the maneuvers that

  he is actually fond of using himself. When an abused woman tries to tell you how bad things are, listen.

• The person who says: “These abuse activists are anti-male.”

How is it anti-male to be against abuse? Are we supposed to pretend we don’t notice that the overwhelming majority of abusers are male? This accusation parallels the abuser’s words to his partner: “The reason you think I’m abusive is because you have a problem with men!” One of the best counters to this piece of side-tracking is to point out how many men are active in combating the abuse of women. Remember also that abused

women are the sisters, daughters, mothers, and friends of men; men’s lives are affected by abuse, because it happens to women we know and care about.

I HAVE GIVEN just a few of the dozens of examples I have encountered of how people take on the abuser’s view of his abuse. When you hear these

kinds of statements, draw the speaker’s attention to the fact that he or she is making the abuser’s arguments for him. Most people don’t want to carry his banner and will drop it quickly once you show them what is in their hands.

It is impossible for a community to stop abuse while continuing to assist or ignore abusers at the same time. Protecting or enabling an abuser is as

morally repugnant as the abuse itself. This critical concept needs to become firmly embedded in our culture. Colluding with abuse abandons the abused woman and her children, and ultimately abandons the abuser as well, since it keeps him from ever dealing with his problem. In particular we have to bring to light the actions of those powerful, well-trained professionals who choose to join the abuser in his goals and tactics. If we can erode the ability of abusers to gain allies, they will stand alone, and alone they are easier to stop.

It often falls to the abused woman herself, unfortunately, to try to

educate the people around her whose help and support she needs, so that they will understand the dynamics of abuse and stop supporting the abusive man. Much of why an abuser is so able to recruit allies, besides his own

manipulativeness and charm, is his skill in playing on people’s ignorance and misconceptions and often on their negative attitudes toward women. As difficult as it is to take on, you will often find yourself having to be your

own best advocate, arguing forcefully against the range of ways in which your society’s values may buy into the abusive man’s outlook, in order to gain the kind of strong backing that you deserve from all those around you.

 

Key points to remember

 

 

When people take a neutral stand between you and your abusive partner, they are in effect supporting him and abandoning you, no matter how much they may claim otherwise.

 

People cannot claim to be opposed to partner abuse while assisting their own son, brother, friend, or partner in his abusiveness toward a woman.

 

Everyone should be very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence. The great majority of allegations of abuse—though not all—are substantially accurate. And an abuser almost never “seems like the type.”

 

The argument that “he is a human being, too, and he deserves emotional support” should not be used as an excuse to support a man’s abusiveness. Our society should not buy into the abusive man’s claim that holding him accountable is an act of cruelty.