We pass a magazine rack, and he points at the cover of

Cosmo and says, “Why don’t you look like that?”

His favorite song is that Guns N’ Roses one: “I used to love her, but I had to kill her.” He puts it on all the time.

His dad treats his mom the same way he treats me.

You should see the way he and his buddies talk about women, like they’re pieces of meat.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew up with a happy dream. He was told when he was very young—as soon as he was old enough to understand anything, really—that a beautiful piece of land out on the edge of town was in trust for him. When he was grown up, it would be his very own and was sure to bring him great contentment. His family and other relatives often described the land to him in terms that made it sound like a fairy world, paradise on earth. They did not tell him precisely when it would be his but implied that it would be when he was around age sixteen or twenty.

In his mid-teens, the boy began to visit the property and take

walks on it, dreaming of owning it. Two or three years later, he felt the time had come to take it on. However, by then he had noticed

some disturbing things: From time to time, he would observe people hiking or picnicking on his acres, and when he told them not to

come there without his permission, they refused to leave and

insisted that the land was public! When he questioned his relatives about this, they reassured him that there was no claim to the land but his.

In his late adolescence and early twenties, he became increasingly frustrated about the failure of the townspeople to respect his ownership. He first tried to manage the problem through compromise. He set aside a small section of the property as a public picnic area and even spent his own money to put up some tables. On the remainder of the land he put up “No Trespassing” signs and expected people to stay off. But, to his amazement, town residents showed no signs of gratitude for his concession; instead they continued to help themselves to the enjoyment of the full area.

The boy finally could tolerate the intrusions on his birthright no longer. He began screaming and swearing at people who trespassed and in this way succeeded in driving many of them away. The few who were not cowed by him became targets of his physical assaults. And when even his aggression did not completely clear the area, he bought a gun and began firing at people just to frighten them, not actually to shoot them. The townspeople came to the conclusion that the young man was insane.

One particularly courageous local resident decided to spend a day searching through the town real estate records and was able to establish what a number of people had suspected all along: The property was indeed public. The claim made by the boy’s family on his behalf was the product of legend and misconception, without any basis in the documentary record.

When the boy was confronted with this evidence, his ire only

grew. He was convinced that the townspeople had conspired to alter the records and that they were out to deprive him of his most cherished dream. For several years after, his behavior remained erratic; at times it seemed that he had accepted having been misled during his childhood, but then he would erupt again in efforts to regain control of the land through lawsuits, creating booby traps on the land to injure visitors and employing any other strategy he could think of. His relatives encouraged him to maintain his belligerence, telling him, “Don’t let them take away what is yours.” Years went by before he was able to accept the fact that his dream would never

be realized and that he would have to learn to share the land. Over that period he went through a painful, though ultimately freeing, process of gradually accepting how badly misled he had been and how destructive his behavior had been as a result.

IN ORDER TO know how to foster change in abusive men, individuals and communities need to understand not only how abusive thinking works,

which has been my focus so far, but also where it comes from. Overcoming the scourge of relationship abuse demands attention to the root causes of the problem.

The story I have just told is a metaphor for the childhood social process that produces an abuser. As I have explained in earlier chapters, abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with

values and beliefs. Where do a boy’s values about partner relationships come from? The sources are many. The most important ones include the family he grows up in, his neighborhood, the television he watches and

books he reads, jokes he hears, messages that he receives from the toys he is given, and his most influential adult role models. His role models are important not just for which behaviors they exhibit to the boy but also for which values they teach him in words and what expectations they instill in

him for the future. In sum, a boy’s values develop from the full range of his experiences within his culture.

Each boy’s socialization is unique. Even two siblings close in age do not learn identical values. Culture is thus transmitted on a continuum. In a culture that is fairly religious, for example, some children will grow up to be devout believers; others will reject the faith completely; and most will fall in with the average level of religious observance for their community. Where a child will land on this continuum partly depends on how strong a set of messages he or she receives from the social environment and partly

on his or her personal predispositions. The family rebel, for example, might become an atheist, while the child who is most focused on pleasing the

parents might become even more religious than they are.

HOW A BOY LEARNS ABUSE

Children begin at a very young age—certainly by the time they are three and probably sooner—to absorb the rules and traditions of their culture.

This learning continues throughout their childhood and adolescence. The family in which children grow up is usually the strongest influence, at least for their first few years, but it is only one among many. Children’s sense of proper and improper ways to behave, their moral perceptions of right and wrong, and their beliefs about sex roles are brought to them by television and videos, popular songs, children’s books, and jokes. They observe

behaviors that are modeled by friends and relatives, including adults to whom they are close. They watch to see which behaviors get rewarded—by making people popular, for example—as opposed to those that are condemned. By age four or five they start to express curiosity about laws and police, both of which play an important role in shaping their moral sense. During their adolescence, young people have increasing access to the wider culture, with less and less filtering by adults, and are subject to the rapidly growing influence of their peers. Even after reaching adulthood,

people continue to read the social messages that surround them in the

culture and to adjust their values and beliefs in response to what is socially acceptable.

 

Question 18:

Where did he learn to be that way?

 

Let’s look now at how society influences the development of a boy or a young man’s attitude toward abuse. Some of what I describe here dates back many hundreds of years, while other messages are more recent arrivals on the cultural scene. I give examples from child-oriented culture, such as children’s books and movies, and others from adult culture, which trickle down to children from the models they observe of adult behavior and from what adults tell them directly about right and wrong.

• Laws and the legal system have colluded with the abuse of women.

  Until well into the 1800s, it was expressly legal for a man in the English- speaking world to physically abuse his wife. She had no recourse to the

  police or the courts, and, if she chose to divorce him because of his abusiveness, he was legally entitled to custody of their children. In the late nineteenth century some legal consequences were finally legislated for

  some of the most extreme beatings of women, but they were rarely enforced until the 1970s and were not enforced consistently at all until the 1990s! For hundreds and perhaps thousands of years the domestic assault of women

  has been considered a necessary tool for a man to maintain order and

  discipline in his home, to make sure that his superior intelligence rules, and to avoid the mushrooming of the hysterical, short-sighted, and naive

  qualities that men widely attribute to women. It was only with the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and especially with the work of those

  activists focusing specifically on battering and sexual assault, that the intimate oppression of women began to be taken seriously as a crime.

  This legal history plays an important role in shaping today’s cultural

  views among males—and females—about the abuse of women. It is likely to take a number of generations to overcome the accumulated impact of

  hundreds of years of destructive social attitudes. The culture that shaped these laws, and was in turn shaped by them, is reflected in people’s

  continued willingness to blame women for “provoking” abuse, to feel sorry for men who face legal consequences for intimate violence, and to be highly skeptical of women’s reports of abuse. These are all attitudes that children can absorb from the behaviors and comments of the adults around them.

  Children also notice responses by the legal system. A boy who grows up in a home where his father assaults his mother may observe over the

  years that his father never seems to get in any serious trouble, indicating to him that his father’s behavior is not viewed as wrong by the community. (In fact, any male who is older than ten or fifteen years of age today is unlikely to have ever seen his father prosecuted for domestic violence, since such prosecution was uncommon before 1990). When a woman asks me, “Why does a physically abusive man believe he can get away with it?”, I have to answer that until very recently he could, and even now legal consequences are less serious for men who assault partners than for those who assault strangers. This historical condoning of the physical abuse of women has also played a critical role in making it difficult to address and overcome emotional abuse, as it has created an atmosphere of impunity regarding men’s conduct in partner relationships.

• Religious beliefs have often condoned the abuse of women.

  The most influential religious scriptures in the world today, including the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, and major Buddhist and Hindu writings, explicitly instruct women to submit to male domination. Genesis, for example, includes the following passage: “Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” I have had numerous clients over the years who explicitly rely on

  quotations from scripture to justify their abuse of their partners. Similarly, religious prohibitions against divorce have entrapped women in abusive marriages. The book When Love Goes Wrong (see “Resources”), published in 1985, describes a study of conservative Protestant clergy that reported that 21 percent said that no amount of abuse would justify a woman’s leaving her husband, and 26 percent agreed with the statement “a wife should submit to her husband and trust that God would honor her action by either stopping the abuse or giving her the strength to endure it.”

  Children who are raised in a faith tradition are commonly taught that the rules of their religion are the ultimate guide to right and wrong, superior even to civil law. A boy’s early religious training can be formative in the development of his image of appropriate behaviors in intimate relationships, the status of women, and the entitlements of men. If the more destructive aspects of his religious background are the ones that are given

  the most emphasis in his family or community, some dangerous seeds may have been sown.

• Popular performers both reflect and shape social attitudes.

  The white rapper Eminem won a Grammy Award while I was writing this book. At the time of his award, one of his newest popular songs was “Kim,” the name of Eminem’s wife. The song begins with the singer putting his baby daughter to bed and then preparing to murder his wife for being with another man. He tells his wife, “If you move I’ll beat the shit out of you,” and informs her that he has already murdered their four-year-old son. He then tells his wife he is going to drive away with her in the car, leaving the baby at home alone, and then will bring her home dead in the trunk. Kim’s voice (as performed by Eminem) is audible off and on throughout the song, screaming with terror. At times she pleads with him not to hurt her. He

  describes to her how he is going to make it look as if she is the one who killed their son and that he killed her in self-defense, so that he’ll get away

  with it. Kim screams for help, then is audibly choked to death, as Eminem screams, “Bleed, bitch, bleed! Bleed!” The murder is followed by the sound of a body being dragged across dry leaves, thrown into the trunk of a car, and closed in.

  Even more horrible than Eminem’s decision to record this song glorifying the murder of a woman and child is the fact that it did not stop him from receiving a Grammy. What is a teen boy or a young man to

  conclude about our culture from this award? I believe I can safely say that a singer who openly promoted the killing of Jews, or blacks, or people in

  wheelchairs would be considered ineligible for a Grammy. But not so, unfortunately, for encouraging the brutal and premeditated murder of one’s wife and child, complete with a plan for how to escape consequences for it.

  And, unfortunately, Eminem has plenty of company. The extremely popular Guns ’n’ Roses recorded a song that goes: “I used to love her / But I had to kill her / I had to put her six feet under / And I can still hear her

  complain.” The singer (Axl Rose) goes on to sing that he knew he would miss her so he buried her in the backyard. This song supports a common

  attitude among physical abusers that women’s complaints are what provoke men to violence. Another outstanding example is the comedian Andrew

  Dice Clay, whose repertoire of “jokes” about the beating and sexual assault of females has filled performance halls across the country. Fans of these

  kinds of performers have been known to state defensively, “Come on, it’s just humor.” But humor is actually one of the powerful ways a culture

  passes on its values. If a man is already inclined toward abuse because of his earlier training or experience, he can find validation in such

  performances and distance himself even further from empathy for his partners. In one abuse case that I was involved in, the man used to play the above Guns ’n’ Roses song on the stereo repeatedly and tell his wife that

  this was what was going to happen to her, laughing about it. But in the context of verbal assault and physical fear that he created, what was a joke to him was a blood-curdling threat to his partner.

• Popular plays and movies romanticize abuse of women.

  Several years ago I saw the play Frankie and Johnny Got Married in Boston. The story line goes like this: Johnny is in love with Frankie and knows that she is the right woman for him. One evening he comes to her apartment to express his love and convince her to get involved with him.

  She is not interested, and tells him so. Johnny then begins a relentless

  pressure campaign that lasts for the remainder of the play. He criticizes her and puts her down, telling her that her fears of intimacy and commitment

  are the reasons why she avoids being with him. He lets her know that, whatever knowledge she may have about who she is and what she needs, his judgment is better. Frankie remains unimpressed.

  So Johnny’s coercion escalates. At one point Frankie, who is exhausted after hours of this pressure, attempts to go to sleep, but Johnny blocks her path to the bedroom, grabbing her arms. She then goes to the kitchen and makes herself a sandwich, figuring that if she can’t sleep she might at least eat. It is not to be, however, because Johnny grabs the plate away from her and heaves it into the sink, sandwich and all.

  Exasperated, Frankie orders Johnny to leave her apartment. He refuses.

  She threatens to call the police to remove him, to which he replies with words to the effect of: “Go ahead, bring them over. In an hour they will have released me, and I’ll be back on your fire escape. Sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with me.”

  So now that Frankie has discovered that she can’t succeed in having any of her rights respected at all, what happens next? Lo and behold, she has an epiphany! A life-changing breakthrough! In a flash, she overcomes her fear of deep connection—it turns out Johnny was right about her fear of intimacy as well as everything else—and she falls enraptured into his arms.

  Frankie and Johnny are in love. The curtain falls. (Presumably Frankie is now permitted to eat and sleep, though we have no way to say for sure.)

  The most astounding part of the evening was still to come, however. To my amazement, the roughly two hundred and fifty well-educated, economically privileged adults who were packed into their Huntington Theater Company seats rose in a roar of delighted applause, smiling from ear to ear. Not a person in the auditorium remained seated—except me. I had been working with abusers for over five years at this point and knew perfectly well what we had been witnessing. No one else seemed to notice anything amiss in the physical grabbing, sleep and food deprivation, threats, superiority, and other forms of coercion we had just watched. Was Frankie reluctant to be with Johnny because she feared intimacy? Or could it

  perhaps have been because he was arrogant, coercive, and physically violent? Who wouldn’t fear intimacy with this bully? One ought to.

  The messages to young men, intentional or not, are that coercion and even a degree of physical violence and intimidation are compatible with deep love and that a man can know better than a woman what is good for her. The attitudes that drive the behavior of many of my clients were woven throughout this play. And if a young boy doesn’t see this play—most of the audience was adult—he nonetheless is influenced by the attitudes that his

  parents bring home with them from the theater.

• A boy’s early training about sex roles and about relationships can feed abuse.

  At least until quite recently, a boy has tended to learn from the most tender age that when he reaches young adulthood he will have a wife or girlfriend who will do everything for him and make him a happy man. His partner will belong to him. Her top responsibility will be to provide love and nurturing, while his key contribution will be to fill the role of “the brains of the

  operation,” using his wisdom and strength to guide the family. Tightly interwoven with these expectations are other messages he is likely to receive about females. He may learn that boys are superior to girls,

  particularly if he grows up around men who exhibit that attitude. (In many families, there is no worse insult you can give to a boy than to say, “You’re acting like a girl.”) When he is old enough to know about sex, he may learn that the most valuable thing about females is their capacity to give sexual

  pleasure to males. Depending on what his father or stepfather is like, what kinds of peers he chooses in his teen years, or what kinds of music he

  listens to, he may learn that, when a female partner does not defer to him, he can use verbal degradation or even physical intimidation to punish her and ensure better cooperation in the future.

  Studies have found that nearly half of abusive men grow up in homes where their father or stepfather is an abuser. Home is a critical learning ground for values and sex-role expectations. Boys are at risk to absorb the abuser’s attitude through his words and actions (see Chapter 10). Even if

  the dad never explicitly says that females are inferior, for example, or that the man should have the last word in an argument, his behavior can get the message across.

  The sex-role expectations to which boys and men have historically been subjected are captured powerfully by an article called “The Good Wife’s

  Guide,” from a 1955 issue of Housekeeping Monthly that includes such

  instructions as “Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness,” and “Don’t complain if he’s late home for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this minor compared to what he might have gone through that day.” The

  wife is further encouraged to make sure the children are quiet when he gets home, to keep the house perfectly orderly and clean, and not to complain if her husband goes out for evening entertainment without her, because she

  needs to “understand his world of strain and pressure.” Our society’s sex-

  role attitudes have certainly progressed greatly over the past fifty years, yet the expectations laid out in this article are precisely the ones I find in many of my abusive clients to this day; cultural values that run this deep take

  generations to unearth and dispose of.

• Some messages in media oriented toward children and teens support abuse by men.

  In a book in the popular Berenstain Bears series for children called Trouble with Homework, both the mother and the children cower when Father

  becomes angry. (It’s on the cover.) At one point he knocks over a chair and clenches his fists above his head. At the end of the story, the children have pleased Dad by doing what he wanted, and Mom smiles happily to see them cuddled up with Dad on the couch. In Bedtime for Francis, by Russel Hoban, the father threatens Francis that he will spank her if she does not stop asking for help with her fear of the dark, and she falls asleep alone with the fear of how the spanking would hurt.

  Fairy tales also sometimes support the abusive mentality. In Beauty and the Beast, for example, the beast is cruel to the woman and isolates her from the world, but she loves him anyhow, and her love ultimately

  transforms him into a good man—the precise myth that keeps some women entrapped in their abusive relationships. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel

  chooses to give up her voice—literally—in order to live on land so that she can marry the man she loves. A woman with no voice is the dream girl of many abusive men.

  Even movies that are aimed at children and teens commonly include messages that condone abuse of females. In a recent Jim Carrey film, for

  example, a man sits down in a park next to a strange woman who is nursing her baby and then suddenly pushes the baby away from the woman and

  begins to suck her breast himself. This sexual assault is presented as humorous.

  Music videos and computer games have become the predominant

  sources of cultural training for children and teenagers. In the world of MTV and VH1, many of the sex-role messages are worse than ever, with males

  aggressive and in control and the value of females restricted to their sexual allure. As was exposed in a recent documentary broadcast on MTV,

  pornographers are frequently being hired to make music videos, which predictably leads to portrayals of women that make them look like they exist for men to use.

  Some music videos show abuse explicitly. In one, for example, a man stalks a woman throughout the song as she repeatedly tries to escape him, including one part in which she dives into a car to get away and he pulls

  open another door and jumps in after her. At the end of the video, she gives up and falls in love with him. The message thus is not only that stalking

  proves how much he loves her but also that the stalker was actually doing what was best for her. Women in music videos never mean “no” when they say it, and when they run away, they really want to be chased and caught.

  What could more perfectly capture the abusive mentality?

• Pornographic videos, magazines, and web sites are learning grounds.

  As a boy enters his teen years, he is likely to encounter another powerful shaper of his outlook on females and how to treat them: pornography. Most pornographic movies, magazines, and web sites can function as training

  manuals for abusers, whether they intend to or not, teaching that women are unworthy of respect and valuable only as sex objects for men. The Internet has made access to pornography much easier—and free—for teenage boys; a recent study found, for example, that one in four teenage boys has experienced exposure to unwanted sexual material, most commonly through Internet solicitations. A great deal of mainstream pornographic material— not just so-called “hard core”—contains stories and images showing the

  abuse of both women and children as sexy, sometimes including presentations of rape as erotic. The harm to teens from looking at

  pornography has little to do with its sexual explicitness and everything to do with the attitudes it teaches toward women, relationships, sexual assault, and abuse. Spend some time looking at pornography yourself—if you can

  stand it—and think about the messages it is sending to young people and especially to boys.

  I learned of a recent case in an upper-class suburb involving a group of middle school–aged boys who were in the habit of spending hours each day after school watching pornography on their computers. One day they went from this activity to a party where they succeeded in pressuring several girls

  —with an average age of twelve—into performing group oral sex on them, inspired by something they had watched at a web site. Parents found out about what happened and a scandal ensued, but the community still did not seem to recognize the critical influence of the images to which the boys

  were being exposed.

  Boys often learn that they are not responsible for their actions.

  Boys’ aggressiveness is increasingly being treated as a medical problem, particularly in schools, a trend that has led to the diagnosing and medicating of boys whose problem may really be that they have been traumatized and influenced by exposure to violence and abuse at home. Treating these boys as though they have a chemical problem not only overlooks the distress they are in but also reinforces their belief that they are “out of control” or

  “sick,” rather than helping them to recognize that they are making bad

  choices based on destructive values. I have sometimes heard adults telling girls that they should be flattered by boys’ invasive or aggressive behavior “because it means they really like you,” an approach that prepares both

  boys and girls to confuse love with abuse and socializes girls to feel helpless.

  In most media coverage of bullying and school violence, including highly publicized school murders such as Columbine, reporters have overlooked the gender issues. Headlines have described these events as

  “kids killing kids,” when close to 100 percent of them have involved boys killing kids. In some cases it has been revealed that the killings were related to boys’ hostility toward females, including one case in which the two boys who went on a murderous rampage said afterward that they had done it

  because they were angry that their girlfriends had broken up with them. But the urgent need to confront the anti-female attitudes among these boys was never mentioned as a strategy for preventing future school violence.

• When culture and home experience dovetail, each reinforces the other.

If a boy grows up in a home where his mother is abused, hearing a song like Eminem’s “Kim” could leave a deep imprint on him. He may well feel that society is giving its public stamp of approval to the mistreatment of women he has witnessed at home. The likelihood that he will blame his mother for what happens to her and begin to copy the abuser’s behavior increases with each pro-abuse message he absorbs from his surroundings. My counseling

experience persuades me that the men who are most likely to grow up to abuse women are probably those who grow up with an abuser as an important role model and who also get especially heavy doses of

destructive cultural training. But also be aware: Half or more of my clients do not come from homes in which a man modeled abuse of women. The cultural influences I have discussed above are sufficient in themselves to

prepare a boy to become an abusive man. It is therefore essential to teach boys to respect women and think critically about the societal messages to which they are exposed.

Many sons of abused women whom I have known, including police officers, writers, therapists, and activists, have dedicated their lives to opposing the abuse of women. The example set by these men shows that a boy’s family influences are only the beginning of the story and that he can make the choice to channel his childhood distress into constructive action— if he learns about alternative ways of thinking and acting.

LET’S RETURN NOW to our growing boy. From a combination of different cultural influences, he develops an image of his future, which he carries within him. He pictures a woman who is beautiful, alluring, and focused entirely on meeting his needs—one who has no needs of her own that might require sacrifice or effort on his part. She will belong to him and cater to him, and he will be free to disrespect her when he sees fit. In his mind this picture may illustrate the word partner, but a more accurate word for the

image he is developing might be servant.

When this boy gets involved in actual—as opposed to imagined— dating, especially as he reaches an age where his relationships become more serious, his childhood fantasy life collides with the real-life young woman

he is seeing. She defies him on occasion. She has other people in her life who are important to her rather than making him her exclusive focus. She demands from time to time that he take an interest in her as a person. She

doesn’t always accept his opinions as accurate and superior to hers. She may even attempt at some point to break up with him, as if she were not his personal possession. The boy doesn’t believe that he is demanding anything unreasonable; he seeks only what he considers his due. In fact, our young man feels like he gives his girlfriend more freedom than a lot of other guys do, just as the boy in our opening story felt generous for providing a public picnic area on “his” land. And, like that boy’s reaction to the “trespassers,” he becomes increasingly frustrated, erratic, and coercive as he tries to regain control over his partner. His first sexual experiences are likely to be a result of his pressuring a girl steadily until she gives in, so that sexual coercion becomes one of his earliest relationship habits. He may even start to appear mentally ill, as did the young man who began firing at hikers, but in fact his behavior is largely logical and rational, given what his key social influences have led him to believe. Above all, he feels that his rights are the ones being denied—which is precisely the attitude of almost all of my

clients when they begin my program. The abusive man feels cheated, ripped off, and wronged, because his sense of entitlement is so badly distorting his perceptions of right and wrong.

In sum, an abuser can be thought of not as a man who is a “deviant,” but rather as one who learned his society’s lessons too well, swallowing them whole. He followed too carefully the signposts his culture put out for him marking the path to manhood—at least with respect to relationships with women.

THE CULTURAL EXCUSE

My abusive clients sometimes become aware of these ways in which society has shaped their values and, sticking closely to their long-standing abusive habits, seize this insight as a new excuse. Instead of saying “I was drunk “or “I was abused as a child,” they rise to a new level of sophistication in escaping responsibility, declaring, “I did it because I learned entitled expectations and the devaluing of females.” I respond by telling the client that he is putting old wine in a new bottle. “The number- one lesson you seem to have learned,” I say, “is how to make excuses for abusing women. And I see that you’re still practicing it.” Abusive men do

need to learn about social influences, but not in a way that gives them yet another means of letting themselves off the hook.

ABUSE AS A FORM OF OPPRESSION

A home where a woman is abused is a small-scale model of much larger oppressive systems that work in remarkably similar ways. Many of the

excuses an abusive man uses for verbally tearing his partner to shreds are the same ones that a power-mad boss uses for humiliating his or her employees. The abusive man’s ability to convince himself that his domination of you is for your own good is paralleled by the dictator who

says, “People in this country are too primitive for democracy.” The divide- and-conquer strategies used by abusers are reminiscent of a corporate head who tries to break the labor union by giving certain groups of workers favored treatment. The making of an abuser is thus not necessarily restricted to the specific values his society teaches him about men’s

relationships with women; without realizing it he may also apply attitudes and tactics from other forms of oppression that he has been exposed to as a boy or as a young adult and that he has learned to justify or even admire.

If you look at any oppressive organization or system, from a racist country club up to a military government, you will find most of the same behaviors and justifications by the powerful that I have described in this book. The tactics of control, the intimidation of victims who try to protest, the undermining of efforts at independence, the negative distortions about the victims in order to cast blame upon them, the careful cultivation of the public image of the oppressors—all are present, along with many other parallels. The people in power generally tell lies while simultaneously working hard to silence the voices of the people who are being dominated and to stop them from thinking, just as the abusive man strives to do. And the bottom line is the same: Oppressive systems stay in existence because

the people in power enjoy the luxury of their position and become unwilling to give up the privileges they win through taking advantage of other people and keeping them down. In short, the abusive mentality is the mentality of

oppression.

The connection among different kinds of power abuses can add greatly to the stress experienced by an abused woman. If you already face

discrimination as a woman of color or if you are a low-income woman or a lesbian, you may feel overwhelmed at times by how similar the control and abuse from your partner feel to other forms of oppression you have endured. Some abusive men even deliberately take advantage of their partner’s social vulnerabilities. I have had several clients, for example,

whose partners are undocumented immigrants whom they have threatened to have deported if the women ever disclose the abuse. In some geographical areas you can find supportive services for specific groups of abused women, such as immigrants or lesbians, or locate agencies where

there are staff people from your background who understand the additional challenges you face. (See “Resources.”)

WHEN WE STEP BACK and gaze upon the broad panorama of social influences on a boy’s development, we can see that it’s really no great wonder that he may learn the patterns of abuse. What he isn’t taught by the cultural

messages around him that specifically support the abuse of women he can learn from the tactics of other abusers of power and from the blaming of other victims. In fact, the greater surprise is that so many boys do not grow up to abuse women. There must not be anything inherently abusive or power-hungry about men, or it would be impossible for so many to refuse to follow the path where their cultural training is propelling them. One of the best-known male crusaders against the abuse of women, a man with whom I have had the good fortune to work, grew up in a home where his mother

was physically beaten. He could have modeled himself after his father, but he didn’t. He chose instead to think critically about his experience and take the opposite road. Many of the influential leaders of the movement against the abuse of women in the United States, Canada, and other countries are male, including men who have mentored me in my work.

The oppressive mentality can be taken apart and replaced with a new consciousness. The composer of “Amazing Grace,” you may have heard, was a slave trader who repented of his cruelty and became an abolitionist. Abusive men can learn respect and equality—if we insist that they do so.

But they won’t make those changes unless they are subjected to tremendous pressure, because their cultural values as well as their privileges are pushing them so hard to stay the same.

There has never been a better time than the present to apply that pressure, to demand that abusers accept responsibility for the destruction they cause. We live in a period of mounting international pressure for the respect of human rights for everyone, of insistence on the recognition of the worth and dignity of each person, male or female, young or old, wealthy or poor, and of whatever color. The current context is probably the most hopeful one there has ever been for putting an end to the abuse of women, and to the range of abuses of power that follow its pattern. Resistance never disappears; it waits in the shadows, sometimes for many years, and then eventually sprouts again. You may have gone through dark times when you felt, “I just can’t fight this anymore, I give up,” yet you rebound after a

while to try again to recover your rights. And one day you will succeed.

 

Key points to remember

 

 

An abuser is not born; he is made.

 

In order to bring about change in an abuser, we have to reshape his attitude toward power and exploitation.

 

Abusive behavior is reinforced by multiple societal messages, some of which are specific to the abuse of women and some of which reflect the overall culture of oppression.

 

Your courageous resistance to partner abuse—and you have stood up for yourself (and your children) in many ways, whether you

realize it or not—is a gift to everyone, because all forms of abuse are intertwined.