Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 24, 1992 TAG: 9203240231
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Each year an estimated 6 million women are beaten by the men they live with, and 30 percent of women who become homicide victims die at the hands of men with whom they have a "family" relationship.
While there are some cases of domestic violence in which the wife is the abuser as well as problems of abuse among gay couples, in the overwhelming majority of cases, women are the victims at the hands of their men.
When such cases gain wide attention, the public tends to blame alcohol or drugs or poverty as the provocation. But are they?
A chemical high may release inhibitions against physical abuse but it does not create a violent, power-hungry person who needs to control a spouse even more tightly than a master rules a slave. As for poverty, experts say well-educated, well-off professional men are hardly immune; they are simply better at escaping punishment.
Even when the victim's charges of abuse are believed, she is often blamed for staying with her abuser, for not throwing him out or picking up the children and leaving. Sometimes she is blamed for hooking up with a violent man, or even for provoking his attacks.
"Why did she stay?" is the leading question. Far fewer people ask, "Why did he do it?" Yet understanding the nature of spouse abuse and the forces that foster and perpetuate it is crucial to establishing effective social and legal mechanisms for protecting the victims, breaking these violent patterns and preventing such cases from developing in the first place.
As more communities mandate therapy for men convicted of domestic violence, the extent and origins of their abusive behavior is at last undergoing professional scrutiny.
For example, Cyndee Pattison, a therapist who runs groups for men who batter women, said: "Most of the time the men don't understand that what they are saying or doing is offensive. It's like a reflex, something they've done all their lives."
She says men tend to minimize their actions and the consequences, saying things like "we had a little argument," even when the woman required stitches to close facial wounds.
Pattison, who works for Victim Services, a private nonprofit agency in New York City that aids battered women, said the men are acting on beliefs they learned from their parents and society.
"Boys are taught to settle problems and disputes with their fists, whereas girls are taught to use their mouths," she said.
John Aponte, a founder of the Victim Services counseling program for men who batter, said batterers were at the extreme of a continuum of men who "carry the seeds of superiority given to them" at an early age. "Men may use intimidation, threats, economic control or emotional abuse," he said. "It's when these control tactics don't work and a man's authority is challenged that he feels he has to resort to physical abuse."
Experts say many abusive men are the products of a vicious cycle in which they were abused as children or witnessed their fathers abusing their mothers physically or psychologically by belittling them.
The issue, Pattison said, is power and control. "Historically, women were property, and men had to keep them in line," she said. An abusive man may control his wife's access to money, not allow her to work and make her account for every penny she spends.
He may try to isolate her from social contacts by disapproving of her friends, escorting her everywhere she goes and alienating her from her family. And he may constantly berate her until she is convinced she is worthless. When he is through, she has nowhere to turn for support and affirmation but to him, her abuser.
Dr. Samuel Klagsbrun, psychiatrist and medical director of Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, N.Y., points out that most abusive relationships start out normally as loving, romantic and exciting. When abuse begins, women have trouble believing that something initially so wonderful is turning sour.
There is a lot of apologizing and making up, and the woman thinks everything will go back to the way it once was. Slowly, barraged by repeated abuse, she becomes dehumanized, helpless and unable to see herself as a separate person and to distinguish right from wrong.
Klagsbrun, who treated Hedda Nussbaum, the abused companion of Joel Steinberg, the New York lawyer now in jail for fatal child abuse, said such women end up surviving in the same way that prisoners of war, hostages or concentration camp victims do: by trying to behave well, by accommodating their captors, by living from hour to hour.
An abused woman may even begin to believe her batterer's rationalization that the beating is for her own good. The New York Times
by CNB