Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 27, 1994 TAG: 9406280079
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DANIEL R. CLOW
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Judging from the many conversations I have had since Simpson fell from grace, it appears we feel remorse for the victims of our domestic fury. It isn't enough.
Remorse doesn't change anything. Our feelings of remorse may even help to perpetuate vulnerability and the very circumstances which foment violence.
Remorse is too common. I have never met a perpetrator of domestic violence who wasn't remorseful for his behavior. I should also say that I have never been impressed with an offender's remorse.
Unfortunately, battered women often are. Violence appears to cycle through family lines, and researchers suggest that victims settle for remorse from their offenders.
Men who abuse women tend to cycle through three phases of violence.
In the first phase, which could last days or even decades, tensions build and problems are never really resolved. Most of the time the couple or the family keeps these difficulties private.
The second phase is called "the critical incident," and it usually passes quickly, except for the victim who endures as though in a slow-motion bad dream. In this phase problems erupt into violence, and private family struggles become public knowledge. When police respond to a domestic disturbance call, they are at greater risk than when answering any other emergency.
Following the eruption of violence is a third phase: remorse. Abusers promise they've learned their lesson, and many dramatize their remorse with religious conversions. Their remorse is often manipulative enough that police withdraw without making arrests, or enough for the victim to drop charges. The offender is remorseful but unchanged. It only takes time before Phase 3 becomes another Phase 1, tensions building toward another explosion.
Remorse fails in a violent family for the same reasons it fails in a violent society. It lacks substance. It lacks change. It lacks conviction. If we take Garcetti's call to examine our tolerance of violent acts, we might have to do some soul-searching around two critical points in the violence cycle: emergency response and offender treatment.
Records indicate that police were summoned to the Nicole Brown Simpson home on several occasions, but withdrew. The reason the police withdrew had nothing to do with celebrity status or wealth. This response to domestic violence is due to our societal belief that family matters are private - including violence.
This belief must change. Remorse for a family in crisis helps draw a curtain around a family, keeping its violence a secret. Our response to domestic violence should be based on the belief that battering is a crime. If we really believe it is a crime to abuse women, then our emergency response should require the offender's arrest. Our judicial system shouldn't allow domestic-violence charges to be dropped without a hearing.
The second critical point in the handling of domestic violence has to do with offender treatment. All men who abuse women should be required to successfully complete a treatment program. But some programs are better than others. To improve treatment of men who abuse women, we must re-visit an old concept: repentance.
Repentance is not the same thing as remorse, though both are a response to an unacceptable behavior. Repentance can be measured because the changes it generates are substantial enough to be observed.
My research on violent men suggests that the most effective treatment programs are those that elicit behavior changes in clearly identified problem situations. If a violent man is moving beyond remorse toward actual repentance, then it should be possible to identify how his pre-violent thoughts, feelings, and actions are changing, becoming non-violent.
Garcetti's advocacy for a national review of the problem of domestic violence may not be as sensational as the charges against O.J. Simpson. But if we don't do some of this soul-searching,we may be promoting the conditions under which domestic violence rages.
Daniel R. Clow is a mental health counselor in Roanoke.
by CNB