Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 30, 1994 TAG: 9411300019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAROLE JORDAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Imagine that you are sitting at your desk at work, or standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, or enjoying a picnic with your family. Someone walks up to you and begins to hit you, speaking in icy unemotional tones, telling you how you deserve this, how you asked for it, how it is all for your own good.
Your first reaction is to defend yourself and your family, fight back or run. You feel anger, bewilderment, outrage; you call the police and report this nut, file a report, go to court if necessary. The law is on your side. You are a citizen. You pay taxes. You never hurt anyone and did nothing to provoke such acts. You could have been killed; your little children could have been killed. For months, maybe years, you have occasional nightmares. The thought comes to you over and over: "People can't do things like this to each other. It's not right."
Hundreds of thousands of women and children are attacked like this every year in the United States. Just like this, with the same cold brutality and disregard for suffering and consequences. We never hear about them because they don't cry out or go to the police. This is because domestic violence begins long before the first blow is struck.
Bloodless battering is similar in every way to brainwashing techniques used on prisoners of war. It consists of alternating periods of positive and negative reinforcement. First food, then starvation, then food again. First kindness, then mindless torture, then back to kindness, with no explanation. It doesn't take very long for most animals, including humans, to lose sight of who they are and what they believe in. It literally drives the victims crazy, destroying the ability to think autonomously, to protect the young, to care anymore whether one lives or dies.
The batterer feeds the ego of his victim with an enfolding love and tenderness, real soul food. Then comes the deprivation: food, sleep, friends, employment, family, transportation, money, adequate clothing, control over her life. See-saw, see-saw, back and forth, constantly keeping the victim off balance.
But how can anyone take away food or friends or family or jobs from another adult? Sometimes this is literal deprivation, such as starting arguments at mealtime or bedtime, seizing the car keys, money, "accidentally" discarding clothing and other belongings. Less literal but equally effective deprivation is accomplished by undermining relationships with family, starting rumors, "gaslighting" (so named after the movie in which the husband sets out to drive his wife crazy by upsetting her physical environment, then claiming not to notice the changes).
This bloodless battering may go on for months or years before the first blow is struck, by which time the victim no longer believes in anything or anyone, has become dependent on the batterer for the basics of life, and has lost herself, her "self," completely. She has lost the capacity for outrage, she has no self with which to feel self-righteous, and the only thing keeping her alive is concern for her children on an instinctive level, how she can protect them from the next blow.
Life outside this convoluted relationship is unimaginable. What she means by "but I still love him" is: "If I leave, he will kill me and I will deserve it."
It takes professional intervention on a grand scale to rescue women and children from a situation like this. It starts so slowly as to be undetectable. If he constantly left little love notes on her car when they were dating, it means that even then he was monitoring her whereabouts. But how could she know that? If he humiliated and berated waitresses and clerks, it means that he will one day abuse her in the same way. But first he must relegate her to the "inferior" status he imagines is occupied by the waitress, who has to stand there and "take it."
So begins the battering, without bruises or fists but with words and destructive manipulation. He knows that sooner or later she, also, will have little choice but to "take it."
The real heartbreaker is that if she was brought up in a home where the pattern was established, she is preconditioned. She has hatred and violence as her emotional model of loving intimacy. He probably knows only the same model and for the same reasons. Why else would he, why would anyone, beat senseless a pregnant woman or a tiny child? He is toughened, all the genuine sweetness gone from him. She is tenderized. They can start right out, no need to waste time intimidating and being intimidated. Go right for the blood and fulfill their legacy.
The real victims of domestic violence are children.
What of the woman who bears wounds and scars? Is she not a victim? In the dictionary sense, yes, she is. She usually has already been victimized, usually in childhood, and has grown up to be a survivor. She is cross-hatched with physical and emotional scar tissue and, if she finally tries to save herself, it is because she is finally stricken by light, knowledge that she is worth saving, that she is not property, that she is an adult responsible for herself.
Despite the media identification of multitudes of "victims" (a victim of ice-cream craving, a victim of the common cold), real victimhood is more closely associated with absolute helplessness and dire harm in situations where there is no way out.
Some of the wounds inflicted upon the fragile, perfect bodies of children are horrifying almost beyond imagination, certainly beyond description. Worse than physical harm, though, are the emotional scars that form tight bands across the mind and heart, forever constricting the capacity to love without fear.
Even if both parents can brag that they never involved the kids in their disputes, they cannot know how the yelling, crashing, terrifying noises in the night will affect their children. To a young child, he is his parents. We forget how inseparably bound we all felt to our parents as soon as those bonds are broken in the normal process of growing up.
To believe that familial violence does not affect the child who is supposedly asleep in his bed is itself neglectful. That child is hiding with his head under the pillow, singing to himself, using every method available to disbelieve what he hears and knows to be true. If his parents make up in the night in the way of couples, he senses the satisfaction at breakfast the next morning and, bingo, the connection is formed: violence = love = sex = violence.
In this way, another abuser sprouts up, ready to take on the next generation of girls. He wasn't born to violence; he was transformed by it and so is its littlest and most tragic victim.
Carole Jordan works in the medical library at Community Hospital of the Roanoke Valley.
by CNB