Lundy Bancroft Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

good evening everybody my name is Susan vine and I'm a vice president of the network for women's lives on behalf of the network and our hardworking co-sponsors I want to welcome you to a very special event the network is a volunteer organization dedicated to preventing domestic violence and promoting healthy relationships our goal is prevention our vehicle is education our co-sponsors this evening are the coner parel domestic violence Roundtable the domestic violence services of central middle sex Sudbury wh and Lincoln domestic violence Roundtable and violence prevention Coalition of Bedford the network is deeply grateful for their contributions and for the outstanding Spirit of cooperation that has marked our work together for this event before introducing the gentleman and teacher we've all come to hear I'd like to thank Paulie Atwood of the allcut school who generously made this venue available to us and I would also like to thank our location Angel Katie oats who discovered it for us Lundy bankrupt is the author of a number of Publications on domestic abuse his first book was the batterer as parent addressing the impact of domestic violence on family Dynamics his second book is entitled why does he do that inside the minds of angry and controlling men that book is one of the two best selling books in the country on relationship abuse his most recent book is entitled when Dad hurts mom helping your children heal the wounds of witnessing abuse which addresses the impact on children of exposure to abuse and guides mothers and how to help boys and girls get well and stay well emotionally Lundy Specializes in counseling and legal interventions for abusive men and he has worked extensively with teen boys who've been exposed to domestic violence his most current work focuses on men who abuse women and the impact those men have on the lives of both women and children in his work as author trainer counselor and activist on issues of abuse and Recovery Lundy spends a great deal of time traveling across this country he tells us he's especially pleased to be speaking in his home state of Massachusetts and we are absolutely delighted to present him here tonight will you please join me in welcoming the remarkable Mr Lundy bang thank you that's one of the nicest receptions I've ever had I feel like I should have some magic tricks ready for the occasion but it it is fun to speak in Massachusetts and I I I don't know why I don't get to speak in Massachusetts more often I think it's partly because for at least the past 5 years the state has been completely broke but it is it is funny to live here and I've been to Alaska twice I think in the last three years and and Hawaii and it's funny that I don't speak in Massachusetts and one of the effects that it has being here is that I noticed I keep thinking I recognize everybody in the audience which I probably don't but I keeps being a sense of of having seen people people somewhere before before I really get into the nitty-gritty of talking about my experience working with men who batter and what I've learned from that and what I hope we and our communities can take from what people in the domestic violence field have learned about domestic violence offenders is I want to say first that I think we continue in the year 2006 to underestimate the number of lives that are being torn AP Heart by the conduct of battering men and I'm I am in airports a lot and it means that I'm constantly being subjected to very loud television sets and it's getting more and more so the only place you can get away from a television set in an airport is by crawling under your seat in the waiting area and but it means that I get a constant reminder of what people are being constantly reminded Ed of in their homes and pretty much what it is is Terrorism terrorism terrorism terrorism terrorism terrorism now I take our safety seriously I want everybody to be well I want everybody to be safe I also believe though that in order to keep people safe you have to prioritize where your greatest risks are I think that's just sort of common sense about safety if if I living in Massachusetts put most of my energy into figuring out how I was going to keep my children from being stung by scorpions that would not be time terribly well spent it's just not something that's real likely to happen in Massachusetts and I've got to focus much more on keeping them from getting hit by cars now in in an average year in the United States between 1500 and 2,000 women are murdered by their husbands or boyfri friends or their ex-husbands or ex-boyfriends and uh in other words by a domestic terrorist coincidentally that's roughly the number about 1,600 women died in the World Trade Center demolition so if we look over the last five years since the since 911 the number of women who have died at the hands of a domestic terrorist in the United States are five times greater is five times greater than the number of women that have died at the hands of an international terrorist if we want to pick another period say over the past 20 years 20 times as many women have died at the hands of domestic terrorists in the United States as at the hands of international terrorists so in order for us to be thinking realistically about women's safety and I would argue about children's safety too which I'll say more about what our news media should be talking about is about domestic violence and the and violence against women about five times as much or perhaps 20 times as much as it's talking about the threat from International terrorism in order to be realistically reflecting where the danger in the United States to women lies and yet of course are we hearing about domestic violence five times as much or 20 times as much no we're hearing about nameless International terrorism a thousand times as much I didn't get that from a research study I made that up uh but it seems like it's easily a thousand times as much as we're hearing about domestic violence from our televisions and unfortunately television is still what most people rely on for their view of what's going on in the world which is a lot of why we're in the state that we're in but the the the murders are also just the beginning of the lives that are being torn apart and the the now statistics studies of how prevalent domestic violences vary they come up with a lot of different findings but one of the lower statistics that I've seen and I spend a lot of time with the with the studies because of the writing that I do gave us a rate of 16% in heterosexual relationships that means a battering man or a battered woman are about one and six that's huge that means millions and millions and millions of lives are being torn apart by fear by Violence by De by being degraded and demeaned by having basic freedoms taken away and by then having to live even after the boun or abuse stops if it stops with years and years afterwards of the after effects of trauma and in the last 10 or 12 years there has started to be a tremendous amount of research published about the impact on children of growing up witnessing their mom being battered by the children's dad or stepdad or by a live-in partner of the moms and we're finding that children are traumatized sometimes for years after by the violence that they're witnessing and by a whole set of other behaviors that they're subjected to at the hands of men who abuse women we're finding that children have higher rates of involvement in in violence if they've witnessed battering of violence of all kinds that they have higher rates of substance abuse that they have higher rates of school performance problems higher rates of school behavior problems that when they get into teen years they're more likely to perpetrate Dating Violence they're more like to be victims of Dating Violence they're more likely to perpetrate perpetrate sexual assault they're more likely to be victims of sexual assault they're more likely to run away from home they're more likely to get involved in a gang they're more likely to be school bullies these is all in studies that are that's just they're just piling up higher and higher and higher I think that an argument can reasonably be made that domestic violence is our number one social problem and I'm not alone in it one of the major public health associations about two and a half years ago declared domestic violence this country's number one public health problem that's a striking conclusion given the kinds of problems that this country has with drug and alcohol abuse with HIV AIDS with heart disease with cancer including the the epidemic of breast cancer air quality water quality nonetheless the research that they did about what's costing us the most from a physical health standpoint from a mental health standpoint from expenses for lost work law enforcement and other kinds of public expenses that result from violence against women domestic violence was named our number one public health problem the former Surgeon General ever Coupe declared that domestic violence was the number one cause of injury to women in the United States and some emergency room research studies have confirmed that women end up in the hospital with injuries from being battered more commonly than for any other cause of injury and now I continue to struggle because of my professional connection to this issue with how reluctant judges are to send batters to jail or impose any other kind of meaningful consequence how reluctant prosecutors often are even to prosecute uh in a family law matter how reluctant judges are to in any way restrict batterer's access to their children post separation in other words a batterer essentially has the same opportunity to have unsupervised visitation or to win custody that a non- battering man has we are not prepared yet as a society and I don't mean we in this room the big we and the society are not prepared yet to decide that violence against women is unacceptable that it's destroying people's lives that it's a violation of women's human rights that it's a violation of the rights of the children who have to live in the atmosphere that this violence creates and that it's simply not going to be tolerated anymore that it has to stop and I get asked I'll come back to this question a little bit but I get asked all the time as someone who has specialized in counseling men who batter and I don't do it the last couple years because I'm on the road so much that I can't but I was a counselor for men who batter for about 15 years and I get asked all the time well can men who batter change and I say yes I think the great majority can change and the great majority don't and they don't not because they can't but because they figured out that they don't really have to and that once our society decides that battering is no longer going to be tolerated battering will stop I was just looking at studies in the last few months about jail and I'm going to be saying some things about jail I hate to be a promoter of jail I'm actually someone who is against jail in all kinds of ways and yet when it comes to batters I'm suddenly saying yes they should go to jail but the studies on on the effect of jail on men who batter there there there are a number of interesting findings there but the one that I'm going to mention right now is that it was found that jail was more effective at reducing reoffending reducing recidivism among men who batter than among any other category of criminal in other words jail is particularly effective for stopping batters and I think I'm going to be able to explain tonight why that's true what it is about men who batter that Mak jail often work well to make them stuck I have seen a number of models across the country of communities who decided we are going to make domestic violence our top priority or we're going to make it right close to our top priority and we're going to coordinate efforts among a lot of different players in the community we're going to bring in influential people we're going to we're going to coordinate Services we're going to coordinate law enforcement response every time a woman gets killed we're going to do an intensive study of what happened and what went wrong and and what we could have done potentially to keep her alive how we can keep the next woman alive how we can stop the next batter from killing and I've seen communities make tremendous changes in what their Community culture is about violence against women and what their rates are are of homicide in what the sense is uh that a woman has that there will be a safety net out there for her that she will be assisted that she can find a way to get the safety so if if there's nothing else that you remember from tonight I hope you will remember that we can do it we can stop the domestic abuse of women next I want to talk just a little bit about oppression and I'm not going to say a lot about it because that I could give a two-day speech just on the subject but I now have in many ways some very different ways of thinking than I had 17 18 years ago when I started into working with men who batter and I came increasingly to perceive a a home where there's a batterer as a a little tyranny I don't know what else to call it but it's a little chunk of fascism or totalitarianism and that in many ways when we look closely at what's going on in a home where there's a batter in a relationship where there's a Bader we find the key elements that are present in almost any oppressive system that it's a microcon that if we learn well enough what's going on in a battering home we can understand what's going on in a lot of other systems where people are being subjected to violence or being exploited or being demeaned or being degraded or being killed or having their human rights denied I'll say just a few things about it that first of all most forms of Oppression that I know about involve the involve violence the threat of violence and various kinds of intimidation ways that you are reminded that violence could be done to you if you don't hyper cooperate if you make yourself too visible if you fight back against the oppression in any way or maybe for no reason at all just to keep you guessing and off balance second that in in most cases where there's oppression somebody's benefiting there are people who are getting to live luxuriously who are getting to do a lot less than their share of the work who are getting to have a lot more than their share of the stuff who are getting to make a lot more than their share of the decisions and then there are other people who are being silenced who are being shut up who who are not being permitted to talk who are not being heard or who are permitted to talk occasionally but sort of on the terms in other words we'll listen when we feel like listening to you and then we're going to silence you when we've had enough that all systems of Oppression involve you can call it by different names but propaganda where the people involved and the society at large The Wider world are told that the system is just that it's right that it's necessary and that the people who are being subjected to this kind of treatment are less than they are inferior they're not human beings in the same sense that the rest of us are that they don't suffer the way the rest of us suffer they don't know pain the way the rest of us know pain so we can't be as concerned for what they are going through these elements are all present in the mentality of men who batter and in the mentality of their allies in their behavior and how they get away with it and in Social systems that back them up and make it possible for them to get away with doing what they are doing and this actually Segways directly into the first thing that I want to tell you about men who batter because it's very closely related which is that battering is not at core a psychologically driven problem it is at core a culturally driven problem and I'm going to explain what I mean by that batterers are psychologically speaking in other words from the point of view of their mental health how their emotional worlds work how they Express themselves or don't express themselves emotionally how much they suffer pain how distorted their perceptions are are not distinctly different from non battering men on average they are also not dramatically different from non- battering men in their skills researchers have measured their conflict resolution skills their assertiveness skills their communication skills and they test about average about the same as non- battering men Ed gondol who's one of the country's top researchers on men who batter and he also does a lot of other very interesting domestic violence related research did extensive psychological testing using the mcmi which for any of you who are in clinical fields at all is a modern sophisticated psychological test that has a reputation for being good not only for catching major mental illnesses but for catching what are known as personality disorders and he still found that a solid majority of Court convicted battering men that he was testing tested normal tested indistinguishable from a non- battering man he did F find among a the minority that did have some mental health problems that they were more likely than non- battering men to have narcissistic personality disorders meaning to be extremely self-centered self-referential see the world only through through their own perspective being capable of taking the perspectives of others or caring about the perspective of others and that they had higher rates of what's known as antisocial personality disorder which is not strictly speaking really even a psychological problem it's a moral problem antisocial personality disorder which is also known as being a sociopath or being a psychopath means that the individual lacks a conscience that the individual just doesn't have seem to have the normal mechanisms that the rest of us have for feeling bad about pain that they've caused other people but even when you allow for that that increase in those categories compared to non- battering men you still have a solid majority that don't have those problems or any other kind of noticeable psychological problem when we look at their family of origin experiences because the whole field of psychology tends to be very very focused on what happened in people's families of origin uh we do not find batterers uh dramatically having dramatically higher rates of having been abused as children than non- battering men we do find them having we do find them having higher rates than non- battering men of coming from homes where their mom was abused in other words it's really not child abuse that feeds woman abuse in the Next Generation but woman abuse that feeds woman abuse in the Next Generation child abuse feeds child abuse in the Next Generation but there's more even than that to say about what the research finds because we tend to start once we know about that to think oh well these boys who are so traumatized by growing up in homes where their mom is being battered that's an emotional problem that's a mental health issue well two of the studies there been multiple studies that have found how that have looked at how domestic violence is transmitted to the Next Generation but two of the studies specifically looked at the process of transmission for boys in other words what is it about growing up in a home where your mom is being battered that leads so many boys to grow up to become battering men and one of the studies specifically compared boys that were more traumatized by the violence that they had witnessed to boys that were less traumatized by the violence that they had witnessed both sets being from homes where there was a batterer and found that they had about the same rates of growing up to become battering men in other words the level of trauma did not distinguish which boys became offenders and which boys did it and uh two of these studies looked to see what it was and both found that it was the extent to which they had taken on the batterer's mentality that determined whether they followed in his footsteps or not whether they had absorbed his key values and attitudes such as had they come to believe that their mother was to blame for the violence that was done to her because then that generalizes to believing that women are the cause of the violence that's done to them and that men are are not responsible or that somehow we can't be expected to do differently the the the I I I've had a a lot of clients over the years who've talked about the vi vience that happened to us or the violence that happened to me as they're talking about their beating of women as if somehow this this violence was a was a a spirit that possessed him and moved his arms and legs and and in other words he's he's he's abdicating responsibility for the choices that he was making and I'm going to talk a little bit about batter's on choice in a few minutes but does has the come to believe that you're not responsible for your own actions has he come to believe that females are inferior has he come to believe that females were put on this Earth to make sure that men's needs are fulfilled to be a sort of endless full-time servant and what was it that I years ago I remember hearing people say uh when two uh when a man and a woman get married they become one and that one is the man yeah and this is very much the batterer value system another thing that I that I resonate with from years back is I remember when I was growing up this has changed a little bit now but when I was growing up if you saw a man and a woman a couple in any kind of magazine ad the man was all was looking sort of deeply in thoughtfully into the distance and the woman was looking at the man and the message was the man is deep and the man thinks about the world and the woman thinks about her man and this is how the abuser wants the world to be really Carri to its extreme where her life is supposed to always revolve around him and what he wants and needs now when I say that battering is a culturally driven problem I don't mean that it belongs to one particular culture and for some reason I don't get this question as much as I used to but I used to almost every time I spoke somebody in the audience would say and I still get it sometimes uh somebody the audience would raise their hand and say well aren't there cultures where domestic violence is just acceptable and I have always answered absolutely yours for example and I need to tell you about an experience that I had quite a few years back I had already been working with batterers for a while and I went with a friend to the Huntington Theater Company to watch Frankie and Johnny back when was a stage show before it became a movie how many of you saw the movie Fair number anybody see it on stage somebody else saw it on stage a couple other people saw it on stage I never saw the movie because after seeing the play I'd had enough the uh but the movie was called Frank and Johnny got married uh and I heard the movie was somewhat different but not that much different but in the play the premises is uh that Frankie's a she Johnny's a he this is a play from quite a while back um Johnny knows that Frankie is the right woman for him that they belong together that they were made for each other and that the only reason Frankie doesn't want to be with him is because she's afraid of intimacy and she's afraid of commitment and so he comes over to her apartment one night to persuade her in effect that she doesn't know what's good for her and that he adores her and he knows that she loves him and that they belong together and for the next two hours of this play he hassles her at best there's things that are worse than hassling but he hassles her at best lots of criticism about what her Faults Are and why she doesn't want to be with him shows what's wrong it just shows what's wrong with her this escalates over the course of the play where it's intensifying pressure it's relentlessness and then it starts to cross the line into abuse and he starts to do things like not permit her to go to sleep she's exhausted because he's been hounding her for hours and she wants to go to sleep and he says no you're not going to bed till we resolve this question resolve this question means till I get my way and she goes and gets a sand makes herself a sandwich and he grabs the plate out of her hand and throws it into the sink so he's not like okay so now in addition to sleep deprivation she's being food deprived she's not permitted to eat this woman is being captive in effect she orders him out of her apartment and he refuses to leave she says okay I'm going to call the police he says go ahead call the police in an hour they will have released me and I'm going to be back on your fire escape sooner or later you're going to deal with me there also as I recall at least a couple of incidents where he physically blocks her path and grabs her as she I think it's particularly as she's trying to get into her bedroom to go to sleep so there's also direct physical violence okay physical violence food deprivation sleep deprivation refusal to leave her apartment refusal to honor her rights a threat in effect right I'm going to be back on your fire escape so he's threatening and intimidating her No Boundaries complete invasion of her space and tons and tons and tons of criticism superiority he knows better she doesn't want to be with this man because she's afraid of commitment no she doesn't want to be with this man because he's a jerk you should fear commitment with this man you should fear intimacy with this man what happens Frankie sees the light she has a huge breakthrough I would too so I could go to bed um she overcomes her fears of commitment she overcomes her fears of intimacy she realizes that Johnny is really the right man for her they fall in love the curtain closes the play is over I'm not on an airplane so there is no air sickness bag available to me now I'm not yet at the punchline to the story however who goes to the Huntington Theater Company tickets were I mean this was a few years back but tickets were already 3540 bucks it's who even likes theater right it's a very well educated audience it's an audience with money this is a mainstream privileged mainstream and above mainstream privileged American audience overwhelmingly white Standing Ovation including my friend I'm sorry to say felt like kicking her in the shim that my quite aware friend I might add um station I'm the only person in the hunting Theater Company left in my seat as far as I could tell I was the only person that had any awareness of what we had just watched that's why people can't tell me well what about those countries where domestic violence is just acceptable it's like in some countries you have to put a nicer ribbon on it than others that's all in the United States you got to pretty it up better than in some countries that's the only difference well that's not the only difference because we're actually making some cultural shifts and the batter women's movement is having some successes but it's a long process and it's because of a movement and it's because of activism and it's because of very hard work it's not because of some kind of cultural superiority there have been quite a number of cross-cultural studies done there's a lot a lot of international work not as much as I would like but there's a lot of international work done studying domestic violence in different countries comparing rates between different countries and what do we find we find that there's abuse of women violence against women domestic battery of women in all modernized societies that there are very few Societies in which re anthropologists and other kinds of researchers have been able to find little or no violence against women and there are societies that are structured in a completely different way from how modern societies are structured they're far less hierarchical there isn't there aren't clear uh centers of power in those societies there are much less division of labor and power particularly power actually more than labor between males and females in other words women have much higher status in those societies than they do in any modernized society and there is not only no tolerance socially speaking for violence against women but there's no tolerance for any form of violence violence is simply unacceptable Behavior period in those cultures so when I say that domestic violence that the that that the domestic abuse of women is culturally driven I don't mean that it's driven by a particular culture what I mean is is that it's that batterers learn battering and come to use those behaviors and believe in their right to use those behaviors through their socialization processes through becoming part of their culture so they learn them yes a lot of them learn them from dad or stepdad a lot of them learn them at home the way that's a lot of where you learn your cultures values is what's modeled in your family for you although fewer than half by the way somewhere between researchers tell somewhere between about 40 and and and and maybe 45% but below 50% of baders come from homes where their mom was abused so that's only one place to learn it although it's a particularly powerful place to learn it but uh they learn it through all the ways you learn about your culture in other words that would be a whole anthropological discussion but they learn it through the religious values that they're taught they learn it through the basic cultural values that they learn from their family from their relatives from television from video games about what men are supposed to be like what women are supposed to be like who has the right to use violence who has the right to make rules who has the right to impose punishments who has who has the obligation to obey and so forth uh I as a central part of my work as a counselor for men who batter I I have to deal with as every batter counselor has to deal with how remarkably and disturbingly Justified my clients feel in doing what they do they will now when a when a client first comes to a batter program he doesn't tend to start right out with his justification sometimes he does but more often he comes comes the first week the second week the third week saying he feels terrible about what he's done that he knows it's rotten that he knows it's not a way you should ever treat women but as soon as he's really comfortable in the program and starts to get to know you and starts to get to know the other people in the program without exception I've never had a client this wasn't true of within a few weeks he's starting to tell you why it's not fair to think that badly of him for what he did and why it's justifiable and it's it's both excuses and words why I'm not responsible for my actions and justifications which are why my actions were necessary uh it's victim blaming it's claims that this is just how men are and women can't expect men to be different it's women that need to change uh it's things like the client of mine who said I kept trying to explain to the police that this was my wife but they wouldn't listen so I have to try to change a client's basic core values I have to try to persuade him that things that he thinks are acceptable are completely unacceptable and in that process I end up learning where he got his values from often because in order to take up his side of the argument he's going to tell me well but this is what my dad said or this is what my grandfather said this is what I read in the Bible or whatever his particular cultures spiritual texts religious texts are he's not quite as likely to openly say well I learned this from pornography but when I press on the question I very often find that pornography has been a critical influence in how he has decided what men are like and what women are like what sex is like and what violence is whether violence is really so bad or not and so forth so having opened that can of worms up I'm going to say a couple words about pornography uh I know that we live in an era where there's a lot of kind of antix campaigners out there and I want to make it clear that I am not among them some of you may be I'm not even saying anything about that I'm just clarifying so you know where I stand not I'm not against sex uh my beef with pornography has nothing to do with the fact that it's sexual or that it's sexually explicit or that there are naked bodies in it my beef with pornography is what kind of sexuality is it teaching what is the version of sexuality that American pornography and pornography all over the world socializes our young men into it's a version of pornography where it's a version of sexuality sorry what I call the pornography School of sexual uality where uh sex is connected very often to violence where violence is shown as being sexually exciting where degradation is shown as being sexually exciting where women are constantly REM robbed of all Humanity all compassion all Dignity of course regular advertising does that too you don't have to go to pornography I mean I you constantly see women in in your major newspapers in Po in post poses in their underwear that you would never see a man in such a pose because a man in such a pose you'd say he looks ridiculous he's been robbed of all dignity but for some reason it's acceptable for women to be shown in these ways that Rob them of all dignity uh there's all there's there's really nothing in pornography that's about love that's about mutual respect that's about kindness pornography also puts quite a bit of energy into saying that the more that a woman looks like a girl the more she looks underage uh the more sexually appealing that makes her so it's specifically encouraging and socializing men to abuse to to abuse girls we love to title their videos things like barely legal and things like that to to to Really entice men into this attraction uh for uh underage females when we try to address pornography in our communities people start to scream censorship that you know you're going to ruin our you're going to ruin people's First Amendment Amendment rights you're bring in censorship I'm not an advocate of censorship I'm not saying that the way to stop pornography is to censor it I'm saying the way to stop pornography is to put enough pressure on carriers that they don't want to carry it because it's so unwelcome in their communities and to put enough pressure on men and other consumers because some women are heavy consumers of pornography also to stop buying it and to stop giving this 10 billion dollar a year industry our money uh because of the kind of damage that's being done to women in the production of pornography in the use of pornography and in what pornography is teaching our children and by the way lest you have any Illusions about this boys look at lots of lots and lots of pornography I'm a former boy uh and I can assure you that 30 years ago pornography was very easy to get any boy who wanted to get his hands on it could get his hands on that was pre- internet so if it was easy then imagine how easy it is now very very whether we like it or not it's a very very heavy influence on how males in the society think about sexuality and how they think about females if you were starting to talk about a magazine a book depictions in your community that were horribly racist that glorified slavery or that made that made torture of black people look exciting and you said we've got to get this out of our community people wouldn't be screaming censorship at you they'd be saying we got to get this out of our community and we wouldn't proposed to get that out of our community Through censorship we would propose to get that out of our community by decrying how racist it was by blasting anyone who would sell it by blasting anyone who would buy it I'm saying the same thing about pornography it's has nothing if anyone starts talking censorship First Amendment just tell them that's got nothing to do with it we're talking about our right to protest and cry out and drive out of our communities without censorship through moral pressure influences they're contributing so much to violence against females and to the attitudes that support and by the way there's considerable research to show the ways that pornography actually affect the ways that men's attitudes are actually different after they've spent time with porn AR that their belief systems change backpedaling now to talk some about how I came into this field to work with men who batter almost 20 years ago and not understanding a lot understanding certain pieces but not understanding in any sense the fabric of what I've been talking to you about in a sense I've told you the end of the story first in case anybody has to leave early that uh I came into this work with some understanding of the the tragedy and outrage of violence against women in society but on the micro level I really at the same time didn't get it and on the micro level what I expected was that I was going to come in to work with these guys who were deeply ashamed of what they were doing of beating women that they they sort of would do it because something came over them that they couldn't really control but they then would feel terrible about after doing it that they in many ways would hate their own lives and that I was going to be offering them this other pathway that they knew nothing about and they were going to be so excited to learn about this other pathway that was open to them that was going to lead them into this beautiful garden and all I had to do was open the door for them and they were going to be kissing me on both cheeks for liberating them from this ugly life that they have been living now I realized that young does not necessarily equal naive but in my case it did and I really believe that my clients were going to be men who were inwardly tortured that they suffered somehow differently from other men so in my first couple of years as a counselor for men who batter oh by the way one more thing I should say I was told by my early mentors and trainers that this was rot what I believed but I thought oh that's just their political line that's just their Dogma I didn't buy it and I I believe that they were ideologically very rigid which actually they weren't not that there aren't some of those types running around some places but actually in retrospect the people that I worked with were not but that's what I decided and so then I had to struggle out for myself during my first two two or three years working with manhub the fact that my experiences would keep not fitting with this whole set of of beliefs that I had come in with I would have I had to I kept running up against the remark able Consciousness that would go into my client's actions so I had one of my early clients one of my very first guys a Gas Company employee who admitted that he had beaten his wife up very very badly and that he had tied her to a chair and he had torn some of her clothes off he said I had partly tied her to a chair I mean someone's either tied to a chair or they're not right I you partly tie someone to the chair the uh maybe he meant she could still move eyebrows or something I don't know but the the but it's I say I say that because again it's an example of the whole way the battering mentality works it's like you you always you always minimize everything you always split little hairs you always make things sound you know they they say I I grab my wife by the throat and put her up against the wall like it was some sort of gentle delivery you know the uh he had beaten her black and blue it was horrible and uh so I asked him what her injuries were and he told me that she had these blacks and black and blues and wels all up and down her legs and I said did she have any injuries to her arms or to her face and he looked at me this guy was probably 15 20 years older than I was he looked at me like I must be some kind of idiot and he said I wasn't going to do anything that would show he was did I say he was very drunk at the time time he was very drunk at the time and that wasn't just his claim because I talked to his wife I've always done interviews with the partners of my clients if I was able to get hold of them for for numerous reasons but mostly to try to find out if if what kind of danger she's in and what we can do to help her out so even in this incredible rage that he was in just furious and very drunk he nonetheless continued to make quite aware decisions about where to hit her in ways that would hurt her terribly but that wouldn't get him in trouble and you I caught on but it took me a while I remember a woman saying to me oh he just goes berserk and smashes things up all over the house and I said well does he break your stuff or does he break his stuff or does he break stuff that belongs to the two of you and there was this considerable pause on the other end of the line and then she said I never thought about that before but it's only my stuff that gets broken now that speaks not only to the level of I don't know if Consciousness is the right decision but of deliberateness of chosenness that goes into batter's Behavior but it also speaks to their remarkable ability to cause tremendous confusion to create an electrified atmosphere of fear and intimidation that makes it very hard for even a really bright person to think clearly so that in the midst of that chaos a perfectly bright woman had never even noticed that it was only her stuff that got broken and again that speaks to how much we can offer women who are being abused because women who are being abused are not different from other women there have been so many research studies that have tried to figure out who are battered women you know what what are their issues what kind of background do they come from why would they get involved with a man like this and all the research can tell us is that they are women with one exception that there is some solid research evidence that they have a somewhat higher rate not a vastly higher rate a somewhat higher rate of coming from homes where their mom was battered but even that when you look carefully at the research it turns out does not indicate that they're more likely to get involved with a batterer what that indicates is that they're more likely to stay longer than another woman if they do get involved with a badler because of what they learned they learned it's your own fault they learn you got to work harder to please the man they learn there's no way out they learned that police come and don't do anything in various pieces of information of unfortunate information that they absorbed from their experience battered women are just women that means that most of what we see going on for a battered woman is a product of her circumstances I'm not saying that she in other words she's neither better nor worse than anybody else she's another human being and yeah she's going to come in with some issues but any of us would come in with some issues so ultimately that doesn't tell us very much does it and I mean there are also cases where she's coming in with severe issues that are making it harder for us to help her but that's not the norm the norm is for her to be pretty much like anybody else and uh a sort of quick way of thinking about this that I think is helpful and that I'll offer you and hopes that this another piece that might stay with you from tonight when we look at how a particular woman is being is reacting to being abused and we're trying to understand why she reacts in certain ways or is doing certain things or is making certain choices or is feeling certain ways we tend to try to find the answer to those questions by looking more and more closely at her putting her more and more tightly under the microscope and I would argue the answers lie much more in putting him more and more under the microscope the more you look at him the more you understand his behaviors the more you understand how he messes with Minds The more you understand his manipulative tactics and it's different each abuser is a little different from the other they have their they have their particular tricks they have their particular abilities they have their things that they're better at than others the more you get what it would be like to live with him the more her reactions start to not seem so mysterious and start to seem more or less like how anyone would react in her circumstances a couple of great resources I can point you towards one is Dr Judith Herman psychiatrist at Cambridge she was at Cambridge hospital last I knew wrote what I really consider the Bible on trauma or at least it was in its time called trauma and recovery and one thing that Dr Herman did that I thought was was particularly interesting it it's practically every sentence of the book is profound but is that she compared women and men who had been in circumstances of captivity and found that their reactions were not very different other she compared women who had lived in in circumstances where they were being battered to men who had been in prisoner of war camps or in hostage taking situations and found that the symptoms the reactions the confusions the desire to protect the abuser and on and on and on were actually very very similar between the two groups that again women's reactions to oppression don't have much to do with being women and have almost everything to do with being oppressed and these conditions are going to be pretty similar for anyone who's in those circumstances and that means that we have a lot to offer because it means that we can help a woman a a lot by offering support by offering Clarity by offering some insight into what the abuser mentality is like and what he's getting away with by offering resources a safe place to stay a shoulder to cry on some help with child care a support group the kinds of work that the that the that the women's network does is so crucial to our communities and I here I am tonight primarily to talk about the the horrors and dynamics of battering but I want to also tell you that everywhere I go I also hear women's stories about how they got out about the fact that they're not living that way anymore about what The Battered Women's program did for them I hear that particular one over and over and over again so many women have come up to me and saying you know if it weren't for these women that put this conference on today because most of the places I go I'm invited by the women's program if it weren't for these people who are here today I probably wouldn't be alive today or I'd still be with my abuser or I'd still be feeling like it was all my fault and these people are are my were my lifeline and it's it's it's really touching and inspiring to to hear these stories and it's as important to hear those stories as it is to look at the women who are still trapped to look at the abusers who are still getting away with it uh it it's it's really critical all right so that little tangent aside so I started to have to accept the fact that my clients were pretty aware of what they were doing a a great moment and I I worked for a merge in Cambridge I wasn't one of the founders I got there a few years after it started but I was at a merge for many years which was the first program specially program for men who batter in the country a great moment while I worked there but it didn't involve me David Adams and Carol Souza who both worked there they led a batter group together and Carol soua was really one of my biggest influences David Adams also huge in what I've learned from him and from Susan KET and various others Ted German and various others that emerge David and Carol had prepared a skit for a training that they were going to be doing on domestic violence where dve was playing the batter and Carol was playing the batter woman and they decided that they would rehearse it in front of the group that they LED for men who batter they were curious to see how their clients would react to this and whether the clients would feel it was realistic or not and so they acted it out for their group and the group's reaction was very interesting the group's reaction was to get quite energized and agitated by this skit and be very bothered by things that David was doing wrong and start telling him how he should be doing it and they were telling him things like well you can't let her talk like that because once she gets going you'll never shut her up you got to cut her off right away as soon as she starts and they would say you got to move closer to her so that she knows that you mean business move over more where she is and in other words in the excitement of giving feedback on this skit they were forgetting to play their normal their normal role of out of control I don't know why I do it I don't know what comes over me abuser so as I started to put these pieces together and finally started to believe the people around me and what they've been telling me for a while my mentors that emerg I started to ask my clients why they had not done even more serious things okay you're telling me that you lost control of yourself because they always say they lost control of themselves you say that you you slapped her twice and then you shoved her and she fell onto the floor okay there she was on the floor right it would have been easy to kick her in the head why didn't you kick her in the head he can always tell me why he doesn't say the way someone who was truly out of control would say gee I don't know I just stopped or I just didn't he'll say oh I didn't want to hurt her that badly if if I did that I could kill her uh I suddenly realized one of our children was watching these were all were real life things the clients have told me uh she was screaming really loud and the police have the neighbors have called the police on us before it's never on me it's on us the the the the neighbors have called the police on us before and I was afraid they'd call again and the most common response I get more common than all the others put together when I when I lay out those scenarios of why you didn't do even the next the next thing up the line oh I wouldn't do that and that's a very revealing response because it tells you a that he's not out of control that he doesn't do things that to his own moral system are Beyond The Pale uh and it tells you that his fundamental problem is in his beliefs about what is acceptable Because he believes as long as he doesn't cross that line it's okay if he's the kind of guy who who who tells his wife periodically that he's going to kill her and he locks her in rooms and he Raves his fist to her but he never actually punches or slaps her then the real batterer is the one that punches or slaps her if he's the one that punches or slaps her then the real batter is the one that strangles her if he strangles her then the real batter in his mind is the one that puts a gun to her throat to her head and says he's going to kill her and who rapes her and then if he does those things then the real batter is the one who killed her it's always this other oh one more I got to tell you dozens and dozens of clients have said to me you know I'm not one of those guys who comes home and beats his wife for no reason again very revealing of the batterer mentality the real batterer is the guy that does it for no reason well I've never known the guy that does it for no reason he doesn't exist every batter develop vs this system for justifying what he does what's in it for him why batter first of all he gets his way and I don't want you to get the impression that batter women don't stand up for themselves this is one of the complete misconceptions about batter women they do stand up for themselves but it gets harder and harder as the years go by and they start picking their battles more and more they stand up for themselves less often they stand up for themselves less forcefully except for periodic times when they just decide to let out all the stops but they pay a huge price every time they they go for it standing up for themselves or standing up for their children and so he gets more and more cooperation and compliance over time because he's dangerous he's at the very least severely psychologically dangerous and he's at least to some extent physically dangerous I should say by the way that over 50% not not 80% not 90% but over a little better than half of battered women do some kind of I don't know what what image you think of as beating up but do some kind of physical or sexual assault on her every month there are other batters who they let it boil they make you feel like maybe it's going to come you never quite know when it's going to come but the actual physical or sexual assault happens every two years and that can be enough to keep everybody in the f as long as it comes out once in a while or he knows how to get you you feel like it's just about to come that's enough to keep everybody in the family really frightened and walking on eggshells so he gets a lot of cooperation he gets his way uh he gets economic benefits he gets to orient the family's resources towards what matters to him he's often ripping the woman off economically in all kinds of ways taking money from her getting her inheritance from her running her into debts borrowing money from her that he never pays back and so on and so forth uh destroying her earning ability often in various ways in other words sabotaging the development of her education or her career uh at divorce time the the the the the effects of this often become particularly pronounced because the whole way that he's laid the groundwork can leave her in a situation where he's got everything and she's got nothing and this we Happ happens particularly commonly in a domestic violence divorce so there's economic benefits to him uh he gets a lot of service on his terms get weighted on get his meals cooked for him get get the shopping done for him his children raised for him all this work and he can give back as much or as little as he chooses it's entirely on his terms and he's going to tend to get her working very very hard women and children in homes where there's a batterer work extra hard generally to please the batterer you have to you have to to if you don't you will pay for it so he gets catering uh he gets to impose a lot of double standards so he can be very flirtatious with other women or even be sleeping with other women but punish her terribly for any even having a male friend he over time tends to start punishing her terribly even for having female friends he tends to isolate her socially increasingly over time uh he gets to criticize her relentlessly but he gets to be above criticism himself very hard you can criticize the batter to some extent some days but he's never going to do anything about it even if even the days that he does let you do it other days he's going to cream you for trying to criticize him uh I noticed how my client seemed constantly to be talking about how their wives or girlfriends nag them or she nags me this she nags me about this she nags me about that and I figured out it took me a while took me a long time actually but I finally figured out what this means nag means presses me to meet my responsibilities because his attitude is he should never be called on what he hasn't done or on what he has done the bad things he has done or the things he should have done that he hasn't he's not supposed to hear about those things you're not to raise grievances with him so he gets to be above criticism uh he gets to control the sexual life of the relationship so that the sex can be on his terms or if he's not interested in sex and some batters aren't he can be in a relationship and not have any responsibility to the sexual life of the relationship at all if that's what he chooses it's just all however he wants to do it if he wants to have lots of outside uh Affairs as a lot of batterers do not all batterers do but a lot do he gets to do that uh I know I go off into a lot of these stories but but uh these these these experiences were just so important to how I came to understand these things client of mine was telling me that he had assaulted his wife he had hit her because she was accusing him of having an affair now I asked him a question that nobody except the batterer counselor would ever think to ask this man which is well were you and he said yes but she had no proof and she shouldn't be saying things like that when she has no proof so you can even be correctly accusing a batter of having Affair and get hit for that and of course I in in in real terms you're you're at more risk actually with a batter if you're accusing him of something he really is doing than if you're accusing him of something that he isn't this is something we really see I think in the modern day father's rights movement where they say they're so concerned with false allegations of domestic violence or false allegations of child sexual abuse but when you look carefully at their stands on a lot of different issues it becomes clear that it's not the false allegations that concern them it's the true allegations that concern them that's what they're upset about and it comes out in I won't really have time to talk about that tonight but but I've spent a lot of time reading their literature reading their websites uh reading their responses to things I've written and so forth and it becomes really clear that well for example I'll just give you one example I promise I won't go off on a soap box about this but they say they're very concerned about false allegations yet they argue against more thorough investigation of allegations of abuse well if you were concerned about false allegations you would want them to be more thoroughly investigated not less thoroughly investigated so uh batters reap this tremendous set of rewards from battering I think this is the best kept secret probably about domestic violence is that it's actually working pretty well for the typical batterer for some batters it's not for some batter he's in some ways messing up his life almost not not as much but almost almost as much as he's messing up her life and his children's life but that's not actually the norm that's the way a batterer is portrayed a lot of times in movies as this character where you almost feel as sorry for him as you do for her that's not the typical batterer the typical batter is someone for whom the system is actually going pretty well you don't see batters hit by botom the way a substance abuser does a batter can batter for 20 years can batter for 30 years and still be in pretty good health still have a lot of friends if he's the social style of guy still be very popular in his community uh his life he his his career may have gone perfectly well or his job life may have gone perfectly well during that time it's very it's it it can work out just fine sometimes for him and this is why the battering of women has gone on for thousands well well as well as we know at least a few thousand years is because unfortunately so many men perceive that it works and it wasn't in any way illegal until very very recent times there weren't enforcable in any way meaningful enforcable laws against the domestic abuse of women in Massachusetts until 1992 uh the there there women did start to get uh access to restraining orders in the late 70s and that did start to make a difference in in women's freedom in some cases it was a meaningful step I'm not saying it wasn't but from a point of view of there being any significant chance that a batter would experience any consequences for his actions 1992 and even now in 2006 he's very unlikely to get more than a real a very light slap on the wrist even if he's convicted of a a quite significant assault uh when we start to understand how much batters are benefiting from battering we become much less inclined to feel sorry for them and much more inclined to hold them accountable for their actions impose meaningful unpleasant consequences be there 100% for their victims be there 100% for the children who are being exposed to this kind of treatment of their mother and so I I think it's very important to get the word out I I have a lot of experience as anyone here who works with batterers certainly will also have of clients who who look like they're starting to change and then they backslide and when you ask them why did you go back to your old ways of Behaving it almost always comes out that it's some way that his privileges were slipping it's some way that the benefits that he counts on Ian he doesn't think of it that way I'm not saying that it's formulated that way in his mind but when he starts to talk about what was what was starting to arise that led him to go back to the battering it was some luxury or unfairness or Injustice that he was used to being able to impose that he was now not being able to impose as well as he had before so he went back to his old ways uh I've said a number of things about the impact on children of living around a batterer and I'm going to be saying a lot about about this in the in the presentation tomorrow morning but just a few points I want to make about it tonight first of all when you think about the mentality of a batter that I've talked to you about let's do a quick recap here he's extremely controlling and he believes in his right to be in control and to dominate he periodically uses violence and he believes in his right to use violence when that when he deems it necessary uh he expects that the life of the relationship should revolve around the meeting of his needs in other words he has a a very selfish self-centered orientation towards partner relationship he may not have that orientation towards other aspects of his life that varies from bad to bad but you're my woman this is about what you should do for me of course during the dating phase it's all about what I'm going to do for you and what we're going to do for each other and we're going to make beautiful music together and so forth but the oh B woman was just telling me this very powerful story she was a playwright and actually she very did all kinds of writing and uh while she was in the early stages of the relationship uh with the man really trying to charm her he was talking to her about how excited he was by her writing and how where they where they lived was just a great place for a writer and how because he made a lot of M quite a bit of money he was head of an ash uh he they wouldn't she wouldn't need to bring in very much money and as soon as they moved in together and their relationship got serious and committed and they in fact they got married it was like almost overnight you know we don't have time for you to be writing that this is a waste of time you're really pretentious what makes you think this is something you could do anyhow and you got to be bringing in money and you know I don't know it was just like it had flipped over to the other side so a guy who once he's in a serious relationship it's all about what's for him and what's good for him and what he needs well oh couple things I didn't mention about him that he tends to be a real objectifier in other words he tends to really see a woman as a thing not necessarily all women although some of them just have big problems respecting or interacting with women in general but a woman specifically a woman that he's involved with he really sees as as almost like a personal possession you know like a trophy that you would take home and put on the mantle and so that her feelings her needs her Ambitions her Humanity just tends to slip out become less and less important to him over time and she's like an owned object all right when you think about this profile uh that's not a recipe for good parenting to I realize that's an understatement that to be a good parent you have to do everything the opposite right you have to be able to go without a lot of your needs being met for years and you you I mean you get what you can because you can't live on nothing but responsible parents find that their own needs get laid aside to a tremendous extent for a long time particularly while children are young you just you have to let it go you have to be able to in other words extensively focus on somebody else's needs and understand those needs you have you have to have a lot of respect you have to be able to cooperate with the other parent if you're in a two- parent situation and respect that person's parenting judgment and be able to negotiate with and struggle with in a respectful way things that the other parent wants to do as a parent that you don't agree with or don't think are good uh you absolutely have to not use violence and there may be people in the room who disagree with me about that but I think it's overwhelmingly clear that any hitting of children is destructive to them and that spanking children is hitting them and let me say one thing about spanking uh which is that I was almost never spanked as a child I was spanked only a handful of times and when I remember what it was like when I really remember what it was like like really a few times when I've sat and really thought about it and really because there one incident in particular that I can really remember I feel so Furious and so bitter that I feel like I could kill somebody and I feel so completely betrayed and alone in the world that the people who were supposed to look after me and keep me safe could be hitting me and here's what I think happened in my childhood I think that I didn't get hit enough and what I mean by this is if you get hit enough times it just all gets buried in how painful it all is and you can't remember anymore how awful it was and that's why so many people are running around saying well I hit my children and I turned out I mean I got hit a lot when I was a kid and I turned out okay although my battering clients love to use that argument and I say excuse me you're not really the person to be making that argument are you but there are a lot of other people who say and I think it's because when something happens to you enough times it becomes so traumatic and so painful that it just gets buried away and you can't remember anymore and I think what happened is because I only got hit a few times I'm able to remember what it was really like and it was horrible horrible horrible please don't ever ever hit your children for any reason it's not worth it it's not worth it in the it may get you the cooperation in the short term that you want and in the long term it will uh greatly interfere with whatever your goals may be for that child and more importantly will really interfere with that child's potential to have a happy life uh so I can also tell you what the research I won't go into it but the research is quite profound about the impact on children of being hit also so essentially everything that you need to do in order to be a good parent are things that batters tend to be quite weak on and batters also have much much higher rates than other men of abusing children seven times the rate of non- battering men of physically abusing children six times the rate of non- battering men of sexually abusing children they're much more likely than non- battering men to perpetrate incest and again when you look at the literature on incest perpetration it's very similar mentality it's a it's a it's you read Judith Herman read Nicholas grth read Eric leeberg Reed Anna Salter it's a real it's a power and control issue it's not a sexual issue and the incest perpetrator is very manipulative very self-centered a couple of the writers including one of the research studies specifically found that they that that incest perpetrators feel justified in doing what they're doing and one of the studies actually two of the two two of the top writers Nicholas grth and these other folks whose name I'm forgetting at the moment fanto and these others found that incest perpetrators have this concept of entitlement that they're entitled to sexual use of their children so it's it's in other words what they what at core what they share is exploitativeness and a sense of ownership those two pieces are why there's such a high overlap between uh battering and incest perpetration I'll be talking more about about those issues tomorrow as well uh now there are batters who are reasonably responsible parents I don't mean to suggest that all batters are disastrous parents although it's not good parenting to batter your children's Mother that's that's one of the worst that that in itself shows Reckless disregard for your children's well-being so anytime a client of mine says he's a good father I have always said well no I'm sure you do some good things as a father but I'm not willing to give you the mantle good father what when you abuse these children's Mother that's terrible for your children you really care about your children deeply you'll never do that again um but but given that limitation of how good a parent you can there's only so good a parent you can be while you're abusing the children's Mother given that limitation batters are really on a spectrum in how they treat children from some that are you know more or less okay to some that are just terribly psychologically destructive to children or who beat them or sexually abused them my main concern continues to be about their psychological destructiveness to Children even more than the other kinds of harm that they may do so it's very very important for us in our communities to influence family courts to stop being so liberal and granting access to Children post separation to their battering dads that kind of access has to be greatly curtailed it has to be much better evaluated before it's granted and mothers have to be much more supportive for protecting their children a mother's trying to protect their children is being a good parent that's what parents are supposed to do that's what we should be rewarding parents who are trying to protect their children and instead protective parents particularly protective Minds just get slammed into little bits in Family Court proceedings for custody and visitation and get they get treated like there's some horrible Vermin for the fact that they're trying to protect these children so I want to stop in just a few minutes so I'm going to make a couple of closing comments first of all uh there's a lot of research on interventions with men who batter you know what's the impact of arrest what's the impact of prosecution what's the impact of a batter Intervention Program what's the impact of a tightly supervised versus an unsupervised probation and different research studies find different things but the overall picture suggests that these interventions make some difference that they will reduce the rate of reoffending on average among men who batter how however of all of all oh and and and Studies have looked at Short jail sentences sort of the 30 to 60 day range and long jail sentences on the order of nine months of all these interventions the only one that has been found to take a really large bite out of re civism to be in other words a really significant deterrent to reoffending for a large percentage of the population is the nine-month jail sentence the law jail sentence I've had to change my tune about this because I used to be really against law and jail sentences I'm against jail in general because they're incredibly inhumane environments you can't somehow help people become prod productive non-offending members of society by being cruel to them uh insulting them it's giving them no rights and so forth and there's tremendous discrimination by race and class in who ends up in jail other words the privilege can can escape it in a lot of different ways so I don't think the jail is in any sense the long-term solution but unfortunately for now it's the best we've got it's the only thing that's being proven to be really effective in deterring men who batter and I would argue that it's for all the reasons I've already said that the Privileges that batterers get from battering are too much they're too good and only a really significant chunk of time in jail is enough to make him decide that he's willing to give up a lifetime that he spent getting ready to use women for his own purposes two other things I want to say one I have seen a dramatic and very encouraging change in the 15 years that I've been speaking publicly on domestic violence in where men stand on this issue for the first several years that I was speaking men in my audience tended to be defensive they tended to say that I was attacking men that I was saying bad things about men in general even though I'm really careful not to do that somehow that's still what they would hear uh and would feel like they had to defend themselves would feel like they had to defend men in general would go on the Counterattack against women I almost never get that anymore the change is incredible and actually what I do get is men who are much more vocal than they would have been 15 years ago in a positive way who are saying well how can I help with this how can I help with this who are giving examples of ways that they have spoken out in their communities or ways that they have challenged other men about about what they're doing and there's a huge and encouraging change out there that men more so many more men now want to get on the right side of this question are not seeing it as men versus women but are seeing it as abusers against everybody else which is how it should be perceived from point of view what kind of damage it's doing to all of our lives but certainly to the lives of women that we care about uh and I just want to say let's keep it going that direction let's encourage men to find more ways to speak out to be visible as a a man against violence against women in your community to to look for where you can sign a letter to the editor where it'll be important that a man wrote that letter to where you can be talking to a group where it will be important that a man was the one talking to that group to who you can challenge in your personal professional life about their own behaviors or attitudes because it's really really powerful of course we need to be continuing always to support women's activism and women's leadership but at the same time making our own voices heard loudly has a tremendous impact and men are often particularly affected when they're called by other men uh on on what they're on what they're doing and uh let me just say finally that I don't think that we can separate out domestic violence and violence against women from all questions of ways that women are oppressed as a group in society and then we can't separate out the oppression of women from all forms of Oppression of people by class by Race by sexual orientation and on and on and on and that yes it makes sense to continue to to devote certain kinds of particular Focus to stopping violence against women that's certainly what I choose to do in my life but we've got to always be making the links to how we're going to form a society where people are not degraded because of being part of any group group are not exploited or or assaulted or jailed because of being part of any group and where the resources of our society are properly shared amongst all the the resources and the say the power are properly shared amongst all the people who uh live here this the the this country is is people frequently refer to this country as a democracy I I don't get that but you'll have to help me understand but that even though we have a a very very small and Powerful group of people that make almost all the decisions that govern our lives and even though we have one of the most horrible distributions of wealth between rich and poor in the world I think when we're talking about stopping battering we're talking about declaring that that homes have to be Democratic places that homes have to be places where everybody has an equal say well children don't have quite an equal say although they have a significant they should have some significant say I would I wouldn't say they should have an equal say but they should have better say than they tend to have some houses they have little too much say but the um but that among all adults there should be equal say in a household and equal access to resources and that that's linked to demanding a society that stops paying this laughable lip service that we pay to democracy in this country and start demanding a society where people truly do share the decision- making and share the wealth thank you very much and we have the rest of the time for questions the question was if I were speaking to a group of young women what uh what would I say about what to watch out for warning red flags by the way the the I really focused tonight because it's my area of expertise on men who abuse women but there are gay men that abuse their gay male Partners there are lesbians who abuse their female partners and there are sometimes very serious cases there are sometimes homicides and other words it's not a situation we can take lightly so one of the things that I and what what's calling this to my mind is one of the things that I'd have to say to young women is the fact that you go out with women doesn't somehow make you safe from is not going to make you safe from abuse you're still going to have to watch out for the same kinds of things uh they'll take somewhat different form in women and obviously women aren't socialized in the same way but it'll come out in different ways uh really watch out perhaps top of the list for jealousy and possessiveness which to young women in particular tends to be really flattering you know oh I've never had a guy care about me like that before oh he's just crazy about me he gets so upset if I even talk to another guy like that just that feels like love but it ain't it's ownership and it's one of the top warning signs for domestic violence uh to just watch out by about a guy who's controlling again that can be exciting at first you hear him described as a take charge kind of guy but you have to say but what happens when you don't want to do what he wants to do what happens when you don't want him completely in charge that's what she has to really pay attention to how does he react when she doesn't want to go along because if he has really bad reactions to that that's a really bad sign but to watch out for a guy who's got problems with women in general for example the kind of guy who says that all his previous girlfriends were you know whats but you're different or who says and this by the way all moms and dads these are all things we should be talking to our daughters about uh or who says you're the first girl or you're the first woman who's ever understood me if you're the first female who's ever understood him I want to know why why is it so hard to understand and the the other thing that I say is this if a guy is telling you now that you're different from all other women what he's going to be telling you in a year or two is that you're just like the rest you're going to go from being the exception to being part of the rule so watch out for how he look talks about women in general including you might listen to some things about how he talks about his own mother but particularly past Girlfriends Past wives at girlf uh to really really notice how he deals with challenge this is often the litus test is what happens when he is stood up to uh then do you feel respected by him because sometimes women tell me that they feel terribly loved by the man but when I say yeah but do you feel respected huh and it's odd that we can even separate love and respect but we do like does is he actually interested in your opinions does he actually care what you think about things or does he think your opinions are just something to be altered to fit his I remember this old Malvina Reynolds song where she says he thinks my head's all full of nothing he can't wait to put his special stuff in um the uh and then uh are things never his fault or he gives these apologies but they're not very sincere sounding apologies and then he demands that that be adequate he says well I said I was sorry first of all an apology that sounds like that is never going to be very satisfying but an apology also isn't necessarily enough often when someone apologizes you also want to tell them some things about how they affected you so well that's great that you apologize but I'm also going to tell you some things about the mess that you made or the harm that you did he's going to say no he doesn't want to hear that he apologized that should be enough uh those are like those are really the critical pieces to watch for that another additional one one that that's sometimes revealing is to notice whether he treats you differently alone than when other people are around this actually tends to do a flip between teen years and adulthood uh teen years he often treats her worse when other people are around and better in private and then in adulthood it's the abuser starts to flip and be worse with her when there's nobody watching and better than there's other people around with teens I really emphasize is he pressuring you to have sex and he's because he's telling her if you really loved me we'd be having sex or we've been going out for two months and we're not doing it yet or whatever it is and that's so clearly not respect that's so clearly not love and that and what I say to teens is if if somebody really loved you would he want you to be having sex before you felt comfortable or ready for that or before it was what you really wanted is is that is that love and that's a really that's a good end to get that conversation going the the question was giving an example of of the kind of thing some abusers will say where she says you know you're not going to I'm not going to take this from you or or I'm I'm leaving you or whatever it may be you're not going to treat me like this and he says you mess with me I will destroy you and mess with me means don't do what you're told or try to leave me or it can mean a number of why would he want to destroy her well most abusers don't want to destroy her it's a threat to get her to cooperate he would rather destroy her however than have her be an independent human being that would not follow his lead or would not be with him because he deeply believes that that's a female's obligation that that's your job if you're involved with him but you must do that and I've had client after client say to me she had no right to leave me like why I thought in the society we accepted people's rights to leave relationships that they didn't want to be in anymore especially if they're being abused but we actually there's generally commonly accepted in the society that you get I mean there's some Pockets where that's not believed but in general in the society nowaday we believe that you don't have to be in a relationship anymore when you don't want to be but he'll insists no she she she owes it to me but there's the the level of hatred that you're describing can be really disturbing and his the the the depth of his sense that a woman is obligated to do these things for him and a fair number of batterers and I don't have a percentage because it hasn't been researched but I've observed with my clients a fair number of baders really have big problems with females in general and and and sometimes a level of hatred towards females in general and it's ugly and scary and violent and they sometimes can cover it up pretty well in the early days unfortunately that that there is not a psychological test that exists that will distinguish a battering man from a non- battering man there's not a psychological test that exists by the way that will distinguish an incest perpetrator from a non-incest perpetrator or fact any kind of child sexual abuser from a non-child sexual abuser battering is as I said at the beginning not a psychological problem it's a problem of learned behavior of values and attitudes and therefore a psychological tests cannot detect it I was just uh on Tuesday training a whole bunch of judges in New Jersey although training with judges is a strong word u I was speaking in the general direction of some judges that were seated in the room and um the what I had to these were judges that do custom visitation who do family law proceedings and what I had to say to them is psychological testing in a domestic violence case is a mistake it's actually not going to tell you anything relevant about whether the allegations are true or false or if they are true because they're almost always true are they real serious or less serious how risky is this particular man to the child for the child there's no psychological test that's designed to do that what the court should be doing instead of psychologically testing the parties is investigating the evidence that they should be appointing a good investigator instead of a clinical evaluator the clinical evaluator is helpful to you when you got someone with serious mental health problems who can help you figure out whether this person is capable of parenting their children and what kind of help they need in in the in the in the meantime but that's not what mental health evaluation is typically used for in custody it's typically used to say is someone an abuser or not or who should have custody it's completely inappropriate to use psychological testing to say who should have custody and yet that's it's used for that purpose all the time it's a it's a huge topic and I'll say some things about it tomorrow and I could talk about it for a long long time but I'll just point to a few things uh that that first of all maintaining the closest possible relationship with him that you yourself that you can and that means of course obviously working all the time extra hard on your parenting unfortunately an abused woman in many ways has to be a better parent than other parents I'm not saying it's fair I'm not saying it's right it's just real that's the way it is you have to read extra books you have to get extra help you have to work on yourself more you have to work on working out your conflicts with your child because the abuser will look for any crack that he can exploit to drive you apart so you want to make your your relationship an extra high priority and really work on it well uh read parent you know read some of the great parenting books and things like that all of us have more to learn I mean all of us have more to learn everybody can always be working on every parent should be reading parenting books and trying new things and going to workshops I mean we all have more to learn about being better parents I'm I you know I've been a parent for whatever 14 years now and I still learn new things practically every day including some things I wish I'd learned a long time ago um next to to here here's a trick but what you want to do you want to try to avoid burdening your child with too much awareness about the heaviness and difficulties of the world and yet he needs to start learning right away about sexism because if he's T and three and a half is old enough actually to start learning about concepts of equality between males and females to start learning about respect for women and girls to start pointing out to him when other people aren't being respectful to a female or when advertising or television is not being respectful to females also start pointing out to him unhealthy images of masculinity in other words when they're being bad messages sent to him about what a man should be like other words he's he the the the earlier that he can learn to start thinking critically about gender messages the harder it's going to be for his dad to recruit him to his team um another thing is that that uh batters are abusers are very very strong at sort of brainwashing manipulation getting you to think like you think like he thinks so if if if the if the if the mom tries to get the CH children to think like she thinks and the and the abusers trying to get the children to think like he thinks he's going to win because that's you're playing right to his strengths that's his area so you have to teach your children to think for themselves that's the only way to so that you're not so you're actually stepping outside of his game getting the child to think like you and children who are taught to think for themselves can learn gradually over time to see through uh their dad's thinking the last point that I'll make now is that when moms try to talk to their children about the abusers issues it tends to backfire because children start to feel defensive of him and protective of him and they don't want to hear bad things about him on the other hand to let things go by is not is a real problem also oh Dad said such and such you know and it's really unhealthy stuff where Dad says that you're telling the court that he that he hit you and he never hit you that's a total lie these these are all things that really happen in in these cases um and so a couple things that you can do one is to try to teach children to identify their father's behavior in other people without saying that that's something dad does so when you see for example a parent at a playground doing some of the same kinds of things that you know the dad does point that out to the child don't connect it to Dad don't say your dad does that too just say did you see what happened here's what's not okay about that what do you think about that how do you think that made the child feel or what do you think that person's doing or just point just explain it yourself if the child can't get it just so they learn to analyze adult behavior and particularly learn to analyze the kinds of things that their dad does and then with luck they'll see it when he's doing it they may tell you or they may not tell you children sometimes are fairly willing to criticize dad to Mom if Mom isn't very critical of dad and I relate to this some from my own childh now my dad was not an abuser but uh for other reasons I didn't care for him very much there are other ways to be an unpleasant person besides by being an abuser and uh I remember that I could say you know my dad is this way and my dad is this way and my dad is this way and if somebody else said yeah he sure is I said don't talk about my dad like that and so you really want it to come from from inside and the to some extent you you I I believe that you do have to correct misinformation if he says well you know Dad says you're saying in court that that he hit you and he never did uh you can't just let that go by you have to say something like well you know uh he's not really supposed to be talking to you about what goes on in those Court decisions and I don't want to say anything bad to you about your dad but I will assure you that I don't lie about him you know that kind of trying to frame things in the most diplomatic way that you can but I've seen moms go to The Other Extreme where they they're so eager not to talk badly about him that they just keep letting all the stuff go by and that's a problem also it's a fine it's a hard line to walk it's it's you it's it's a hard line to walk we have a huge split first of all in Massachusetts between sort of theory and reality the theory and Massachusetts according to law is that batterers are not supposed to get sole or joint custody of their children if they have if there's been a pattern of incidents of violence or if there or if there's been even one incident that was serious is that a pattern what's a pattern the pattern would be more than once right a number of times it it it's not defined as whether it's two or three or four but a pattern or serious incident or Ser in other words it only takes one if it's defined as serious now what's serious again not clearly defined there's a lot of judicial discretion in Massachusetts mostly indiscretion on those questions the the the so and that if there has been a pattern or serious incident of violence the court should consider placing restrictions on the batter's visitation either supervision or restricting his overnights or for require putting various kinds of requirements on what he has to do in order to have that visitation that he has to go to a batter program that he has to obstain from substance use and so forth so that's the theory the reality in in in the state of Massachusetts is an absolute human rights disaster and unfortunately it's true in almost everywhere I go across the country that batters are routinely granted unsupervised condu contact regardless of serious reasons to be cons concern for those children's psychological or sexual safety sometimes even for their physical safety uh that batters are increasingly winning custody and the court is refusing to take domestic violence seriously the family law the family courts are very heavily influenced by the Massachusetts Association of Guardians at lion which are which I used to be part of I used to go to their conferences I used to read get their newsletter I've written an article in their newsletter that SLI on through the cracks uh and I you know I I know personally a fair number of the really influential people in the Massachusetts associ guard associations of Guardian adum Guardians at lium their attitudes are appalling I can't put another word on it so we from a from a strategy standpoint you know that's a whole other discussion we have to across the country organize at the Grassroots level level massive protest movement against what is happening to batter women well protective parents in general in child custody because it's not just battered women it's also it's also women whose children are being sexually abused by the dad non-offending parents of incest perpetrators and in occasional cases it's a father where children are being sexually abused by the mom's new partner it's the protected parent is much more often a mother than a father but sometimes the protected parent you know because of who tends to be the perpetrator of domestic violence and and and incest but uh the sometimes the protective parent is the dad and so we need a huge protective parents movement across the country and it's just beginning beginning to build but it's there's so much to do there anybody wants to get involved with that talk to me about it because it's really critical and and it's not going to be able to be done by being nice to people about it unfortunately we're goingon to have to really take it to the streets the the now on a personal level to try to survive a particular case that's a whole other discussion that involves uh being able to to pull together as much evidence as you can you know who you can get who's willing to testify on your behalf whether you can get whether you can afford a lawyer and find a lawyer who understands the abuse issues because it's not about finding a lawyer who's a great divorce lawyer this is one of the mistakes that people make it's about finding a lawyer who specifically understands the abuse issues it's about having having that lawyer go with you to every meeting with an evaluator they always need to be there they need to watch evaluators like Hawks uh it's about a lawyer who's willing to put evaluators on the stand and and very very powerfully cross-examine them uh it's about thinking long term because if you go and fighting too hard the way the court system is currently stacked in Massachusetts if you go and fighting too hard it will actually count against you and I'm not saying that's right I'm just saying again that's how it is and so you have to go in very reasonable you have to bend over backwards you have to agree to things that you don't really think are good in order to try to keep the worst things from happening and try to wait for the abuser to unravel over time and fortunately if you play it strategically with a long-term view very often the abuser will unravel over time some guys are good enough that they never will but but you just have to hope that he'll be in the category that eventually digs his own hole or he gets tired of it and gives up I'd be happy to talk to you more you know after we're done tonight about your particular case or if you're available to come tomorrow I talk to you more then but those are sort of some very basic concepts when Dad her's mom has a chapter specifically on pursuing your case in family court it's with some good ideas in it it's not an overwhelming flood of good ideas because what we really need is social change and I can't unfortunately I don't have any magic for someone's particular case but I but there is a set of suggestions there and I think you always want to combine that with trying to figure out no matter what happens how to keep your children well thank you thanks very much for l all

Channel: Frank Breen

Views: 136,448

Keywords: Lundy Bancroft, Network for Women's Lives

Id: YmbrAWDft0s

Length: 110min 4sec (6604 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 04 2014