A Few Uncomfortable Truths about Domestic Violence

In media depictions of domestic violence, abusers are often portrayed as irrational and unstable, making their actions seem senseless. Writers, directors, and costume designers prefer characters that quickly signal 'abuser’ to the audience so they can move on to telling a story with the character. Their behavior appears alien, surprising, and most importantly, disconnected from us. News reports often frame these actions as illogical and bizarre, typically dismissed as ‘domestic disputes’. However, in my experience working with survivors, I've found that these depictions often reinforce the very tactics abusers use to manipulate and control. Its cover for this important fact: abusers act the way they do because it benefits them. Because of this, it requires active and evolving awareness of power structures to side with survivors against domestic violence.

We are all complicit in domestic violence

Domestic violence’s impact is pervasive. While not everyone experiences it directly, we are all conditioned to accept or perpetuate harmful ideas that support a hegemonic power structure, whether we benefit from it or not. Some of these ideas, ingrained in us from birth seem innocuous, some are blatantly offensive. Men hold doors open for women. Men pay for dates, not women. Men are better leaders than women. The belief that men make better leaders than women is blatantly offensive and has no built in plausible deniability that it’s “just the way things are”. It’s just misogyny. But the way that men are socialized to hold doors open for women can feel arbitrary. It’s only on examination that we might notice how it reinforces a constant infantilization of women by men and that it serves the existing power structure. It’s not that a man holding a door open for a woman is in itself a misogynistic act, but an entire culture invested in this gesture reveals a value at play: men take care of women. And if men take care of women, why listen to women? Why let women in the work force? Why write laws that protect women?

With this understanding, we can see domestic violence as the individual extension of these currents through society. When men abuse women they pick up where the culture left off; if someone has been socialized to accept harmful ideas about their identity an abuser can reinforce these ideas and sharpen them for use towards their specific agenda.

And domestic violence is as embedded into our society from a fundamental level as the necessity to drive, pay taxes, or eat apple pie. We cannot absolve abusers of the heinous dehumanizing acts they commit: they need to be held accountable for their actions. But we also cannot absolve ourselves from our day to day compliance with power structures, particularly ones from which we benefit. Further, we cannot continue to strip the cultural context from our understanding of abuse. Out of context, it might seem unfair to a young boy to hear for the first time that heterosexual men are socialized to pay for dates with women. But we’re not sharing with equal frequency that it is within many of our lifetimes that women could not open up a credit card in their own name, stand any sort of chance of securing high paying positions, or that our government acknowledged the legal possibility that a man could rape his wife. What we forgive as casual sexism has clearly had a cumulative effect on our culture, perhaps most evidently in our laws. Abusers have been listening to all the same music, watching the same television, and reading the same books that we do; are we so surprised they accepted the subtext? Domestic violence merely cashes the check written by our cultural values and practices to give an abuser more power.

Anyone can experience domestic violence but…

Anyone, of any identity or background can experience domestic violence. Men who have experienced domestic violence have been historically shuttered from victim services, face ridicule and shame when coming forward all while representing an non-insignificant percentage (15% per NCADV) of all domestic violence victims. 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner violence (CDC) and 4.5% of male inmates reported being sexually assaulted within the last year. But you’ve probably heard that before. Recent shifts in the way we’ve talked about domestic violence and gender focus on the prevalence of victims who are men. The idea, often articulated as “men can be abused too” has gone from novel insight that pointed out a gap in services that victims of sexual assault or domestic violence who are men experienced to, at best, slogan that distracts from truth, and at worst, a tool used by abusers to move blame to the victim (a practice recognized by professionals as DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender).

The media was transfixed by Depp v. Heard, not the extraordinary power imbalance in the relationship, or the well documented abuse suffered by Heard, but by the idea of “co-abuse” and ultimately the excitement of demonizing a woman for confronting her abuser. They did this all while both pondering why a woman would stay in an abusive relationship and denying abuse was present. You can almost see the gears turning as the headlines progressed and the goalposts shifted. There was no abuse and if there was, well she was abusive too, and if she was abusive too then she deserves to be abused.

Is it possible for a man to be a victim of domestic violence? Empirically, yes. We have statistics to back us up and a theoretical framework of domestic violence that also tells us that men can be victims of domestic violence. But by who? The answer seems to be, overwhelmingly, by other men. Prison rape is understood in American culture as ubiquitous in all major prisons and largely an issue experienced by incarcerated men. While it is true that men make up a larger percentage of prison sexual assault victims, this seems to be largely a function of who is incarcerated in America. When their relative percentages are compared the differences shrink. 4.5% of male inmates reported being sexually victimized in prison in the past year while 3.2% of female inmates reported the same thing. Worse still, 54% of instances of sexual assault reported by female inmates were perpetrated by prison staff compared to 35% with male inmates. While these numbers do not speak directly to rates of domestic violence (and both are certainly under-reported) they illustrate to me that our investigation into whether or not men can experience domestic violence should not end with “yes”. Ultimately, I believe men can be victims of domestic violence, women can abuse men, and that it is our responsibility to believe all victims. But I also believe it is our responsibility not to forget the cultural context that we live in; that we remember who has been given all the tools to control who.

It seems to be working

William Blackstone wrote in the 1790s, It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. I, along with (I expect) most Americans concerned with the just treatment of others, agree with this sentiment. We absolutely cannot lose sight of how utterly untenable any position is that advocates for more Americans going to prison en masse. Every statistic, every chart, and every person that has had any encounter with the prison industrial complex (and isn’t on their payroll) says it’s completely unacceptable. I’m also not a legal expert who knows what legal changes would actual provide practical protections for victims. But I can tell you the strategies that abusers use seem to be working.

I can tell you this because I’ve sat with victims and wondered with them why their ex won’t just leave them alone. Why they destroyed a sacred belonging, showed up at their job, lied to law enforcement about breaking an order of protection, skipped visits with their shared children, destroyed important documents, refuse to sign paperwork, harassed their families, kidnapped their children, and hundreds more each more extreme than the last. And the answer has nearly always been: in an effort to control you.

Frustratingly, discussions of domestic violence often come back to a largely irrelevant question; why did you stay or why did you go back? This question is often asked much sooner than any attempt to hold an abuser accountable for their abusive and unacceptable behavior much less than any true understanding of what someone has gone through, but I want to explain why I think we are so ready to jump into this victim-blaming approach. We don’t understand that these behaviors are not uncalculated and they work incredibly well to trap you.

Many survivors, particularly of physically violent abuse, report a reoccurring and unsettling pattern from their abusers that illustrates an important tool abusers have. And while this example is specific to physical abuse, the same is true, perhaps less starkly, with other forms of abuse. Abusers often explain their actions by saying they “lost control”. We see the buy into this idea all over our culture, just look at news reports that frame the most violent loveless acts as “crimes of passion”. But when you start to question this loss of control it all crumbles pretty quickly. I’ve heard time and time again from survivors how when police arrived at their door, their abuser was able to instantly, as if flipping a switch, shift from threatening and violent to calm and collected. The police officer then encounters a calm (typically) man ready to cooperate and communicate, and an escalated (typically) woman who, through socialization by a flawed culture, will be understood as hysterical and not ready to communicate. They might say that this is just the threat of deadly force should they present themselves as hostile to police and that this is what let them “regain control”, but they never lost control. If you can make the determination to stop destroying, yelling, hitting, or whatever unsafe action you were taking that caused the person you “love” to call police for their own safety because you are worried they will cause you serious bodily harm… I just don’t think we should have to entertain that. Besides the obvious hypocrisy to this is the high order conceptual thinking you have to do to make that type of decision. It’s just completely incongruous with the “I saw red” narrative. It’s also important to note how often survivors realize years later that the “out of control” person destroying “everything in the house” only really destroyed their belongings, none of the abuser’s own. Funny how that works.

Lastly, I want to point out how these abusive behaviors function to control victims. Some are pretty easy to understand: an abuser shouts at their partner for bringing them a cold dinner. Even in this example there’s a lot going on to unpack, but for now we can understand this as the abuser, through fear and cruelty, making it a dangerous proposition ever again to bring a cold dinner. But why do abusers leave threatening notes? Or show up at jobs? We can never understand fully what is going on in any one situation and it’s irresponsible not to point out how much more important it is to understand what victims need from us than it is to ponder endlessly the psychology of an abuser, but I tend to see these actions are variations of three main strategies abusers take. A. Communicate how difficult I can make your life if you don’t do what I tell you to do. B. Show you how wonderful I am, how much you misjudged me and how ultimately maybe I’m the victim and maybe you’re the abuser?? C. If I can’t have you no one can.

Survivors of domestic violence have very little in common. They come from all walks of life because, I promise you, anyone can be a victim of domestic violence. What survivors do have in common is incredible resourcefulness, resilience and determination. Because everything in front of them is against them. We owe it to survivors and victims to remain engaged in these ideas because if we don’t, we’re on the wrong side.

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Harmony House

The mission of Harmony House is to provide shelter, advocacy and education to survivors of domestic violence and promote the principle that all individuals have the right to life free of abuse.

Since 1976, our emergency shelter and supportive outreach case management programs have offered individuals and their children the opportunity to rest and heal both emotionally and physically in a supportive environment. We believe you. You are not alone and we can help!

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