Social influences

Tactic #9 — Using Social Institutions & Social Prejudices

by Clare Murphy PhD on February 15 2013

This is the ninth of 16 blogs discussing the patterns of tactics from my power and control wheel – Using Social Institutions & Social Prejudices.

Many perpetrators of psychological abuse use social, health, legal and other institutions such as child protection services as arenas to further their coercive control over their intimate partner.

They use the legal system endlessly to stop their partners from leaving, or to stop them from moving town or country, they do dodgy things to implicate their partner so she will get a criminal record, and perpetrators with financial resources engage women in drawn-out, frequent court battles over property, or over day-to-day care and contact with children. They also use loopholes in the government agency system to avoid paying child support and many use religious ideologies as a tool to keep women and children in line.

Perpetrators who use coercive control also use male privilege and entitlement believing that they “own” their partner, that she must obey and serve them. The good news is that some perpetrators seek help to stop abusing their partner by attending stopping violence programmes. The bad news is that many men then use that programme to further control women. I’ll explain what is meant by all of this below.

Of all the women I interviewed for my Masters research, Adriana had experienced the least amount of psychological abuse. However, it was a different matter after she divorced her husband — he threatened to kill her and began to use social institutions as a vehicle to establish power and control over her. Adriana said, “I think what pisses him off is that I was always in control of my life. The only thing he can get at me with is through our daughter, using the system he can control me.”

How is it possible for perpetrators of psychological abuse to use social institutions to further their coercive control when there may actually be good quality legislations and dedicated well-trained professionals who work hard to protect victims of abuse? Well — there are flaws in the systems — which means some policies, legislations and professional practices can lead to colluding with perpetrators by not holding them accountable for their actions, and can lead to blaming the victims. One of the flaws in the system is a lack of staff training in the dynamics of coercive control in the context of intimate partner abuse. Women I interviewed for my Masters research and men I interviewed for my PhD research tell their stories below….

Using the Legal System to stop women from moving town or country

Adriana regretted moving from the UK to New Zealand with her partner Steven. His controlling behaviours increased when they arrived back into his home territory. After their separation Steven became abusive in the extreme — he threatened to kill her. For hers, and her daughter’s safety, Adriana wanted to take her daughter back to the UK. However, she could not leave “because he doesn’t want our daughter to leave the country, therefore I can’t leave with her. I wouldn’t leave without her, so I have to be here. I’m quite happy and settled here and doing what I’m doing, but my freedom is totally cut down. I don’t have the freedom to even move towns because he would prevent me. I would have to go to court. It would probably take a year before I could move. He wouldn’t allow me to. It’s the court who would possibly allow me to.”

Heather became pregnant when she was in the process of applying for university. She knew she wanted to leave Luke and pursue an education, so was going to have an abortion. But Luke had High Court papers served on her and the hospital to prevent the abortion. This institutional response fueled Luke’s fire, which enabled him to become even more controlling. Heather wanted to take out a protection order, so that if he breached it, the police would have rights to intervene and arrest him. However, the lawyer insisted she take out an “undertaking” instead. This is one way that the legal system fails to protect victims of intimate partner abuse. An “undertaking” is only a promise — it does not give the police legal rights to arrest a perpetrator of abuse when he breaches his undertaking. The legal system enabled Luke to breach the undertaking. He did this by approaching Heather in the street and also when she dropped her son off at the agency who provided supervised contact. Each time Luke approached Heather he begged her for more contact with their son, he cried and swore at her. Heather had been wanting to move towns with her son to pursue a new life away from the abuse, but Luke used the legal system to prevent her from doing so.

Using the Legal System to fight for custody of children, with the underlying aim of maintaining power and control over the children’s mother

Elizabeth and David attended a mediation conference where an arrangement was made for Elizabeth to have the children three or four days a week and David would have them for the other three or four days. Such shared care is very disruptive and destabilising for children. Elizabeth said no-one was enjoying it. So Elizabeth “tried to talk to David about ‘What can we do about this? Can we try this, can we try that?’ He wasn’t interested. In the end the kids were really unhappy and she just said, ‘I am just not going to do this any more’ and of course it forced all the legal eagles to get together and deal with it.” David was a wealthy professional so had the financial resources to use the legal system to continue to coercively control his ex-wife.

Elizabeth said, “The judge made the decision which was a much more viable arrangement, which David was really angry about. He still wanted to go to court for custody and of course I am on legal aid. I’ve paid altogether over $25,000 on legal fees, $13,000 I still owe. We worked our guts out to try and get some negotiation before we went to court about custody. He would not respond, he would not negotiate. As far as he was concerned he was going to get what he wanted and he was really pissed off when he didn’t. He said, ‘I paid all this money to get what I wanted and I still haven’t got it.’ He was really angry about that. But I think part of him continuing to push for doing everything legally was because it would cost me a lot of money — money that I don’t have.”

Coercive tactics that lead to the victim getting a criminal record

Elizabeth said David took “up this trespass order when the property settlement came through. A few weeks later I was caught up with my car, and I was going to be late, and he was going to be picking the kids up from my place. I tried to get him at work and tried to get him at home quickly but couldn’t get hold of him. So I rang my neighbour to say, ‘If he turns up can you let him know that I will drop the kids at his place.’ I did what I could to get the message to him. He was absolutely furious. So I dropped my kids there and then rang up a bit later to say, ‘I am really sorry about what happened I tried to get hold of you.’ He hung up on me. At that stage I was really angry, because I thought it was important that he and I have some communication because of the children, so I went around to apologise and say, ‘We need to sort something out here, like there are going to be times when one or either of us is not going to be able to meet a time. What are we going to do in that situation? This isn’t going to work.’ But, he called the cops, had me arrested for trespassing. The kids see the cops take me out of what was our home, off in a police car. Anyway I explained the situation to the cops. They said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll go and get your car, we’ll have a word with the guy, I’m sure he doesn’t really want to press charges.’ They came back — ‘Yes he does want to press charges. Don’t worry about it we’ll get diversion, first offence.’ But for diversion the complainant has to agree. He wouldn’t agree to me having a diversion coz he wanted me to have a criminal record. I had about three court appearances, and my lawyer eventually got it to the point where, I think he knew David years ago, and he rang off the record and said, ‘Hey listen mate I wouldn’t do this if I were you.’ Eventually got him to change his mind and I got diversion. But he was prepared to take it to the absolute limit.”

Anthony engaged in tactics that wrongfully led Susan to be investigated and prosecuted for fraud. After Susan separated from Anthony she did not have a car so he would take her to get the groceries. Her overlocker was not working so Anthony took it into town. Susan said that when he came home he said, “It’s not worth fixing, but they’ll give you so much for a trade-in if you want to buy a new one”. So Susan agreed. Susan told me: “This is how naïve and trusting I was. He brought me home a new overlocker. It was in his name. He put me down as being his spouse. He put my address as being his address. When he got his cell phone he did the same thing. He put me down as being his spouse.”

Unfortunately for Susan the government department that provides financial support to single parents contacted her saying, “’You know you’ve been living with Anthony while you’ve been on the single parent benefit.’ She said they had all this evidence that said I was with him because he’d put me down as being his spouse. I said ‘I wasn’t with him’, but they said, ‘He used to take you to town. You used to drive his car’. I said ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that we’re together.’ Anyway, I didn’t know the overlocker was in his name until the last time we split up and I got done for fraud. I said we weren’t a couple. Anthony was telling everybody that we were a couple. That really hurts. I thought I’d got out from him, but he’s still doing these things to make it look good. I hated him. I hated the things he’d done to us, to the low level that he’d brought us down to.”

Using the Government Agency that provides financial benefits to single parents

After she was divorced, Elizabeth spent some time on the single parent benefit whilst caring for her children. During that time she was having a casual relationship with a man. When parenting of children is shared, it is inevitable that children chat to the other parent about what happens at the other house. However, many perpetrators of coercive control use children to find out information that they then use as ammunition to continue controlling their ex-partner. Elizabeth said one time when her son came to her place to stay he asked her, “How many nights a week does Stewart stay mum?” Elizabeth said, “Next thing there’s an investigation by the fraud squad of [the government agency that provides the benefit].” The fraud squad asked, “We believe you have a partner now, what’s his name, when does he stay here, is it a relationship?” Elizabeth was angry, saying this government agency “would rather that you were f***ing a different guy every night than seeing one person who was giving you a bit of moral support or having sex once every three months.”

Elizabeth said David’s accusations to the department that provided the benefit meant that “To stay on the single parent benefit was a challenge, it’s happened twice. In fact the first time was when I was doing some odd jobs from time to time, helping a friend with her business. Anyway the next thing I’ve got the fraud investigation people. Pretty much all of the work that I was doing I was declaring, and the next thing I’ve got them on my case, ‘Did you do work at this place, did you sell this, do that, dah, dah dah dah dah?’ If I did cleaning jobs the kids used to come with me. They told David and David collated all the information that the kids got and gave to him and sent it to the government agency.”

Using the Government Agency that manages child support payments by separated parents

After couples separate, perpetrators of coercive control often find loopholes in the system and use that gap to pay minimal money towards supporting their children, or they may pay nothing at all. Men I interviewed for my PhD said not all men have a problem with paying child support, but some men do. Some controlling intimate partners do not have the best interests of the children at heart. As James said, many men believe “they’re controlled by a government agency over the kids that maybe they feel they own themselves… It’s a loss of control thing, their own personal property.” Lazarus knew the loopholes in the system. He said, “as soon as they start taking money out of my wages, I quit and change jobs … probably every eight months.” This, meant the system’s policy did not oblige him to pay for a period of time. Children involved in such a climate of control are negatively impacted in various ways, for example, not being able to afford to attend school camps and so miss out on healthy social bonding, physical challenges and may develop anxiety, depression or delinquent behaviour problems.

Some perpetrators of coercive control threaten their ex-partners by telling her that if she pursues child support payments from him, he will use the legal system to push for shared custody of the children which would then mean he would not be obliged to pay child support. This is frightening for women victims of coercive control because most women will do what ever it takes to keep their children safe. In their book, The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics (SAGE Series on Violence against Women) Lundy Bancroft and Jay Silverman draw from their clinical work with men that shows many perpetrators of intimate partner abuse do not engage in healthy fathering practices and many push for custody or contact with children partly as a tactic of maintaining control over the woman, not because they want to develop a warm relationship with their children.

Using Child Protection Services to coercively threaten the children’s mother

Susan said that, “One time Anthony rang and said that a child protection social worker rang and wanted him to go in. When he came back he said someone’s reported that our daughter’s been sexually molested. He said, ‘It’s your father.’ I found that really odd that they didn’t contact me, that he had to just go in without having a set appointment time and that he could take our son with him. Anyway I said, ‘So you don’t want dad looking after our daughter?’ He said, ‘No that’s alright, but they’re going to contact the kindy’. I was absolutely distraught because my dad has a lot to do with my kids. I fully believed Anthony knew what he was bloody saying. I went to the kindy and asked if they’d been contacted by the child protection service social workers. They said, ‘No’ and would let me know if they were. When I did talk to the social worker she said, ‘We had an anonymous person whose given the names and ages of the children.’ The ages weren’t right. She said it was a man. She said, ‘We don’t follow up on these ones they’re very low priority’. It pretty much was Anthony that was doing this, because if there’s an investigation saying that my father’s molesting our daughter, then what happens, the kids get taken away. Of course he fully denies that he’d done it.”

Luckily, in Susan’s case, the child protection services did not remove Susan’s daughter. However, many perpetrators of coercive control threaten their partners saying they will inform child protection services that they are an unfit parent. Unfortunately sometimes the child protection system colludes with perpetrators and engages in mother blaming, partly because of a lack of staff training and understanding of the dynamics of coercive control.

Using Religion to establish and maintain power and control

Some men use religious ideologies to justify controlling their partners, by for example telling her she has to obey him because the Bible says so. They may use religion to stop their partner from leaving by saying that God does not allow divorce. Eva Lundgren (1995) interviewed fundamentalist Christian couples in Scandinavia. One man believed that keeping his wife in line was very important because it meant keeping the “pattern of nature” and meant he was following God’s plan. Part of the men’s aim for using the Bible as a guide was to enforce rigid gender roles for women, so that the more feminine they perceived their partners to be the more masculine this made them feel — a feeling which makes some men feel more strong, secure and superior.

Using Social Prejudices as weapons to degrade and control women

Some perpetrators of psychological abuse use social prejudices to reinforce their power. They may do this by drawing on a range of social hierarchies. Social hierarchies only exist because people decide who is superior and who is inferior. Here’s what I mean….

He may draw on the gender hierarchy that men are more superior than women and tell their partner she deserves abuse because she’s ‘just’ a woman.

He may draw on the race hierarchy that ranks white people as ‘better than’ and tell her she’s ‘just’ a Mäori, or ‘just’ a Black woman, or ‘just’ an Indian/Aborigine/Hispanic, and so forth.

He may draw on the hierarchy that classifies some age groups as having more rights and privileges, saying she’s ‘just’ a kid.

He can find many social messages that place him at the top of any hierarchy related to work and finances. He may be a breadwinner, earn more money than his partner, have wealth in his extended family, work as a lawyer, etc. — such positions are accompanied with kudos, status, respect and a sense of entitlement. She may engage in activities classified low on the hierarchy such as be a ‘stay at home mum’, do volunteer work, or work in paid employment as a cleaner — such positions tend to afford less respect and can be viewed as inferior…. In these circumstances, some men use their socially superior position to degrade, use and control their partners. They may do this by saying to their partners: “you don’t have any right to make decisions because you don’t have a ‘real’ job”, “you’re ‘only’ a mother”, “you have no money so you’ll get nowhere without me”. Then if a woman is dependent on her partner financially and she leaves him, he may further abuse her by engaging her in repeated and lengthy child custody and property battles, or may refuse to assist her and the children financially. Such unjust degradation can make women vulnerable to ongoing coercive control partly because what their partner tells them makes commonsense, because so many people have not learned to critique socially constructed concepts such as social hierarchies. The idea of equality between spouses flies out the window.

Other social prejudices perpetrators draw from include hierarchies relating to physical and psychological abilities — they may say to a disabled wife: “you will never amount to anything, you can’t even walk out the door”. Or they may use body image as a source of degradation by calling their partner “a fat slob”, and they may call a partner who does not have high level of education “a dumb bitch”. As Victoria points out below, all of these comments reinforce messages that surround all of us all the time.

Whenever Graham made snide remarks about Victoria’s size, he’d trivialise the negative impact on Victoria by saying, “Oh but it’s only a term of endearment”. Victoria said “I knew I was big, so it destroyed me a little bit more”. To cope with the abuse Victoria said, “I didn’t try to change my size because my weight is about safety. If I am overweight, I am fat, if I’m fat I’m ugly, if I’m ugly I’m safe, so I eat to keep safe. If you stop eating, you lose weight, people say ‘oh you’re looking good’, then you get abused. I ate because I was hurting. To get over the pain I eat.”

Some women learn that if they challenged their husband’s controlling behaviours, this would cause him to find more and more ways to maintain control by degrading them.

Using Social Prejudices that stigmatise mental illness

In our society, being healthy and well is considered worthy of praise, while having a mental illness and taking medication such as antidepressants is often stigmatised. Some people use these unjust social ideas as weapons to abuse and control others — by attempting to sway how the victim perceives themselves. Perpetrators who are hell-bent on diminishing their partner’s wellbeing may attempt to convince her that she needs a psychiatrist, or threaten to have her hospitalised for a mental illness. During the course of her seven year relationship with Dylan, Sally became depressed as a consequence of his incessant controlling behaviours. When she started taking antidepressants he said to her that her depression was the crux of their relationship problems. An effect of intimate partner coercive control can lead to the victim feeling as if they are going crazy — feeling as if they’re going insane or have indeed gone mad.

Using Women’s Immigrant Status as a weapon of power and control

Immigrants are vulnerable to abuse by their partner because they may not yet have a work permit, they may lack language skills in a foreign country, they may not know what services are available to them or how the systems work. Many women are sponsored into the country by their partner, which increases her dependence on him. There are various loopholes in the immigration systems that leave women who are victims of domestic violence very vulnerable and powerless.

Perpetrators use women’s immigration status as a weapon of control. They may constantly threaten to cancel their sponsorship of her, they may refuse to help her fill in the forms to get an extension to her work permit, some men threaten to have her deported and they use the legal system to get a court order preventing the removal of the children from the country. Thus children are left in the care of the abusing parent and grieve the loss of bond with the non-abusing parent who has been deported. Some perpetrators cancel their sponsorship, so that the woman’s application to reside in the country cannot go ahead. One Chinese woman, in a New Zealand study of women’s experience of Protection Orders, said her husband repeatedly told her, “I’ve been in this country for so long I know how things work. ‘I am telling you …’” Whenever she contradicted him he would yell: “You stupid Chinese. I’m going to call the immigration service right now and you’ll be out of here!” (Robertson and colleagues 2007:191) Some men will say to their partner ‘what do you know, you weren’t born here’, or ‘you can’t even speak English properly’. Such statements may not sound degrading to an outsider, but in the context of ongoing power and control they are statements that punch hard at immigrant women’s emotional wellbeing.

Using Male Privilege and Entitlement

Men I interviewed for my PhD talked about the kinds of privilege, entitlement and accompanying beliefs that drove their controlling behaviour towards their partners. These beliefs included the idea that men ‘own’ women, and that women are possessions who should serve and obey men. For example, Bill said:

“I can do what I want but you gotta do what I tell you to. That’s the way I’d see 90 percent of marriages, from a man’s point of view.”

Many couples have their money, house and car in both spouses’ names. Regardless of this, as Elizabeth and Sally said, their husbands used to repeatedly say the money, house and car belonged to them and not the woman.

Elsie said, “I was just something that he owned in every facet, whether it be sex or when friends are there, or if I was cooking, or doing some work, or whatever, it was nothing. Nothing I did was ever valued.”

When Pauline and Chris married, he chose the marriage vows — that led to Pauline promising to obey Chris. In line with the belief that women should obey men, Chris had sexist attitudes towards all women. Pauline said that when Miss World was on TV Chris would sit under the TV and look up. She said he had the attitude that all women are “tits and bums”.

Max said women should:

“Do as the man says. We can be very domineering. We want it our way. Our way or the highway, girl.… A lot of men do want to rule the roost, like, ‘I went to work, I paid for f***ing this, I’ve been working all week, get home to this shit’!”

Research with men who abuse women finds that those men justify their abuse by blaming women for failing to serve them as men. Geni, a man I interviewed said, “I would think the majority of men would think the wife is like the doting little servant, slave, there to do everything. But a lot of men come home from work in his suit and drops the briefcase and he expects the beer there and the meal on the table.”

Using Stopping Violence Programmes and Anger Management Programmes to further control women

Thankfully there are perpetrators of intimate partner abuse who seek help to change. Unfortunately though, research shows that many men use stopping abuse programmes and anger management programmes as yet another avenue to control their current or ex-partner. The ways men do this include telling her how lucky she is because his behaviours are “nothing” compared with other men’s, or by misinterpreting the training and twisting the definition of what constitutes coercive control by telling her that her behaviours are controlling, or by learning how to use a wider range of control tactics. Men who learn to take “time out” as an anger management strategy, can misuse this by not returning to resolve issues, or they may put the woman in charge of ensuring he takes time out. Many women get confused when their coercively controlling partner accuses them of being controlling. Yes everyone uses controlling behaviours in some form at some time — BUT…. There’s a big difference between destructive and constructive use of controlling behaviours. I write about this in the blog on Denial, Minimising, Blaming, and in my blog on the difference between “healthy” relationships and relationships where there’s “one-sided” power and control.

References:

Bancroft, Lundy, & Silverman, Jay G. (2002). The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics (SAGE Series on Violence against Women). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Jaffe, Peter G. (2002). Access denied: The barriers of violence and poverty for abused women and their children’s search for justice and community services after separation. London, ON: A summary report prepared for the Atkinson Foundation, The Centre for Children & Families in the Justice System. http://www.lfcc.on.ca/access_denied_full.pdf
Lundgren, Eva. (1995). Feminist Theory and Violent Empiricism. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.
Robertson, Neville, Busch, Ruth, D’Souza, Radha, Lam Sheung, Fiona, Anand, Reynu, Balzer, Roma, . . . Paina, Dulcie. (2007). Living at the cutting edge: Women’s experience of Protection Orders: Volume 1: The women’s stories. http://research.waikato.ac.nz/CuttingEdge/VolOne.pdf

Watch out for blogs on the following control tactics:

One-Sided power games
Mind games
Inappropriate restrictions
Isolation
Over-protection & ‘caring’
Emotional unkindness & violation of trust
Degradation & Suppression of Potential
Separation Abuse
Denial, Minimising, Blaming
Using the children
Economic abuse
Sexual abuse
Symbolic aggression
Domestic slavery
Physical violence

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Tactic #7 — Degradation & Suppression of Potential

by Clare Murphy PhD on July 19 2012

This is the seventh of 16 blogs discussing the patterns of tactics from my power and control wheel – Degradation & Suppression of Potential.

Men who degrade their female partner do this by calling her derogatory names like slut or whore, using abusive language, correcting things the woman says or does, by depriving her of sleep, food or health care, by humiliating and embarrassing her in public, by putting down or making fun of her cultural traditions, spiritual beliefs, interests, ideas and desires. Degradation can also entail threatening women with a wide array of reasons why she could never leave such as incessant jibes that no one else would ever want her. All these forms of degradation, and other tactics that women discuss below, all lead to a suppression of women’s potential.

It is our human birthright to grow, to flourish, to live in a nourishing environment that feeds us. Women usually enter a relationship with a man believing they will grow together. Ironically, this is what many men believe too. But when the man is uncritically steeped in gaining emotional and social kudos for controlling “his” woman by putting her down to make himself look like “the man” in the eyes of others – then a lack of growth is inevitable – in fact a slow slow slow psychological and spiritual decay occurs – for the woman – and for the man.

Women I interviewed cried when they discussed some of the ways the man they loved and once trusted chipped away at their soul. Here are their stories . . .

Puts her down

Luke diminished Heather’s intelligence saying that their son was going to be like Luke when he gets older, that he’s going to be bright, not like Heather.

Elizabeth said David “certainly didn’t encourage my self-esteem. He was very derogatory, he used to put me down a lot.”

Elsie said Leon “was always putting me down, always, always was. He would tell me I was fat and stupid, a million things really. Nothing that I did was good enough whether it was around the house or in the garden, or something that was on the news, or whatever, I never gave my opinions. It just wasn’t worth it. In the end I gave up having my own opinions. I didn’t really believe his, but I’d just agree with him.”

One time when Susan was pregnant, Anthony wouldn’t talk to her about the pregnancy. Instead, he put her down by saying, “Are you going to call the baby after the last place you lived in or all the people you slept with?”. Yet Susan said she didn’t sleep around. Many women experience such degrading comments by men who engage in possessive jealousy.

Karen told me that her mum used to despair watching the way Felix treated Karen. Karen said this was, “because I’d be bouncing around, apparently as a child I used to skip everywhere singing, and I bounced when I came into a room and he’d watch me and then he’d just find the most cutting thing that he could say and I’d fold over, go and sit in the corner. My mother told me it would wrench her heart. She told me this after we split. She was the one who pointed it out to me that if I said it was ‘blue’, he’d say it was ‘green’. She pointed that out about four or five years into the relationship. I thought it was good that she told me this because I thought at that stage that it was me that was wrong.”

Raewyn said if she “had an idea, it would be like Brian would almost ignore me. He would never listen to me and then somebody else who he respected, usually a male, would have an idea that had been the same as my idea, and he would be all ears and say, ‘Yeah that’s great, that’s great.’ So in some ways, although the same idea would crop up and he would believe it, but initially it would make me feel like I was useless.” Despite Brian’s dismissiveness, Raewyn said she “still gave opinions but I held back a lot of things because I used to get to the stage where I just felt I couldn’t be bothered with him.”

Teresa worked in the same place as her partner, but after she left him, she ended up having to work with him because her co-worker had left. She said “it was awful having to sit there and face Patrick for four hours every morning. He was absolutely foul to me the whole time, really nasty. I’d had two lumps taken out of my breast and I’d had something done to my knee so I’d had three surgical procedures, and he said to me one morning, really conversationally and in a friendly way, ‘How many anaesthetics have you had in the last year?’ And I said, ‘Three’ and he said, ‘That explains why you’re so fucked in the head.’ He’d introduce something in a really conversational way, but he’d have planned the barb to come at the end of it. I cried, I was really upset. I gradually started to get angrier and walk out of the room, and in the end I’d only go in there to do my set job and I’d leave the room again straight after. I wasn’t very good at being angry directly to him and saying ‘piss off you wanker’, or anything like that.”

Compares her unfavourably to other people

Teresa said Patrick compared her to his ex-wife sometimes and unfavourably so. “He’d say – ‘Well Sandra was always happy when I did this, she didn’t mind if I did that’.” Teresa responded to these comparisons, “By changing what I did so that it was more like what she had done”.

Dylan constantly put down how Sally looked. She said, “He put down my breasts, he was always comparing them to other lovers that he had in the past and how mine were not as big, not as firm, not as pert not as upright. I was not allowed to not wear a bra because that meant that over time they would hang down too low and they would be ugly and he would want to leave me. I wasn’t allowed to have children because it would effect how my breasts looked because lovers he had in the past who were mothers had ugly breasts and if I had ugly breasts he would leave me.”

Victoria said Graham compared her to her sister. “I think he quite fancied my sister. ‘Diana’s so good, Diana does this, and Diana does that’. I already thought my sister was better than me anyway, so it just confirmed it. And it made me feel that really everybody was right, that I was lucky to be married, so just don’t rock the boat.”

Exploiting women’s vulnerabilities is a method many men use to establish one-upmanship, which is also a tactic used by school bullies. Many women are very astute at recognising that among men’s motivation to control them is often a need to maintain a certain masculine image.

For example, Victoria said, “I didn’t make many achievements after we were married, because again it would threaten his masculinity, so it’s best not to do that. I learned that really quickly if I wanted to keep the peace. He very much discredited me as a female. That just reinforced everything I believed to be true about myself anyway. I think he destroyed my identity (laughter). I didn’t have one. One part of me was like, ‘I don’t deserve this, I deserve better than that’, and the other part of me was like, ‘just put up with it, you get what you deserve’. There was an element of self-fulfilling prophecy that nobody wants you and you’re not good enough and you’re not of any worth, you’re going to a marriage that supports that anyway. But deep down I kind of knew I was better than that.

The incessant and often subtle clawing away at degrading women and suppressing women’s potential one facet at a time, day in and day out, is draining and debilitating as each woman slides into decline.

Victoria describes the erosive impact here . . .

“It wasn’t an overt degradation, it was just – what I had to offer wasn’t what he needed to meet his needs, so it just kind of had to go really. I felt great sadness and disappointment and regret and longing. Throughout all of this, throughout the whole marriage, I really wished that it was normal, I really longed for a proper marriage. This had been something I’d waited for a long time and the result was just unbelievable. I deserved better than that.”

Denies her of her individual tastes, or downgrades them

Pauline’s husband Chris would say things to downgrade her personal tastes. She said, “we were trying to decorate the home and any suggestion that I would come up with I just wasn’t allowed it. I would say what I thought and my taste and everything, but he would come back with a comment that would wipe it.” Pauline said that silently on the inside she wouldn’t accept that, rather she would think, “You bugger”. But on the outside she said she make it appear as if she just accepted his perspective.

Uses emotional blackmail to make her feel selfish or guilty for pursuing her own interests

Calling women selfish eats at the heart of the way most women are socialised to behave – sacrifice yourself for your husband – being selfish is considered a big no no for women. But the social messages for men are the opposite, so men who believe they are entitled to have everything their way use this as a manipulative control tactic.

When I asked Teresa if Patrick ever called her selfish, she replied, “Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, I was very selfish. That’s what my mother had always said as well, so it was just reinforcing that. I absolutely believed I was selfish and would redouble my efforts to be not selfish.”

Teresa experienced guilt and fear for pursuing her relationships with family and friends. She said, “I thought it was really selfish and that I should be thinking of him. I’d feel guilty when I’d do things without telling him I’d done them, I’d feel really guilty, like if I’d gone and had afternoon tea with a friend while he was at work. Sometimes I’d lie about where I’d been. He’d say ‘what have you been doing?’ and I’d say ‘nothing’ and Patrick would say ‘well I rang and you weren’t here’, I’d say ‘oh, I just went for a walk’. But I felt really guilty about it, coz you’re not supposed to have lies in a relationship (laughter), you’re supposed to have honesty.”

Criticises and diminishes her strengths and achievements

When the women told me about being degraded, they said a lot of the tactics were incredibly subtle. For instance Karen said Felix dagraded her “all the time, just subtle little comments like ‘Oh yes that’s very nice but what about the bit you missed over here?’” Karen went on to say that Felix “criticised my strength, well tried to negate it. Intelligence, organisational skills, artistic ability, creativity, he’d bring it all down. I’ve always been a very resourceful crafty person making stuff. He’d find a hole in it. In response I could either turn around and bitch back at him and have a fight, or I could try and just ignore it. Either way was part of me resisting it, tossing it off, ‘that’s just a load of bullshit, you know that’s not right’. Equally the flip side of that was me believing I had made a mistake and I had done something wrong, that it was something about me. There was a subtle erosion.”

Teresa said, “During the course of the relationship and after it as well, Patrick tried to diminish my professional achievements in quite insidious ways where I didn’t realise what he was doing, because it didn’t occur to me that somebody would do that to somebody that they supposedly loved. You expect people to be supportive and kind and proud of you, but, because we worked in the same field, I think that was very much to do with his own self-esteem. By diminishing me and my achievements, he’d build up his own.

Teresa’s feeling of achievement was diminished. Her self-esteem through the relationship dropped to absolutely zero. She said, “I don’t think it diminished my intelligence in any way. He did challenge my intelligence. At the time I was studying for my Certificate in Horticulture. He was quite dismissing of that and quite patronising, like it was – ‘Your little hobby. Well if it makes you feel as if you’re achieving something, well that’s good.’ But in a way where it sounded like he was proud of it – ‘Oh it’s so great you’ve got this little thing you’re interested in’. So it was the two messages coming through. I didn’t notice this until I looked back and realised. It was really typical of the whole relationship that it was gradual and insidious and you just slid slowly down the slope.”

Teresa said Patrick “put down what I thought when we were still having the relationship. Once the relationship was over he used to put down how I looked and acted quite a lot. I’d come into work and he’d go, ‘oh, that’s an interesting look.’ It was awful because I’d just started to get some confidence back and I’d feel I looked nice, and I’d come in and it would just take it away. He seemed to know exactly where all my vulnerable points were and he’d get me every time, it was really horrible. I just wouldn’t say anything to him if he said that because I was trying to be mature and reasonable. At that point I was able to think, ‘well no!’ This was after the relationship was over. But it would knock my confidence and I would be full of doubt again about, ‘did I look horrible?’.

The whole time Teresa was with Patrick she didn’t feel as if she had strengths. Though, now she feels as if she has got a lot of strengths. She said, “I saw myself only in relation to him and that was where I existed, was in his perception of me.”

Elizabeth thought “that going to the parenting course 13 years ago would have been the beginnings of starting to look at what the hell has been going on here. She thought David saw the parenting course as just a little thing – ‘you go off and do that, it’ll keep you busy, it’ll keep you happy’. He was disrespectful and very disdainful like it was of no consequence. I had joined a sewing group and had just learned to sew and it was like he was doing the important things and I was just doing the fiddly bits around the side (laughter).”

Raewyn said she “used to keep very quiet about having a Masters degree. Brian would rubbish the work I used to do when I was working , he would say, ‘Oh God what’s the point of that?’ ‘Head tripping’ – that’s what he used to say. I would never argue and that’s when I was protecting him. Because I used to think he’s just jealous.” Everytime Brian criticised Raewyn’s strengths she, “Usually just ignored it. I just thought, ‘huh?’ I mean in some ways I had enough in me to know that he just loved to put me down. It was just him trying to put me down, although I got worn down by it.”

Uses various tactics to suppress her ideas

Elizabeth said she often used to come up with ideas about things and David hated it. She said, “he would just reject them out of hand and then a bit further down the track he would come up with exactly the same idea and it would be his idea (laughter) and I used to find that quite annoying. I would say, ‘Hang on a minute I was talking about….’, but his response was ‘Oh, no, no, no, no that was something different.’ So there was no acknowledgement at all for any contribution I might make.”

As a result Elizabeth “used to get really pissed off, but it was the way it was. David wouldn’t listen, he wasn’t interested in listening to what my ideas might be because he’d indicate they were always really stupid ideas.” Elizabeth said she “stopped voicing my ideas and self doubt has always been a really big thing, but I think over the time that I was with him my self doubt grew even more and more because everything I suggested just got put down. I guess it fed my thing about somehow the patriarchal thing too that women are inferior and men are superior.”

Elizabeth talked about how this continual silencing of her voice by David “just proved to me that these ideas that were out there were really the truth, that is the way it works, men are more superior, they do know more, they are cleverer.”

Elizabeth said . . .

“It’s taken me a long time to think – ‘hey my ideas are really valid, just as valid as anybody else’s’ – and have the confidence to speak them.”

Elizabeth then shared that the long-term negative impact of being degraded meant “I still find I can be in a room at a meeting, and I do speak up now at meetings, whereas I used to not say anything, I was too scared to say anything at all, but if I don’t start getting some feedback pretty quickly, like through body language or just noises, I’ll start to think ‘am I not making sense?’, or ‘do you not understand me, is this really dumb?’ That starts very quickly with me so I still battle with that now. My father was very ridiculing and putting down too.”

As Elizabeth was telling me about being put down she started to cry as she continued to say, “I can’t even remember anyone ever saying to me, ‘Well that was a good idea Elizabeth’. So I’m only just starting to have some faith in myself, some confidence now so it’s had a big impact really, which I hadn’t really thought about.”

The women I interviewed had been out of their relationship for more than a year, some such as Elizabeth, for about 10 years. Everyone who experiences putdowns suffers – no matter what age or what gender, and when degradation and suppression of your potential is part of a multitude of other controlling tactics, the wounding is huge and can take years to heal, and the scars may always remain.

Suppresses her potential

Victoria thought Graham “felt quite threatened by my initial independence. I was a relatively independent person, so he definitely thwarted any growth there and tried to retard that by his behaviour. For example, Victoria “got onto the teaching training programme and it just started to cause too many ructions, so I gave it up after six months. And it had been something that I’d strived for a long time to get in. I think it threatened his position of power that I was being academic, that I was achieving and moving forward. He used to talk about the fact, ‘I’m useless, I’m nothing, I can’t do anything’, and in order not to offend his ego any more I pulled out.”

As part of gender socialisation, there are many social messages that influence women to pull back on pursuing their own potential because they believe they should not offend men’s ego, in other words, not be equal to or better than their male partner.

Teresa had “thought about going back to university which Patrick wasn’t encouraging of, so that was something I didn’t pursue, but I hadn’t decided I wanted to do it, but I was thinking about it. I put everything on hold that he wanted me to put on hold.”

Many of men’s tactics described by women I interviewed were subtle. They stemmed from the man’s need to maintain a masculine status that was above the woman. This is personal for many men –– and it is deeply social –– it is how masculine the man feels he’s perceived by others.

Karen said that when she went to university, “the shit hit the fan big time. I kept going though. I discovered feminism there, which was huge. I’m crying now just thinking about that. It was a huge relief for me. It was like I’d been validated. Somebody’s out there talking about this stuff, I’m not mad. I felt really really isolated being a mother in the situation I was in. I’d been through a very rough few years in this shitty relationship, so when I got to university it was wonderful. I discovered all this stuff about reading and writing feminism. It was great, but it was a big bloody challenge to Felix. He didn’t like it much. He didn’t tell me to stop, in a lot of ways he was supportive, but in other ways not. Sometimes it’s subtle sometimes it wasn’t.”

Elizabeth said, “I didn’t really know who I was, and if any slight glimmer of it came through, it got squashed before it saw the light of day. I remember once that when I was doing part-time work for a clothes designer – oh and I loved it, I just loved that contact with the public and the beautiful clothes that I was working with and I was imagining what it would be like to have my own clothing business to be able to buy fabrics and design clothes and it was like, ‘oh wow it would be so cool’ and it was just this idea! I talked to the people that I was working with quite a bit, and where they got the stuff’ and where I could learn. I came home and I said, ‘Oh what about dah dah dah?’ And it was stomped on straight away and I felt just totally stunned, and it just wiped it away. I didn’t give it another thought, that was it.”

If Elizabeth tried to discuss or express any area of her creativity with David, he would stomp on it, squash it and push her potential back down immediately. The result was that Elizabeth “put on hold finding out who I was, getting in touch with my own purpose in life, my own spirit. I was so busy trying to be the role, that who I was didn’t even come into it.”

Elizabeth had a miscarriage and did little part time jobs, which she had quite a lot of fun doing, but David never really gave her career a lot of encouragement and support. Elizabeth, like many other women, coped with her husband’s lack of encouragement, by following social messages about how to be a woman. For example, Elizabeth said, “I know a couple of times I came up with ideas about things I’d really like to do and he was very quick to just slate them completely, ‘There’s no way you can do that, what are you talking about, you couldn’t do that, where would you get the money?’ He was very negative about it, and I guess I still had this picture in my mind that we were married, and we were going to have babies, and I would be the mum and stay at home and look after them, the way my mum did. And that he would look after me, and that would be the way it was. I didn’t have strong feelings about a career anyway, so I can’t say it was all his doing that I didn’t end up with a career.”

Tells her their relationship is the best she can hope for

Donna said Frank reckoned that, “once he died I’d probably never be able to re-marry because I had the best, no one else could measure up.”

Teresa mentioned the other version of this control tactic, that is, Patrick would often tell her, “’No-one will ever love you as much as I do.’ Which in one way sounds like a nice thing to say, but it’s not. It’s like saying, ‘no-one else will ever love you really’.”

This is an incredibly common tactic used by men who are determined to control their partner. Elizabeth said David would often say, “’Who else would want you?’ ‘Who else would put up with this stuff?’ like I was so bad that he was doing me this big favour by putting up with me. I think at the end of the day, what I was to him was a possession.” After Elizabeth left, she thought David “was really pissed off that he lost his prize possession. He is still really angry now, and it’s nearly eight years down the track.”

Not long before Elsie left Leon, he played the “this relationship is the best you can hope for” card. Elsie said, “It was when I was pregnant. I left when my son was eight or 12 weeks old or something. I was about seven months pregnant when he said that I’d need him because when the baby came along I wouldn’t be able to live on my own. I’d find it really hard. I think he knew I was getting near snapping point. I didn’t argue with him, I didn’t say anything, but in my head I just knew that that wasn’t true, coz by then anything would have been better.”

Heather said Luke “used to say that half of Whanganui wanted him, even though I was the one that had his child, and that when I left him, I’d be the one that would regret it and I wouldn’t find a guy like him. He’d say that he’s the one that’s the most affectionate person in Whanganui and I wouldn’t find someone that hugged and kissed like he did.”

Heather explained that this was hard, “It’s still quite hard today because I haven’t met another man and I think, ‘are there other affectionate men out there, was he the only affectionate man?’ I think maybe he was, because I really enjoyed the affection, that was the thing that attracted me to him, holding hands and stuff. But then I remember seeing his face yelling and screaming and I think I don’t want that, but then I think he seems to always have one woman after another. He must have some charm that picks up women quite quickly.”

Respectful relationships require challenging rigid gender socialisation

For centuries, generally speaking, men’s roles have been given the most kudos and respect and women’s roles have been subordinated, marginalised and demeaned. Many men do not tolerate these ideas, they challenge themselves and other men to have compassion and respect for people’s differences whether they are male or female, no matter what age, race or class. But many men take gender socialisation for granted – as if it is natural to be superior to their partner. One of the social messages that influences some men is that it is weak to admit to mistakes and failings and seek support to change. The first step is challenging the status quo, naming the costs to men for degrading the women they claim to love, naming the harm to themselves, to their children, to their children’s mother. And as one man I interviewed said – men just have to change in front of other men – be a role model – and not wait for approval from other men before challenging the social norms that breed disrespect.

Watch out for blogs on the following control tactics:

One-Sided power games
Mind games
Inappropriate restrictions
Isolation
Over-protection and ‘caring’
Emotional unkindness & violation of trust
Separation abuse
Using social institutions & social prejudices
Denial, minimising, blaming
Using the children
Economic abuse
Sexual abuse
Symbolic aggression
Domestic slavery
Physical violence

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Tactic #6 — Emotional Unkindness & Violation of Trust

by Clare Murphy PhD on July 16 2012

This is the sixth of 16 blogs discussing the patterns of tactics from my power and control wheel – Emotional unkindness & violation of trust.

What is emotional unkindness?

Emotional unkindness entails DOING something unkind and the ABSENCE of, or FAILURE to do something kind.

Emotional unkindness is a failure to provide for emotional needs such as encouragement, understanding, respect and compassion. It includes ignoring you when you start a conversation, showing you none or very little attention and no empathy. It entails rejection, silent treatment and withdrawing. Emotional unkindness entails an absence of concern or care at times when you would most expect it – such as when you’re sick, in hospital, recovering from giving birth to a baby, or when you’re worn out and need a break.

Emotional unkindness also includes refusing to share responsibility for your children’s care and development, threatening to abandon you if he doesn’t get his way, making it emotionally difficult if you want to leave the house or leave the relationship, complaining whenever you ask for any kind of support, or making promises but not keeping them, saying ‘yes’ to doing something then ‘forgetting’, or it entails helping but with conditions attached.

When emotional kindness is turned on its head into an abusive manipulative tactic the result is a violation of trust.

Anyone can be emotionally unkind on occasion whether it’s done ignorantly or purposefully. There isn’t really a problem to write about if the unkind person takes responsibility for their behaviours and makes valid attempts to change. But the problem I’m addressing here is quite different – it’s about when an intimate partner withholds love, care, concern, attention and encouragement – on an ongoing regular basis.

Red flags that there’s a major problem become glaringly obvious when:

all your attempts at getting your partner to take responsibility for his unkind neglectful behaviours fall on deaf ears
he denies that he’s done anything harmful
he minimises your experience
he turns the situation about face and blames you

If this is the case, you need to listen to your gut instinct, admit to yourself that what you are experiencing is what you are experiencing! Otherwise you’re in danger of making one excuse after another for your partner’s emotional unkindness and violation of trust. You’re in danger of staying in a relationship in which his behaviours get worse and worse over time, and the long-term effects on you will get worse and worse. Stories from thousands of women show this to be true.

Here are some experiences that women shared with me during interviews I conducted for my Masters research.

Acts like she doesn’t matter

Pauline said, “I actually have a tattoo on my hand which Chris never knew I had. Not only did he really not take a good look at me, he never really acknowledged or thought, I actually had a personality and emotional side. It was just like he would look at me and see the word ‘wife’. In all those years of knowing me, he never knew me, so the true me was never shown. And because I didn’t express myself as I would today, speaking up, also he never really took the time to find out.”

Teresa’s partner, Patrick acted like she didn’t matter by showing “indifference if he was cross with me and be really cold and hard. He’d be indifferent to everything and ignore what I said and not show any sign at all that he’d heard anything I’d said or done for him. I’d increase my efforts to be nice and to do the right thing so that he’d notice me again and be nice to me, and I’d be back in his good books.”

Donna said, “I lost so much of myself, my freedom, everything, but I poured it back into the garden and even that got destroyed. I wasn’t even allowed to be upset because the pigs destroyed my gardens. That was just me being a bitch wife.” In response, Donna said she “Just quietly died inside. You didn’t respond to Frank, whatever he said happened. However he wanted it to be, that’s how it was, what I thought didn’t count.”

Donna talked about tending to her garden as her passion and solace from abuse. But when she got sick, although Frank could easily afford to hire a gardener he refused to and he also begrudged her the money to water her plants. She said, “When I got too sick to garden the whole garden turned into a jungle and so for about the last 12 months before I left, I didn’t used to go out to that part of the house anymore coz it just used to break my heart seeing all my years of beautiful work turned into a jungle and nobody cared, it didn’t matter but it mattered to me.”

Shows no empathy

Elsie said Leon, “had no empathy for my feelings, it didn’t matter at all.”

Teresa said, “I’d try and increase his level of empathy when there wasn’t any, when there was that indifference by trying to explain things in a different way, or do things differently or, to try and get a response from him but it didn’t make any difference so I just tried harder.”

On the other hand Raewyn responded to Brian’s lack of empathy by putting her focus into the children. She said, “I was just so happy with my children I didn’t need him any more. I used to just forget that he gave very little, touched very little.”

Gives then takes it away

Pauline said, “Chris did up a car with a mate and he gave it to me for Christmas. Well I didn’t have my licence. He sold it the following February (laugh). So I never got to drive my car. He did it up and it was all a big show, like, ‘I got my wife a car for Christmas’. It wasn’t until after I had my second child I got my licence. . . I look back and think things were just given and taken. Things were slowly taken away and I didn’t think a lot about it.”

Acts cruelly, then says she is too sensitive and cannot take a joke

Teresa said, “Once, I’d been out and I had stayed at a friend’s for tea and had got back later than he thought and he was cross about it and I apologised and tried to smooth things over. And it’s the nastiest thing anyone has ever done to me – he said and I thought it was okay – and he came out of the kitchen and he said ‘Would you like me to make you a cup of tea, would you like a cup of tea?’ and I said ‘That would be really nice, thank you darling.’ He went out to the kitchen and the jug boiled and he came back in with a cup and I was sitting on the couch and he got right up to me, then he went like that (acted out throwing a cup of tea in my face) and it was an empty cup and he planned it as a trick and it was just awful, it was just pre-meditated nastiness. And he was like, ‘It was just a joke, you’ve got no sense of humour, you can’t take a joke.’ But it was horrible and he used to do that sort thing.”

Makes promises but doesn’t carry them out

Teresa said Patrick would agree with something she wanted, “and then he just wouldn’t do anything. Little things, he was prepared to pay attention to, little wants, needs and wishes but big ones he’d just disregard, it was as if you hadn’t said anything at all.” I’d tried and there was nothing else I could do … sometimes I’d have one more try in saying something or doing something but it wouldn’t make any difference, so it was just the way it was.”

Susan spent most of her days crying because of the things Anthony had done. She said, “He didn’t run me down. I think it’s the things he did that didn’t bring me up. If I asked him to do something, it would never get done. If I said ‘Can we go somewhere?’ we’d never go. He didn’t do anything to build my self esteem. I thought for a long time he was easy going coz I didn’t have to cook him a good meal every night. He was quite happy with hamburgers, baked beans on toast or toasted sandwiches. I felt that’s really really nice coz there are people who won’t accept takeaways. If I didn’t clean up the house he didn’t tell me I was messy. He definitely neglected my emotional side.”

Withholds care, respect, approval, affection and support

Victoria said Graham “never really seemed to give a horse’s patoot that I may be upset about something. I tried not to think about it. I just got on with it. Life doesn’t become about trying to resolve anything, life becomes about surviving it. So you don’t try to actively do anything about anything because that just tells you there’s a problem, you don’t need to think about that right now, you just need to survive. If it’s going to cause you distress and upset the house, don’t bother, just survive it. And survive’s usually done by avoiding.”

Raewyn said, “I don’t think I ever heard Brian once say he loved me. He didn’t touch me a lot, he didn’t cuddle me a lot, in fact hardly ever. When we made up we might have had a cuddle, that was usually me initiating it. He would come home from work say and just get his book out, sit at the table and read. And that used to piss me off, because the children would be there and he’d just ignore them. There was that neglect as well where he would just do his own thing. He’d do his own thing all the time, his art, fishing, bike racing, so really there was very little attention given to me, very little. The only time was when he wanted sex then he’d be a little bit nice to me have sex and then that would be it and he wouldn’t be nice to me again until he wanted sex.” As a result, Raewyn said she, “learnt pretty quickly not have any wants, needs and wishes. I expected nothing from him pretty quickly in the marriage, oh except the money.”

Helps other people but not her

Karen said, “I couldn’t understand that if we broke a window in the house and I’d say, ‘hey could you fix the window?’ that Felix would get his back up and if he had been thinking about fixing the window that afternoon it would be completely out of the question now because I’d asked him to do it. What he would do would be he’d get his window making equipment and he’d go around the whanau (family) and ask if anybody needed any bloody windows fixing. Go and fix an entire community’s windows, and come home and look at me and say, ‘so there!’ I couldn’t understand it (laughter).”

Karen went on to say that Felix, “was so much more caring and tolerant and understanding of people other than of me. There was another solo mother and he’d say to her, ‘You’re looking tired, I’ll make you a cup of tea, have you had a break? Perhaps we can organise it so you can have a spa’. He’d be really caring to people outside of the home. I wanted him to listen to me and hear me. Saying, ‘I don’t want you to brush me off like that’, saying, ‘I’m here, I’m a person, the children are here, they’re real, there is a bond here, there is responsibility here, please be aware of it because you can’t just brush it away. I want you to offer me some support, because at the moment you’re taxing me more than you’re supporting me.’”

Donna said Frank, “would kill a beast and he’d have steak for breakfast and steak for lunch and steak for tea, give his friends steak because he was a great ‘I am’ and he was God in their world. My boys were only allowed to eat the mince and the sausages so they had to do the work on the farm and then he started ripping them off. They weren’t allowed to eat steaks.”

Ignores her need for assistance when she’s tired, overworked, or sick

Pauline said, “After my fifth baby I had a cancerous lump on my arm and I was breastfeeding her and once they found what it was, I had to go in straight away and have surgery. The operation to get this lump out was quite long so they did a big cut, and I’m all bandaged up and they said, ‘You won’t be able to use your arm for a few weeks, don’t go lifting or anything.’ I had this young baby, she was about three months old, and I thought, ‘how am I going to lift her out of her cot and feed her and change her and bath her?’ And my husband came and got me, I had the surgery and went home. All my children were at home and he went out. I sat down on the couch, he handed me my daughter and I started breastfeeding her and he said, ‘Well I’m off.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I was still under anaesthetic and we had stairs in the house. I remember not arguing but saying, ‘What? No, you can’t go out.’ But he went anyway.”

Sally said that in the last year of her relationship with Dylan when “my back was so sore and my health was so bad with these constant viruses, I felt desperate for help. I knew that Dylan wouldn’t let me. I just felt this intense rage inside of me because I was so sick, so I just phoned and made an appointment with a chiropractor. I knew Dylan wouldn’t let me spend the money on my health so I went behind his back and made the appointment and went anyway.”

Susan said, “When I was sick Anthony went off for the weekend with his family. I was so sick, I couldn’t even get out of bed. I only had our first child. I was grossly sick. I said, ‘Why don’t you please stay at home?’ ‘No, see ya.’ And he was gone. That’s what he was like and he’s always been like that. He didn’t care how I felt. Generally I cried about it.”

Susan went on to say that, “When I had our first child, I was really upset because I didn’t feel I had any security at all. It was an emergency birth. Anthony wouldn’t come to the hospital. He was out drinking with his mates. When I had her, he wouldn’t take any time off work to pick me up from hospital. My mum did it.”

Possessive jealousy used as excuse for deliberate emotional unkindness

Karen said Felix’s “jealousy started really really soon after I met him if I met somebody, gave them a peck on the cheek, all hell would break loose, there’d be two or three days of absolute hell. So I learnt not to express any affection to anybody, not to look at anybody. When my first baby was born, about the first time I went out with him after that I got a babysitter, but he made sure he told me it’s not going to be any fun for you anyway because you know that so and so …. Then he sat in the back row just glowering. I started dancing, he basically just came and got me, grabbed me by the arm, put a nice smile on his face and started to escort me away, pushed me into the car, and on the way home threw me out of the car. I had to walk well over an hour home in the middle of the night in winter wearing high-heeled shoes with a bloody baby waiting at home for me. He didn’t come back and get me. Just little things like that made me really careful not to fuck up.”

Exploits her intimate disclosures and uses them as ammunition

Karen said, “I don’t think Felix could ever really dominate. He listened to me very carefully for long periods of time to get to know me and I felt very secure in that initially and in those tender moments when he would listen and reflect back, I don’t know whether he was consciously building up ammunition, but when he felt the need he would grab those things and humiliate me with them.” Karen said she found right from the start that it was difficult sharing with Felix “because it would come back as a weapon. So I didn’t feel as if I could talk to him. He didn’t know I was sick with eating disorders, I couldn’t trust him with that. He thought everything was hunky dory.”

When Elizabeth went through a traumatic time while being counselled about sexual abuse perpetrated by her father when she was a child, David used this as an opportunity to tell her how ‘bad’ she was. Sally had a similar experience with Dylan. After nearly seven years of feeling used and never getting Dylan to take responsibility for his neglect and dismissive behaviours she went to the doctor, was put on anti-depressants. Then Dylan deflected responsibility further by arguing that her depression was the cause of the relationship issues.

Elsie said, “I trusted Leon not at all. If he ever found out anything about me, he just used it to give me a good psychological kick whenever he could as often and as much as he could. So I never ever trusted him at all.”

Dismisses her if she’s upset or asks for emotional support

Pauline said, “I had a miscarriage and while I was pregnant he wanted to abort the baby. He came home one night from work and he said, ‘I’ve decided’. He’d gone to work and he decided that I was having an abortion, and he went back downstairs to the kitchen and I was sitting in the bed reading and it was like, ‘arsehole!’ The abortion thing was huge because he actually knew I was anti-abortion. As fate would have it, that night I started bleeding. I lost the baby and he put me on the steps of Accident & Emergency (A & E) the next day and drove away. I came back very late that night, and he was just a total bastard over the whole thing.”

Subsequently, Pauline ”got really really low, very depressed and he would come home from work and he started to not even say hello and I never forgave him for how he acted when I lost the baby. I think that was a huge factor in my shift in deciding to leave him. But I’ve never been able to pinpoint exactly when I decided ‘that’s it.’ I never forgave him for it, or the way he treated me afterwards. I finally accepted whatever I was going to face in the future if I left would be better than now.”

Pauline said, “I would be in tears after the miscarriage and he would just look through me and walk off.” Pauline remembered being incredibly surprised when the nurse in A & E showed concern for her wellbeing. Pauline handed them the note from the doctor, and remembered “the nurse saying to me, ‘Are you okay, do you need anything? Come in straight away.’ I was thinking, ‘Wow, oh that’s nice. That’s nice, someone’s asking how I am’.”

Violates Trust

Pauline said she, “ended up not trusting Chris several years before we separated. I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I started marriage absolutely trusting him with my whole life and once I had that miscarriage I didn’t ever trust him again. To cope with this loss of trust, Pauline said she, “Did a lot of self talk. He’d say something or whatever he did, and rather than say it out loud I’d think in my mind ‘Oh yeah you prick. Fuck off to bed.’ But I would never say it out loud.”

Takes no responsibility for being caring – the focus of attention has to be on him

Victoria had asthma and had a really severe asthma attack one day. She called the ambulance when Graham was at work. She said, “We had no phone, we couldn’t afford one because the debts were too high. I managed to ring at the neighbour’s house and the ambulance came and got me. Graham pulled up in the driveway and I was in the back of the ambulance being nebulised and I was scared as scared as scared. So the ambulance people said to him we’re taking her through to the hospital. So he went round to my girlfriend’s for a cup of tea and thought she might like to come up to the hospital with him. I’m in this ambulance, and he went round to her place! It was like ‘for Christ’s sake!’” Victoria went on to say that although Graham “never stopped me from getting medical treatment, he was just a little bizarre when I got it. My impression of it was that it wasn’t about him really.”

Elsie said, “Leon took no responsibility for anything, like to be caring wasn’t his responsibility, to be there at any particular time when you think a normal person would be, that wasn’t anything that he believed was his responsibility. He was only there for the things that he wanted, for the play things that he did.”

Emotional unkindess is debilitating for men and women

It is often shocking for women when their partner repeatedly neglects them emotionally. But gender socialisation is full of messages about how to be a man and how to be a woman. Unfortunately, men experience social pressure to suppress expressions of love, care and empathy – in fact many men are bullied for doing so. On the other hand women experience the opposite pressure – that it is the woman’s role to do the emotional work in relationship – and for this women are applauded. This rigid socialisation not only harms women, it harms men.

At the individual level, women who experience ongoing emotional unkindness and violation of trust by a partner who refuses to take responsibility and make changes that lead to a close, constructive, caring connection, should continue to take steps to keep safe and, if possible, seriously consider doing what it takes to empower themselves to regain any lost self-determination and self-worth and follow their personal values, which may be quite different from what rigid gender socialisation is asking of women.

At the social level, everything we do influences our social and cultural norms, therefore individuals throughout every arena of our society can challenge gender socialisation that suppresses half of our humanity and speak out loud for a just society that honours men and women for living authentically – which requires courage to challenge social norms that work against kindness and trusting relations.

Watch out for blogs on the following control tactics:

One-Sided power games
Mind games
Inappropriate restrictions
Isolation
Over-protection and ‘caring’
Degradation & suppression of potential
Separation abuse
Using social institutions & social prejudices
Denial, minimising, blaming
Using the children
Economic abuse
Sexual abuse
Symbolic aggression
Domestic slavery
Physical violence

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Cognitive dissonance – how women justify staying with a controlling partner

by Clare Murphy PhD on June 15 2012

Cognitive dissonance is a theory developed by social psychologist, Leon Festinger, in the 1950s. The theory explains how people respond when their attitudes and beliefs do not match their behaviours. We humans are driven to have harmony between our attitudes and our behaviours and to avoid dissonance, that is, to avoid contradiction. Cognitive dissonance theory explains why women who stay with abusive male partners adapt their beliefs and behaviours. They do this so there is no contradiction between staying with him and their thoughts, attitudes and beliefs.

If a woman believes she has married a charming, caring man, but then he goes on to control, manipulate and abuse her, this can be extremely confusing. There are many many reasons why women continue to live with a psychologically controlling partner. However, when women go down this path they experience cognitive dissonance. In other words staying with an abusive partner causes her to have feelings of discomfort and disharmony because her thoughts and beliefs about his abusive behaviours don’t match her action of sticking with him.

So, the theory of cognitive dissonance explains that people find ways to reconcile the discrepancy between their thoughts and their actions. Cognitive dissonance theory explains the ways we all go about achieving such reconciliation. In this instance, women do the following:

Adopt beliefs and attitudes that are in harmony with the situation.
Change perceptions about his abusive behaviours.
Change her behaviours to match her beliefs and attitudes.

Here are some examples of ways the women I interviewed for my Masters research attempted to eliminate the discord they felt by continuing to live with their controlling partners.

1. Women changed their beliefs and attitudes so these were in harmony. They did this by altering or trivialising the importance or value of their belief that their partner was the wonderful man they used to know e.g.

No marriage is perfect

Adriana said, “There are always trade offs. I wouldn’t have stayed if there weren’t the good bits”, Pauline said, “No marriage is smooth all the way”, and Susan said, “I always gave him the benefit of the doubt”.

Disbelief he would abuse her intentionally

Victoria said, “I was never sure if he was doing it intentionally because I think that would be a really horrible thing to have to admit that he was doing that intentionally. So we excused him a lot in my family saying he’d had a really rough upbringing and he didn’t really know any better”. Likewise, Teresa said, “I trusted him not to hurt me and he kept hurting me. But because I loved him and trusted him not to, I couldn’t believe that he was doing it, so I must be misinterpreting it. Teresa said, “I didn’t know I was abused, I would have said no, no, no he really loves me”.

Belief there was still potential for the relationship to work

Karen’s partner worked as a caregiver. She said, “There really was potential. I could see the love and support and patience that he offered his clients. He’d bring them around home and I saw the love and the patience he had”.

Waiting for the old him to come back

Heather said, “I always thought back to the person I first met, I thought where’s that person gone, he’s got to be there somewhere, he can’t just disappear altogether. I just wanted him to come back. I thought he might look and say, ‘Gosh this is a lovely little boy, I love his mother and how can I go about this to get it to work out for a family situation?’ which is what he claimed he wanted the most.”

Pauline thought, “That it would get better. It would actually go back, right back, rewind to the time …. I was waiting for my old husband to come back, that whatever was bugging him or was going wrong, that would go away and we would go back to how it used to be”.

2. The women changed their perceptions about his behaviours. They achieved this by: emphasising beliefs that supported their decision to stay; by finding justifications for his behaviours; by focusing on his positive qualities and ignoring his abusive ones; and, by blaming themselves; e.g.

Finding justifications for his behaviours

Raewyn thought perhaps he behaved as he did because he had “troubles at work, a bit of conflict at work. And therefore he’d bring it out on me…. Or that he’s sick I think actually something physiologically and mentally wrong with him”. Teresa said, “At the time I thought he behaved the way he did because he loved me so much and maybe that that’s what people did when they loved each other that much. Then later in the relationship I thought he behaved the way he did because he was an alcoholic. Now I think he behaved the way he did partly because he was an alcoholic but I think the reason he was an alcoholic also is some of the reason he behaves the way he did, and I think he’s sick, almost psychopathic really, in terms of not having a conscience, of being charming and manipulative, being able to turn on the tears and appear remorseful, and he’s not”.

Holding onto the positives

Susan said, “I put up with it for so long coz he’d be really nice for a week after he’d done that and it’s like ‘far out this is cool’. He’d do things for me. He’d cook the tea, he’d help out and then he’d go out and do that sort of thing again….. Every time he upset me, he’d then be nice to me. And I always thought something good always comes when something bad has happened”.

Believing it’s her problem and she’s to blame

Elizabeth said, “I just thought that was the way it was. There must be something wrong with me. Other women didn’t seem to be having the problems I was having. He kept telling me it was my problem and I just believed him”.

Heather said, “I found it quite hard especially when he blamed me for the relationship not working. I’d say the relationship’s only not working because of the way you are treating me and I don’t want to be with you. He’d say, ‘That’s your fault, if you were living here it wouldn’t be like that, if you were living with me I’d be the same person I was when we first went out, you’re making me be like this.’ I’d start to believe him and thought maybe I should move there and things would be different if I was living with him, maybe I’m being too hard on him.”

3. The women adopted behaviours to match their beliefs and attitudes that the marriage had to work at all costs, e.g.

Belief she has to make the relationship work

Teresa thought, “That I would be able to make a success of it. That I would be able to change him into being a normal person (laugh) and that we would be able to have this stable, happy relationship…. I perceived it as a failure on my part to have a good relationship with a good person, so I didn’t really want to talk about it to friends or family because I felt that they would see me as a failure and that I’d buggered it up. And I guess also that they would want me to do something that I wasn’t ready to do, like you have to leave. Whereas my feeling was that if you’re in a relationship, then you have to do everything you can to make it work and you can’t just get up and walk out because you’ve made a commitment”.

Belief it’s the woman’s job to make the relationship work

Victoria said, “I didn’t want to lose face. I wanted to be married, because without my marriage, who was I? I was nothing again and I was worse than nothing because I was a failed wife and that was worse than being a spinster, to have been a failed wife. It was just dreadful to admit to my family that my husband was treating me like he was because by the end of it I truly believed that I was worthless, there was just no point and to leave the marriage would have been to confirm that I was of no worth, I wasn’t even worth keeping as an abused wife. God I’m pleased I’m older, got over that!”

Marriage is a commitment that must be worked at in order to overcome any problems

Elizabeth said, “I think I stayed because I thought it was wrong to leave”. Likewise, because Elsie had “a very religious upbringing. I had the belief that marriage is forever and if you make the commitment you have to stick it out”. Teresa also, “saw it as a long term commitment, not as a convenience thing…. I certainly believe that the couple unit was the most important unit and that all steps should be taken to preserve it and protect it and nurture it”. And Victoria, “believed we were going to be together forever, that’s what marriage for me was. I never believed divorce was the right answer. I thought it was an easy way out and that if you worked hard enough at it, if both of you decided to marry in the first place, then there must be something that you had together, so what you should be doing is try to find out what had changed, what had you lost that you needed to work on getting back together. Divorce was a big sign of failure. I didn’t want to confirm the suspicions that my family held, so I was determined to make it work”.

Belief he needs her help

Teresa said that, “for a long time I thought it was my fault and then once I discovered the drinking pattern, I thought that was my fault as well and that I was responsible for it because that was the way he would fling it back at me, and that because I was in a relationship with him it was my duty to help him. It would be wrong to walk away and leave him, that he needed help and that I should be able to help him”.

Children need a family that stays together

Pauline said, “The whole religion expectation, I felt really guilty for my children. I thought, ‘what am I going to do to them?’ I was the big bad person because I was going to initiate a separation I was going to initiate a split of this family. I felt guilty because of what I was going to do to my children, never mind the fact what their father was doing to us all, all those years. But all of a sudden that wasn’t a part of it, it was I’m doing this I’m the one to be guilty”.

Similarly, Teresa wanted to ensure her stepson had stability. She said, “that it was really important to create a nice family home for him”.

Belief that children need a father

Susan said she stayed, “Because I’ve got this thing that children have the right to be with their father”.

Belief that being married has higher status than being single

Susan said, “You’re taught back then marriages stay together and you try and hold it together. I can remember thinking I didn’t want to be a solo mother”.

Believing she has to make it look like she tried hard

No matter what abuse the women experienced, many such as Elsie believed that, “After a while I’d always hoped that I would leave one day. I started thinking if I put up with it for a year or two maybe I can leave, it won’t look so bad, I would have tried hard”.

Women draw from social messages about how to be a woman

The attitudes women adopt, in order to reconcile staying in relationship with their dysfunctional partner, do not come out of thin air, women draw from dominant social messages about how to behave – as a woman – in an intimate relationship. Unfortunately, these dominant social messages do not take into account how to recognise and protect themselves from mind-games, manipulative brainwashing, and crazymaking tactics of psychological power and control.

Therefore, women do what comes naturally – that is, do what it takes to find ways to explain the contradiction between committing to a relationship then staying in it after discovering their partner was not the man they expected him to be.

When women make these adaptions to their thoughts and behaviours they silence or bury beliefs they once held dear. However, most women continue to hold onto an inner spirit and conviction, so that no matter how many months or years later, if or when they reach the limit of their tolerance, they will be able to excavate remnants of themselves again – despite this often being a long painstaking process.

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Tactic #5 — Over-Protection and ‘Caring’

by Clare Murphy PhD on April 23 2012

This is the fifth of 16 blogs discussing the patterns of tactics from my power and control wheel – Over-protection and ‘caring’.

Beliefs lead to behaviours

Many men who psychologically abuse and control their female partners do not define their behaviour as cruel or abusive. This is partly because their behaviours make perfect sense when viewed from their belief system – their socially reinforced belief system. Family violence including non-physical control tactics are motivated by beliefs based on – men’s sense of masculinity – their gender as a man – that is, the ways men have learned that they should behave in relationship. Men seeking to change by attending counselling or stopping abuse programmes describe being motivated by beliefs such as:

Men should be top dog, the boss, the one in control
Women should do as the man says
Men are entitled to correct or discipline their partner if she strays from behaviour he expects from a female partner
Men are entitled to define the rules
Women are possessions

Over-protection and ‘caring’

These kinds of beliefs lead to behaving in over-protective ways in the guise of caring. This includes begging the woman not to go out alone or she might get raped, telling her she never has to work (even though she wants to) because he wants to take care of her, taking her to and from work so her co-workers will not get ‘ideas’, or attempting to keep her at home by saying he worries when she’s away.

Women I interviewed for my Masters research gave some examples of experiencing over-protection in the guise of caring:

Sally said, “There was one group I went to for a year, a women’s group, which Dylan didn’t like me going to and he did try to stop me quite a few times and I did stop going when he tried to stop me. I would do what he said and I would be confused about that because he would say some rational thing like ‘because it’s really bad weather out there. I don’t want you driving’ and because I was nervous at driving myself, I wouldn’t drive. I wouldn’t go to this women’s group.”

Karen said, “I did have access to the car then, that’s right I claimed it (laughter). I remember for a long time Felix would say, ‘Those roads are far too dangerous, you haven’t got experience, it’s not warranted or registered, we could be in real trouble if you stuff up out there’. I’d say, ‘How about we warrant and register the car and get it insured?’ ‘Oh we don’t have enough money for that.’ It was his vehicle, he bought it, he was the one who fluffed over it. I was asking a favour of him by wanting to use it. I was really really sick. I was really depressed and I think quite mentally ill at that stage. I knew I was and I do intermittently get convoluted in my head space. That was the worst state I’d ever been in.”

Possessive jealousy in the guise of ‘caring’

When men operate from possessive jealousy, many women perceive this to be a sign of love and commitment – especially during the dating and early phases of the relationship. However this is a notion learned from places such as fairytales, romance novels and movies – it is absolutely not true. Jealousy is about the jealous person’s own beliefs. At the personal level, a jealous man’s feelings stem from beliefs about himself such as believing he’s inadequate, unworthy, or not good enough. At the social level a jealous man’s feelings stem from the belief that as a boyfriend or a husband they own their female partner.

Belief that marriage implies men’s ownership of female partners can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman times. Manuscripts dated during the medieval period (900-1300) state that the Church, for instance, pushed for the idea that women should obey their husbands, and men were granted the authority to castigate their wives and beat and otherwise control her to correct her behaviour.

Whilst men’s sense of ownership of their wives has been played out for centuries, not everyone has always agreed with this form of relationship, and for the past 50 years there have been consistent major challenges – by men and especially by women – to dismantle such inhumane forms of relationship.

The problem is that gender socialisation in western societies continues to be steeped in subtle (and sometimes very obvious) social support for men’s ongoing ownership, control and enslavement of intimate female partners.

Some of the men I interviewed for my PhD research talked about love being linked to ownership and the socially reinforced double standards accompanying such beliefs. Alex said he used to think “love was an ownership type of thing, you love someone you’re with them 24 hours a day.” David said that a man, “loves his wife to do everything that she’s told to do, and be obedient.” James said “most guys would like their wife or partner to be subservient to them. And be agreeable with the ideals of the husband.” Sam said he used to believe that women had to be a slave. Bob said the husband was entitled to sex every night because “That is really part of the culture.” Bill said that men marry “to tie up the mini me (laughter). Get her off the market… Men want to go back to the market and the women can’t. I dare say that’s 99 percent of men.”

Obsessive possessive jealousy leads to hyper-vigilance, anger and sometimes to murder

Men’s possessive sexual jealousy is used to justify isolating women from social opportunities, as well as for monitoring women’s whereabouts and as an excuse for stalking women. Possessive sexual jealousy is often at play when a controlling man kills his wife or his ex-wife and and sometimes her new boyfriend.

Donna said, “once I started having sex with him and he was madly in love with me he started displaying his jealousy and his possessiveness.”

Heather said, “Luke was just ultra jealous about anything especially my ex-husband. I think one of his main things that he was jealous and that I was close to our son and that we were away from him having that time together.”

Harasses her about imagined affairs

Susan said, “When I was living at dad’s it was good coz I had my money every week and I had the support and then Anthony came down and accused me of playing around on him. And that wasn’t me.”

When she is out, he is extremely jealous

Heather said “Luke used to complain about the clothes I wore, said I dressed like a whore, didn’t like the way I had my hair because I attract the guys, that I wear fuck-me pants and just want to get guys after me. And if I wanted to take our son to the beach, Luke would pass a comment, ‘Oh you just want to go to the beach and flounder around in your skimpy bikini in front of guys.’ In the end anything I put on I was thinking ‘is this looking tarty?’ I got to the stage when I thought I really should change my hair colour, even though I’ve had this hair colour my whole life.”

“Even if I stopped and talked to a guy he’d say, ‘I’ll poke his fucking eyes out.’ He was really anti. We were in the supermarket and a friend of my cousin’s was there and we stopped and talked and he goes, ‘What took you so long, the supermarket’s only across the road?’ I said I was talking to Joey and he said, ‘I can see that.’ I just stepped back. I felt like a little child being told off. At the supermarket if someone asked me where the bread was Luke would say, ‘Why didn’t he fucking ask me where the bread was he’s just trying to get into your pants.’ It was constant. So I didn’t even talk to a person let alone look at them when I was in his company. And I never would tell him if I saw any guy and spoke to him.”

He frequently phones or unexpectedly goes to her work to check up on her

Teresa said a warning sign that something was not right was Patrick’s “constant wanting to know where I was and what I was doing, which started right in the early stages in the relationship, the ringing up and checking all the time, from home, from work, from everywhere. Sometimes at midnight to see if I was there, or to make sure that no-one else was there.”

Possessive sexual jealousy leads to stalking

Heather said “Luke would drive where my house was being built and say, ‘I’ve sussed out who your plumber is, he’s not that nice looking, I’ve sussed out who the builder is, he’s ok, I’ve looked at the concrete guy and I reckon he’d get his rocks off on you’.”

Accusations based on possessiveness and jealousy lead women to doubt their version of reality

Heather said, “I didn’t really know what Luke expected of me. Even now you kind of think, coz he’s built this belief into me, ‘how am I coming across, does it look like I’m flirting with this person?’ You’re analysing everything you do coz I think I don’t want to come across like that, ‘Am I coming across like that? I don’t want to talk too much to this guy, he’s married.’ Really silly things you wouldn’t have thought of before.”

Possessiveness and jealousy lead women to find ways to protect their integrity

Raewyn said “Brian was jealous of me teaching art because he would make it very difficult. He would never comfort the children when I left. He would never try and keep them happy when I left, they would be screaming at the door. When they were younger they would be crying and he would do nothing, but I would never say anything. In some ways it was more to protect myself because I didn’t want to have a big fight about it, but yeah I knew he didn’t like the fact that I was teaching art, so I didn’t make a big issue of it either because I didn’t want to make him feel even worse.”

It is important that women be honest with themselves about their gut feelings

Believing in Knight in Shining Armour stories can lead to confusion for some women when their partner tries to stop her from leaving the house for fear she will be harmed. Early in a relationship this can sound charming and be thought of as a sentiment that means he loves her. It is often only after months or years of an ongoing pattern of feeling controlled and restricted that some seemingly innocent behaviours start to become of major concern. It is important for women to trust their perceptions about their partner’s motivations. When women are continually being blamed for making their partner jealous – yet are not actually doing anything that is dishonest or untrustworthy – it is important that the woman not doubt herself – that she does what it takes to maintain a belief in her own integrity.

It is important that men be honest with themselves about their beliefs, feelings and needs

Many men’s possessive and jealous behaviours are motivated by beliefs that they have to stay on top, otherwise they believe they will fall prey to condemnation from others (often other men), many believe that they are a failure as a man if they do not appear to be ‘wearing the pants’. Some men have experienced bullying by other men aimed at shaping this kind of masculinity, so to avoid victimisation they do what it takes to show their masculine prowess for the sake of being accepted by other men. And if there are no other men to prove this to, some men have learned that controlling women and treating them as possessions is a way to feel they have succeeded.

But many men want a caring relationship. But a relationship is about team work – doing what it takes so that all team members can flourish. When one team member (in this case the man) plays by a set of rules that controls and restricts the other team member so that the man comes out the winner – that’s not only destructive for the woman – but it is also destroying the man’s sense of wellbeing and happiness. It is also destructive for any children growing up in this atmosphere. Sam, one of the men I interviewed, said that challenging peers to stop controlling, abusing and using women “does cross your mind” but what “does play on your mind more is that my mate can’t see that soft side.” And here’s the paradox – ‘real men’ are supposed to have courage and strength – yet many don’t use that courage and inner strength to stand up against social pressures to control the women they love – because doing so has been labelled “soft” and that’s not manly.

Watch out for blogs on the following control tactics:

One-Sided power games
Mind games
Inappropriate restrictions
Isolation
Emotional unkindness & violation of trust
Degradation & suppression of potential
Separation abuse
Using social institutions & social prejudices
Denial, minimising, blaming
Using the children
Economic abuse
Sexual abuse
Symbolic aggression
Domestic slavery
Physical violence

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Objectification: Women are objects that many men admire. So what?

by Clare Murphy PhD on March 15 2011

Good clean fun? Just a bloke thing? Innocuous?

Recently, when the New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key, responded to a sports radio show host’s question about which female celebrities he would have on his “wishlist”, John Key said Liz Hurley was “hot” and that Jessica Alba “looked pretty hot”.

So what? Many people would ask – some would even say, “good on him”. But one British newspaper argued that such comments were sexist. And when some of our local commentators expressed disapproval, our Prime Minister defended his comments. He said, “My concern is to make sure that I represent the views I want to represent on those shows.”

It’s election year in New Zealand national politics. One journalist, Derek Cheng, stated that “Mr Key continues to ride the wave of popularity, and part of his appeal is considered to be his informal, regular-guy approach.”

But unfettered objectification of females by men lets loose a set of attitudes and behaviours full of sexual innuendo that represents women as possessions, playthings to be used to achieve macho status….. Ordinarily it’s not mutual. Nor desired. Talking about or treating women as objects narrowly stereotypes them into nothing more than a hollow cardboard replica that disregards all that is deep, interesting and complex about women. Objectification mocks and demeans the multiple talents and capabilities of half the human race.

However, men who objectify women are applauded within our society – they’re popular. Such men are considered to be ‘real men’, expressing a successful idea of masculinity. These ideas — that women are men’s possessions – playthings – objects to play with — are what domestic violence and psychological control is all about. See these posts — here and here and here and here and here.

Harmless compliments, or violation and harassment?

I like to bike a lot. A few years ago when I was biking to and from work, men working on the side of the road would call out “nice legs”. Car loads of males would call out sexualized language, some would swoop in close and drive me into the gutter. During this same time in my life I was walking along the river, a place where many people walk. But this particular afternoon I was the only one walking. A man biked past me back and forward twice, then the third time he screeched on his brakes, threw down his bike and grabbed my backside. A surreal slow motion several moments passed and I screamed in his face and he took off. It was 3 o’clock broad daylight, yet when I told a male friend what had happened he said, “You shouldn’t go walking alone at night”.

There are several assumptions in what my friend said. 1. Men will do what they want to do to women as of right. 2. Men have power over women, it’s inevitable and it will always be that way. 3. Women are to blame if they put themselves into vulnerable times and places. 4. They shouldn’t walk alone – to do so invites danger on themselves. 5. It is up to the female victims to change.

In this case, for my safety, I did change. In one bound my personal freedom was curtailed. I stopped walking on the river, I threw my skirt away and only wore trousers and I had my long hair cut to within one inch of my skull. Men stopped staring, glaring and calling out to me after that. I felt relieved and free from harassment. This is just one cost of objectification. The man who grabbed me did so because he felt entitled to, as a man he thought he had every right to do that to an anonymous woman. Just a piece of arse.

Other women might welcome the attention. “Nice legs” or “she’s hot” – but there’s a fine line between harmless objectifying of one individual woman who welcomes it and objectifying women en masse.

Objectification is not about sex appeal, it’s about treating women as playthings, possessions, pieces of meat and slaves

And what about women who do not fit these flawless standards? Do men call them “hot” too? No – some men objectify women who do not fit the stereotype – simply because they do not fit the stereotype. Here’s what I mean …

When I interviewed men for my PhD research – who had been abusive and controlling over their female partner – I asked questions about their school days including which behaviours made boys popular and what the benefits were for being high on the hierarchy of masculinities and the costs of being low on the hierarchy. One man said that boys at the bottom of the hierarchy would miss out on games played by popular boys. One such game, called “pig lotto” occurred at school dances.

He said, “There’d be bets on … with the popular crowd, who was gonna get what girl … and they were serious bets… Who could get the ugliest girl got the bag of money.” He said this game had been going on for years at his school. The game was a means of riding a wave of popularity amongst regular guys to gain approval ratings. (There’s those words again – popularity and regular guy.)

Many women are heavily dependent on gaining approval, power and respect for the attractiveness of their physical appearance. Such strivings are in part due to the abuse and denigration experienced because they don’t fit. Failure, to fit the standards is often inevitable because the advertising, media and corporate-driven standard view of women is airbrushed beyond reach.

Of course there are women who do fit contemporary western ideals of physical beauty, but, sadly, are often not taken seriously for their creative, professional and multiple other talents.

For example, I asked men I interviewed what they and other men thought about working for a female boss. The man who said the following reflected what most men told me:

“99.9 percent of men wouldn’t like [having a female boss] at all… It’s a power thing, the man gotta be … this strong, dominant, the man’s the boss… I wouldn’t have a problem if the female was intelligent and knew more than me. But (laugh) if I had some bimbo that was trying to order me around, I couldn’t handle it.”

Some men believe they possess female partners

One man I interviewed reflected what several men said, that entering marriage was like owning “a new car. Once I’ve done enough payments, it’s mine. I own this.” Men interviewed by other researchers say they beat their partner because she does not maintain her physical appearances well enough. Other men attempt to control their partner’s physical appearance by, for example, in the words of one woman I know, telling her that if she got pregnant she must have an abortion because he did not want her breasts to droop.

And some men use female partners as slaves

Several men I interviewed said that men are the masters and women are the slaves. In the words of one man this meant treating female partners, “Like pieces of meat and sex objects. ‘Stuff it, it’s my missus I’ll do whatever I bloody like.… ‘You got my ring. You’ll give me sex when I want. If you don’t I’ll get it from somewhere else’.” Another man said, “I can do what I want but you gotta do what I tell you to. That’s the way I’d see 90 percent of marriages, from a man’s point of view.”

Why we should all care about a Prime Minister calling some women celebrities “hot”

There’s a long history of inequality in our society. We continue to live in a world steeped in power structures – where certain groups are accorded higher status and greater levels of entitlement, prestige, recognition and respect than others. Many people with such prestige use their entitlement for the betterment of others. Many people low on social hierarchies look upward for role models – whether that’s towards a professional footballer, rap musician, a father, teacher, coach, corporate leader or Prime Minister.

However, many people with high status attempt to gain their approval ratings by objectifying women – they get away with this because for centuries it’s been seen as the right way to be a powerful man. Many men don’t stop at calling women “hot” they go on to use, abuse, rape, control and even kill women – in the name of male entitlement to demanding servitude.

Objectifying women is not a joke, it’s not about sex appeal – it’s about entrenched attitudes that lead to harm – attitudes that have to be discussed and challenged – starting when children are young. Innocuous attitudes that lead to even so-called ordinary men to be tempted to the dark side aided and abetted on all sides by a society, and its leaders, that grants men great power over women. Objectification of women is an unhealthy shadowland in which many men lurk and is a major support for the hierarchical notion that men are superior to women.

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Is men’s abuse of female partners an individual problem or a social problem?

by Clare Murphy PhD on December 2 2010

When we see that a man beats his wife we tend to assume the abuse is the problem of the individuals involved. He has a problem or she has a problem. The same is true if you read a newspaper article about a man who sexually abuses his female partner. Most readers assume the abuse is purely the problem of the individuals involved. There is no thought given to how our society is constructed and what role it plays in our daily lives.

But studies show that there are patterns in men’s behaviours, attitudes and motivations for abusing a woman that mimic hierarchical power structures that permeate society. It is seen that the nature and construction of these social structures may lend a certain permission, a certain kind of advocacy for the right of male power, control and dominance that is based on hierarchical social structures, beliefs and norms. Example the oft quoted glass ceiling for females in the business world.

Simply put, those at the top are accorded the highest social status. It’s a pyramid in which the power and status diminishes the lower you are placed. Maleness is tested, gender differences are tested, race and ethnicity are tested. Men and women, young and old, healthy or sick, heterosexual or gay, we are all involved in a vast milieu of social constructs and position taking. Wealth, and lack of it soon sorts status and place in the hierarchy.

Most social structures in the world are hierarchical and patterns of relating to each other entail power relations that manifest positively or negatively.

Social structures shape patterns of relating

At the social level there are different patterns in relations between genders.

The accepted social pattern of relating between men and women might be viewed as a template, an overlay with decrees that say the man should initiate a date, the man should be the breadwinner, the man should propose marriage, the man should protect the woman, the woman should care for the children, and do the housework. In these patterns of relating, the man’s role and the woman’s role are clearly defined. And it is typically accepted that the man’s role is accorded higher status than the woman’s role. At this time these are the dominant patterns. They’re an endless string of pronouncements that when unquestioned and unchallenged lead to conformity, domination and subordination.

It’s true that many individuals question and shake up these patterns in their private relationships and do not adhere to these old ideas. It would be nice to think that these patterns were influenced by getting to know, understand and like each other’s differences, celebrate the true meaning of equality, but that’s not majorly the case. Any challenge to the status quo runs the gauntlet of ridicule, sneers and jibes by those who have a vested interest in keeping things just as they are. Many of us – men and women – may believe wholeheartedly in the ‘man as the head of the house’ doctrine, but often fail to see how this one-sided power and control can leave parties open to abuse.

Thus men are socialised to behave in certain ways – and some of those ways entail controlling female partners. Men are expected to be the protector and provider for women and children. Men are expected to hold the position as head of the household. This position is one of power – too much which – for some men – fosters abuse against women and children.

Yet not all women need protecting. Many women have stronger muscles than many men. Women are quite capable of protecting themselves and their children.

And not all men want the roles of protector and provider as expected. Instead, many men want equal relationships with women. But often they are stuck with roles of dominance, because our society is founded on social hierarchies of old, outmoded thinking. When men and women choose to share household chores, child rearing, decision-making, and share power it is flying in the face of, or moving away from, current dominant social expectations.

Social rules which shape expectations about behaviour are a real conundrum for many men

Many believe in social justice and gender equality so that everyone is afforded opportunities to fulfill their life’s potential.

But other men would not agree, believing in the credo that men are superior to women and would strenuously reject the idea that a man should or could work for a female boss, for instance. This personal belief trickles down from the wider social structures and strictures that accord men higher status than women.

An example of ways some men’s attitudes reflect the gendered social structure was evident when I asked men I interviewed for my PhD research what men thought about working for a female boss. Many of the men said something similar to this man:

“99.9 percent of men wouldn’t like [working for a female boss] at all… It’s a power thing, the man gotta be … this strong, dominant … the man’s the boss… I wouldn’t have a problem if the female was intelligent and knew more than me. But (laugh) if I had some bimbo that was trying to order me around, I couldn’t handle it.”

Men’s abuse of partners too, is shaped by these same social structures

In a way it’s like individual men who abuse their female partners are justified in assuming an unspoken right conferred upon them by hierarchical social structures. Men I interviewed said they carried an unwritten contract into their relationships that stated the man should be the master and the woman his servant. This unspoken, unchallenged contract overlay their other desire, which was to have a caring long-term relationship. Likewise, the patterns of power and control and the tactics used in family violence, school bullying, workplace bullying, trafficking of women and children, acquaintance rape, and hate crime against homosexual and transgender people are similar – because they mimic hierarchical social structures at the wider level.

Change must entail deconstructing hierarchical social structures

It seems that for individual men to initiate change, and to maintain that change, social structures have to change. Or it means a perilous journey of awareness and personal conviction to go against the grain of dominant social thinking. So it is important that men get support to understand how their individual decisions, motivations and behaviours reflect wider social ideas. This support should extend to assisting men to critique and challenge social messages that encourage hierarchical relationships, destructive use of power and control, and denigration of those with lower social status.

In my next post I will brainstorm some questions that help critique hierarchical social structures.

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“Ensuring our manhood stays intact”

by Clare Murphy PhD on October 9 2010

Men and women are socialised into a society founded on social hierarchies. In the west, those who are considered to have higher status than others are white people, people with higher education, men, people in the middle age range (that is not children and not elderly), people who are physically and mentally able, the rich, heterosexuals – I think you know this, even if you don’t believe in the validity of these hierarchies – they exist for the benefit of a few and to the detriment of most.

These social hierarchies are sustained across all levels of society – at the political level; at the institutional level such as the judiciary, education and health system; in relationships with family, peers, colleagues and at the individual level – those of us who consciously or unconsciously internalise beliefs and do things that uphold social hierarchies (including laughing at racist, homophobic or sexist jokes).

Masculinities represent one form of hierarchy. Some ways of behaving bring about honour, kudos, respect, prestige, heroic status, acceptance and recognition, whilst other ways of behaving lead to abuse, bullying, denigration, shaming, humiliation and ostracism.

Men’s violence against men is glamorised (thus violence is an honourable masculine practice). Men’s use, abuse and objectification of women is encouraged in some levels across the social ecology (images abound in the media that glamorise such masculine behaviour). Thus a man who controls his dating or live-in female partner is practicing an honourable form of masculinity.

Colonialists transported British laws that condoned men’s ownership and control over wives, into USA, Australia, New Zealand in the 1700s and 1800s. Remnants of this legal legacy impact our society today.

One of the strongest influences on men’s perpetration of intimate partner abuse is other men. Research shows men face constant badgering from their peers: “Who wears the pants in your house?” “What are you mate, are you under the thumb?” “Who makes the decisions in your house? Don’t let your woman control you!”

When I interviewed some men who had abused their partners, some said that over the years they had nearly always responded to such peer pressure by: 1. Pretending they were in control of their partners in order to save face in front of men; 2. Actually going on to control their partner; 3. Remaining silent in order to maintain relationships with male peers; 4. And as one man said, “Try to make sure our manhood stayed intact” by using verbal abuse or physical abuse.

It is rare for men to challenge other men who promote sexism, misogyny and abuse of women. There is a culture of silence and protection. It had been rare for the men I interviewed to stand up for a close caring relationship with their female partner. Yet underneath, many men want this.

Many male perpetrators of domestic and family violence and psychological abuse and control attempt to suppress vulnerabilities, signs of weakness, anxieties, any behaviours considered feminine (including showing care, love and empathy). Instead they attempt to climb the hierarchy of masculinities by behaving in violent, bullying and controlling ways in order to claim acceptance, recognition and heroic status in the eyes or real or imagined other men. MOST people do NOT bestow this kudos on men who abuse and control others. However, the reality is that in our contemporary society – you will observe multiple messages and practices that honour certain masculinities and dishonour others.

Individual men abuse individual women. But social structures (in practice and ideologies) support and encourage this. For intimate partner abuse and control to stop, support for social hierarchies of all kinds has to stop. It takes a whole community to stop power and control over others.

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Why do so many women lose custody battles?

by Clare Murphy PhD on March 23 2010

Why are so many women who are psychologically abused and controlled by male partners losing court battles for custody of their children?

There are two cruxes of men’s intimate partner abuse – gender and power.

The way that power operates in our society underpins domestic violence and family court judges’s decisions.

Whether men deliberately aim to gain and maintain power and control or not, this is the effect on women. If you look at the hierarchies of power and control in nearly every social setting, from kindergartens, workplaces, universities and governments, you will see that the misuse of power and control in an intimate relationship is not a symptom of that one relationship – but reflects a wider social problem.

When John Howard was Australia’s Prime Minister, his political party pulled the plug on the airing of challenges against psychological abuse and power and control in a national public multi-media campaign. After a three-year market research project, costing the Australian government at least $3.53 million, the government withdrew the launch of the campaign at the last minute. The campaign slogan was going to be “No Respect, No Relationship”, but a new campaign was quickly developed to replace this with the slogan “Violence Against Women, Australia Says No”. The function of the original campaign was to help people understand that psychologically controlling forms of abuse, as well as physical and sexual abuse, are inappropriate ways for men to relate to women. The new campaign only depicted images of physical violence and rape. The new slogan had no bearing on what men do, rather only stated the government’s position. The Prime Minister stated in the foreword to the booklet that went to all Australian homes, that the government’s role was not “to tell people how to live their lives; our personal relationships are private”.

The way that gender operates in our society underpins domestic violence and family court judges’s decisions.

When you examine gender hierarchies, men are generally considered superior to women. There are hierarchies amongst men that consider some men to be more superior than other men – for example white middle class heterosexual men are considered to have greater social kudos and are often given more respect than black working class homosexual men. People at the top of hierarchies are often talked about in positive terms and people at the bottom are often blamed for being lazy, bludging, sick, irresponsible, bad people. These are gross stereotypical generalisations – but nonetheless hold sway in the public mind – and the minds of court judges.

Domestic violence is usually discussed in terms of who is responsible and who is to blame. Even if the man did use physical or sexual violence, public attitudes tend towards justifying, excusing, minimising or hiding men’s violence against women. Psychological abuse and non-physical tactics of control are already hidden and often so subtle, even the woman victim is not able to articulate what’s going on.

Public attitudes often consider men’s control over female partners as men’s legitimate right to uphold their male position as head of the house – thereby what they say goes. Women are perceived as provoking abuse and are held responsible for preventing or stopping it. These attitudes, along with the myth that it take two-to-tango and that men’s abuse is a symptom of the relationship, play a role in family court judges’s decisions.

Many judges collude with male perpetrators – especially middle to upper class men – they may engage in banter about sport for instance and the judge may rule in favour of the man. I read an example of this and in the end the judge dismissed the woman’s need for protection. The man later murdered his ex-partner. This killing might have been prevented if it was not for the judge being influenced by the dominant idea that domestic violence only occurs amongst working class groups or amongst non-white races.

Public attitudes and the structures of gender and power in our society play a major role in why family court judges make particular rulings. This means many women lose custody of their children despite their male partner having engaged in years of ongoing systematic damaging tactics of power and control.

I have written a blog about possible ways women can represent themselves in court documents and verbally in court – ways that do not play into stereotypes of passive, pathetic, mad, female victims.

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Are women who live with abusive partners codependent?

by Clare Murphy PhD on July 8 2009

The other day I met a social worker/counsellor at a seminar. When she found out I research domestic violence she immediately told me that women who stay with violent men are codependent. She said such women were just the same as women who live with alcoholics. She was not interested in another view because she was adamant that she was right.

According to Codependents Anonymous World Fellowship, the following are six of a long list of characteristics of codependency:

She has difficulty identifying what she is feeling
She has difficulty making decisions
She harshly judges everything she thinks, says, or does – as never “good enough”
She does not perceive herself as a lovable or worthwhile person
She puts aside her own interests and hobbies in order to do what others want
She compromises her own values and integrity to avoid rejection, or others’ anger

I have difficulty with applying the ‘codependent’ label on a woman surviving in a relationship where her male partner abuses and controls her – for the following reasons …

Victims of intimate partner abuse are not codependent

Research with women shows that the above six characteristics are an effect of experiencing long-term, ongoing, relentless abuse and control. Many male perpetrators degrade and intimidate women into believing they deserve physical violence, sexual violation, verbal abuse, or other forms of punishment.

A tactic of abuse entails brainwashing women into believing they think and feel something other than they actually do. Many domestic violence perpetrators control the decision-making. Many make women wrong for making decisions, or denigrate any decisions made by women. Many male perpetrators enslave women, making demands that she be a more than perfect housekeeper, partner, parent or woman. No human can meet those kinds of demands, hence can never be ‘good enough’. Being degraded several times a day, or several times a week, month after month after month leads to feeling unlovable and unworthy.

Changing her values and integrity to avoid rejection or anger are often consciously chosen strategies of self-preservation used by abused and controlled women. Women I have interviewed would confront the man, avoid the man, lie to get some freedom, be completely honest to try to make him stop controlling them, become violent themselves, retaliate verbally, be passive or silent. Yet these women would secretly harbour knowledge of their true selves, whilst attempting a variety of behaviours – that went against their values – in order to avoid, or stop the abuse. These are not strategies of a codependent person.

It is dangerous to give the ‘codependent’ label to victims of intimate partner abuse

Codependence implies a lack of assertion. Whereas, if a woman asserts her opinions, needs, or rights to a controlling man, he could then engage in more or worse abuse to stamp out her assertiveness. It may, therefore, be dangerous for a psychologist to coach a woman to assertively stand up to her partner. Anyone wishing to help such a woman should respect her reasoning for not asserting herself.

Codependence implies women serve others to the detriment of flourishing to her full potential. Whereas, women who want to, or do, attend tertiary schooling to improve their skills and talents, can actually experience more, or worse, abuse by their partner because he wants to ensure she does not grow. For example, a man interviewed by Eva Lundgren (1995) said, “It makes her reconsider when I lock her up in a cupboard. Then she gets scared. Give her a sense of her total dependency, that’s the only way.” Therefore, it may be dangerous for a psychotherapist to encourage a woman to go against her partner’s demands by attending school. People in the helping professions need to listen to women’s views on how detrimental to her safety such a step might be.

Codependence implies women stay with violent and otherwise abusive men because they are attracted to being abused, like it, and want it. Whereas, in reality, women engage in multiple strategies to stop the abuse, to help the man change, to protect themselves and their children, or to avoid being abused in the first place. It may be dangerous for a counsellor to encourage a woman to leave. Social workers should honour women’s knowledge about what will, and will not, keep her safe, and that might mean staying with the abuser. It definitely means that multiple services are required to support the woman’s safety, such as police, safe housing, and financial support agencies.

Blaming the victim is tantamount to abusing her

Anyone who gives the ‘codependent’ label – to anyone who is living with a man who engages in a degrading pattern of psychological abuse and control – is blaming the victim and pathologising her. This label implies the victim has behaviours that pull the abuse out of the man. Yet, Jeff Hearn’s (1998) in-depth interviews with male perpetrators shows, for example, that some men threaten suicide as a way of ensuring women do not leave them, and other men threaten to harm or kill pets, children, family, friends and/or the woman herself.

Many perpetrators of intimate partner abuse consider themselves to be the King of the Castle, the Boss, the Master who must be obeyed at all costs. Such attitudes may creep in slowly over time entrapping and disempowering their female partners. These men may also be charming, caring, protective and kind at other times. This is confusing to women. Many women spend years attempting to understand and change the man’s abusive behaviours – they do not accept abuse as their lot.

The subject of this website is domestic violence which is different to mutual abuse – it is about one person’s campaign to control the other through whatever means they find works. For example, one of the men Cavanagh and her colleagues (2001) interviewed said he “was a bit of a tactician” and that he would “more or less try to intimidate her by going quiet and staring.” This kind of intentional behaviour aimed at subservience, and at lowering a woman’s sense of self-esteem, worth and personal integrity, is a hallmark of a systematic pattern over time. A pattern that entails the male abuser refusing to take responsibility for his behaviours and entails blaming the woman, confusing her, isolating her, making her wrong and demanding respect for his position as the man. Coping with such behaviours does not make a woman codependent.

Power and control over women is a social issue

This is not about a woman being codependent by reinforcing the man’s behaviour. The need that many men have to establish and maintain authority over women is a social issue – an issue of contemporary expectations of masculinity. My research with male perpetrators shows that this is a way for certain men to avoid feeling weak, vulnerable and feminine – as not being a so-called ‘real man’ is considered inferior. Controlling a female partner is a socially sanctioned way for the man to gain social kudos. Men who control their partners know what they’re doing. Many men provoke women to do something that the man then believes will justify hitting her. For instance, a man interviewed by Cavanagh and colleagues (2001) said he’d “do anything to get an excuse” to use violence against his partner.

In sum, any psychological issues female victims experience, that resemble characteristics deemed to be codependent, are a result of incessant abuse and control by their male partners, and are reinforced by social issues that support male authority in the home and male control and possessiveness over humans and animals in the home. Women’s coping strategies should be taken seriously. Blaming women revictimises them, further isolates them and deepens their growing sense of not being good enough.

References:

Cavanagh, Kate, Dobash, R. Emerson, Dobash, Russell P. & Lewis, Ruth. (2001). ‘Remedial work’: Men’s strategic responses to their violence against intimate female partners. Sociology, 35, 695-714.
Dear, Greg. (1997). Blaming the victim: Domestic violence and the codepenedency model. Retrieved June, 2003, from http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/proceedings/27/dear.pdf
Hearn, Jeff. (1998). The Violences of Men: How Men Talk About and How Agencies Respond to Men’s Violence to Women. London: Sage
Lundgren, Eva. (1995). Feminist Theory and Violent Empiricism. Aldershot, UK: Avebury.

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