I thought this comment was so wonderful I'm putting it here as a post all by itself. Thank you so much, whoever you are, for writing this heartfelt cry from one who grew up with an abusive father.
Read on...
"Staying for the kids?" – possibly the most damaging alternative. My mum made us stay with our abusive father and I would have preferred live on the streets. If you knew how incredibly DAMAGED I am and my sisters are from the abuse, you would know that "staying for the kids" is hardly an option.
My advice would be to find a refuge and go on Centrelink [Govt Welfare Office in Australia]. YES this may be "doing it tough" for a while and making some material sacrifices but its BETTER than putting your children through psychological trauma and forcing them to live hyper-vigilantly.
Talking from experience - when we left dad we were certainly poorer. But they were the happier years of my life. As opposed to the 10 years lived under the abuse of my own father.
If you are a mother - your instincts should call you to protect. Protect your children at any cost - not just for the sake of their safety but as a christian - for the sake of JUSTICE.
God requires us to "SEEK JUSTICE, love mercy and walk humbly with your God" Micah 6:8
Please consider seeking justice for your own children. I know its hard and you will certainly cop a lot of persecution from others, even christians as they dont understand. But remember also that it is not our requirement to "fear man" and care what others think of us. Rather, we must do what we feel God's will is.
God asked Abraham to offer his own son as a sacrifice and although others would call this murder! Abraham was willing to trust God and be obedient to him.
PLEASE be obedient to God and be his ambassadors of Justice. As the carer of your children you have a responsibility to show them what is right. By remaining in your abusive households and allowing them to witness and experience abuse, you are showing them that "this is okay behaviour". This is NOT justice. And that is NOT what God intends for us. I pray that you come to understand the urgency of protecting your children from further harm. And that you dont wait twenty years and see the sad reality of what it has done to your own when they have grown up as damaged adults.
I'm not opening the comments facility on this post here, because I've also posted it over at A Cry For Justice. If you want to comment, head on over there and make your comment. Then we can all have one conversation, rather than two separate ones.
May 4, 2012
Apr 23, 2012
Lundy Bancroft says the right outlook is outrage
Lundy Bancroft is considered one of the world's experts on domestic abuse.
Here is a transcript of his video presentation "Domestic Violence in Popular Culture" Part 2. It has been transcribed and published here with Lundy's permission.
You can watch the video here: Lundy Bancroft pt2 on DV in Popular Culture
Lundy says:
Is
this a male on female crime?
The answer is
yes;
it is overwhelmingly a male on female crime. Certainly there are
lesbian batterers who are abusing their female partners; there are
gay male batterers who are abusing their male partners. But the
people who are dying are not men who are being abused by women. I
certainly know couples where the man is the nice guy and the woman is
the not-nice person. It has nothing to do with who is nice people or
who's not nice people. It's not that image of the world where somehow
men are bad and women are good. But it's about tyranny and it's about
fear and intimidation and it's about the belief that you have the
right
to create fear and intimidation, and that you can count on other
people to back you up.
And when you really look at all those factors,
how many women are going to be able to create that electrified,
charged atmosphere of intimidation and degradation over a man, and
get that electrified, charged atmosphere of intimidation and
degradation that makes domestic violence what it is?
I
think it's very important to say this always in the modern world
because the abusers have been able to create all this [hand gesture
suggesting “misinformation”] … people are apologetic
now about referring to this as a male on female crime. And we need to
stop apologising for that. That's overwhelmingly what it is: you've
got to call things what they are. It's very important as we look at
some of this media where you get some specific messages suggesting
that it's a roughly equal crime, a roughly equal problem.
You
know, all we have to do is go through our own common sense and our
own experience. Ask women that you know. “How many of you have ever
been involved with a guy that you ended up really really scared of?”
And you're going to find actually that almost every woman has at
least one experience of that somewhere in her life. And you're going
to find very few men that have any experience of having lived with
someone that they were really really scared of. They may have lived
with some people that none of us would like very much, but that's
really different from living with someone who you have to spend a lot
of your time wondering what the hell they're going to do, and go to
sleep wondering whether he might kill you, and wondering whether your
kids are going to be okay, and so forth.
I
want us to look very carefully and directly at certain questions and
work our way through conclusion and work our way through declaring...
And
I also want to say I don't believe in a dispassionate, academic way
of thinking about domestic violence. And I've done some academic
writing and I believe in that when it's the right place for it. The
right outlook is outrage – about what's being done to women.
Now,
I can get away with outrage about what's being done to women, because
I'm a man! Women, unfortunately, get slammed for being outraged
about male violence.
And I'm specialising a lot these days in the
custody of women, where women are supposed to come into court after
being beaten, raped, demeaned, degraded, impoverished and all that
this man has done to the quality of their lie, and they're not
supposed to be mad about it! And in fact if they are
mad about it, that's going to be to the court to raise very serious
questions about whether they are an appropriate custodial parents for
their children.
So
I am going to continue, and I hope that everyone will join me in
continuing to speak with outrage, and in supporting people's rights
to be outraged and specifically also in supporting women's
right to be outraged about want abusers are doing
to women, and what they're doing to the quality of life for all of
us.
And
in one of my presentations I go through what abusers are costing us
in terms of injury
to women, what they're costing us in injury to children, what they're
costing us in mental health damage and mental health expenses, what
they're costing us in health care and how that's adding to our health
care bills, how much of our community law enforcement costs that
abusers are the cause of because abusers are the root of, according
to various studies, close to 30% of all police calls. So consider
abusers as responsible for 30% of law enforcement, prosecution, jail
and everything. And on and on and on. I have a whole rap about it.
So
our outrage should go beyond what specific abusers are doing to
specific women and to specific children. It should also be about how
we're doing economically in our communities, how safe we can feel in
our communities, how much we can trust each other, how our court
system works, how many lies are around (they work very very hard to
spread lies) – they're at the root at a lot of the problems that we
have.
Before
we start looking at media influences, I want to talk a little bit
about the abuser mentality, because you can see so much in what we
see and listen when we go through the examples from media about the
abuser mentality.
We
have an image in our society of an abuser as someone who is a
tortured, out of control individual who is tormented and his violence
towards women is a product of his pain. And then that of course, that
view, I shouldn’t say of course, that view lends itself very
easily, though we don’t notice it and that’s what I shouldn’t
say of course, but it actually lends itself very easily then to
starting to look for the ways that the woman is to blame because if
she’s doing this because of how much pain he’s in, well she’s
probably one of the main people causing him pain, right? Anyone who’s
ever been in a partner relationship, at some point in their life, can
tell you that once you’re in a partner relationship, one of the
people who can cause you the most pain is your partner. So if his
pain is the problem, then naturally we’re going to start looking at
her and looking at the pain that she is causing him so we have
slipped right down the slope into the victim blaming as soon as we
start to get caught up in his pain as a supposed cause of his
problems.
What
I’ve discovered from my years of working with abusers is that my
clients didn’t turn out to be in any special pain They certainly
didn’t look to me like they were in any more pain than non-abusive
men. I’ve certainly known plenty of non-abusive men who have lived
very painful lives for all kinds of reasons and I’ve had a lot of
clients who were absolutely top-dog, I mean everything was going
great for them, they were making lots of money, they were popular,
everyone liked them, except us and the women who had to live with
them of course, and often their children.
The
abuser works this stuff, to some extent consciously, to some extent
unconsciously, but it doesn’t really matter, in fact whether it is
conscious or unconscious, the point is he works this stuff. He works
getting people to feel sorry for him, he works playing himself as a
very tormented individual, and once he has he has got you in there,
he works quickly into getting you to think about her as the cause of
his torment. And we’ll see that again in one of the snippets, in one
of the media selections we’ll be looking at today.
So
if it’s not about his inner pain, what’s it about?
It’s about
his mentality.
The abuser’s problem is actually not very much
located in his feeling world. Psychologically, there’s been some
really interesting research that’s been done particularly by a
researcher named Ed Gondolf – psychologically he turns out not to be very different from
non-abusers, minor differences but not very much, he’s much more
different in his values and attitudes, his mentality.
A
very interesting study was done that looked at boys of batterers and
their process of growing up to become abusers themselves, because a
lot of them grow up to become abusers of women themselves, and two
different studies, well actually there’s a third, that have
compared: Is it the way these boys are wounded
growing up that’s leading them to become batterers, or is the way
that they’re being indoctrinated?
And all three of these studies
came to the conclusion that the emotional effects didn’t turn out
to be statistically to be good explanations of why they became
perpetrators. The emotional effects caused all kinds of other
problems, it’s not that they didn’t cause serious problems, they
did, but they didn’t cause out to be what causes perpetration in
the next generation, when they reach adulthood, it’s the
indoctrination. In other words, what all three of these studies have
found is that boys who don’t buy into the abuser’s ways of
thinking, who don’t look down on women, who don’t become really
oriented towards domination, who aren’t contemptuous, who aren’t
superior, who don’t make all kinds of excuses for their violence,
actually interestingly, don’t turn out to have any higher rate of
becoming an abuser than boys who grew up in non-violent homes.
In
other words, you growing up around a batterer does not increase your
chance of becoming a batterer yourself except to the extent that you
take on your dad’s mentality.
So
the problem is in his mind, not his heart.
And I’m going to give you
a four minute version of what’s normally a two hour discussion but
the key points in his mentality are:
He
believes in his right to rule, not necessarily in all fronts of his
life but when it comes to a partner, he believes in his right to
rule. He’s going to control her in all kinds of ways that usually
don’t involve violence and this is one of the points that I think
is important to get, you don’t have to use direct physical
intimidation a lot. If you use it once in a while, that’s enough to
keep people really cautious around you and then you can control them
in all kinds of other ways. So day to day life with an abuser is not
usually about outright violence or outright rape, it’s usually
about being demeaning, being degraded, being told what you can do,
being told what you can’t do, having your self-confidence
undermined, being made to feel stupid and so forth.
A huge
percentage of my clients, and I didn’t keep statistics of this but
the stories were just there over and over and over again during the
years I was working with abusers, they were using the woman’s
workplace in one way or another as part of the venue for his abuse.
I
learned about this from the women but sometimes my clients would
directly admit it, constant phone calls, calling her five, ten
fifteen times a day at work, making it very hard for her to get any
work done and also making her start to have a lot of annoyance and
upset of the part of her employer because their irritation at all of
these phone calls is going towards her. Showing up unexpectedly at
work to make her feel unsafe, injuring her in ways that were causing
her to miss work. Causing her so much emotional turmoil through
tearing her down that she couldn’t concentrate at work, couldn’t
get much done. Becoming particularly difficult if she were starting
to do well at work, in other words, he liked it when she was bringing
in money, but he doesn’t like it if her works starts to be a source
of a lot of pride, or it starts to look like she is going to really
advance, or it might help her to become independent, cause that could
mean independent of him,
so he gets particularly disruptive in a way, the better she’s
doing, the more it’s really starting to go somewhere. And I could
give you lots of other examples. The workplace is so often an
important aspect of how he’s going after her and how he’s
affecting her.
The
abuser really sees himself as superior to his partner and he believes
he is entitled to a relationship that works completely on his terms
and that he’s entitled to all kinds of double standards. There’s
a completely different set of rules [for him as compared to her].
end of transcript.
Lundy's blog is Healing and Hope and at lundybancroft.com you'll find many resources.
Mar 4, 2012
How to Effect Change?
On Jeff Crippen's post about John MacArthur's teaching that endangers victims of domestic abuse an anonymous survivor has written:
"I am wondering why more people don’t write to or about such authors [like John MacArthur], in an effort to raise the awareness about what abuse is and how such teachings are dangerous. I know Natalie Collins wrote an open letter about Stormie Omartian’s Praying Wife book. I think if many of us do it, and obviously, avoid slander or hostility, it should have an effect."
I can only agree wholeheartedly. If people keep writing and talking about how the evangelical church DOESN'T GET IT about domestic abuse, and is doing MAJOR HARM through its ignorance, and we keep spreading the word on every media we can think of, through all our networks, there will develop a groundswell that these Big Shot Teachers will no longer be able to ignore.
So far they’ve pretty much ignored us, but they can’t forever as more and more voices join the chorus. It seems to me that since January when I connected with others who are blogging and writing passionately on this issue, my own thinking has been stimulated and my zeal has intensified because I’m feeling less alone in this mighty battle. That’s the kind of dynamic that can become a snowball rolling down the hill, growing bigger all the time.
I’m busy with lots of writing projects already, but I’m sure there are others who can write critiques of the various Horrendous Teachings which are so diabolically bad for abuse victims. Pick the book, article or video-teaching that riled you most, and go for it!
If you want suggestions about articles and things to critique, I’m happy to provide some as I have quite a few things in my “would love to critique that” basket that I won’t be able to get to for ages.
Feb 26, 2012
"I am abused". Those words are so hard to say.
Every survivor of abuse will identify with those words. Saying "I am abused" means passing through a membrane into a whole new reality. In this new world everything is different, scary, confronting...
- "I'm one of those women - a victim of abuse!"
- I'm afraid I'll be ostracised, judged, disbelieved, shunned... [You name it]
Like the surface tension on the skin of water, or the surface tension on a soap bubble, there is a tension at that membrane. Will the victim pass through it and acknowledge "Yes, I am abused." Or will she shy away to avoid going through into that unknown world where everything will (at first) seem upside down, inside out and back to front?
Only when she passed through the membrane and has educated herself more about abuse will she realise that the world that was actually upside down, inside out and back to front, was the world the abuser imposed on her.
Once she's learned to breathe the air in the new world, and smell the flowers and fruit (and maybe even grow some) she realises that this new world is actually the place where things are upright, right side out, and facing forwards.
Dear reader, whether you're approaching that membrane, newly transitioned, or have been across for years, or whether you just know someone on that journey, I'd love you to share what it's been like for you.
And if you've gone through the membrane, what was the thing that precipitated you going through it? What was the thing that overcame the surface tension?
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We say some people are ‘accident-prone’ when they lack the spatial relations or cognitive or mobility skills to avoid accidents. But an abuser doesn’t lack the skills of respectful relating: he possesses those skills in abundance when it comes to enlisting allies in the church. He CHOOSES to relate disrespectfully and abusively to his target victim. So we should call it that, not excuse him with weasel words like ‘violence-prone’.
“[if you] are merely a weary wife who is fed up with a cantankerous or disagreeable husband–”
Did you catch that word “merely”? How belittling! Clearly MacArthur doesn’t understand that because abuse is a pattern of conduct designed to exercise power and control over the victim, every victim will inevitably end up feeling incredibly weary and exhausted, and will be fed up. MacArthur never says that weariness and fed up-ness can be red flags for abuse, so victims of abuse who read his words will stay longer in the fog, because they not been helped to identify whether they are Victims of Abuse.
Many survivors have said, “He didn’t hit me often. He didn’t have to. Fear is a powerful weapon.” And others say, “He never hit me. He didn’t have to. Fear is a powerful weapon.”