ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Domestic violence is a pattern of coercive, abusive, and threatening behaviors aimed at gaining power and control over an intimate partner. These behaviors include cutting the victim off from family and friends, manipulation, sexual assaults, and using children as pawns. While physical assault may occur infrequently, other forms of abuse may occur daily. Domestic violence forces victim/survivors to make choices based on how their partner may harm them.

Domestic violence crosses all class, race, lifestyle and religious lines. The only clear distinction is gender. Though same sex battering occurs about as often as in other couples, 95% of the victims of domestic violence in heterosexual couples are women battered by male partners.

Alcohol and other drugs do not cause non-violent persons to become violent. Many people use or abuse those drugs without ever battering their partners, though substances are often given as an excuse for the battering. Though it doesn’t cause the abuse, the use of, or addiction to, substances may increase the lethality of domestic violence and can create additional barriers for victims trying to achieve safety. Chemical dependency treatment does not cure battering behavior.

There are many different sources of stress in our lives and people respond to stress in a wide variety of ways. Stress does not "cause" people to act in certain ways. They react to the stresses of their lives in ways they have observed as working in the past or anticipate will work in the present. Moreover, many episodes of domestic violence occur when the perpetrator is not emotionally charged or stressed. It is important to hold people responsible for the choices they make. Just as we would not excuse a robbery or a mugging by a stranger simply because the perpetrator was stressed, we cannot excuse batterers because of stress.

We all get angry, but very few of us batter. Some battering episodes occur when the perpetrator is not angry, and some occur when the perpetrator is very emotionally aroused. Often the tactics of control are used calmly, while displays of anger may be deliberately used to intimidate the victim. Anger-management programs have failed as a treatment for batterers. Rather than saying someone batters because they are angry, the reality is that batterers are often angry because they have unrealistic expectations of their partners. They get angry when their partner (or police or the courts) is unable or unwilling to comply with what they want. The underlying problem is an unrealistic sense of entitlement.

What perpetrators report as abusive behavior by the victim are often acts of resistance. Victims engage in strategies for survival that may include yelling, pushing, or hitting their attacker. Perpetrators respond with escalating tactics of control and violence. Some argue there is "mutual battering" when both individuals are using physical force. In cases where two people are using force, a determination can be made about who may is the primary physical aggressor and who is the victim. This assessment is based on descriptions of the event in question but also on the history of prior violence and threats in the relationship. Careful assessment reveals that one person is the aggressor while the victim's violence is in self-defense (e.g. she stabbed him as he was choking her), or occurred when the perpetrator's violence was more severe (e.g. his punching/choking versus her scratching). Sometimes the issue of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim can be clarified by asking which partner is terrified by the other's behavior.