Because domestic violence is a man’s problem
Patrick Stewart was five years old when his father returned from the second world war to wage his own war on his wife. On weekend nights, Stewart would lie in bed, alert, awaiting his father’s return from the pub, ready for his rage, braced to throw himself between his parents to protect his mother.
Two years ago, Luke and Ryan Hart’s father shot dead their mother, Claire, and their 19-year-old sister, Charlotte, before turning his gun on himself. This happened days after Charlotte and Claire had left the family home in Lincolnshire in a bid for freedom. Until then, Lance Hart had exercised total control over his family.
The three of them were on a panel organized by a domestic violence group called Refuge.
“Because domestic violence is a man’s problem,” Stewart tells me before the event. “We are the ones who are committing the offences, performing the cruel acts, controlling and denying. It’s the men.”
And yet – as always – the people listening are almost entirely women. Among the journalists, activists and supporters in the packed audience, I count five men.
And of the men who do attend, some are there to ask “what about the men??”
The US educator and speaker Jackson Katz has made this message* his life’s work. The author of The Macho Paradox, Katz teaches the “bystander approach”, in which communities are encouraged to take ownership of the problem of relationship abuse and men are encouraged to challenge sexist comments and unacceptable behaviour. His programme has been delivered in the military and at colleges, sports teams and businesses across the US.
*that men should not look away
Katz keeps wondering why more men don’t get involved.
One obstacle, Katz believes, is men’s fear of judgment from other men. “They worry that they’ll be seen as soft or insincere or ‘not a real man’.” Another is a lack of role models. “There haven’t been a whole lot of men in a public space who’ve spoken out,” he says.
If that first reason is true it’s pretty pathetic, and also telling. It’s pretty pathetic for men to fail to be in solidarity with women because other men might think they’re too gurrrrrly. It’s also telling that being thought too gurrrrrly is so aversive and so powerful.
This next bit is painful.
For the Harts, public speaking has been equally transformative. “For the first year after it happened, it was Groundhog Day,” says Ryan, an engineer who took a year off work after the murders. “Wake up, walk the dog, eat some food, go to bed. We were waiting for time to heal – and it doesn’t.
“Then Surrey police asked us to speak to them about coercive control. We were quite nervous, but found that speaking gave us a purpose. For our entire lives, Mum and Charlotte had been our purpose – freeing them from our father, moving them away and giving them a good life was all we wanted. When we lost them, each day became meaningless. Now we’re creating something in their name, living a life that would make them proud.”
Pause to pull ourselves together.
Before long, the brothers moved beyond recounting their personal experiences to addressing its causes. “To tackle domestic abuse, you need to look at masculinity,” says Luke. “Our father’s need for control came from his beliefs on what it means to be a man. I think most men – like me, before this happened – don’t realise how dangerous it is.”
This is where feminism can be so useful, provided it’s allowed to be feminism and not hijacked to be a cheering squad for Hannah Mounceys. Feminism can explain why setting up a polarity of powerful aggressive dominant people on the one hand and feeble submissive subordinate people on the other will of course foster violence in the doms toward the subs. It’s not just kink, it’s the whole damn social order.
I remember seeing a video of Patrick Stewart speaking very movingly and compellingly on this subject. I went to find it on YouTube, but it turns out there’s a bunch of videos — he’s been outspoken about it for quite some time.
Maybe if it was framed in terms of beating the shit out of abusers it would be more manly or something…
Domestic violence is a strange phenomenon, when people who claim to love people spend their life beating those same people to a pulp. I have been a victim myself, from a brother rather than a father or husband, and it’s strange looking back and thinking about some of the things I took for granted at the time.
My brother, a very large man from early adolescence, would beat his sisters and raise his hand in his mother’s direction. My father, a smallish man, would come in and lift his hand in my brother’s direction to stop his actions. Though my brother was just as capable of beating his father as he was capable of beating his mother and sisters, never said a word or lifted a fist in his direction. He stood there and let my dad floor him. Of course, while that stopped that particular incident, it made it worse later, as my brother vented his anger and shame at being decked on his helpless sisters.
I often wondered as a child why he let Dad deck him when he could have so easily killed Dad. I realized some years later that it was a different dynamic when it was male on male. He had respect for Dad as a man; he had no respect for any of us, though all of us were at least as accomplished and intelligent as my brother. He simply didn’t respect anyone who was not male.
I am fortunate; I was able to escape. My ex, bless his heart, pulled me out of that situation, found a better place for me, and helped me get the help I needed. (Okay, so he was a jerk himself later, but he never beat me, and I do still appreciate what he did then).
I haven’t spoken to my brother in many years. My family still pushes for a reconciliation. He’s family, after all. Family Schmamily.
Domestic violence is a man’s problem, but men who are committing it may not want to hear that, and men who are not committing it may be unaware of the extent to which women are threatened by domestic violence. My current husband doesn’t quite get it, because although he knows much of my history, he didn’t see it. He never saw me beaten and bruised, in tears and scared, and none of the women in his life were abused, so he can’t grasp it on a visceral level. I always think that’s the sort of man that needs to be in those meetings, because they don’t want to see women mistreated, but they haven’t become energized.
Blood Knight in Sour Armor @2: Actually, I suspect that’s part of the problem. A lot of men–even those who genuinely recognize the nature of the malady–believe that “beating the shit out of the abuser” is the only ‘acceptable’ form of intervention, for a man. Calling the cops MIGHT qualify, but that’s often not effective unless the abuse is so far gone that the cops are able to arrest him immediately. Actually talking to an abuser (or even more importantly, a proto-abuser who is showing signs but hasn’t fully committed to that course of action), is ‘touchy-feely’. Likewise, talking directly to the wife and getting her to a shelter or other care network is seen as underhanded and cowardly.
This is why Hollywood movies almost always portray interventions as a direct physical confrontation, often featuring a single punch that knocks the abuser out–even as it says, “Abuse bad”, it undercuts it by saying, “Proper violence is good” (not ‘acceptable’ or ‘a necessary evil’, mind you, but good and righteous). That such things are easy to portray as simple and effective adds to their narrative appeal, of course. Even an extended beat-down is maybe five minutes of screen time; showing someone being ushered through the system of shelters, police and aid agencies would take a 3- or 4-season TV show, with a lot of unhappy endings along the way.
There is one group that is able to get away with this. Members of the clergy are able to talk to an abuser without being seen as less male than they are. They are not exactly seen as a macho group to begin with, though, and frankly, too many of them advise the woman to stay with her abuser. And it tends to be ineffective, at least in my own experience.
I think looking at the ratio of women to men is missing the point.
Of course many women would want to attend something like this, as they are potential victims.
Men who are abusers aren’t going to go.
What’s the motivation for men who aren’t abusers to go to something like this? They’re not planning to abuse anyone.
If you held a conference on preventing bank robberies, you wouldn’t expect bank robbers to show up. You wouldn’t expect members of the general public to show up. You’d expect the victims, people who work at banks.
If you want to recruit men to help out, then you have to strongly pitch it that way. I think a lot of good men would be interested in helping. It’s not clear how this event was pitched, but look at the Refuge website:
https://www.refuge.org.uk
Call me sexist and/or judgmental, but that’s not going to reach men. The part of the site that goes into influencing society for the better is this:
https://www.refuge.org.uk/get-involved/sheroes-campaign/
Yes, the gender-neutral “hero” has been turned into “shero”. If they weren’t telling me they wanted more male participation I’d think they were actively discouraging it.
Skeletor, I think you are missing the point. I actually noted what you said in my post, but I find something unbalanced in much of this. It is not seen as unusual to have women attend “men’s” things, like sports and Nascar, and participate avidly and by choice in activities seen culturally as being “for men”. Women have for decades, even centuries to the extent they’ve been allowed, attended history classes, literature classes, etc, that were mostly by, about, and for men, because they featured only men. Men, on the other hand, do not do things in large numbers that are seen as “woman” culturally. Men are much less frequent playgoers, for instance, in spite of the fact that most of the plays are still by and about men, and women are often shut out of the field of playwriting and directing. Men do not attend women’s history classes, and many of them complain when women are included in standard history classes. Men do not enroll in women’s literature courses, and many of them complain when there is a move to add women writers to the curriculum.
The real problem is that too many men do not give a shit about women, and actively dislike having women included in a world they perceive as belonging to men. No, abusers are not going to attend these meetings, of course not. The big problem is that the non-abusers are not attending these things to see how they can help. So yes, the ratio of women to men is a problem, and men try to wiggle out of the accusation of not being willing to help by making arguments like the one you just made – the description of the event isn’t going to appeal to them. Heroes are renamed sheros. If the description were written differently, I suspect at most only a few more men would attend. The thing is, men do not see issues that women have to deal with as being about them, and they shrug it off. Women, on the other hand, having been raised in a world that treats us like shit if we don’t give most of our attention to other people, particularly male people, tend to get involved in things even if there is no immediate benefit to them.
So your argument, IMHO, actually proves the point being made.
Skeletor’s question is such a classic of oblivious justification of selfishness that it’s breathtaking. Why would men care about violence against women? I don’t know, why would anyone care about violence against anyone? Because of fellow-feeling, empathy, hope for a better world, dislike of cruelty and domination and violence? Maybe?
But also, in less general terms – men might care because they know some women, because they care about some women. Of course lots of men do manage to know women without caring about any of them, but Not All Men. Lots of men manage to extrapolate from women they care about to women in general, and some of those men even act on the caring.
Others just take the Skeletor approach and ask why they should care when they’re not perps themselves. Whatevs, bro.