Domestically Violent Men Describe the Benefits of Abusing Women and Children
This is how abusers describe the advantages they get, in their own words
Victims and survivors of domestic violence and abuse – and anyone who cares about them or works with them – often wonder why the abuser did what they did.
They wonder if the abuser’s abuse was:
(a) conscious and intentional, or
(b) an accidental (and therefore perhaps excusable) ‘mistake’.
This blog explores this question and ultimately suggests the following…
Answer: (a)
What they were doing was not accidental; it was highly purposeful.
Here is the key point.
Men usually use violence and abuse against women and children because it is FUNCTIONAL for them to do so.
It serves many functions in their lives and it brings them many benefits, benefits which, as we will see in this post, they can name and describe in depth.
Bringing these strategies to light helps to raise awareness and understanding of the harms that these abusers cause. Please read more on coercive control on this site, and also follow me on my social media channels.
Below, I tell a story about what might happen when a well-meaning sympathizer tries to understand domestically-abusive men. The remainder of the post explores:
… a court’s failed experiment based on a misconception that abusers lack communication skills
… how abusers were benefiting from abuse — I divide these benefits into 3 ‘dimensions’ and itemize each dimension in turn
… the link between abusers’ perceptions of their actions and our ‘ordinary’ assumptions about how relationships between men and women should work
Helping wife-beating men to ‘express their emotions’: a court’s failed experiment
Chuck Derry, an American anti-domestic violence campaigner based in Minnesota, ran court-mandated groups for men who beat their wives.
Derry was trying to help these abusive men to ‘express their emotions’, thinking that it would make them better husbands. However, this was a failed experiment.
What happened?
These abusive men revealed something eye-opening to Derry about their motivations for violence — and it completely changed Derry’s understanding of what needed to be done with these men.