October 20, 2014 • 47 mins
Intimate partner violence, or domestic violence, accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime in the United States. Cristen and Caroline uncover the cycle of domestic violence and manipulation that keeps female and male victims from leaving their partners and the long-term health impacts of this epidemic of abuse.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we're gonna be talking about
domestic violence. So first just want to issue a trigger
warning that we will be addressing things including emotional, physical,
(00:25):
and sexual violence within relationships. But this is such an
important topic for us to cover, and unfortunately it is
a newsworthy item, but it's also something that's happening every
single day in relationships, and we've never really talked about
(00:46):
domestic violence before on the podcast. And partially we're talking
about this because of the incident that happened between NFL
player Ray Rice and his then fiancee, Jenney Palmer Um,
in which a video surfaced of Rice dragging Palmer unconscious
out of an elevator Um. But not just the incident itself,
but also the huge conversation that came up in the
(01:08):
media around that incident Um and what sort of rose
to the surface in all of this was sort of
a a general cry from people in the media just
demanding to know why Gene Palmer now Jennet Palmer Rice
would stay in the relationship, and there seemed to be
(01:28):
like a huge misunderstanding about domestic violence in general and
victims of domestic violence in particular. So we definitely wanted
to address a lot of these issues. And there were
also conversations too that came up about it in terms
of men as victims of domestic violence as well, because
in that elevator video, Jenne does strike ray Rice at
(01:50):
one point, and we're not going to get into the
details of the video, um all of us to say,
there is a lot to talk about, because if there
is anything that all of these conversations about the NFL
and issues of domestic violence have brought to the surface
is the fact that there's a lot of misunderstanding about
(02:10):
domestic violence. So first of all, I just want to
establish the fact of how common it is and why
it can be problematic to just frame the conversation surrounding
the NFL as a scandal, as though it's just one
isolated incident or a few incidents that have happened. Because
in the United States, more than one in three women
(02:33):
and more than one in four men have experienced rape,
physical violence, and or stalking by an intimate partner in
their lifetime right, And so it's definitely worth throwing out
those numbers because I feel like, you know, it's it's
just not something that's talked about. I mean, it's talked
about in terms of victims rights and things like that
(02:53):
and criminal prosecution, and you do hear about it in
the news sometimes, especially if it's someone famous, like an
NFL player, But in general, domestic violence is hugely under reported.
This is coming from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
They reported that only about a quarter of all physical assaults,
about a fifth of all rapes, and about half of
all stockings perpetuated against women by intimate partners are reported
(03:17):
to police. And that's another thing about domestic violence too,
is that it seems like we only hear about it
and we only begin talking about it more openly after
the fact. So let's talk about what happens before the fact.
Let's talk about risk factors. And a lot of this
is coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
which has begun collecting data and actually issued its first
(03:40):
major report on domestic violence in the US in two
thousand and ten. So just some of the risk factors
involved with people who are victims and perpetuators of domestic
violence include things like low self esteem, low income, young age.
Actually women in their early twenties from twenty to twenty
(04:01):
five are the likeliest victims of domestic violence. There are
issues such as heavy alcohol and drug use, depression, obviously
aggressive behavior in your youth, having few friends, being socially isolated, right,
and a big one is being a victim of physical
or psychological abuse previously in your life that is consistently
(04:23):
one of the strongest predictors of perpetration of domestic violence,
but also experiencing poor parenting or strong physical discipline as
a child. And there are risk factors as well just
within the relationship dynamics, such as marital conflicts or instability.
There might be issues of dominance and imbalance of power
(04:45):
in relationships to where you have one partner who is
heavily and abusively dominant over the other. Economic stress is
something that often comes up with this as well, just
adding to the conflict and instability within relationship ships and
also unhealthy family relationships and interactions. There's definitely a strong
(05:06):
social component to it as well, in terms of either
the unstable relationships surrounding you or just blatant isolation. Right
And if we move outward a little bit, there are
definitely strong community and larger societal factors that affect domestic
violence as well. Um, things like poverty and issues associated
(05:27):
with poverty such as overcrowding, but also issues like having
low social capital, a lack of institutions and connections in
your community that can support you and your family, UM,
and just weak community sanctions against intimate partner violence. So basically,
if your neighbors or family or friends are unwilling or
unable to step in when they witness violence happening. And
(05:48):
there's also the big issue of traditional gender norms. UM.
This issue of violent masculinity in particular is something that
researchers look into a lot, so particularly in heterosexual relationships,
which and we'll get into this more. A lot of
domestic violence research is focused in a very heteronormative framework,
(06:10):
usually with the hyperdominant male partner having very traditional gender beliefs,
for instance, women needing to stay at home, not into
the workforce, being submissive sort of men being the heads
of the household, but to an abusive and potentially violent extent.
And if we're looking at the different types of violent
(06:34):
acts that constitute intimate partner or in domestic violence. Those
include physical violence, sexual violence, threats of physical or sexual violence, stalking,
and psychological aggression by a current or former intimate partner.
And when you look at the gender divide in terms
of abuse threatened or suffered, women are likelier to experience
(06:57):
multiple forms of abuse. Um Among victims of intimate partner violence,
more than one in three women experienced multiple forms of rape, stalking,
or physical violence, and nine two point one percent of
male victims of domestic violence experienced physical violence alone. And
if we just look at sexual violence, nearly one in
(07:19):
ten women has been raped by an intimate partner in
her lifetime. And when it comes to sexual violence other
than rape, meaning vaginal penetration, you know, against your consent,
an estimated sixteen point nine percent of women and eight
percent of men have experienced it at some point in
their lifetime. And we're getting into all of these details
(07:42):
in terms of the different types of violence that can occur,
because I think it's important to understand just how what
all constitutes domestic violence, because I think that a lot
of times we just assume that it's limited to someone
punching some someone else, right, But there's so much more
to it than that. Yeah, So if you look at
(08:03):
severe physical violence, for instance by an intimate partner, one
in four women and one in seven men have suffered
severe physical violence. But if you look at stalking, for instance,
which is not something that we stereotypically associate with domestic violence,
ten point seven percent of women and two point one
percent of men have experienced stalking. And psychological aggression is
(08:25):
a huge factor of this and definitely one that tends
to be left out of our you know, sort of
common framework of domestic violence of thinking of it as
something that is very physical, but there's definitely the psychological
aspect to it as well as over forty percent of
both men and women have experienced that kind of emotional
(08:47):
and psychological abuse. And getting back to the age factor,
most of this abuse first takes place before age, right,
and sort of driving home how pervasive domestic violence intimate
partner violence is. Intimate partner violence accounts for fift of
(09:08):
all violent crime in this country, and the US has
the highest rate of intimate partner homicide among the world's
wealthiest twenty five countries. That amounts to over sixteen thousand.
That's actually six hundred homicides every year because of intimate
partner violence, and when it comes to female homicides in
(09:28):
the US, almost a third of those were killed by
an intimate partner, and three point one percent of male
homicides in the US were committed by a female intimate partner.
And again that in those statistics are clearly focusing on
heterosexual relationships, but there has been more emerging data and
(09:52):
research and also outreach towards the LGBT community because they're
not immune from domestic violence at as well. It's important
to acknowledge that violence does happen within these relationships because
the fact that are domestic violence framework and resources too
are often focused on straight couples. That means that there
(10:14):
tend to be a lot of limited resources for LGBT victims,
especially transgender victims of violence. Right. And so this whole
framework that Christens talking about is just the idea of
the woman being the battered party and the man being
the abuser, and that tends to make it hard for
either one to find help in a same sex relationship
(10:37):
because they're often faced with attitudes from law enforcement or
other community services that basically, if you're two guys, just
work it out, just fight and get it over with,
or if you're two women, well two women don't hit
each other exactly. And to that point, in a two
thousand thirteen CDC report, they said, quote little is known
(10:57):
about the national prevalence of intimate partner violence, sexual violence,
and stalking among lesbian, gay, and bisexual men and women
in the United States. But from the data they have
collected so far, it's clear that more research needs to
be done into certain kinds of relationship dynamics, because, for instance,
bisexuals have higher rates of experiencing domestic violence. Um of them,
(11:23):
at least, according to data from the CDC, have been
with a violent partner, as opposed to forty percent of
lesbian women and forty percent of straight women. When it
comes to men, for bisexual men that number was forty
seven percent, and for gay men it was and for
straight men. So statistically there is a bit of a hierarchy.
(11:47):
But again, in the CDC's own words, little is still
known about what exactly is going on within those communities,
because it's only been within the past few years that
they've even started paying closer attention to it, right, And
one strong piece of evidence that we can see that
same sex couples by sexual couples are getting more attention
in this arena. Is when President Obama resigned the Violence
(12:11):
Against Women Act, it did include a section about same
sex couples offering protection. But we do, I think, have
a long way to go, because in terms of lesbian couples,
for instance, both women could end up in a shelter.
For instance, you know, one woman could be abused and
could be seeking help and shelter, whereas the other woman
(12:34):
could lie and say that she was also abused and
end up infiltrating the same the same shelter. And when
it comes to shelters, that finding that kind of resource.
I mean, first of all, beds are scarce in shelters
to begin with, but for transgender victims of domestic violence,
finding a shelter that will accept them can be even
(12:56):
more challenging because some of them are not going to
be as opening and welcome to transgender victims because of
rules that they might have in place, or they might
be religious organizations that might not be so keen on that.
So there's definitely more work that needs to be done
in that regard. But we also need to to talk
(13:18):
about women, not only as victims in need of shelter
and resources. But we also need to talk about women
as abusers. Yeah, and part of the problem is that, um,
if a woman is the perpetrator of violence, um, it
tends to be not even just ignored, but laughed off,
(13:39):
saying you know, oh well, you obviously can't handle your woman,
you know, if if you're letting her do this to you.
And this was shown to be the case in an experiment.
This happened in London. This was Mankind's hashtag violence is
Violence project where they showed and they caught on camera
a man and shoving a woman, and people's reactions around
(14:03):
them were like they immediately stepped in and said, what
are you doing? What are you thinking? Stop hurting her.
When the tables were turned and they had their actress
shoved the actor and get violent with him and he
pulled his hair and shoved him into a fence and whatever.
People were just kind of laughing about it, which only
serves to reinforce those heteronormative, like hyper masculine gender roles
(14:30):
of man. You need to be, you know, taking care
of your woman. If you can't keep her in line,
then what's wrong with you? I mean those are the same,
that's the same kind of thinking that feeds into man
on woman domestic violence. But I think it's too when
you start googling around for statistics, for instance, on women
as abusers men as victims of domestic violence. Again sticking
(14:53):
within this heteronormative framework, what comes up a lot are
arguments made for pticularly by self labeled men's rights activists,
that the societal deck is stacked against men because domestic
violence does happen to men, but a lot of the
(15:16):
resources out there are clearly geared toward women because feminists
from the get go in the seventies one second way
feminism really started kicking up, feminists made domestic violence one
of their major platforms. And so there are these arguments
to come up a lot that that that's sort of
(15:36):
a conspiracy in a way to keep men down and
frames domestic violence assistance and resources as a zero sum game,
that men need more attention, and that women are really
just trying to take away more of men's rights. And
I don't want to get deep into that, but I
(15:58):
just wanted to acknowledge that because it is something that
will come up very quickly in your Google results when
you start looking for that, UM. But the truth of
the matter is, when you start looking into those dynamics
of female perpetrated domestic violence, they're do tend to be
different kinds of relationship factors involved, which are also very
(16:23):
important to understand, right exactly, Yeah, it is not all
black and white, and it's important to look at what's
going on behind the statistics. And so we looked at
a report by Michael S. Kimmel, who's a sociology professor
at sunny Stony Brook in two thousand one UM that
talked about how much of woman on man violence is
(16:44):
committed in self defense and actually ends up putting that
woman at greater risk of injury herself because she is
far likelier to end up getting hurt if the man retaliates.
And this is this really ties into what was going
on with the Ray Rice Janet Palmer Rice incident, with
a lot of people in the media and a lot
(17:06):
of people in the sports community saying, oh, well, Janet
hit Ray first, he retaliated, But a lot of that
has to do with that if you are a victim
with an abuser and you're trying to defend yourself, things
can spiral out of control. Well, and when you are,
(17:27):
I mean just that physical imbalance in terms of her
physical strengths, is his physical strength. If she hits him,
his retaliation to her clearly is going to be far
more severe just by sheer fact of muscle mass. Right,
and um, Women's violence towards men is certainly different from
(17:49):
that of men committed against women because of that whole
weight and strength factor. It is far less injurious and
far less likely to be motivated by attempts to dominate
or terrorists the partner because you know, Kristen mentioned earlier
that whole stereotypical gender dominance issue in or that exists
(18:09):
in a relationship, and so a woman is not likely
to be acting from a place of domination. Yeah. And
again this is not to minimize men being victims of
domestic violence. Again, I mean, I think the psychological and
emotional abuse is a huge factor to this. It was well,
because when it comes to that kind of abuse, there
(18:30):
is gender parity, unfortunately, just overtent in fact of both
men and women have experienced that. And again one in
seven men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner.
So this isn't to say or try to erase those
statistics or negate the issues you know that men are facing,
(18:52):
and negate the fact that there are some women who
are simply out and out blatant abusers. Right, some women
are violent and are trying to terrorize their partners. But
I think it's important to talk about the nuances within that,
especially because there was so much hue and cry, unfortunately
when it came to that Ray Rice video of people saying, well,
(19:14):
she hit him first, and like you said, Caroline, it's
not again and again and again. It's important to remember
that it's not all black and white. It's never black
and white in these kinds of situations, right, exactly, And um,
all of this is backed up by a meta analysis
from October two thousand eight and the journal Trauma, Violence
and Abuse that found that female perpetrated domestic violence is
(19:36):
likeliest to take the form of emotional abuse. And I'm wondering,
just from my own personal perspective, if that's not the
case simply because of weight and strength differences, if that's
just not the weapon that women have at their disposal.
I mean, I have a guy friend who was the
victim of extreme emotional and psychological abuse by a female partner.
(19:57):
And you know, I would certainly never want to downplay
the suffering that he went through, but you know, it's
not that he was hit or be beaten or experienced
physical violence necessarily at her hand. Well, and one thing
that I read in prepping for this podcast too was
that the psychological aggression and abuse perpetrated by women might
(20:22):
be more of the the go to form of it too,
because women tend to be more socialized. I mean, just
think about it in terms of our female adolescent relationships,
Like the type of abuse that tends to happen is
the more socialized kind of bullying. Girls usually don't aren't
as likely to say fist fight as they are too
(20:43):
just really enact like psychological warfare, so nasty notes and
talking behind backs instead of a fist fight in the cafeteria. Well,
and I think too that the prevalence of that psychological
and emotional abuse does add another layer of news to
the lack of resources for men who are in those
(21:04):
kinds of abusive relationships because there is no physical evidence.
And it is worth noting that a lot of these
patterns of intimate partner violence among women as perpetrators often
start at an early age, but the data do suggests
that girls who perpetrate intimate partner violence may themselves experience
(21:25):
more violent or frequent intimate partner violence victimization. Now, when
it comes to the portrayal of women as the perpetrators,
there was a study about this that came out in
September twelve and the journal Violence against Women and talked
about how women are three times likelier than men to
be arrested when they were construed as the perpetrator. And
(21:48):
that might possibly be because typically our again our framework
is of the male abuser and the female victim. And
when they talked to about in this paper is how
because of that gendered framework, which goes back in along
too for a long time in history, that women in
(22:12):
these situations are usually portrayed in these kinds of court
cases as pathological perpetuators of violence, whereas men are often
portrayed if if they are, you know, the abusers, they
are then portrayed as the batterers. Because it's almost as
if it's such a violation of this like nastiest kind
(22:35):
of gender norm, if you want to even call it that,
that there's even a separate kind of language to describe
the woman as the abuser, right, and researchers Ellen Pens
and Shamina Dasta Skupta talk a lot about this whole division,
this language division, and the meaning behind it, and they
talk about how the word itself battering signifies a pattern
(22:56):
of things like coercive control and intimidation and oppressure, and
that women suffer at the hands of men in their lives,
whereas the idea of pathological violence comes from, well, the
woman is doing it because she's abusing substances, she's suffering
a mental illness or a physical disorder, maybe she has
neurological damage, and then uses physical violence against others, including
(23:19):
intimate partners. And they write it is exceptional for the
woman to achieve the kind of dominance over her male
partner that characterizes battering. And so we see these gender
divides even in the very language that we use, whether
it's medically or in the legal system, to describe violence
perpetrated against men versus women. Well and again and again
(23:41):
and again too. What keeps coming to my mind is
how so much of this subconscious or at least unconscious
framing and language that's used again does such a disservice
to men because it constantly assumes that they need no
sort of psychological background or impetus is for being violent.
(24:02):
It's simply within their natures, whereas women usually need some
you know, when this happens, people are looking for like, oh, well,
what what could be the issue? Why, what could possibly
provoke her to do this? And that's part of the
reason why there's actually this term battered women's syndrome, which
is a defense developed in the mid nineteen seventies by
(24:24):
Dr Leonor Walker to help combat the sex bias present
in criminal law, particularly in the case of women killing
their male intimate partners um who had been I mean,
it was largely cases of self defense when it comes
to this battered women's syndrome. And there is a paper
(24:46):
that we found about this in the American Bar Association
talking about how in these cases if a woman who
had been previously abused by her partner at one point
like kills her partner, there like they needed some kind
of again, some kind of like psychological explanation for what
was going on, right, And I mean, I think it's
(25:08):
crazy to even think of a time when the law
did not even recognize this, this idea of self defense
and an abusive intimate partner relationship. Well because for a
long time, the law didn't even acknowledge or feel like
it was its place to step into domestic violence to
begin with. But it's interesting in this In this paper,
(25:29):
it also talks about how the fact that this thing
is called a syndrome, battered Women's syndrome, definitely pathologizes victimhood.
And so it led to yes, a lot of women,
you know, not being sent to prison for murdering their abusers,
but also being excused simply by the for the idea
(25:51):
that they are irrational or incapacitated. But the authors of
the paper certainly do not argue that we should do
away with this idea. This to into this concept, we
obviously still need an idea of self defense, whether it's
in an intimate partner relationship or not. Right, right, And
I mean and again and again, I feel like I'm
(26:11):
just repeating myself so many times in this episode, because
it's yet another layer of gray within all of it. Right,
and when we look at the battered Women's syndrome issue,
this defense and acting women acting in self defense and
killing their abuser. This is something that Michael S. Kimmel
also talked about. He's a sociology professor that we mentioned earlier,
(26:33):
and he wrote in his two thousand one report that
men actually benefit from efforts to reduce male violence against women.
He wrote that it turns out that efforts to protect
women in the US have had the effect of reducing
the murder rate of men by their partners by almost
seventy percent over the past twenty four years. So if
(26:55):
you protect women, you're also protecting men. Imagine that well,
And that's another reason why domestic violence resources and assistance
and legal protections should not be framed as some kind
of zero sum game, because there you know clearly there
are benefits to it that it's not just helping women.
(27:18):
Do there need to be more resources out there for
men as victims of domestic violence. Absolutely. Do there need
to be more resources out there for LGBT victims of
domestic violence. Absolutely, But again it seems like taking resources
away from straight women is not going to help anyone
in the long run. Right, So we now need to
(27:40):
talk about, though, what happens when women don't seek out
the resources, or if they do and then they return
to their abuser, because that is something that happens a lot,
and like Caroline mentioned at the top of the podcast,
one reason we wanted to have this conversation today is
because of the why I Stayed hashtag that surfaced on
Twitter and resp on to a lot of people talking about,
(28:04):
you know, Jenny Palmer Rice saying well, why is she
even in this relationship to begin with? She stuck around.
So we're going to talk about the cycle of abuse
and why victims returned to their abusers when we come
right back from a quick break. So, what I think
(28:26):
a lot of people don't realize, and what a lot
of people also don't understand, is how difficult it can
be for a victim to leave the abuser. And I
think that's evident in a common statistic that it takes
a victim seven times to ultimately and finally leave an
abusive relationship. And you can see that ignorance of this
(28:51):
cycle of abuse that happens that we're going to talk
about in more detail. Whenever these kinds of cases of
domestic violence, it's intimate partner violence become national news, not
just in the case of Ray Rice, but also going
back a few years to Rihanna and Chris Brown, where
there were the same kinds of well, what is she
even doing in this relationship? Why why is she staying?
(29:14):
But the fact of the matter is it's not just
about escaping the physical abuse, because in the process of
that abuse happening, there is a lot of psychological underpinnings
that make it hard and sometimes impossible for some victims,
where seemingly impossible for some victims to lead because it
(29:35):
sets up this pendulum in a way of pain that
swings between being fearful, being angry, being resentful of your abuser,
but then going into feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety of thinking,
well maybe I did something, Oh well what if people
find out? How am I going to live without this person? Right?
And all that definitely ties into issues of codependency, because
(29:58):
you're thinking, this person is suffering, this person is unhappy
and scared and angry. How can here she stay with
this abusive partner? And when you are in a codependent
relationship and you are the codependent party, you feel that
it's almost your responsibility to fix or to save the
person that you're with, and that if only I give
(30:20):
him or her my full support and do everything I
can to help him or her, then this situation will
get better, you can fix the person, right and you
just can't. Yeah, and um, I mean and I think
to the fact that it's such a taboo topic also
feeds into this psychological cycle of abuse. So in terms
(30:40):
of the cycle of abuse, help guide dot org actually
laid out a very clear picture of what that means.
When you start the cycle with abuse, this is when
basically one of the partners is sort of issuing a
power play designed to show who is boss there being aggressive,
they're belittling their partner or acting in a violent way.
So after that initial abuse happens, the abusive partner might
(31:04):
feel a sense of guilt, might be concerned about what
he or she has done, concerned about losing the other partner,
and so then a period of excuses and rationalization often
takes place of the partner trying to rationalize the violence
that has taken place, perhaps placing blame on the other person,
on the victim for you know, asking for bringing on
(31:26):
or triggering that kind of violent behavior, which is then
followed by a period of quote unquote normalcy or what's
sometimes dubbed the honeymoon phase, where the abuser does everything
in his or her power to regain control and keep
that partner in the relationship, which might mean acting like
(31:47):
nothing has ever happened, just sweeping it under the rug,
or really turning up the charm, like really promising to
change and going out of his or her way to
be sweeked right. And then this leads to a terrible
period that I really was not aware of before I
looked at this cycle of abuse chart. But it's the
(32:10):
fantasy and planning phase where basically, once the abuser has
secured you back in this relationship, through this honeymoon period
of being nice and normal so to speak, here she
begins to fantasize about abusing you again the way that
it will happen, um making a plan for turning this
fantasy of abuse into reality, basically looking around at anything
(32:34):
you know, quote unquote wrong this victim might do, and
then lashing out. Yeah. I mean it's followed then yeah,
by the setup of some kind of situation. It's that
rationalization phase again, but almost in reverse, rationalizing the pre
planning for something that he or she can then lash
out at, and the cycle then begins a new and
(32:57):
a lot of times the abuser, after it happened will
be apologetic and will be act even lovingly toward the
other person, which only reinforces a lot of the codependency.
There might be, you know, he or she might beg
the other person to stay, to help them, to fix them.
Don't let it people other people know because it is
(33:18):
so taboo and not talked about. What will people think? Yeah,
and you know, krist and I've talked about gas lighting
on the podcast before. That's definitely part of the cycle.
And gas lighting, of course, refers to uh just basically,
long story short, making your partner feel crazy. Um, you know,
they have legitimate feelings or thoughts or concerns and you
basically downplay them and say, oh, you're nuts. And that's gaslighting,
(33:40):
and that plays into both emotional and physical manipulation and violence.
And the Why I Stayed hashtag offers so many examples
of how what that cycle of abuse really looks like
in the real world. And it was started by writer
bever Really Gordon in response to that victim blaming directed
(34:03):
at Jenney Palmer Rice and so one of her tweets
of why I stayed was he said he would change,
He promised. It was the last time I believed him.
He lied, right, And other tweets say things like my
mom had three young kids, a mortgage on a part
time job, my dad had a full time paycheck, our
church behind him, and a bigger fist. Another tweet was
(34:26):
because he never hit me and I didn't think verbal
abuse and emotional manipulation was considered an abusive relationship, and
so things like that. I mean, just in those three tweets,
you see the importance of education about abuse and abusive
relationships in the different forms it can take, and the
importance of providing support to people who need it. Absolutely,
because it is clear that there in that tragically there
(34:49):
because we don't talk about it enough. Clearly, there's not
even a recognition of what those kinds of violent behaviors
really are and all the different forms that they can take.
But what we also no is that not only does
it often take a long time for victims to finally
and completely leave their abusers, which can be hard because
(35:10):
again remember that stalking is a violent behavior as well.
That's part of this too, So sometimes they have to
geographically get as far away from their you know, ex
partner as possible. But even after the violence stops, there
are long term health effects. Right if you look at
(35:31):
the psychological fallout. Specifically, among female victims said they were
fearful as a result of intimate partner violence were concerned
for their safety. Sixty two percent also experienced at least
one post traumatic stress disorder symptom after the fact, and
twenty percent missed at least one day of work or school.
(35:52):
So it is worth repeating that the fallout from domestic
violence is not always going to be visible. And in
addition to those psychological repercussions, there are also long term
health effects that a lot of people don't recognize either,
including doctors. Um and we read about this in a
really in depth article in More magazine called Domestic Violence
(36:15):
a Hidden Cause of Chronic Illness, and the author writes,
domestic violence has an insidiously long half life, and by
that she means that it has high risks of chronic
health problems including arthritis and hormonal disorders asthma, diabetes, hypertension,
chronic pain, severe headaches, and irritable bowel syndrome. Yeah, this article,
(36:39):
I found it to be incredibly disturbing because this is
something that I literally have never read before. They have
the long term health effects and you hear Kristen say
things like arthritis, hormonal disorders, asthma, and how could that
possibly come out of domestic violence. But when you think
about you've probably read articles or or her podcasts on
(37:01):
the effects of various types of stress and what happens
to your body and your brain when you are under
an incredible amount of stress over a long period of time.
And domestic violence is a huge cause of this chronic stress. Basically,
your fight or flight is in constant engagement, and that
(37:23):
can do horrible things to your body. Yeah, it actually
trims the length of telomeres, which are protective caps on
the ends of our chromosomes that affect how quickly our
cells age. And under that kind of chronic stress that
victims of domestic violence live with even after the relationship
(37:44):
is over, those telomeres tend to shorten and which can
lead to a shorter lifespan. Um For another statistic, victims
of domestic violence spend more on medical care than other
women due to either outright injuries or chronic stress or terror.
(38:05):
Right and the CDC released a two thousand eight study
looking at the medical costs that come out of this
in the United States, and they estimated that those costs
fall somewhere between twenty billion and fifty nine billion dollars
every year. And in addition to the you know, the
stress impacts on a biological level for a number of
(38:26):
domestic violence victims. They might not get proper medical care
when violence incidents occur, and that can have long lasting
effects as well, or just simply have long lasting effects
from having to their bodies having to sustain repeated acts
of violence. So, for instance, um More Magazine talked to
(38:49):
the author of the memoir Crazy Love, which is all
about this violent relationship that this woman was in, and
she said that even today, decades down the line, she
still us trouble with short term memory and arthritis in
her shoulders, hands, risks, joints, and ankles, especially in the
areas that he beat her. Right, And they talked to
(39:10):
another woman who had had six miscarriages and you know,
just thinking, oh gosh, you know, what's wrong with me,
what's going on with my body? And doctors told her
that it was entirely possible that her endocrine system, her
hormone system, had been compromised by the brain damage that
she had suffered repeatedly at the hands of her husband,
(39:31):
and that was making it hard to carry a baby
to term. Yeah. Michelle Black, who is an epidemiologist at
the CDC who was the lead author of a landmark
two thousand eleven report on domestic violence related illness, told
More magazine that your whole body is at risk. There
is no organ that's immune from this kind of long
(39:53):
term damage, right, And they talked about sort of the
biology behind this, and therefore too it is allostatic load,
which is basically the fact that it's sort of an awful,
terrible mental and emotional and physical cycle where you have
these terrible things that happen to you, but you also
have the memories of these terrible things that end up
(40:14):
getting stored in the amygdala. These generate what's called cytokines,
their chemical messengers that elevate inflammation in nearly every system
in your body. In response, your body ends up releasing cortisol,
which is a stress hormone. So normally your body works
to keep everything in balance under control. But if these
(40:34):
traumatic memories keep resurfacing and keep sounding the alarm bell
for years after or after the abuse has suffered, it
generates way too much inflammation for your body to handle,
and your body loses the ability to regulate cortisol, the
stress hormone, so you're under that constant level of stress.
A lot of women also who have experienced domestic violence,
(40:55):
and men too, i'm sure, also carry long symptoms of
post traumatic stres disorder, So you know, things can be
very triggering that can set off that allis static load
and Caroline, when I was reading this that I was
thinking about the horrible irony of the fact that this
entire conversation was spurred by domestic violence among NFL players
(41:19):
in particular, and previously the biggest controversy within the NFL
has been the NFL having to take into account players
having sustained years and years and years of violence and
head injuries now dealing with similar long term effects of this,
and the NFL having to take that into account and
(41:42):
you know, pay players for that kind of abuse that
they suffered on the field. And these are the same
kinds of symptoms and long term and chronic health impacts
that some of these women who are very much also
connected to the NFL are dealing with as well, and
similar the something that we just don't think about or
(42:04):
don't really understand as fully as we could which is
yet another reason why it's so important that we talk
about this more and not just talk about it in
reaction to these events happening. Yeah. Now, Chris and I
have given you a lot of information throughout this podcast,
things that you should be aware of, but we do
(42:25):
also have resources to give you as well. UM. In
the US, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline
at one seven nine nine seven two three three safe.
In the UK you can call Women's Aid at zero
eight zero eight two thousand, two four seven, and worldwide,
you can visit the International Directory of Domestic Violence Agencies
(42:47):
for a global list of helplines and crisis centers, and
male victims of abuse also have hotlines they can call.
In the US and Canada there's the Domestic Abuse Helpline
for Men and Women. In UK there's Mankind Initiative, and
in Australia there's the one in three campaign. And we'll
be posting links to all of these resources and all
(43:09):
of these hotlines on our website stuff. But I'm never
told you dot com so you can find them there
as well. So we do want to hear from you
about this issue. UM, share whatever you're comfortable sharing with us.
And what you think would be helpful for our listeners
to know as well. We weren't able to even talk
(43:29):
about every single facet of domestic violence. So if there's
something really important that we left out of the conversation,
please fill us in. Moms Stuff at how stuff works
dot com is our email address. You can also tweet
us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook, and
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. Well, I have a letter here from Catherine
(43:55):
who's writing us about our notorious RBG or Ruth Bittergan's
but episode that we did a little while ago. She says,
I work in theatrical costumes and wardrobe in Seattle, but
a few summers ago was the assistant wardrobe supervisor at
the Santa Fe Opera, the largest opera festival in the country,
one of the largest in the world. Apparently, Justice Ginsburg
(44:18):
is a huge opera fan and attend the festival every season,
and the summer I was there was no exception. You
can always tell when she's going to be in the
theater that night because lots of security come through the
backstage areas. Sometimes she will take a backstage tour meet
the singers, which is how I got to see her
notorious nous in the flesh. I don't think of myself
as getting star struck, but what do you say to
(44:41):
someone who has changed so much about our lives for
the better? I went with hello, that was good, right, bug.
We'll keep up the good works, minty, ladies, and thank you, Kate,
you too well. I've gotta let her hear from Gia
about our episode, the Grandmother Hypothesis. She writes, Ladies, I
love a Grandmother Hypothesis episode. I loved it so much.
(45:02):
I told my nana about it and then brought it
with me to Sunday dinner so she could listen to it.
She loved it and insisted I make her a tape
so she could listen to it again. She has an
iPod and a CD player, but she wanted a cassette.
I made her a cassette. You don't argue with Grandma.
She thinks that the studies you cided explained to her
need to feed. The part she like the most about
(45:24):
that episode was when you talked about the Chinese grandmother's
because that is the way we lived. She also thought
it was hilarious that people had to take classes to
learn how to deal with whiney grandchildren. She just needed
to make the face and hold up a wooden spoon.
She never hit us with it, but it was implied. Also,
we got biscottie and hugs when we stopped whining. I'm
(45:45):
thirty two years old. I moved out of the family
building years ago and moved less than a city block away.
My grandmother calls me every day to make sure I'm
not hungry, to see if I need anything, and to
tell me she loves me. She has a long list
of those all she makes every day and every Sunday
her table is loaded like Thanksgiving and we have a
house full of family. So thank you, Jia. Oh and
(46:09):
she also writes Caroline that if we're ever in Boston,
there's a sweet old lady in the heart of the
North End who would love to feed you till you burst.
I will take you up on that offer, just whenever
I'm in Boston. Excellent, All right, thanks Jia, and thanks
to everybody who's written to us again. Our email address
is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com and
(46:30):
to find links to all of our social media as
well as all of our videos, blogs as well as
all of our podcasts, including this one, which will have
all of the sources that we referenced as well as
links to all of those resources as well. Head on
over to stuff Mom Never told You dot com for
(46:51):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Doesn't how
Stuff Works dot com. Both fas
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and today we're gonna be talking about
domestic violence. So first just want to issue a trigger
warning that we will be addressing things including emotional, physical,
(00:25):
and sexual violence within relationships. But this is such an
important topic for us to cover, and unfortunately it is
a newsworthy item, but it's also something that's happening every
single day in relationships, and we've never really talked about
(00:46):
domestic violence before on the podcast. And partially we're talking
about this because of the incident that happened between NFL
player Ray Rice and his then fiancee, Jenney Palmer Um,
in which a video surfaced of Rice dragging Palmer unconscious
out of an elevator Um. But not just the incident itself,
but also the huge conversation that came up in the
(01:08):
media around that incident Um and what sort of rose
to the surface in all of this was sort of
a a general cry from people in the media just
demanding to know why Gene Palmer now Jennet Palmer Rice
would stay in the relationship, and there seemed to be
(01:28):
like a huge misunderstanding about domestic violence in general and
victims of domestic violence in particular. So we definitely wanted
to address a lot of these issues. And there were
also conversations too that came up about it in terms
of men as victims of domestic violence as well, because
in that elevator video, Jenne does strike ray Rice at
(01:50):
one point, and we're not going to get into the
details of the video, um all of us to say,
there is a lot to talk about, because if there
is anything that all of these conversations about the NFL
and issues of domestic violence have brought to the surface
is the fact that there's a lot of misunderstanding about
(02:10):
domestic violence. So first of all, I just want to
establish the fact of how common it is and why
it can be problematic to just frame the conversation surrounding
the NFL as a scandal, as though it's just one
isolated incident or a few incidents that have happened. Because
in the United States, more than one in three women
(02:33):
and more than one in four men have experienced rape,
physical violence, and or stalking by an intimate partner in
their lifetime right, And so it's definitely worth throwing out
those numbers because I feel like, you know, it's it's
just not something that's talked about. I mean, it's talked
about in terms of victims rights and things like that
(02:53):
and criminal prosecution, and you do hear about it in
the news sometimes, especially if it's someone famous, like an
NFL player, But in general, domestic violence is hugely under reported.
This is coming from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
They reported that only about a quarter of all physical assaults,
about a fifth of all rapes, and about half of
all stockings perpetuated against women by intimate partners are reported
(03:17):
to police. And that's another thing about domestic violence too,
is that it seems like we only hear about it
and we only begin talking about it more openly after
the fact. So let's talk about what happens before the fact.
Let's talk about risk factors. And a lot of this
is coming from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
which has begun collecting data and actually issued its first
(03:40):
major report on domestic violence in the US in two
thousand and ten. So just some of the risk factors
involved with people who are victims and perpetuators of domestic
violence include things like low self esteem, low income, young age.
Actually women in their early twenties from twenty to twenty
(04:01):
five are the likeliest victims of domestic violence. There are
issues such as heavy alcohol and drug use, depression, obviously
aggressive behavior in your youth, having few friends, being socially isolated, right,
and a big one is being a victim of physical
or psychological abuse previously in your life that is consistently
(04:23):
one of the strongest predictors of perpetration of domestic violence,
but also experiencing poor parenting or strong physical discipline as
a child. And there are risk factors as well just
within the relationship dynamics, such as marital conflicts or instability.
There might be issues of dominance and imbalance of power
(04:45):
in relationships to where you have one partner who is
heavily and abusively dominant over the other. Economic stress is
something that often comes up with this as well, just
adding to the conflict and instability within relationship ships and
also unhealthy family relationships and interactions. There's definitely a strong
(05:06):
social component to it as well, in terms of either
the unstable relationships surrounding you or just blatant isolation. Right
And if we move outward a little bit, there are
definitely strong community and larger societal factors that affect domestic
violence as well. Um, things like poverty and issues associated
(05:27):
with poverty such as overcrowding, but also issues like having
low social capital, a lack of institutions and connections in
your community that can support you and your family, UM,
and just weak community sanctions against intimate partner violence. So basically,
if your neighbors or family or friends are unwilling or
unable to step in when they witness violence happening. And
(05:48):
there's also the big issue of traditional gender norms. UM.
This issue of violent masculinity in particular is something that
researchers look into a lot, so particularly in heterosexual relationships,
which and we'll get into this more. A lot of
domestic violence research is focused in a very heteronormative framework,
(06:10):
usually with the hyperdominant male partner having very traditional gender beliefs,
for instance, women needing to stay at home, not into
the workforce, being submissive sort of men being the heads
of the household, but to an abusive and potentially violent extent.
And if we're looking at the different types of violent
(06:34):
acts that constitute intimate partner or in domestic violence. Those
include physical violence, sexual violence, threats of physical or sexual violence, stalking,
and psychological aggression by a current or former intimate partner.
And when you look at the gender divide in terms
of abuse threatened or suffered, women are likelier to experience
(06:57):
multiple forms of abuse. Um Among victims of intimate partner violence,
more than one in three women experienced multiple forms of rape, stalking,
or physical violence, and nine two point one percent of
male victims of domestic violence experienced physical violence alone. And
if we just look at sexual violence, nearly one in
(07:19):
ten women has been raped by an intimate partner in
her lifetime. And when it comes to sexual violence other
than rape, meaning vaginal penetration, you know, against your consent,
an estimated sixteen point nine percent of women and eight
percent of men have experienced it at some point in
their lifetime. And we're getting into all of these details
(07:42):
in terms of the different types of violence that can occur,
because I think it's important to understand just how what
all constitutes domestic violence, because I think that a lot
of times we just assume that it's limited to someone
punching some someone else, right, But there's so much more
to it than that. Yeah, So if you look at
(08:03):
severe physical violence, for instance by an intimate partner, one
in four women and one in seven men have suffered
severe physical violence. But if you look at stalking, for instance,
which is not something that we stereotypically associate with domestic violence,
ten point seven percent of women and two point one
percent of men have experienced stalking. And psychological aggression is
(08:25):
a huge factor of this and definitely one that tends
to be left out of our you know, sort of
common framework of domestic violence of thinking of it as
something that is very physical, but there's definitely the psychological
aspect to it as well as over forty percent of
both men and women have experienced that kind of emotional
(08:47):
and psychological abuse. And getting back to the age factor,
most of this abuse first takes place before age, right,
and sort of driving home how pervasive domestic violence intimate
partner violence is. Intimate partner violence accounts for fift of
(09:08):
all violent crime in this country, and the US has
the highest rate of intimate partner homicide among the world's
wealthiest twenty five countries. That amounts to over sixteen thousand.
That's actually six hundred homicides every year because of intimate
partner violence, and when it comes to female homicides in
(09:28):
the US, almost a third of those were killed by
an intimate partner, and three point one percent of male
homicides in the US were committed by a female intimate partner.
And again that in those statistics are clearly focusing on
heterosexual relationships, but there has been more emerging data and
(09:52):
research and also outreach towards the LGBT community because they're
not immune from domestic violence at as well. It's important
to acknowledge that violence does happen within these relationships because
the fact that are domestic violence framework and resources too
are often focused on straight couples. That means that there
(10:14):
tend to be a lot of limited resources for LGBT victims,
especially transgender victims of violence. Right. And so this whole
framework that Christens talking about is just the idea of
the woman being the battered party and the man being
the abuser, and that tends to make it hard for
either one to find help in a same sex relationship
(10:37):
because they're often faced with attitudes from law enforcement or
other community services that basically, if you're two guys, just
work it out, just fight and get it over with,
or if you're two women, well two women don't hit
each other exactly. And to that point, in a two
thousand thirteen CDC report, they said, quote little is known
(10:57):
about the national prevalence of intimate partner violence, sexual violence,
and stalking among lesbian, gay, and bisexual men and women
in the United States. But from the data they have
collected so far, it's clear that more research needs to
be done into certain kinds of relationship dynamics, because, for instance,
bisexuals have higher rates of experiencing domestic violence. Um of them,
(11:23):
at least, according to data from the CDC, have been
with a violent partner, as opposed to forty percent of
lesbian women and forty percent of straight women. When it
comes to men, for bisexual men that number was forty
seven percent, and for gay men it was and for
straight men. So statistically there is a bit of a hierarchy.
(11:47):
But again, in the CDC's own words, little is still
known about what exactly is going on within those communities,
because it's only been within the past few years that
they've even started paying closer attention to it, right, And
one strong piece of evidence that we can see that
same sex couples by sexual couples are getting more attention
in this arena. Is when President Obama resigned the Violence
(12:11):
Against Women Act, it did include a section about same
sex couples offering protection. But we do, I think, have
a long way to go, because in terms of lesbian couples,
for instance, both women could end up in a shelter.
For instance, you know, one woman could be abused and
could be seeking help and shelter, whereas the other woman
(12:34):
could lie and say that she was also abused and
end up infiltrating the same the same shelter. And when
it comes to shelters, that finding that kind of resource.
I mean, first of all, beds are scarce in shelters
to begin with, but for transgender victims of domestic violence,
finding a shelter that will accept them can be even
(12:56):
more challenging because some of them are not going to
be as opening and welcome to transgender victims because of
rules that they might have in place, or they might
be religious organizations that might not be so keen on that.
So there's definitely more work that needs to be done
in that regard. But we also need to to talk
(13:18):
about women, not only as victims in need of shelter
and resources. But we also need to talk about women
as abusers. Yeah, and part of the problem is that, um,
if a woman is the perpetrator of violence, um, it
tends to be not even just ignored, but laughed off,
(13:39):
saying you know, oh well, you obviously can't handle your woman,
you know, if if you're letting her do this to you.
And this was shown to be the case in an experiment.
This happened in London. This was Mankind's hashtag violence is
Violence project where they showed and they caught on camera
a man and shoving a woman, and people's reactions around
(14:03):
them were like they immediately stepped in and said, what
are you doing? What are you thinking? Stop hurting her.
When the tables were turned and they had their actress
shoved the actor and get violent with him and he
pulled his hair and shoved him into a fence and whatever.
People were just kind of laughing about it, which only
serves to reinforce those heteronormative, like hyper masculine gender roles
(14:30):
of man. You need to be, you know, taking care
of your woman. If you can't keep her in line,
then what's wrong with you? I mean those are the same,
that's the same kind of thinking that feeds into man
on woman domestic violence. But I think it's too when
you start googling around for statistics, for instance, on women
as abusers men as victims of domestic violence. Again sticking
(14:53):
within this heteronormative framework, what comes up a lot are
arguments made for pticularly by self labeled men's rights activists,
that the societal deck is stacked against men because domestic
violence does happen to men, but a lot of the
(15:16):
resources out there are clearly geared toward women because feminists
from the get go in the seventies one second way
feminism really started kicking up, feminists made domestic violence one
of their major platforms. And so there are these arguments
to come up a lot that that that's sort of
(15:36):
a conspiracy in a way to keep men down and
frames domestic violence assistance and resources as a zero sum game,
that men need more attention, and that women are really
just trying to take away more of men's rights. And
I don't want to get deep into that, but I
(15:58):
just wanted to acknowledge that because it is something that
will come up very quickly in your Google results when
you start looking for that, UM. But the truth of
the matter is, when you start looking into those dynamics
of female perpetrated domestic violence, they're do tend to be
different kinds of relationship factors involved, which are also very
(16:23):
important to understand, right exactly, Yeah, it is not all
black and white, and it's important to look at what's
going on behind the statistics. And so we looked at
a report by Michael S. Kimmel, who's a sociology professor
at sunny Stony Brook in two thousand one UM that
talked about how much of woman on man violence is
(16:44):
committed in self defense and actually ends up putting that
woman at greater risk of injury herself because she is
far likelier to end up getting hurt if the man retaliates.
And this is this really ties into what was going
on with the Ray Rice Janet Palmer Rice incident, with
a lot of people in the media and a lot
(17:06):
of people in the sports community saying, oh, well, Janet
hit Ray first, he retaliated, But a lot of that
has to do with that if you are a victim
with an abuser and you're trying to defend yourself, things
can spiral out of control. Well, and when you are,
(17:27):
I mean just that physical imbalance in terms of her
physical strengths, is his physical strength. If she hits him,
his retaliation to her clearly is going to be far
more severe just by sheer fact of muscle mass. Right,
and um, Women's violence towards men is certainly different from
(17:49):
that of men committed against women because of that whole
weight and strength factor. It is far less injurious and
far less likely to be motivated by attempts to dominate
or terrorists the partner because you know, Kristen mentioned earlier
that whole stereotypical gender dominance issue in or that exists
(18:09):
in a relationship, and so a woman is not likely
to be acting from a place of domination. Yeah. And
again this is not to minimize men being victims of
domestic violence. Again, I mean, I think the psychological and
emotional abuse is a huge factor to this. It was well,
because when it comes to that kind of abuse, there
(18:30):
is gender parity, unfortunately, just overtent in fact of both
men and women have experienced that. And again one in
seven men have experienced severe physical violence by an intimate partner.
So this isn't to say or try to erase those
statistics or negate the issues you know that men are facing,
(18:52):
and negate the fact that there are some women who
are simply out and out blatant abusers. Right, some women
are violent and are trying to terrorize their partners. But
I think it's important to talk about the nuances within that,
especially because there was so much hue and cry, unfortunately
when it came to that Ray Rice video of people saying, well,
(19:14):
she hit him first, and like you said, Caroline, it's
not again and again and again. It's important to remember
that it's not all black and white. It's never black
and white in these kinds of situations, right, exactly, And um,
all of this is backed up by a meta analysis
from October two thousand eight and the journal Trauma, Violence
and Abuse that found that female perpetrated domestic violence is
(19:36):
likeliest to take the form of emotional abuse. And I'm wondering,
just from my own personal perspective, if that's not the
case simply because of weight and strength differences, if that's
just not the weapon that women have at their disposal.
I mean, I have a guy friend who was the
victim of extreme emotional and psychological abuse by a female partner.
(19:57):
And you know, I would certainly never want to downplay
the suffering that he went through, but you know, it's
not that he was hit or be beaten or experienced
physical violence necessarily at her hand. Well, and one thing
that I read in prepping for this podcast too was
that the psychological aggression and abuse perpetrated by women might
(20:22):
be more of the the go to form of it too,
because women tend to be more socialized. I mean, just
think about it in terms of our female adolescent relationships,
Like the type of abuse that tends to happen is
the more socialized kind of bullying. Girls usually don't aren't
as likely to say fist fight as they are too
(20:43):
just really enact like psychological warfare, so nasty notes and
talking behind backs instead of a fist fight in the cafeteria. Well,
and I think too that the prevalence of that psychological
and emotional abuse does add another layer of news to
the lack of resources for men who are in those
(21:04):
kinds of abusive relationships because there is no physical evidence.
And it is worth noting that a lot of these
patterns of intimate partner violence among women as perpetrators often
start at an early age, but the data do suggests
that girls who perpetrate intimate partner violence may themselves experience
(21:25):
more violent or frequent intimate partner violence victimization. Now, when
it comes to the portrayal of women as the perpetrators,
there was a study about this that came out in
September twelve and the journal Violence against Women and talked
about how women are three times likelier than men to
be arrested when they were construed as the perpetrator. And
(21:48):
that might possibly be because typically our again our framework
is of the male abuser and the female victim. And
when they talked to about in this paper is how
because of that gendered framework, which goes back in along
too for a long time in history, that women in
(22:12):
these situations are usually portrayed in these kinds of court
cases as pathological perpetuators of violence, whereas men are often
portrayed if if they are, you know, the abusers, they
are then portrayed as the batterers. Because it's almost as
if it's such a violation of this like nastiest kind
(22:35):
of gender norm, if you want to even call it that,
that there's even a separate kind of language to describe
the woman as the abuser, right, and researchers Ellen Pens
and Shamina Dasta Skupta talk a lot about this whole division,
this language division, and the meaning behind it, and they
talk about how the word itself battering signifies a pattern
(22:56):
of things like coercive control and intimidation and oppressure, and
that women suffer at the hands of men in their lives,
whereas the idea of pathological violence comes from, well, the
woman is doing it because she's abusing substances, she's suffering
a mental illness or a physical disorder, maybe she has
neurological damage, and then uses physical violence against others, including
(23:19):
intimate partners. And they write it is exceptional for the
woman to achieve the kind of dominance over her male
partner that characterizes battering. And so we see these gender
divides even in the very language that we use, whether
it's medically or in the legal system, to describe violence
perpetrated against men versus women. Well and again and again
(23:41):
and again too. What keeps coming to my mind is
how so much of this subconscious or at least unconscious
framing and language that's used again does such a disservice
to men because it constantly assumes that they need no
sort of psychological background or impetus is for being violent.
(24:02):
It's simply within their natures, whereas women usually need some
you know, when this happens, people are looking for like, oh, well,
what what could be the issue? Why, what could possibly
provoke her to do this? And that's part of the
reason why there's actually this term battered women's syndrome, which
is a defense developed in the mid nineteen seventies by
(24:24):
Dr Leonor Walker to help combat the sex bias present
in criminal law, particularly in the case of women killing
their male intimate partners um who had been I mean,
it was largely cases of self defense when it comes
to this battered women's syndrome. And there is a paper
(24:46):
that we found about this in the American Bar Association
talking about how in these cases if a woman who
had been previously abused by her partner at one point
like kills her partner, there like they needed some kind
of again, some kind of like psychological explanation for what
was going on, right, And I mean, I think it's
(25:08):
crazy to even think of a time when the law
did not even recognize this, this idea of self defense
and an abusive intimate partner relationship. Well because for a
long time, the law didn't even acknowledge or feel like
it was its place to step into domestic violence to
begin with. But it's interesting in this In this paper,
(25:29):
it also talks about how the fact that this thing
is called a syndrome, battered Women's syndrome, definitely pathologizes victimhood.
And so it led to yes, a lot of women,
you know, not being sent to prison for murdering their abusers,
but also being excused simply by the for the idea
(25:51):
that they are irrational or incapacitated. But the authors of
the paper certainly do not argue that we should do
away with this idea. This to into this concept, we
obviously still need an idea of self defense, whether it's
in an intimate partner relationship or not. Right, right, And
I mean and again and again, I feel like I'm
(26:11):
just repeating myself so many times in this episode, because
it's yet another layer of gray within all of it. Right,
and when we look at the battered Women's syndrome issue,
this defense and acting women acting in self defense and
killing their abuser. This is something that Michael S. Kimmel
also talked about. He's a sociology professor that we mentioned earlier,
(26:33):
and he wrote in his two thousand one report that
men actually benefit from efforts to reduce male violence against women.
He wrote that it turns out that efforts to protect
women in the US have had the effect of reducing
the murder rate of men by their partners by almost
seventy percent over the past twenty four years. So if
(26:55):
you protect women, you're also protecting men. Imagine that well,
And that's another reason why domestic violence resources and assistance
and legal protections should not be framed as some kind
of zero sum game, because there you know clearly there
are benefits to it that it's not just helping women.
(27:18):
Do there need to be more resources out there for
men as victims of domestic violence. Absolutely. Do there need
to be more resources out there for LGBT victims of
domestic violence. Absolutely, But again it seems like taking resources
away from straight women is not going to help anyone
in the long run. Right, So we now need to
(27:40):
talk about, though, what happens when women don't seek out
the resources, or if they do and then they return
to their abuser, because that is something that happens a lot,
and like Caroline mentioned at the top of the podcast,
one reason we wanted to have this conversation today is
because of the why I Stayed hashtag that surfaced on
Twitter and resp on to a lot of people talking about,
(28:04):
you know, Jenny Palmer Rice saying well, why is she
even in this relationship to begin with? She stuck around.
So we're going to talk about the cycle of abuse
and why victims returned to their abusers when we come
right back from a quick break. So, what I think
(28:26):
a lot of people don't realize, and what a lot
of people also don't understand, is how difficult it can
be for a victim to leave the abuser. And I
think that's evident in a common statistic that it takes
a victim seven times to ultimately and finally leave an
abusive relationship. And you can see that ignorance of this
(28:51):
cycle of abuse that happens that we're going to talk
about in more detail. Whenever these kinds of cases of
domestic violence, it's intimate partner violence become national news, not
just in the case of Ray Rice, but also going
back a few years to Rihanna and Chris Brown, where
there were the same kinds of well, what is she
even doing in this relationship? Why why is she staying?
(29:14):
But the fact of the matter is it's not just
about escaping the physical abuse, because in the process of
that abuse happening, there is a lot of psychological underpinnings
that make it hard and sometimes impossible for some victims,
where seemingly impossible for some victims to lead because it
(29:35):
sets up this pendulum in a way of pain that
swings between being fearful, being angry, being resentful of your abuser,
but then going into feelings of guilt, shame, anxiety of thinking,
well maybe I did something, Oh well what if people
find out? How am I going to live without this person? Right?
And all that definitely ties into issues of codependency, because
(29:58):
you're thinking, this person is suffering, this person is unhappy
and scared and angry. How can here she stay with
this abusive partner? And when you are in a codependent
relationship and you are the codependent party, you feel that
it's almost your responsibility to fix or to save the
person that you're with, and that if only I give
(30:20):
him or her my full support and do everything I
can to help him or her, then this situation will
get better, you can fix the person, right and you
just can't. Yeah, and um, I mean and I think
to the fact that it's such a taboo topic also
feeds into this psychological cycle of abuse. So in terms
(30:40):
of the cycle of abuse, help guide dot org actually
laid out a very clear picture of what that means.
When you start the cycle with abuse, this is when
basically one of the partners is sort of issuing a
power play designed to show who is boss there being aggressive,
they're belittling their partner or acting in a violent way.
So after that initial abuse happens, the abusive partner might
(31:04):
feel a sense of guilt, might be concerned about what
he or she has done, concerned about losing the other partner,
and so then a period of excuses and rationalization often
takes place of the partner trying to rationalize the violence
that has taken place, perhaps placing blame on the other person,
on the victim for you know, asking for bringing on
(31:26):
or triggering that kind of violent behavior, which is then
followed by a period of quote unquote normalcy or what's
sometimes dubbed the honeymoon phase, where the abuser does everything
in his or her power to regain control and keep
that partner in the relationship, which might mean acting like
(31:47):
nothing has ever happened, just sweeping it under the rug,
or really turning up the charm, like really promising to
change and going out of his or her way to
be sweeked right. And then this leads to a terrible
period that I really was not aware of before I
looked at this cycle of abuse chart. But it's the
(32:10):
fantasy and planning phase where basically, once the abuser has
secured you back in this relationship, through this honeymoon period
of being nice and normal so to speak, here she
begins to fantasize about abusing you again the way that
it will happen, um making a plan for turning this
fantasy of abuse into reality, basically looking around at anything
(32:34):
you know, quote unquote wrong this victim might do, and
then lashing out. Yeah. I mean it's followed then yeah,
by the setup of some kind of situation. It's that
rationalization phase again, but almost in reverse, rationalizing the pre
planning for something that he or she can then lash
out at, and the cycle then begins a new and
(32:57):
a lot of times the abuser, after it happened will
be apologetic and will be act even lovingly toward the
other person, which only reinforces a lot of the codependency.
There might be, you know, he or she might beg
the other person to stay, to help them, to fix them.
Don't let it people other people know because it is
(33:18):
so taboo and not talked about. What will people think? Yeah,
and you know, krist and I've talked about gas lighting
on the podcast before. That's definitely part of the cycle.
And gas lighting, of course, refers to uh just basically,
long story short, making your partner feel crazy. Um, you know,
they have legitimate feelings or thoughts or concerns and you
basically downplay them and say, oh, you're nuts. And that's gaslighting,
(33:40):
and that plays into both emotional and physical manipulation and violence.
And the Why I Stayed hashtag offers so many examples
of how what that cycle of abuse really looks like
in the real world. And it was started by writer
bever Really Gordon in response to that victim blaming directed
(34:03):
at Jenney Palmer Rice and so one of her tweets
of why I stayed was he said he would change,
He promised. It was the last time I believed him.
He lied, right, And other tweets say things like my
mom had three young kids, a mortgage on a part
time job, my dad had a full time paycheck, our
church behind him, and a bigger fist. Another tweet was
(34:26):
because he never hit me and I didn't think verbal
abuse and emotional manipulation was considered an abusive relationship, and
so things like that. I mean, just in those three tweets,
you see the importance of education about abuse and abusive
relationships in the different forms it can take, and the
importance of providing support to people who need it. Absolutely,
because it is clear that there in that tragically there
(34:49):
because we don't talk about it enough. Clearly, there's not
even a recognition of what those kinds of violent behaviors
really are and all the different forms that they can take.
But what we also no is that not only does
it often take a long time for victims to finally
and completely leave their abusers, which can be hard because
(35:10):
again remember that stalking is a violent behavior as well.
That's part of this too, So sometimes they have to
geographically get as far away from their you know, ex
partner as possible. But even after the violence stops, there
are long term health effects. Right if you look at
(35:31):
the psychological fallout. Specifically, among female victims said they were
fearful as a result of intimate partner violence were concerned
for their safety. Sixty two percent also experienced at least
one post traumatic stress disorder symptom after the fact, and
twenty percent missed at least one day of work or school.
(35:52):
So it is worth repeating that the fallout from domestic
violence is not always going to be visible. And in
addition to those psychological repercussions, there are also long term
health effects that a lot of people don't recognize either,
including doctors. Um and we read about this in a
really in depth article in More magazine called Domestic Violence
(36:15):
a Hidden Cause of Chronic Illness, and the author writes,
domestic violence has an insidiously long half life, and by
that she means that it has high risks of chronic
health problems including arthritis and hormonal disorders asthma, diabetes, hypertension,
chronic pain, severe headaches, and irritable bowel syndrome. Yeah, this article,
(36:39):
I found it to be incredibly disturbing because this is
something that I literally have never read before. They have
the long term health effects and you hear Kristen say
things like arthritis, hormonal disorders, asthma, and how could that
possibly come out of domestic violence. But when you think
about you've probably read articles or or her podcasts on
(37:01):
the effects of various types of stress and what happens
to your body and your brain when you are under
an incredible amount of stress over a long period of time.
And domestic violence is a huge cause of this chronic stress. Basically,
your fight or flight is in constant engagement, and that
(37:23):
can do horrible things to your body. Yeah, it actually
trims the length of telomeres, which are protective caps on
the ends of our chromosomes that affect how quickly our
cells age. And under that kind of chronic stress that
victims of domestic violence live with even after the relationship
(37:44):
is over, those telomeres tend to shorten and which can
lead to a shorter lifespan. Um For another statistic, victims
of domestic violence spend more on medical care than other
women due to either outright injuries or chronic stress or terror.
(38:05):
Right and the CDC released a two thousand eight study
looking at the medical costs that come out of this
in the United States, and they estimated that those costs
fall somewhere between twenty billion and fifty nine billion dollars
every year. And in addition to the you know, the
stress impacts on a biological level for a number of
(38:26):
domestic violence victims. They might not get proper medical care
when violence incidents occur, and that can have long lasting
effects as well, or just simply have long lasting effects
from having to their bodies having to sustain repeated acts
of violence. So, for instance, um More Magazine talked to
(38:49):
the author of the memoir Crazy Love, which is all
about this violent relationship that this woman was in, and
she said that even today, decades down the line, she
still us trouble with short term memory and arthritis in
her shoulders, hands, risks, joints, and ankles, especially in the
areas that he beat her. Right, And they talked to
(39:10):
another woman who had had six miscarriages and you know,
just thinking, oh gosh, you know, what's wrong with me,
what's going on with my body? And doctors told her
that it was entirely possible that her endocrine system, her
hormone system, had been compromised by the brain damage that
she had suffered repeatedly at the hands of her husband,
(39:31):
and that was making it hard to carry a baby
to term. Yeah. Michelle Black, who is an epidemiologist at
the CDC who was the lead author of a landmark
two thousand eleven report on domestic violence related illness, told
More magazine that your whole body is at risk. There
is no organ that's immune from this kind of long
(39:53):
term damage, right, And they talked about sort of the
biology behind this, and therefore too it is allostatic load,
which is basically the fact that it's sort of an awful,
terrible mental and emotional and physical cycle where you have
these terrible things that happen to you, but you also
have the memories of these terrible things that end up
(40:14):
getting stored in the amygdala. These generate what's called cytokines,
their chemical messengers that elevate inflammation in nearly every system
in your body. In response, your body ends up releasing cortisol,
which is a stress hormone. So normally your body works
to keep everything in balance under control. But if these
(40:34):
traumatic memories keep resurfacing and keep sounding the alarm bell
for years after or after the abuse has suffered, it
generates way too much inflammation for your body to handle,
and your body loses the ability to regulate cortisol, the
stress hormone, so you're under that constant level of stress.
A lot of women also who have experienced domestic violence,
(40:55):
and men too, i'm sure, also carry long symptoms of
post traumatic stres disorder, So you know, things can be
very triggering that can set off that allis static load
and Caroline, when I was reading this that I was
thinking about the horrible irony of the fact that this
entire conversation was spurred by domestic violence among NFL players
(41:19):
in particular, and previously the biggest controversy within the NFL
has been the NFL having to take into account players
having sustained years and years and years of violence and
head injuries now dealing with similar long term effects of this,
and the NFL having to take that into account and
(41:42):
you know, pay players for that kind of abuse that
they suffered on the field. And these are the same
kinds of symptoms and long term and chronic health impacts
that some of these women who are very much also
connected to the NFL are dealing with as well, and
similar the something that we just don't think about or
(42:04):
don't really understand as fully as we could which is
yet another reason why it's so important that we talk
about this more and not just talk about it in
reaction to these events happening. Yeah. Now, Chris and I
have given you a lot of information throughout this podcast,
things that you should be aware of, but we do
(42:25):
also have resources to give you as well. UM. In
the US, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline
at one seven nine nine seven two three three safe.
In the UK you can call Women's Aid at zero
eight zero eight two thousand, two four seven, and worldwide,
you can visit the International Directory of Domestic Violence Agencies
(42:47):
for a global list of helplines and crisis centers, and
male victims of abuse also have hotlines they can call.
In the US and Canada there's the Domestic Abuse Helpline
for Men and Women. In UK there's Mankind Initiative, and
in Australia there's the one in three campaign. And we'll
be posting links to all of these resources and all
(43:09):
of these hotlines on our website stuff. But I'm never
told you dot com so you can find them there
as well. So we do want to hear from you
about this issue. UM, share whatever you're comfortable sharing with us.
And what you think would be helpful for our listeners
to know as well. We weren't able to even talk
(43:29):
about every single facet of domestic violence. So if there's
something really important that we left out of the conversation,
please fill us in. Moms Stuff at how stuff works
dot com is our email address. You can also tweet
us at mom Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook, and
we've got a couple of messages to share with you
right now. Well, I have a letter here from Catherine
(43:55):
who's writing us about our notorious RBG or Ruth Bittergan's
but episode that we did a little while ago. She says,
I work in theatrical costumes and wardrobe in Seattle, but
a few summers ago was the assistant wardrobe supervisor at
the Santa Fe Opera, the largest opera festival in the country,
one of the largest in the world. Apparently, Justice Ginsburg
(44:18):
is a huge opera fan and attend the festival every season,
and the summer I was there was no exception. You
can always tell when she's going to be in the
theater that night because lots of security come through the
backstage areas. Sometimes she will take a backstage tour meet
the singers, which is how I got to see her
notorious nous in the flesh. I don't think of myself
as getting star struck, but what do you say to
(44:41):
someone who has changed so much about our lives for
the better? I went with hello, that was good, right, bug.
We'll keep up the good works, minty, ladies, and thank you, Kate,
you too well. I've gotta let her hear from Gia
about our episode, the Grandmother Hypothesis. She writes, Ladies, I
love a Grandmother Hypothesis episode. I loved it so much.
(45:02):
I told my nana about it and then brought it
with me to Sunday dinner so she could listen to it.
She loved it and insisted I make her a tape
so she could listen to it again. She has an
iPod and a CD player, but she wanted a cassette.
I made her a cassette. You don't argue with Grandma.
She thinks that the studies you cided explained to her
need to feed. The part she like the most about
(45:24):
that episode was when you talked about the Chinese grandmother's
because that is the way we lived. She also thought
it was hilarious that people had to take classes to
learn how to deal with whiney grandchildren. She just needed
to make the face and hold up a wooden spoon.
She never hit us with it, but it was implied. Also,
we got biscottie and hugs when we stopped whining. I'm
(45:45):
thirty two years old. I moved out of the family
building years ago and moved less than a city block away.
My grandmother calls me every day to make sure I'm
not hungry, to see if I need anything, and to
tell me she loves me. She has a long list
of those all she makes every day and every Sunday
her table is loaded like Thanksgiving and we have a
house full of family. So thank you, Jia. Oh and
(46:09):
she also writes Caroline that if we're ever in Boston,
there's a sweet old lady in the heart of the
North End who would love to feed you till you burst.
I will take you up on that offer, just whenever
I'm in Boston. Excellent, All right, thanks Jia, and thanks
to everybody who's written to us again. Our email address
is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com and
(46:30):
to find links to all of our social media as
well as all of our videos, blogs as well as
all of our podcasts, including this one, which will have
all of the sources that we referenced as well as
links to all of those resources as well. Head on
over to stuff Mom Never told You dot com for
(46:51):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Doesn't how
Stuff Works dot com. Both fas
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