The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence

by Gavin De Becker

  An 800 number like ours, answered by people who have been there and understand the dilemma, is often more likely to be used than the alternative number (which I also recommend): 911. The reason for some women’s reluctance to call the police is eloquently expressed by the case of Nicole Brown Simpson.

  In one episode not revealed during the criminal trial, Simpson pushed Nicole out of a moving car in a parking lot. A police officer who happened on the scene told Simpson, “Take your wife home.” In another incident (well after they were divorced) Simpson broke down the door into Nicole’s home. A responding police officer told Nicole his conclusion of what had happened: “No blows were thrown, he didn’t throw anything at you; we don’t have anything other than a verbal altercation.” Nicole responded correctly: “Breaking and entering, I’d call it.” “Well,” the officer countered, “it’s a little different when the two of you have a relationship; its not like he’s a burglar.” Absolutely wrong, officer. It’s very much like he’s a burglar, and it was breaking and entering, and trespassing. After assuring O.J. Simpson that they’d keep the incident as quiet “as legally possible,” the officers left. (By the way, the LAPD and the L.A. Sheriff’s Department are now leading the nation in new ways to manage domestic violence cases.)

  Earlier I noted that America has tens of thousands of suicide prevention centers but no homicide prevention centers. Battered women’s shelters are the closest thing we have to homicide prevention centers. There are women and children in your community whose lives are in danger, who need to know how to get out, and who need a place to escape to. Los Angeles, the home city of the nation’s most notorious wife abuser, is, I am proud to say, also the city with an escape plan for battered families that other cities can use as a model.

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  Just as there are batterers who will victimize partner after partner, so are there serial victims, women who will select more than one violent man. Given that violence is often the result of an inability to influence events in any other way, and that this is often the result of an inability or unwillingness to effectively communicate, it is interesting to consider the wide appeal of the so-called strong and silent type. The reason often cited by women for the attraction is that the silent man is mysterious, and it may be that physical strength, which in evolutionary terms brought security, now adds an element of danger. The combination means that one cannot be completely certain what this man is feeling or thinking (because he is silent), and there might be fairly high stakes (because he is strong and potentially dangerous).

  I asked a friend who has often followed her attraction to the strong and silent type how long she likes men to remain silent. “About two or three weeks,” she answered, “Just long enough to get me interested. I like to be intrigued, not tricked. The tough part is finding someone who is mysterious but not secretive, strong but not scary.”

  One of the most common errors in selecting a boyfriend or spouse is basing the prediction on potential. This is actually predicting what certain elements might add up to in some different context: He isn’t working now, but he could be really successful. He’s going to be a great artist—of course he can’t paint under present circumstances. He’s a little edgy and aggressive these days, but that’s just until he gets settled.

  Listen to the words: isn’t working; can’t paint; is aggressive. What a person is doing now is the context for successful predictions, and marrying a man on the basis of potential, or for that matter hiring an employee solely on the basis of potential, is a sure way to interfere with intuition. That’s because the focus on potential carries our imagination to how things might be or could be and away from how they are now.

  Spousal abuse is committed by people who are with remarkable frequency described by their victims as having been “the sweetest, the gentlest, the kindest, the most attentive,” etc. Indeed, many were all of these things during the selection process and often still are—between violent incidents.

  But even though these men are frequently kind and gentle in the beginning, there are always warning signs. Victims, however, may not always choose to detect them. I made these points on a recent television interview, and a woman called in and said, “You’re wrong, there’s no way you can tell when a man will turn out to be violent. It just happens out of nowhere.” She went on to describe how her ex-husband, an avid collector of weapons, became possessive immediately after their marriage, made her account for all of her time, didn’t allow her to have a car, and frequently displayed jealousy.

  Could these things have been warning signs?

  In continuing her description of this awful man, she said, “His first wife died as a result of beatings he gave her.”

  Could that have been a warning sign? But people don’t see the signs, maybe because our process of falling in love is in large measure the process of choosing not to see faults, and that requires some denial. This denial is doubtless necessary in a culture that glorifies the kind of romance that leads young couples to rush to get married in spite of all the reasons they shouldn’t, and 50-year-old men to follow what is euphemistically called their hearts into relationships with their young secretaries and out of relationships with their middle-aged wives. This is, frankly, the kind of romance that leads to more failed relationships than successful ones.

  The way our culture pursues romance and mating is not the way of the whole world. Even here within our nation is another nation, of Native Americans, whose culture historically involved arranged marriages. The man and the woman were selected by elders, told to live together, and quite possibly without a scintilla of attraction, told to build a life together. For such relationships to succeed, the partners had to look for favorable attributes in each other. This is the exact opposite of the process most Americans use, that of not looking at the unfavorable attributes.

  The issue of selection and choice brings to mind the important work of psychologist Nathaniel Branden, author of Honoring the Self. He tells of the woman who says: “I have the worst luck with men. Over and over again, I find myself in these relationships with men who are abusive. I just have the worst luck.” Luck has very little to do with it, because the glaringly common characteristic of each of this woman’s relationships is her. My observations about selection are offered to enlighten victims, not to blame them, for I don’t believe that violence is a fair penalty for bad choices. But I do believe they are choices.

  Though leaving is the best response to violence, it is in trying to leave that most women get killed. This dispels a dangerous myth about spousal killings: that they happen in the heat of argument. In fact, the majority of husbands who kill their wives stalk them first, and far from the “crime of passion” that it’s so often called, killing a wife is usually a decision, not a loss of control. Those men who are the most violent are not at all carried away by fury. In fact, their heart rates actually drop and they become physiologically calmer as they become more violent.

  Even the phrase “crime of passion” has contributed to our widespread misunderstanding of this violence. That phrase is not the description of a crime—it is the description of an excuse, a defense. Since 75 percent of spousal murders happen after the woman leaves, it is estrangement, not argument, that begets the worst violence. In the end, stalking is not just about cases of “fatal attraction”—far more often, it is about cases of fatal inaction, in which the woman stayed too long.

  Of all the violence discussed in this book, spousal homicide is the most predictable, yet people are reluctant to predict it. A man in Los Angeles was recently accused of killing his wife, three of his children, and three other family members. News reporters questioning neighbors about the accused murderer were told, “He always seemed normal.” Another said, “He must be crazy,” and another said, “I can’t imagine that a father would kill his own children.” As you know, if you cannot imagine it, you cannot predict it. When will we have seen this story often enough to realize that if several members of a family are killed, it was pro
bably done by another member of that family? In this case, the man who neighbors couldn’t imagine was responsible for the murders had already tried to kill his wife three other times. He had also been arrested twice on domestic violence charges. Sounds predictable to me.

  So how does the system usually respond to society’s most predictable murder risk? It tells the woman to go to court, to civil court, and sue her abuser to stay away. In many states this is called a temporary restraining order because it is expected to restrain the aggressor. In some states it’s called a protection order, expected to protect the victim. In fact on its own, it doesn’t achieve either goal.

  Lawyers, police, TV newspeople, counselors, psychologists, and even some victims’ advocates recommend restraining orders wholesale. They are a growth industry in this country. We should, perhaps, consider putting them on the New York Stock Exchange, but we should stop telling people that a piece of paper of will automatically protect them, because when applied to certain types of cases, it may do the opposite. It is dangerous to promote a specific treatment without first diagnosing the problem in the individual case.

  It is perhaps obvious to say that a restraining order will not restrain a murderer, but there is substantial controversy on the topic. While I warn that they should not be universally recommended because they aren’t right for every kind of case or every stage of a case, most police departments encourage them all the time. Restraining orders (often called TRO’s) have long been homework assignments police give women to prove they’re really committed to getting away from their pursuers. The orders do get the troubled women out of the police station and headed for court, perhaps to have continuing problems, perhaps not, and they do make arrests simpler if the man continues his unwanted pursuit. Thus, TRO’s clearly serve police and prosecutors. But they do not always serve victims. In California, for example, TRO’s are valid for only 14 days, after which the woman must return to court for a trial to determine if the order will be extended.

  Even with all the failures of the present system, there are those who aggressively defend it, including one psychiatrist who has been a loyal apologist for the status quo. At a large police conference, he trumpeted: “TRO’s work, and we have proven it.” He based his reckless statement on a woefully biased study of a small sample of stalking cases that didn’t even include spousal stalkers, the very type most likely to kill.

  In fact, if you work back from the murders, you’ll find restraining orders and other confrontational interventions alarmingly often. The personal effects of a woman murdered by her estranged husband frequently include the piece of paper that that psychiatrist assured us has been “proven” effective. How does he explain that?

  “Look at it this way,” he says. “Some people die on chemotherapy. Some people die when they get restraining orders. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t do chemo—or that you don’t get restraining orders.” The doctor’s comparison between cancer (which the afflicted patient cannot get away from) and the risks posed by an estranged husband (which the woman can get away from) is not only callous, but dangerously flawed.

  Since so many women die as a result of this type of careless thinking, and because most of those deaths are preventable, I am going to go a several layers deeper into the topic. I hope you never need this information for yourself, but I know that someone in your life will need it sometime.

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  Many homicides have occurred at the courthouse where the women were seeking protection orders, or just prior to the hearings. Why? Because the murderers were allergic to rejection. They found it hard enough in private but intolerable in public. For men like this, rejection is a threat to the identity, the persona, to the entire self, and in this sense their crimes could be called murder in defense of the self. In To Have or To Harm, the first major book on stalking, author Linden Gross details case after case in which court orders did not prevent homicides. Here are just a few:

  Shirley Lowery was waiting outside the courtroom for the TRO hearing when she was stabbed 19 times by her husband. Tammy Marie Davis’s husband beat and terrorized her and their twenty-one-month old child, sending them both to the hospital. Right after he was served with the restraining order Tammy obtained, he shot and killed her. She was nineteen years old.

  Donna Montgomery’s husband had held a gun to her head and stalked her, so she obtained a restraining order. He came to the bank where she worked and killed her, then himself.

  Theresa Bender obtained a restraining order that her husband quickly violated. Even though he was arrested, she remained so committed to her safety that she arranged for two male co-workers to accompany her to and from work. Her husband was equally committed: He shot all three to death before turning the gun on himself.

  Maria Navarro called 911 and reported that her estranged husband had just threatened to kill her and was on the way to her house. Despite the fact that he’d been arrested more than once for battery, police declined to dispatch officers to her home because her restraining order had expired. Maria and three others were dead within fifteen minutes, murdered by the man who kept his promise to kill.

  Hilda Rivera’s husband had violated two restraining orders and had six arrest warrants when he killed her in the presence of their seven-year-old son. Betsy Murray’s husband violated his TRO thirteen times. He reacted to her divorce petition by telling her, “Marriage is for life and the only way out is death.” When nothing else worked, Betsy went into hiding, and even after police assured her that her husband had fled the country to avoid being arrested again, she still kept her new address a secret. When she stopped by her old apartment one day to collect mail a neighbor had been holding, her estranged husband killed her and then himself. He had been stalking her for more than six months.

  The fact that so many of these murderers also commit suicide tells us that refusing to accept rejection is more important to them than life itself. By the time they reach this point, are they really going to be deterred by a court order?

  The last case I want to cite is that of Connie Chaney. She had already obtained four protective orders when her husband raped her at gunpoint and attempted to kill her. The solution recommended by police? Get a restraining order, so she did. Before gunning her down, her husband wrote in his diary: “I couldn’t live with myself knowing she won, or she got me. No! This is war.” Those three words speak it all, because the restraining order is like a strategy of war, and the stakes are life and death, just as in war.

  In a study of 179 stalking cases sponsored by the San Diego District Attorney’s Office, about half of the victims who had sought restraining orders felt their cases were worsened by them. In a study done for the U.S. Department of Justice, researchers concluded that restraining orders were “ineffective in stopping physical violence.” They did find that restraining orders were helpful in cases in which there was no history of violent abuse. The report wisely concluded that “given the prevalence of women with children who utilize restraining orders, their general ineffectiveness in curbing subsequent violence may leave a good number of children at risk of either witnessing violence or becoming victims themselves.”

  A more recent study done for the U.S. Department of Justice found that more than a third of women had continuing problems after getting restraining orders. That means, favorably, that almost two thirds did not have continuing problems—but read on. While only 2.6 percent of respondents were physically abused right after getting the orders, when they were re-contacted six months later, that percentage had more than tripled. Reports of continued stalking and psychological abuse also increased dramatically after six-months. This indicates that the short-term benefits of restraining orders are greater than the long-term benefits.

  I want to make clear that I am not saying TRO’s never work, because in fact, most times that court orders are introduced, the cases do improve. It is often for the very reason one would hope: the men are deterred by the threat of arrest. Other times, TRO’s demonstrate the w
oman’s resolve to end the relationship, and that convinces the man to stay away. Whatever the reasons they work, there is no argument that they don’t work in some cases. The question is: Which cases?

  Restraining orders are most effective on the reasonable person who has a limited emotional investment. In other words, they work best on the person least likely to be violent anyway. Also, there is a substantial difference between using a restraining order on an abusive husband and using one on a man you dated a couple of times. That difference is the amount of emotional investment and entitlement the man feels. With a date-stalker (discussed in the next chapter), a TRO orders him to leave the woman alone and go about his life as it was before he met her. The same court order used on an estranged husband asks him to abandon, at the stroke of a judge’s signature, the central features of his life: his intimate relationship, his control and ownership of another human being, his identity as a powerful man, his identity as a husband, and on and on. Thus, a TRO might ask one man to do something he can easily do, while it asks another to do something far more difficult. This distinction has been largely ignored by the criminal-justice system.