See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  ‘For these guys, the lack of empathy, the lack of regard for the victim … You’re banging your head on a wall to have them in a therapeutic group. In fact, they will often try to collude with the facilitators, and speak on behalf of the other guys.’ Appealing to their sense of empathy or remorse is a waste of time, though they may show glimmers of both (generally as a tactic, says Van Altena). Instead, these offenders need to be seen one-on-one, and any appeals for them to change have to speak to their self-interest. How do they feel about what’s happened to them as a result of their crime? Do they really want to keep landing back in jail? Aren’t they smarter than this? ‘The motivation [for change] will be freedom, what quality of life he’s looking for, and what the community expects from him.’

  *

  Gottman and Jacobson’s research suggests there are two types of coercive controllers: a big group, called Pit Bulls, whose anger and hostility builds slowly and then explodes, and a small group, called Cobras, who are always in control, even when their violence looks frenzied. When Pit Bulls fight, their heartrates go up; when Cobras fight, their heart rates go down.

  There’s general agreement from other researchers on the description of these two categories, but subsequent studies have failed to replicate the results exactly.15 One study did succeed in replicating the division in heart rate (20 per cent of their abusive participants showed decelerated heart rates too), but drew different conclusions about what that indicated about the men’s style of violence. When I asked Gottman why his study had never been duplicated, he pointed to the different research methods used. ‘It’s very hard to replicate things when you don’t have the kind of high-tech laboratory that we had,’ he said. ‘That includes very good observational measurement – looking at facial expressions, how the body works, and how they work interactively.’

  One of the leading researchers who tried and failed to replicate the study is Amy Holtzworth-Munroe, a professor of psychology at Indiana University. She has developed perhaps today’s best-known typologies for abusive men, and says that although she thinks there may be problems with the study’s heart-rate conclusions, there hasn’t been enough funding to investigate it properly. What was supported by her research were the basic categories – Cobras, who are cold and calculating, and Pit Bulls, who are paranoid and reactive. These two types were very similar to the typologies she identified.

  Holtzworth-Munroe wrote her now famous paper in 1994,16 a year before Gottman and Jacobson, when domestic abuse researchers were starting to realise that not all offenders were the same. Munroe looked at three different factors:

  1the severity and frequency of the abuse

  2whether the abuser was violent outside the family, or had a criminal history

  3behavioural traits that matched certain personality disorders, like psychopathy or borderline personality disorder.

  ‘When we put that together, we proposed the three types,’ says Holtzworth-Munroe, on the phone from America’s Midwest. ‘I don’t like the names for them, but these are the names that have stuck.’

  The first type – the ‘generally violent/antisocial’ – are essentially the men Gottman and Jacobson defined as ‘Cobras’. These men aren’t just a threat to their partners – they have a criminal nature and may also be a threat to the public. They are the abusers most likely to have had violent childhoods, they act on impulse, and though they have hostile attitudes towards women they’re also just hostile in general and are used to behaving violently. These are your classic sociopaths, psychopaths and malignant narcissists – or men who, though not technically disordered, behave as though they are.

  Lindt Café gunman Man Haron Monis is a classic example of a ‘generally violent/antisocial’ perpetrator. Grandiose and deluded, Monis was a self-styled sheikh who first abused his wife and then, after they’d separated, arranged for his new girlfriend to kill her. In December 2014, when he took eighteen people hostage at the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place, he was awaiting trial for the murder of his ex-wife and had also been charged with sexually assaulting several women who had come to him as a ‘spiritual healer’.

  The connection between domestic abuse and mass shootings is now explicit in the United States, where mass shootings (defined as killing four or more people) have become so commonplace, they occur on nine out of every ten days on average. Between 2009 and 2016, more than half of American mass shootings started with the murder of an intimate partner or family member.17 Many other mass shooters have had histories of domestic abuse, including Omar Mateen, who killed forty-nine and wounded fifty-three at a gay club in Orlando, Florida; Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, who killed more than eighty people when he drove a truck into a crowd in France on Bastille Day; and Robert Lewis Dear Jr, who shot three people dead at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. As Rebecca Traister wrote in New York Magazine: ‘What perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn out to often have in common, more than any particular religion or ideology, are histories of domestic violence.’18

  The second type, which correlates closely with the Pit Bulls, Holtzworth-Munroe called ‘dysphoric/borderline’ (she did warn you – the names aren’t catchy). Their abuse is normally confined to the relationship, which is why neighbours and friends find it hard to believe they could ever be abusive. Typically, a traumatic upbringing has left them terrified of abandonment, codependent and morbidly jealous. Many fantasise that their intimate relationships will dispel the feelings of insecurity and worthlessness that have plagued them since childhood. ‘They’re very worried about losing the relationship, so they become hypervigilant to cues that maybe their wife is screwing around and is going to leave them – even when there’s no logical reason for them to perceive that,’ says Holtzworth-Munroe. ‘We don’t know if they’re using the violence because they’re trying to get control over her, or because they’re so emotionally disregulated that they just can’t control their upset and anger.’ These emotionally dependent men are the most likely to kill themselves after they’ve killed their partners.

  The third type Holtzworth-Munroe identified is the ‘family-only batterer’ (a type I loosely described as an ‘insecure reactor’ in Chapter 1). The family-only batterer is not a coercive controller. Essentially, their violence is an expression of frustration, anger and sometimes rage that arises from stressors in their life; once expressed, their abuse and the emotion that led to it seem to disappear, leaving them feeling back to normal, until the next eruption. When they express remorse, they often mean it, and they are more likely to volunteer for and complete treatment. But even these men – the most receptive to treatment – are often found to have a reluctance to change.

  Holtzworth-Munroe says that of the three types, ‘family-only batterers’ are the most mysterious: why do they abuse, when other men – who also deal with stress in their lives – do not? ‘Maybe it’s cultural factors, maybe it’s substance abuse – we don’t know.’ What she can say is that their stress-related abuse usually corresponds with other risk factors, like growing up around domestic abuse or having poor communication skills. But here’s another thing. Unlike the other two types, these men are not overtly misogynistic – certainly no more or less than other non-violent men. This should be a major consideration when we talk about why men are violent towards women – as we’ll see a little later in this chapter.

  *

  There is no hard and fast border between these typologies. Just because a man fits a ‘family-only batterer’ description now doesn’t mean he won’t develop over time into a coercive controller.

  Typologies can be a great force for good. As Professor Jane Wangmann writes, they offer a vital insight, and can highlight ‘whether the use of violence is motivated by coercive control; whether it is one-off or conflict based … whether the person uses violence beyond the family setting; and whether there are other factors (for example, psychological) which are also important to understanding that person’s use of violence’.19 This, she writes, has huge ramifications for
how we respond to perpetrators: it tells us that a one-size-fits-all approach to reforming them is almost certainly doomed to fail; it helps us to devise better interventions and treatments for victims; and it has the potential to help us make better decisions in family law disputes.

  But typologies can also do a lot of harm. As Wangmann notes, there are serious concerns about how they are applied, and most revolve around one question: do they make victims more or less safe? What if, for example, a judge in a family law case decides to grant access to children after being persuaded that the father was a ‘family-only batterer’, when he was in fact a coercive controller – and was therefore a far greater danger to the children and their mother?

  Holtzworth-Munroe is also disturbed by how her typology has been misused in the justice system. ‘I was told that, for example, a judge was trying to make those decisions from the bench – “Oh, you’re a family-only man,” and “Oh, you’re a borderline-dysphoric man” – and then making decisions based on that. That was very concerning. Because even I couldn’t do that!’ she says with a laugh. ‘Except for extreme cases, you’re not going to find people who are like, “Oh, that’s definitely this kind of man.” They’re more dimensions than clear types.’

  *

  To give you a sense of just how slippery these types can be, let’s look at the story of a 21-year-old white British man called ‘Glen’.20 He’d been in and out of jail since he was a teenager for multiple offences: arson, burglary, assaulting a police officer, attempted robberies, assaults, possession of weapons and theft. Glen sought help soon after he grabbed his girlfriend, ‘Michelle’, by the throat. He had been with Michelle for three years, a relationship he described as the best he’d ever had, despite it being wracked by violence from both sides. Glen had never hit Michelle, he said, even when she hit him. But he had thrown their puppy across the room when they were arguing, and held her by the throat to restrain her when she hit him.

  Speaking to Glen about Michelle, researcher Mary-Louise Corr may have concluded that this was just a volatile relationship, in which both partners were unable to control their anger. But while Glen had not been overtly violent towards Michelle, he was controlling – just as he’d been with his two previous girlfriends. Exploring Glen’s other relationships, the researchers discovered a pattern: with all three girlfriends, he would get ‘wound up’ when they wore revealing clothing or got attention from other guys. His way of dealing with his paranoia was to ‘always … be with them, like I wouldn’t let them out of my sight ’cos I used to get paranoid and seeing, thinking, what they’re fuckin’ up to. I think I used to force them to change [their clothes] as well. Like say, “You better flippin’ change or I’ll change you myself.”’ When he was asked to talk more about his other girlfriends, Glen’s answers revealed a remarkably violent history. When his ex, ‘Karen’, made him wait outside a nightclub one night, he headbutted her, threw food in her face and then poured a drink over her because she ‘tried to make [him] look like a dickhead in front of [his] mates’. When Karen threatened to leave him after she heard him tell an ex-girlfriend he still loved her, Glen retaliated by strangling her, holding her hostage and almost killing her:

  I grabbed her by the throat, threw her onto the bed, like shut the door. And my cousin and his girlfriend was in the room as well. Shut the door, told them none of them were leaving. Then told my other cousin to come round and get me. When he come round to the back of the house [I] went to the window and said, ‘Get me some petrol from the petrol station, I’m going to kill them all.’ But he didn’t end up doing it … Then I just remember hitting her and stuff. And then – because I have anxiety attacks as well when I get stressed – then I had an anxiety attack and the ambulance, the ambulance come. And then I lashed out at the ambulance people as well.

  Glen reacted violently when Michelle threatened to leave too, but in a markedly different way: ‘She tried to leave so I grabbed her by the throat. But obviously I was upset, crying, when I grabbed her by the throat so I sat back down and tried speaking to her.’

  Glen explained that his violence came not from righteous anger, but from a deeper fear of abandonment, and a reaction to feeling disrespected and humiliated: ‘I’ve got paranoia and I end up thinking things and then if I think they’re true I end up hurting them, lashing out and stuff like that. Or when they try and take the mick out of me, I end up hurting them.’ Glen spent much of his childhood feeling shamed, humiliated and abandoned. His parents separated when he was two, and his father was in and out of jail so often that Glen barely knew him. His dad was never violent towards his mum, as far as Glen knew, but a later boyfriend hit her and dragged her by the hair. Violence was commonplace in Glen’s family: he and his older brother fought so severely that when Glen was around seven his brother kicked and punched him so hard he had to be taken to hospital with an appendix close to bursting. When Glen became a teenager, his older brother would do things to make him ‘tougher’, like directing him to bash random strangers in the street. When Glen disclosed that his older brother had masturbated in front of him when he was in primary school, Glen was put into foster care and his brother was sent to jail. When Glen told his mother he was also sexually abused by a relative when he was six, his mum went ‘mad’ and refused to believe him.

  Looking at Glen’s history of domestic abuse, how would you categorise him? If you were to look only at Glen’s relationship with Michelle, you would, as researchers Mary-Louise Corr and David Gadd point out, see someone who resorts to violence during times of stress – a typical ‘family-only’ type. This is further borne out by Glen’s attitudes to violence: when Michelle attacks him over his infidelities, he restrains but never hits her, he says, because men who are violent towards other women are ‘sick’. The violence goes both ways, and there doesn’t appear to be a serious power imbalance. Indeed, write Gadd and Corr, based on this relationship, police had assessed Glen to be a ‘family-only’ type. But when you look at Glen’s history with other girlfriends, a much more threatening pattern of coercive control emerges, and Glen starts to look a lot more dangerous. ‘Glen’s tendency to perpetrate strangling, headbutting, hostage taking, and death threats place him at the most dangerous end of the spectrum,’ write Gadd and Corr, ‘and capable of behaviors that are hardly normal.’21

  Glen – and the many other men like him – should be a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks they can categorise abusers based on their behavior in one relationship.

  So, what to make of the typologies? We may not be able to slot abusive men confidently into one type or another. But understanding these common dimensions does at least help us understand that there’s more than one kind of perpetrator.

  We find ourselves on much shakier ground, however, when we ask why these men feel and behave the way they do.

  *

  At this point it’s worth stepping back to remind ourselves just how complex and random the organism is that we’re trying to understand. In the words of Nobel Prize–winning neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles, ‘the brain is so complicated it staggers its own imagination’.22 We’re talking about a system of 86 billion neurons, each of which can form around 5000 synapses (or connections) to other neurons. That means the helmet-shaped lump of watery fat and protein between our ears can produce hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections. They shape our identity: from our sense of smell to our personality, what we like and dislike, how we respond to our environment – and whether we’re likely to be violent. These synapse formations are shaped by genes, hormones, experience and culture. Neuroscientists can watch these neural pathways in action, but they can’t put them in a petri dish and whiz up a sample of consciousness. Consciousness is formed in a place neuroscientists can’t even find. How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense that we are conscious human beings? Why does human behaviour seesaw between acts of self-sacrifice and acts of sadism? Might our mood and behaviour change according to the bacteria in our guts, as scientists at the Univer
sity of California have started to explore?23 What about other random factors, like research that suggests childhood lead exposure leads to an increase in violent criminal behaviour?24

  We have theories to help us put this complicated picture together, but, scientifically speaking, we can’t prove them. We can’t even say for sure what a ‘self’ is.

  It’s in this unforgiving and deceptive terrain that we go looking for answers to this vital question: why are men violent towards women?

  *

  Since the 1970s, this controversial question has fuelled an intellectual turf war. I could devote an entire chapter to the various models that claim to explain men’s violence,* but let’s just stick to the two that dominate: the ‘feminist’ model and the ‘psychopathology’ model. The more strident devotees of each of these models insist they know the real reason men abuse women – and they alone know how to stop them.

  So how do their theories stack up?

  IT’S ALL IN THE MIND

  Strict adherents to the psychopathology model insist that domestic abuse is rooted in mental illness, substance abuse and childhood trauma, and has little – if anything – to do with gender or patriarchy. In fact, many dismiss gender as an irrelevant distraction. ‘There is no scientific truth to a gendered approach whatsoever,’ Peter Miller, professor of violence prevention and addiction studies at Deakin University, told The Spectator. ‘The real key is psychological predisposition around people with aggression: the “Dark Triad” … narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These are found in people of both sexes.’25 Unlike the feminist model – which asks ‘Why do men beat their wives?’ – the psychopathology school asks: ‘Why did this man beat his wife?’ There must be something identifiably wrong with an abusive man, because he displays aberrant behavior that is fundamentally incompatible with a ‘normal’ mind. The psychopathology model looks first for clear signs of disorder, illness or addiction; if these are absent, it will look for other factors – abuse or neglect in childhood, or other traits that distinguish the abuser, such as narcissism, immaturity or sadism. In other words, from a strict psychopathology perspective, only ‘sick’ individuals would harm people they claim to love. (Some psychiatrists may even believe that if a sickness can’t be found, then that person is probably not abusive – and is being falsely accused.)