See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  How to fix this ‘sick’ abuser? The psychopathology school says the answer is CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy): treatment that identifies, challenges and is ultimately supposed to change the distorted thought processes that lead perpetrators to abuse. This treatment is done either one-on-one or in groups, in which therapists or facilitators also teach abusive men new skills around communication and anger management, and give them strategies like how to take ‘time-outs’. The idea behind this model of change is that since the perpetrator has ‘learned’ to be abusive, they can also ‘unlearn’ it.

  As you would expect, studies of domestic abuse perpetrators do show a higher than average incidence of personality disorder, especially so-called ‘antisocial’ disorders such as sociopathy, psychopathy and borderline personality. But thus far, the psychopathology view that abusive behaviour can be detected like a pathogen has been shown to be false.

  Edward Gondolf, an American expert on abusive behaviour, put the psychopathology model to the test. In his study of 840 abusive men in four cities,26 he found only a small subgroup of abusers who were technically ‘disordered’ (most with narcissistic or antisocial disorders). But the vast majority of the abusers in Gondolf’s study were no more disordered than regular people.# As for the notion that violence is a behaviour boys learn in childhood, other research has shown that theory to be incomplete too. Boys who grow up in violent homes are more likely to become perpetrators than boys who don’t, but, according to a review of multiple studies, there is only a ‘weak-to-moderate relationship’ between experiencing violence as a boy and becoming an abuser as a man.27

  In his bestselling text Why Does He Do That?, long-time men’s behaviour change facilitator Lundy Bancroft says it’s no surprise that people believe abusers’ thinking must be disordered. ‘When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane,’ writes Bancroft. ‘When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around … [it] is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill.’ But the vast majority of the abusers Bancroft has worked with have been what he regards as ‘normal’: ‘Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don’t hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners – and children – thinks that there is anything wrong with them.’ According to Bancroft, it is the abuser’s value system that is unhealthy – not their mind.28

  Applying a pure psychopathology lens to domestic abuse has been widely discredited, but its influence is still remarkably strong. Over the past fifteen years, this model has risen to dominate American public policy on domestic abuse research. That is a problem for the rest of us, because before this policy shift America was where much of the best research was coming from. Now, much of that funding has dried up – redirected away from experts on domestic abuse, and put towards research on personality disorders instead. ‘We haven’t done any more research,’ says John Gottman, ‘because it’s almost impossible to get a research grant from the federal government to study domestic violence. [It has] decided that all of these problems are in the brain, so they won’t study relationships between two people anymore.’ Holtzworth-Munroe has noticed the same trend. ‘Somewhere along the way, a lot of the funding agencies changed, and said they primarily wanted to do research on diagnoses in the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual].† I’m seeing that there’s less research on violence, period.’

  It would be easier for us to believe that domestic abusers are sick, and recognisably different from normal men. But we cannot avoid the uncomfortable truth that violent and sadistic behaviour can come from otherwise ‘normal’ minds. More than fifty years after Hannah Arendt revealed the banality of evil in Adolf Eichmann – the Nazi organiser of the Holocaust who was certified as ‘normal’ by half a dozen psychiatrists – we still struggle to believe that psychologically ordinary men can commit sadistic acts of cruelty.

  IT’S THE PATRIARCHY, STUPID

  To strict adherents of the feminist model, the psychopathology theory is simply a Trojan horse for protecting the patriarchy. Their suspicion is understandable: for much of the twentieth century, the field of psychiatry was dominated by misogynistic figures who blamed victims for their perpetrator’s abuse and commonly misdiagnosed them as masochists and hysterics. According to the feminist model, domestic abuse is a natural byproduct of patriarchy: a system in which men feel entitled to dominate, discredit and disregard women. This model says that an abuser’s personal history is not the decisive factor in his abuse: pathology, upbringing, substance abuse and even class may influence an abusive man’s behaviour, but they don’t cause it.

  Think of the feminist model this way: if an abusive man is a room, then toxic gender attitudes and beliefs – like ‘women belong in the home’, ‘real men don’t cry’, ‘women often make up false rape reports to punish men’ – are the floor. The abusive man’s ‘floor’ may have a lot of heavy furniture on it – alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, child abuse, unemployment and so on. The furniture in each abusive man’s ‘room’ makes it look unique, and sometimes the room is so crowded you can barely see the floor. But that floor – the gender stereotypes that form the foundation of this man’s expectations and behaviour – is still there. It’s what all that furniture is sitting on.

  This perspective has been developed over decades of research and work with victims, in shelters, hospitals and courthouses, and the central assertion – that men who subscribe to rigid gender stereotypes are more likely to abuse their partners – is backed up by decades of research. Study after study29 finds that men are more prone to abusing if they’ve a) been socialised into rigid gender roles, b) believe that men are naturally superior or c) feel their masculinity or authority has been threatened, particularly if women have not complied with their gender-role expectations. The feminist model is clear on how to reform these men: they must first take responsibility for their abuse, and then they must be shown how their male privilege and entitlement is part of a broader – and damaging – system of patriarchy.§

  Karen Willis, a legend of the domestic abuse sector who’s worked with both victims and perpetrators for over thirty years, explained the feminist model to me when I first started researching domestic abuse. As we sat down to chat, I was fixated on one question: why do men still do this? ‘We know that those who use violence in their relationships use it not because they’re mad or because they have anger management issues or any of those sorts of things, but because they’re into power and control,’ Willis explained. ‘They want to hurt, humiliate and dominate. They see that they’re entitled to be completely and utterly in control and that everything revolves around them. Others in the family have an absolute responsibility and obligation to keep them happy at all times and do whatever it is that they want.’

  ‘But where does this sense of entitlement come from?’ I asked. ‘Why this need for control?’

  Willis didn’t miss a beat. ‘Oh, good old-fashioned patriarchy,’ she replied. ‘It’s all part of a social system where men have positions of power, and women are seen as second-class citizens. Most men behave in absolutely ethical ways towards the women and children in their life. But what the system of patriarchy gives some men is what they perceive as permission to use power and control and be dominant … they are top of the pecking order, and … women and children within their families should be subjugated to them.’

  This is the explanation that – after decades of grinding, tireless advocacy – has been adopted by the most powerful people in Australia, from prime ministers to police chiefs. Unlike the United States, where public policy is closely aligned with the psychopathology model, authority figures in Australia all agree on one point: domestic violence is a cultural phenomenon that arises out of rigid gender norms and gender inequality. That’s the thinking behind comments
like this one, from then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull: ‘Disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women.’30 It’s also the bedrock of our national strategy to end domestic abuse, The National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children 2010–2022, which prescribes gender equality and a change in community attitudes as the cure. It says, essentially, that until we change attitudes, close the gender wage gap, and achieve greater gender equality, domestic abuse will continue to thrive.

  When feminist scholars developed this theory back in the 1970s, they did more than just revolutionise our understanding of men’s violence against women. They also raised a middle finger to all those psychiatrists who had insisted for decades – without proof – that domestic violence was a response to provocations from masochistic women who wanted their husbands to abuse them. When these psychiatrists bothered to examine the actual abusers, they reverted to the simplistic conclusion that their violence was the product of a sick and disordered mind. As the newly formed women’s refuge movement proclaimed loud and clear: it’s not pathology, it’s society! What could be ‘disordered’ about behaviour that had been permitted – and encouraged – for centuries?

  So how does the feminist model stack up? As we might expect, coercive controllers – Pit Bulls and Cobras – commonly score high on scales measuring misogyny and rigid gender stereotypes. They are the most dangerous abusers, and it’s their victims that advocates who work in shelters and other emergency programs deal with the most. But when we look towards the lower end of the power and control spectrum, to the ‘family-only’ abusers (who I’ve also called ‘insecure reactors’), surveys show very different results. These abusers are no more or less misogynistic than non-violent men. They’re also unlikely to have any kind of mental disorder. They are not generally the most dangerous offenders, but they are violent and can still pose a serious threat to their partners. How do we explain their behaviour?

  A MIDDLE GROUND

  Let’s return briefly to the story of Glen, the young British man who had abused three girlfriends by the age of twenty-one. How to explain why he did this? The researchers suggest a few possibilities. Was he obsessed with what his girlfriends wore because he’s a misogynist who feels entitled to control them, or was his behaviour driven by the insecurity around intimacy that stemmed from his troubled and brutal childhood? Is it misogyny when Glen expects his girlfriends to adjust their behaviour to soothe his paranoia, or is he grasping for the kind of care he never received as a boy? Is he paranoid about his girlfriends cheating on him because he feels entitled to own them, or is it the result of having his trust routinely broken in childhood? The most likely answer is: it’s all of these things. We cannot truly understand why Glen is abusive – or figure out how best to help him change – without looking at his behaviour through the lenses of gender and psychology.

  I’ve spent years wrestling with misgivings over how to understand – and attempt to explain – the abusive mind. For four years, I’ve listened to survivors bravely recount stories of unfathomable cruelty. I’ve spent countless hours studying men’s historical dominance over women, and how our patriarchal system has for centuries ignored – and continues to excuse – domestic abuse. My rage over the injustice of this has many times threatened to overwhelm me. To then turn around and look at domestic abuse through the eyes of the perpetrators – and to see them as complex humans with their own needs and sensitivities – has been so difficult that it’s sometimes literally made me feel ill. It may be painful – even infuriating – for some readers to confront this too. But it’s essential that we do. Because getting clear on what causes men to abuse – and on how to prevent and stop them doing it – is urgent. As the renowned violence expert James Gilligan says, to simply condemn violence ‘is as irrelevant as it would be to “condemn” cancer or heart disease’.

  This is something that criminologist Michael Salter also anguishes over. His research focuses on men’s violence towards women and children, and he’s consulted with government organisations like VicHealth and Our Watch on strategies to reduce domestic abuse. Over the past few years, he has seen the public discussion about men’s violence against women become increasingly narrow. ‘We’ve moved into a neoliberal feminist analysis of violence, which assumes that perpetrators have no depth; that they are all just surfaces that are written upon by tv and pornography and culture,’ he tells me. ‘I think the populist discourse on domestic violence has turned into a total shitshow. Those of us who appreciate a bit of complexity in our analysis have just stepped back to shut our mouths.’ The problem with this narrow approach – which prescribes changing sexist and violence-supporting attitudes as the cure – is that it is dangerously missing the mark. ‘Treatment based on these liberal feminist principles is not working. It’s not working! At this point, why on earth wouldn’t we swivel to recognise that these guys have an inner world?’

  What’s particularly odd about this increasingly narrow approach is that the ‘swivel’ Salter is talking about was actually made, almost twenty years ago, by the co-founder of the feminist model for men’s behaviour change. The late and legendary Ellen Pence, co-designer of the Duluth model, the world’s leading model of behaviour change, was one of the most influential exponents of the feminist model (in which men abuse women because they want power and control). At the turn of the century, however, she decided the strict feminist model was incomplete – and, for some abusive men, not accurate at all. The idea that all abusers were driven by a need or desire for power ‘did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with’, wrote Pence in 1999. ‘I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were … merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers.’ Notice here, Pence is talking about what abusers feel driven by. She’s not saying abusive men weren’t seeking power over their partners, just that getting power was not what they felt was driving their abuse.

  Pence says that for a long time, when she and her colleagues were running men’s groups, they regarded the views of the men as inconsequential. These were abusers who denied, minimised and justified their abuse – anything they had to say about the reasons behind their abuse was probably just another excuse. ‘Like those we were criticising, we reduced our analysis to a psychological universal truism [that battering was motivated by a need or desire for power]. Like the therapist insisting it was an anger control problem, or the judge wanting to see it as an alcohol problem … [we] remained undaunted by the difference in our theory and the actual experience of those we were working with.’31

  By framing abusive men as two-dimensional control freaks, Pence and her staff had reduced them to mere foot soldiers of the patriarchy – faceless enforcers of our centuries-old system of domination over women. This approach, Pence wrote, reduced ‘complex social relationships to slogans … “He does it for power, he does it for control, he does it because he can” – these were advocacy jingles that, in our opinion, said just about all there was to say.’ But in going back to the individual cases, Pence and her colleagues realised they needed to make a fundamental change to their approach. They began to land on a concept of domestic violence that would apply to all violent relationships: that domestic violence is rooted in the entitlement some people feel over their intimate partners – a sense of entitlement that is formed by society, and connected to patriarchy.

  Once they had made this shift, it also became clear to Pence that different abusers needed different kinds of treatment. In relationships where the violence happened randomly – and not as part of a broader system of control – it could be the case that treating the perpetrator’s addiction or mental illness would actually stop their violence. Such treatment would not be sufficient, however, for a coerc
ive controller who was also an alcoholic: abusive men intent on domination would not stop simply by getting sober. Additionally, there was no point trying to get Cobra-style abusers to reform through group therapy: they are ‘singularly resistant to change’ and often have little capacity to feel shame or remorse for their victim. These men needed a different approach altogether.32

  In acknowledging the diversity of men’s violence, Pence wasn’t abandoning the Duluth theory of power and control. There was no doubt that many abusers wanted power and dominance, and that they felt entitled to it. But in itself, the stock feminist answer for why men abuse – because they want power and control – didn’t go far enough.

  The more interesting question is: why do men want this power and control? And why do they go to such extreme and destructive lengths to get it?