Posted by Benjamin on: 12.06.2007 /
So a word up front. I decided to write a post about domestic violence, knowing *almost* nothing about the issue.
2 years ago at Off The Map Live, a lady named Nancy Murphy was the leader of one of the plenary sessions. As soon as she got the mike, she told the hundreds of us who were in the room that she was going to be playing a 911 call from a 5 year old girl which had involved domestic violence. The thought of listening to such a call so terrified me that I quickly left the room, an act which I have often regretted since then. I think I might have been able to stay if I had had a bit more warning. Afterwards, I saw that many of the conference goers were crying. I’m a little ashamed that I ran out of the room. One of the things I tend to like about myself is my willingness to face hard truth. And then it turned out that I wasn’t willing at all in that case.
Statistics vary, but it looks like *at least* 1 in 5, and up to 50% of, women in most Western nations have at some point experienced physical assault by their intimate partner. Just let that sink in for a moment.
I found out later a little more about Nancy Murphy. She is the executive director of Northwest Family Life, which is a non-profit based in Seattle which helps families who are dealing with domestic violence issues, specifically targeting christians. Part of the reason I decided to write about domestic violence today is because I wanted to let our Seattle readers know about a kind of fun volunteer opportunity this Friday from 4-8 pm involving pizza and envelope stuffing, for which the original volunteers became unavailabe. The contact for that is dgoodman @ nwfamilylife.org. I think NFL is pretty freaking kewl because they are helping both victims and perpetrators experience astounding, life altering, positive change.
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Comment by: David H
1 12/6/07 1:06 PM | Comment Link |My problem is somewhat the opposite. I have to remind myself how I should feel about it because it was normal in my house as a child. And not just physical abuse, also the mental variety (hence the occasional inability of mine to know how to properly feel about some things). Such indoctrination has led two of my siblings into abusive marriages. My sister married an abusive man and my brother married a physically and emotionally abusive woman.
As a reporter I have covered many domestic violence situations (hostages, murder/suicides, etc.) and with three active police officers in my church it comes up sometimes as a topic of conversation (cops hate domestic calls because they, as outsiders, can’t fix them but their mere presence could be part of an explosion of violence since there is no knowing all of the factors involved in those volatile situations).
I also wonder why Americans have trouble looking at domestic violence. Perhaps it has something to do with the inability — especially in our fractured modern society — for the average person to do anything about the people screaming next door. Every action can lead to headaches, trouble or tragedy. So you do nothing and pretend as if you don’t hear them.
Comment by: Claudia Davidson
2 12/6/07 1:09 PM | Comment Link |I knew very little of the epidemic of domestic violence except what my life experience had taught me. Then I came to work at Northwest Family Life. I am the manager of A New Yarn, which is a yarn store owned by NWFL, and all proceeds go to the advocacy program for women and children of domestic violence at NWFL.
It is a privilege to help in the small way that I can. Nancy Murphy and all employees at NWFL are so committed to ending this sad and tragic behavior.
Thank you for writing about this, a step to ending this behavior is educationa and awareness.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
3 12/6/07 2:42 PM | Comment Link |David,
Thankyou for sharing so honestly with us. Do I hear you saying it’s hard to get away from the experience you had of it being “normal”? I wonder how these experiences were operational both in your choice to become a writer, and in your choices of the focus of your writing?
I think you really nailed it about the disjointedness of modern suburbia. People are *so* afraid of each other. They dasn’t get involved at all, or if they do, only anonymously by calling the authorities. I notice this with hitchhikers also. People are so terrified. They are alone in a car with 200 horsepower and 4 extra seats, and they won’t pick up a shivering hitchhiker in the rain. All community is lost, sometimes that’s how it seems.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
4 12/6/07 2:46 PM | Comment Link |Claudia
Thankyou for stopping by! A friend of ours sent my wife the job listing for your job back when it was open. She’s very interested in social justice, but hardly knows a thing about yarn and associated stuff, so when the friend sent the job listing, it made us both smile enormously to imagine her trying to do that.
I’ve meant to stop in there sometime. It’s such a kewl idea. Thankyou for the work you do helping NWFL. Do you actually get to do a lot of knitting and such in your position? There’s something so astoundingly … delightful and warm and loved-feeling about wearing something that was knitted by hand.
Comment by: Randy
5 12/6/07 2:51 PM | Comment Link |I, too, grew up in a home where mom got abused (all of us kids did, too…in lots of ways). I put an end to the physical abuse of my mom when I was 17. I stepped in and beat the crap out of my dad. He never laid a hand on her after that.
But the verbal and emotional abuse continued. Mom could hold her own in this arena (equally abusive, to be honest) so I stayed out of it until the day she died. She doesn’t have to fight that one anymore.
I heard about a Hawaiian church that had to deal with the cultural norm of physical abuse that existed in the Samoan culture (I have seen this first hand). The elders of the church were all large Samoan men who would “visit” the guilty man once to verbally convince him to stop hitting his wife. The second time they had to visit, they beat the crap out of him. This seemed to be effective in that culture, as the men feared not only God but the elders as well. And this fear kept the lid on their abusive behaviors.
I kiddingly (sort of) suggested to a few of my biker friends that we start a new ministry called the F.O.G. Ministry (Fear Of God) that would work in a similar way. Anyone who beats their wife or children would get a visit, and if they continued, a second less gentle visit.
It’s just hard to sit by and do nothing, and the current laws and agencies dealing with abusers and their victims are pretty much about sheltering one from the other. And the police are caught in between. Justice seems to be sacrificed somehow to me.
I know that you are something of a pacifist, Benjamin, and that probably Donna would be horrified at the suggestion of such a violent means of ending violence. I apologize for the insensitivity of my comments. I was a pastor for nine years and never saw other alternatives work very well. I just saw marriages break up, women hospitalized and men continue to get away with (sometimes literally) murder. The only language most of these guys seem to really understand is fear.
And for some of them, even that is not enough. They will inflict pain on women and children until someone literally kills them (these are the psychopaths and some sociopaths). Unfortunately this is all too often done by the police, who the perpetrators intentionally force to fire. “Suicide by cop” is what the police call it. I’ve personally seen that happen, too.
Wow…that’s a lot. Sorry for the outburst. This is subject tends to bring out the worst in me (maybe that’s why it’s so hard to talk about?). I don’t know what’s the right thing to do. I sense that I should be more compassionate and less violent in regards to the perpetrators, but thus far I find myself unable to. Donna is a miracle worker and a saint. I wish I was more like her. The fact that she is willing and able to work with men who are abusers makes her look a lot like Jesus to me.
May God have mercy on us all.
Comment by: Elaine
6 12/6/07 8:02 PM | Comment Link |Randy and David - thanks for sharing your experience with me.
David - your comment
Reminded me of a story I just read in “Influencers” - about a community in Africa who was influenced by a soap opera to stop being silent about violence in the apartment next door.
Apparently, the soap opera raised the people’s awareness of how looking the other way, pretending they didn’t know - was putting the victim at risk and that their silence was allowing the violence to continue.
And so, if they heard their neighbors gearing up for a fight - walls are thin - they would grab pots n’pan, trash can and as a group - go to the neighbor’s house - and beginning beating the cans as loud as they could - it was a way to communicate that they knew what was happening and that it was not acceptable.
The peer pressure worked in that community. How would it work in the US? I don’t know, but might be worth a try - or some variation thereof.
I think the work that Nancy’s group does is amazing. When I was in Seattle this summer, I met Nancy and heard the stories… The piece that blew me away was working with the perpetrator to help rehabilitate them. I think it shows how compassionate Nancy is to want to help both victims.
Comment by: David H
7 12/6/07 9:15 PM | Comment Link |At a certain point in my life I knew enough to realize my childhood experience of many things was not “normal.” However, I continue to struggle with figuring out what normal should be. As a for instance, I sometimes see an adult father and son interacting and wonder if they like each other, are they having fun, is that how a healthy relationship looks, and what does it feel like?
I see this appear most frequently in my interactions with others. Sometimes in small ways. For instance, I only recently became aware that I have always had a problem being touched. Hugging is so uncomfortable to me that I will do almost anything to avoid that. But I also know that I am supposed to hug people, so I will do it when required or feel guilty if I don’t.
Starting out in the newspaper business I often asked my editor to tell me the “rules” of something. If she could give me the rules of a particular style of writing or reporting, I could figure out how to do it. My life sometimes feels the same way. I need someone to tell me the rules, because I sense that what I have been taught through experience is wrong but it seems so right. Even when I know what I should do, I may have to remind myself how I should feel about doing that.
Despite it all, though, I have a strong aversion to striking my own children or wife. It has always felt wrong. Even momentary bursts of anger or frustration at my children can leave me feeling almost physically ill. So, maybe I got something positive from my childhood after all.
How it affected my choice of career and my choices within that career is more difficult to pinpoint. I didn’t set out to work for a newspaper, but I did want to be a writer. I never intended to cover crime, but I did on many occasions. What may be more telling is the sense of displacement in the world that made me comfortable as an observer. I could be at an event and still feel like I wasn’t in the event. I was just watching. Much of my watching was to figure out why people did the things that they did and how they felt about them.
Thinking back, the observer thing could be part of the disassociation that comes out of the abuse thing for many. You lack the ability to protect yourself, so you just go away until it is over. Most of my memories of parental abuse are not from a face-down viewpoint. My point of view hovers next to my father, just slightly behind him. I have memories of forcing myself not to cry — as a punishment to him — but many more that feel like those of an onlooker watching what he did to those children.
Like Randy, I reached a certain age (16) and beat up my father. The physical abuse ended for everyone in the family after that. But even that was accidental, almost, and lacked the anger (until after it was underway) that I hear so many talk about. I didn’t realize until sometime after it happened that my dad was afraid of me and it altered his behavior (no more physical abuse, but still lots of mental/emotional stuff).
I do sometimes get angry at abusers and I know what I would do to my father if he ever touched one of my children. But I also wonder what difference it makes to the perpetrator. They may “understand” because it resonates with their understanding that power dictates action. But I’m not sure it cures them of the need to control. It didn’t for my dad, he just took his needs elsewhere. He definitely falls into the sociopath category (malignant narcissist is one term I heard applied), so he may be the exception.
But the need for power and control is often the result of fear so I’m not sure that fear (and the resulting loss of power and control) could be a real, long-term solution even for your run-of-the-mill abuser. Yet, I also have a strong aversion to reaching out to such people in other ways. They evoke in me such a toxic mix of emotions that I can’t turn away but also am unable to respond (one therapist suggested my fascination with books about abusers and shows like Special Victims Unit came from a desire to understand things that can’t be changed). Often, with both the real and the manufactured versions I feel like a dis-interested observer, hovering somewhere outside the events and not feeling much at all.
Comment by: Rachel
8 12/6/07 10:33 PM | Comment Link |Randy, I don’t think you should have to apologize for your feelings. They come from your own experience. I’m proud of you for sticking up for your mom.
David, I think it is so awesome that you have ended that cycle of abuse. It seems to me like that is the ultimate way to reclaim the power that your dad took away - to be the man you want to be and to not be like him.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
9 12/7/07 3:41 AM | Comment Link |Randy, David
Want to really say how honored I am that you guys are willing to be so open here. Thank you! You seriously rock.
Have either of you guys read Dan Allender? He writes these crazy ass things that always strike me as so devastatingly true. I tend to not be able to cope with more than about a chapter at any one sitting, and his books get thrown, *hard*, at the wall on the other side of the room in my outrage. But I find I am continually drawn back to them. He talks a lot about abuse.
David–I can really identify with a lot of what you were saying about that feeling of being an outsider who is disinterestly observing, and trying to figure out the rules and the feelings from what I see, since I didn’t *have* the feelings. It was only really in the last 4 years or so that I finally started to get permission to have feelings, and at first I thought for a while they were gonna kill me, they were … terrifyingly big. I still worry about that–that my feelings are too big, or … wrong, as in abnormal.
Randy,
I continue to have this sense of disconnect. I think it might not be about you at all, but more about my dad. You sound *so* much like him. He talks a lot like you write, when you write in this … violent vein that you sometimes jump into. Killing, and fear of god, and stuff. And yet I have *never* seen my dad actually do a single violent thing. Ever. For all the times he’s talked in that vein. So I get this disconnect with that. Does that make sense? I know my dad did some crazy violence back before I was born, over in SE Asia. But not since I’ve known him. He’s only violent by ommission–failing to give to himself the kindness he needs from himself, and thus experiencing the long termish violent consequences of that, espcially with regards to his physical health. I don’t know how I got wandered off onto the subject of my dad like that.
Comment by: Randy
10 12/7/07 10:22 AM | Comment Link |Benjamin,
I’m really sorry. I tend to remind people of their dads a lot (and usually not in a warm fuzzy way). Women more than men, but it happens fairly often.
I think talking about the rage for some of us (like maybe your dad and me…but at least me) help us diffuse it. We learned early on that using fear and intimidation…and sometimes simply brute force…can bring an end to the chaos and instantly relieve the terror. There is usually one gross violent act we commit, perhaps a season of violence, that reveals to us what we are truly capable of, and then most of us retreat into verbal and other kinds of intimidation, fearful of what might happen if the rage ever gets out again.
These kind of lessons (learned while we were quite young, usually) become instinctual for some of us, our first line of defense. For me, it was the ONLY thing that made any difference at all during a time of my life when insanity seemed normal all around me. It was physical and immediate intervention or suicide, frankly. At one point in my life I could have gone either way, quite rationally.
I would also add that Jesus has had a lot to do with my own restraint since I started following Him. It has been a long road, and one filled with pain and regret (for the way I have treated the people I loved, mostly), but there has been a lot of healing and redemption and transformation in me and in my relationships, thanks be to God.
The only thing I am afraid of in life anymore is what I would be without Him.
And yes…I’m very familiar with Allender (and Crabb). I’ve read several of his books. We actually paid the kings ransom to have him come out to our church last year and do his seminar. I’m not a huge fan, but some of his stuff is very helpful in terms of personal insight.
Knowing and doing is the struggle for me, and in general terms probably for everyone. Just knowing isn’t enough, no matter how much you know. It’s the doing that makes all the difference.
I give thanks to God for the fact that your dad has never acted violently in your experience with him, despite his demeanor at times. This may have resulted in health issues for him, as you suggest (and I don’t mean to in any way minimize the brutality of verbal assault or threats) but it is God’s grace in your life that you never had to endure his wrath and rage as it might have been expressed.
This is a small consolation in regards to my own children as well. I have at times created fear and anxiety in them as they grew up, but they never once experienced the terror and brutality and abuse that was bestowed upon me by my dad (and other family members). That part of history has ended with me. By God’s grace and mercy the rest will end with them.
Thanks for not dismissing me altogether, Benjamin. I know I’ve given you reason. I deeply respect you and your passion, and hope to learn from you as I continue to grow and change.
Comment by: David H
11 12/7/07 1:08 PM | Comment Link |Thanks Randy for taking the time and risk to express yourself on this. I appreciate what you have to say.
Comment by: Helen
12 12/7/07 2:39 PM | Comment Link |Randy wrote:
Randy, it’s huge that you didn’t treat your children the way your Dad treated you.
My Dad is like you in that he stopped the cycle of violence rather than perpetuating it. He was intent on not physically abusing his children the way his Dad abused him.
I’m sorry about what you went through growing up. Thanks for sharing a part of your story I had no idea about.
Comment by: Staci
13 12/7/07 7:41 PM | Comment Link |I just heard that Canada has a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women It was yesterday, December 6, the anniversary of the 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre, in which 14 women were singled out for their gender and murdered. I know there are lots of days in lots of countries set aside for various topics/people. But I really like that they included the word “action” in the name.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
14 12/8/07 5:15 PM | Comment Link |Randy
Thankyou for your honesty, and your encouragement. I think I’m probably learning more from you here than vice versa =)
I am intrigued by this statement you made. It sounds really nice, actually. I’m afraid of *so* many things, both monga afraid, and a little afraid, depending on the thing, and I find that the more I understand myself, the more I realize that fear has had, and continues to have, a huge impact on my story.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
15 12/8/07 5:18 PM | Comment Link |Staci,
Thank you for letting us know about Canada’s Action on Violence against Women Day. You and Randy have both touched on the fact, in this thread, that action is pretty darn important. I have absolutely no idea what action I could take to address violence against women. Maybe part of the action for me is modeling, living out, teaching, with my thoughts and actions, the concepts of self respect and the right to respect from others to my two little girls (and respect also toward my wife!).
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
16 12/8/07 5:18 PM | Comment Link |Just an addendum. I hardly get that remotely close to perfect. But that’s my ideal, and I’m working on it, every day.
Comment by: Rachel
17 12/8/07 5:45 PM | Comment Link |Benjamin, that’s a huge part of the action! Fathers play such an important role in girls’ lives, giving them a sense of value and worth and modeling to them how women should be treated. The love and attention you give your girls is powerful protection against them getting involved in abusive relationships.
I remember my dad telling me that if any guy ever tried to force me to do anything that I should take the biggest object I could find and hit him with it! Benjamin, my dad was like yours in that he would say these things, but he was actually a very gentle guy. But I got the message - that I was valuable and that I should stand up for myself and not tolerate any abuse. I’m so grateful to have had that love and support from my dad. I shudder to think where I would be without it.
This also reminds me of my aunt Naomi, who is a large and rather formidable woman. She approached Shawn in the receiving line at our wedding and said, “If you ever hurt her, I’ll knock your head off!”