Domestic Violence Awareness Month

I write about domestic violence once a year, always during the month of October, since this is the month that has been designated domestic violence awareness month.

The horror stories are real, vivid and disturbing and they continue to fill up journals, magazines and police blotters. And although some men are also domestic violence victims, about 90 percent of all victims are women and that percentage has stayed fairly stable over the past several years.

Domestic violence victims can roughly be placed into two categories. There are the women who stay in the relationship out of sheer fear that their husband will kill them, or their children, or commit suicide himself if they try to leave and then there are the women who stay because they've become accustomed to this bizarre way of life. I've written about the first category before so this year I'm going to write about the second group.

We don't hear a lot about this group for a couple of reasons. One is that they are certainly a small minority of the total abuse victims and the other reason is that it isn't politically correct to talk or write about this group because it indicates almost a willingness to be abused. However, I learned a long time ago that just because it's downplayed in the literature doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Why would a woman endure being abused? The reason I was given by someone in that situation was that the abuse started early on in her marriage and after her husband successfully brainwashed her over an extended period of time to believe that if she would just act right, the abuse wouldn't happen, she also came to believe that it was his way of showing he cared for her. After all, if she did things she wasn't supposed to do and the husband did nothing, it would suggest he didn't care enough about her to correct her mistakes.

On top of that, there is a phenomenon called submission that influence women AND men, and it especially holds true for women in physically and emotionally abusive relationships. Some women desire dominant men and, when they find them, they tolerate the pain and degradation of being abused because the dividing line between pain and pleasure has been so blurred as to no longer exist to them. Intellectually, these women know that what's being done to them shouldn't happen, but emotionally they "need" the abuse as much as the husband likes to give it.

They often say to themselves that someday they WILL leave; when the children graduate from school and move away, when they've saved up enough money, when they find someone else to love who WON'T abuse them but as each one of these events comes and goes and they find themselves still with him, they come to realize that they can't leave. They have reached a shared and mutual dependency of pain and abuse with their husband that defies all logic and they become convinced that they can't break away from it.

So the relationship between the abused and her abuser takes another step deeper into the dark side. She tells no one about the abuse, not even her best friend, and if anyone suspects it or sees it, she denies it. She doesn't call the domestic abuse hotline and she doesn't report his behavior to the police. In fact, she defends him and stands up for him because of this twisted sense of need and dependency he's forced on her that she can no longer resist.

This is the kind of abuse that supporters of domestic violence awareness month never talk about or even admit could be happening because it makes the woman a willing victim and they take the perspective that there is no such thing.

But there is and that's the saddest part of all.

Today's my birthday. Come out to the Coppermill Restaurant and Lounge this afternoon and help me celebrate it.