Can the violence be stopped?

Josh Brown, former kicker for the Nebraska Cornhuskers and up until last week, the current kicker for the New York Giants professional football team, was dismissed after domestic abuse events between him and his wife came to light. This had been reported several times over the past few years before definitive action was finally taken and it's a bad mark against the NFL for their continued slow response to a nationwide problem.

Every year sometime during the month of October, I write a column about domestic violence because October is Domestic Violence Awareness month. I write this annual column because domestic abuse involving the man as offender and the woman as victim is the most cowardly act a person can commit and it involves people I know and care about.

Almost all of my columns in the past have dealt with reducing this violence through testimony, intervention, police activism and helping our friends but nothing seems to work very well. Abusive men continue to find submissive women who they can bully and coerce to do whatever they're told to do and face the consequences if they don't. It's almost like these two totally different kinds of personalities are pulled towards each other and I'm not so sure they're not.

We all heard the responses a couple of weeks ago to the hidden recording of Donald Trump talking about his own sexual aggression towards woman with Billy Bush. What I learned right away from the outrage is that not everyone WAS outraged and not all women were outraged. Many women claimed that kind of talk was just boys being boys; as Trump described it, locker room talk, and many other women claimed those were the kinds of men they were attracted to. The feminists in this country expected a huge backlash towards Trump for the things he said but it didn't happen because a lot of people agree with that kind of behavior. Which begs the question, how can you fix something that doesn't want to get fixed?

I've known submissive women in my lifetime who wanted to be dictated and ruled by a strong man. I've known women who want their men to make all the choices in life because they don't believe they have the ability to; either because of a severe lack of self-confidence or the fact they've been told that for so long by the dominant man in their life that they've come to accept it as fact.

I've been told by women that when they're beaten or physically abused by their husbands, it's a show of love because if their husbands didn't love them, they wouldn't care what they did or said and there would be no reason for the abuse.

Now none of this makes sense from a rational, intellectual perspective but it seems to make sense to some of the abused women in this country who use these explanations to stay in a bad situation when they could leave and make their lives instantly better. But they all seem to be afraid of the same thing; that their husbands will track them down and kill them so they don't leave, even though they know the abuse will continue in the future.

Is there any proof of this or is it a figment of their imagination? Unfortunately, there IS proof that sometimes happens. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the risk of homicide by 500% (http://www.ncbl.nim.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447915/).

In another piece of research it was found that 6,488 troops were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2012 while during the same time period, 11,766 American women were killed by a current or ex male partner.

Finally, the elephant in the room is that some women desire to be abused. These women are called masochists because of their desire to be hurt, restrained, abused, and controlled and if the person they're married to isn't giving that to them, they'll find someone who will.

Because intimate partner violence is born out of a personal relationship between two people in which literally no one knows about what goes on between them except them, we can't really expect the number of victims of violence to ever go down substantially. But we must stay vigilant if not to protect the woman, to at least try and protect the children because 90% of all the children in domestic violence situations have observed the violence first-hand and boys who see their dads physically abuse their mothers are twice as likely to be violent toward their wives or girlfriends than boys who don't and girls who witness it are much more likely to be victims of violence!

Due to the secret nature of domestic violence and the reluctance of domestic violence victims to tell anyone of their problems because of either personal embarrassment or fear of retribution by the male partner, this seems to be a problem without a solution.