March 18, 2008
Trauma and Post Traumatic Stress
The term trauma is derived from the Greek for "wound." It is imposed on people via unwanted external forces and can result in physical or emotional injury. Although post traumatic stress was formally identified in the 1970's, it has become increasing recognized. Experiencing or witnessing abuse as a child is "a well-established risk factor" for developing multiple mental and emotional illnesses, including "depression, eating disorders and substance abuse, as well as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)." In fact, research is showing that "tiny differences in the genetic code seem to make the difference between whether an individual with a childhood history of abuse rises above it or struggles psychologically when exposed to traumas later in life." This may explain human variences in resiliance. I don't interpret this to say that humans can't learn to increase their psychological elasticity to cope with life's infractions. Personally, I see every challenge as an opportunity to assess my inner strength and ability to apply learned coping skills.
Recommended Reading
Book Description:
When Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery was first published five years ago, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work. In the intervening years, Herman's now classic volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new introduction, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic of trauma and recovery have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research on domestic violence, as well as on a vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.
Product DescriptionThis fascinating investigation into what makes abusive men tick is alarming, but its candid handling of a difficult subject makes it a valuable resource for professionals and victims alike. Bancroft, the former codirector of Emerge, the nation's first program for abusive men, has specialized in domestic violence for 15 years, and his understanding of his subject and audience is apparent on every page. "One of the prevalent features of life with an angry or controlling partner is that he frequently tells you what you should think and tries to get you to doubt or devalue your own perceptions and beliefs," he writes. "I would not like to see your experience with this book re-create that unhealthy dynamic. So the top point to bear in mind as you read [this book] is to listen carefully to what I am saying, but always to think for yourself." He maintains this level of sensitivity and even empathy throughout discussions on the nature of abusive thinking, how abusive men manipulate their families and the legal system and whether or not they can ever be cured. Jargon-free analysis is frequently broken up by interesting first-person accounts and boxes that distill in-depth information into simple checklists. Bancroft's book promises to be a beacon of calm and sanity for many storm-tossed families.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
February 11, 2008
The elevated risk for non-lethal post-separation violence in Canada: a comparison of separated, divorced, and married women
The purpose of the study was to shed fight on the potentially differing dynamics of violence against separated and divorced women by their ex-husbands and violence against married women by their current husbands. Using a nationally representative sample of 7,369 heterosexual women from Cycle 13 of Statistics Canada's General Social Survey, available risk markers were examined in the context of a nested ecological framework. Separated women reported nine times the prevalence of violence and divorced women reported about four times the prevalence of violence compared with married women. The strongest predictors of violence against married women, namely, patriarchal domination, sexual jealousy, and possessiveness, were not significant predictors of violence against separated and divorced women. This suggested that post-separation violence is a complex phenomenon the dynamics of which can be affected by much more than domination and ownership.
References:
Brownridge, Douglas A., Ko Ling Chan, Diane Hiebert-Murphy, Janice Ristock, Agnes Tiwari, Wing-Cheong Leung, and Susy C. Santos. "The elevated risk for non-lethal post-separation violence in Canada: a comparison of separated, divorced, and married women.(Report)." Journal of Interpersonal Violence 23.1 (Jan 2008): 117(19).
References:
Brownridge, Douglas A., Ko Ling Chan, Diane Hiebert-Murphy, Janice Ristock, Agnes Tiwari, Wing-Cheong Leung, and Susy C. Santos. "The elevated risk for non-lethal post-separation violence in Canada: a comparison of separated, divorced, and married women.(Report)." Journal of Interpersonal Violence 23.1 (Jan 2008): 117(19).
Emotional rescue: has a focus on physical abuse hurt the battered women's movement?
Evan Stark began writing about the demise of the battered women's movement in 1995, the year after Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act. That same year, President Bill Clinton, who signed the act into law, addressed a group of prominent women's advocates at the White House; Stark was among them. It was a time of unprecedented national recognition for the movement, but as he applauded the president's speech, Stark caught the apprehensive eye of a colleague. "We had come a long way" he remembers thinking. "Perhaps too far."
Last March, Stark published Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, the book he started 12 years ago. In it, he reaffirms his hunch from the heady days of VAWA: that in its quest for political and popular support, the battered women's movement lost its way. So much so, he says, it's currently stuck. He points to evidence that women are as likely to be killed by their partners today as they were 30 years ago, and that abusive men are almost as unlikely as they were back then to ever land before a judge, let alone behind bars. And he makes the counterintuitive argument that one of the biggest wrong turns the battered women's movement took was focusing too much on physical violence.
Stark describes the early battered women's movement, born in the mid-'70s, as a radical uprising, steadfast in its insistence that domestic violence comes from societal, not individual pathology; in a word, patriarchy. This idea was highly unpopular, he says, because it implied any man could be abusive and any woman abused. So the movement existed on the fringe, initially, estranged even from mainstream feminists. But as shelters spread-growing in numbers from 24 in 1976, to 163 in 1977, to 1,200 by the late '80s--the movement needed help, and started compromising its ideals. It had better luck getting money from governments and charities by present; ing black eyes and broken bones than by kicking up a fuss about gender inequality.
Meanwhile, says Stark, men were still abusing women, only not as obviously. Physical violence became just one of many ways men exerted what Stark calls "coercive control." He gives countless other examples: one man refuses to let his wife's family visit their home; another accuses her of infidelity if she goes out with friends. One man requires his wife to record how she spends every penny in a daily logbook; another won't speak to her when she doesn't launder his socks the way he likes. In one scenario, a man covers his sleeping wife's mouth just long enough to wake her up, gasping for air, and then pretends he is asleep. Applied systematically, Stark says, these are tactics that isolate, intimidate and degrade women to the point that they question their own "personhood" And this, he says, "can be more devastating than injurious assault."
Stark recounts testimony by women that back up this claim, and many domestic violence experts say women tell them the same thing--the violence wasn't the worst part. Stark is also among many experts who say a woman can be at just as much risk from a man who seldom lifts a finger against her as from one who frequently does. Angelique Jenney, director of family violence services at Toronto's Child Development Institute, worked with a woman whose husband was only ever charged once, with uttering threats. At his bail hearing, he was given 48 hours to surrender his firearms to the police, and 12 hours later, he killed his wife. Jenney frequently sees courts deny women protection orders against their partners, because "the abuse is too subtle."
To some extent, Jenney shares Stark's concern about the state of the battered women's movement. "I think we aren't pushing as hard" says Jenney. "I often joke at Woman Abuse Council meetings and say, we actually need to say no to the crap funding opportunities we get, instead of selling our souls to get them." But some experts disagree with Stark that focusing on violence was a wrong turn, or that the movement is stuck. "We had to start somewhere, and the physical was the most obvious" says Ramona Alaggia, social work professor at the University of Toronto. "And I still think the most dangerous."
Stark credits Sharon Rice Vaughan, whom he met while protesting the war in Vietnam, as one of the people who influenced his thinking about domestic violence. Vaughan co-founded North America's first women's shelter in 1975 in St. Patti, Minn., and is considered a mother of the battered women's movement. Though she lauds Stark's book as an encyclopedia of research on domestic violence, she disagrees that the battered women's movement is stuck. "In order to really move forward, we have to do it organically, and of course this means forwards and backwards and flipping around," says Vaughan.
She sees Stark as trying to go too far too fast. At the end of his book, Stark argues that coercive control--meaning all acts of oppression men submit women to, physical or otherwise--should be criminalized. "What Evan wants, what he's expecting, is that all these men are going to say, 'Oh my goodness, I'm abusing her personhood, I don't have the fight to do that,'" she says. "It kind of makes you gasp," she suggests, that Stark would argue for this in a male-dominated justice system, and in a society where many women still answer to men, not vice versa. "But" she quickly adds, with a nod to her radical roots, "that doesn't mean he shouldn't be saying it."
References:
Izenberg, Dafna. "Emotional rescue: has a focus on physical abuse hurt the battered women's movement?(HEALTH)." Maclean's 120.40 (Oct 15, 2007): 84(1).
Named Works:
Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Book)
Last March, Stark published Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life, the book he started 12 years ago. In it, he reaffirms his hunch from the heady days of VAWA: that in its quest for political and popular support, the battered women's movement lost its way. So much so, he says, it's currently stuck. He points to evidence that women are as likely to be killed by their partners today as they were 30 years ago, and that abusive men are almost as unlikely as they were back then to ever land before a judge, let alone behind bars. And he makes the counterintuitive argument that one of the biggest wrong turns the battered women's movement took was focusing too much on physical violence.
Stark describes the early battered women's movement, born in the mid-'70s, as a radical uprising, steadfast in its insistence that domestic violence comes from societal, not individual pathology; in a word, patriarchy. This idea was highly unpopular, he says, because it implied any man could be abusive and any woman abused. So the movement existed on the fringe, initially, estranged even from mainstream feminists. But as shelters spread-growing in numbers from 24 in 1976, to 163 in 1977, to 1,200 by the late '80s--the movement needed help, and started compromising its ideals. It had better luck getting money from governments and charities by present; ing black eyes and broken bones than by kicking up a fuss about gender inequality.
Meanwhile, says Stark, men were still abusing women, only not as obviously. Physical violence became just one of many ways men exerted what Stark calls "coercive control." He gives countless other examples: one man refuses to let his wife's family visit their home; another accuses her of infidelity if she goes out with friends. One man requires his wife to record how she spends every penny in a daily logbook; another won't speak to her when she doesn't launder his socks the way he likes. In one scenario, a man covers his sleeping wife's mouth just long enough to wake her up, gasping for air, and then pretends he is asleep. Applied systematically, Stark says, these are tactics that isolate, intimidate and degrade women to the point that they question their own "personhood" And this, he says, "can be more devastating than injurious assault."
Stark recounts testimony by women that back up this claim, and many domestic violence experts say women tell them the same thing--the violence wasn't the worst part. Stark is also among many experts who say a woman can be at just as much risk from a man who seldom lifts a finger against her as from one who frequently does. Angelique Jenney, director of family violence services at Toronto's Child Development Institute, worked with a woman whose husband was only ever charged once, with uttering threats. At his bail hearing, he was given 48 hours to surrender his firearms to the police, and 12 hours later, he killed his wife. Jenney frequently sees courts deny women protection orders against their partners, because "the abuse is too subtle."
To some extent, Jenney shares Stark's concern about the state of the battered women's movement. "I think we aren't pushing as hard" says Jenney. "I often joke at Woman Abuse Council meetings and say, we actually need to say no to the crap funding opportunities we get, instead of selling our souls to get them." But some experts disagree with Stark that focusing on violence was a wrong turn, or that the movement is stuck. "We had to start somewhere, and the physical was the most obvious" says Ramona Alaggia, social work professor at the University of Toronto. "And I still think the most dangerous."
Stark credits Sharon Rice Vaughan, whom he met while protesting the war in Vietnam, as one of the people who influenced his thinking about domestic violence. Vaughan co-founded North America's first women's shelter in 1975 in St. Patti, Minn., and is considered a mother of the battered women's movement. Though she lauds Stark's book as an encyclopedia of research on domestic violence, she disagrees that the battered women's movement is stuck. "In order to really move forward, we have to do it organically, and of course this means forwards and backwards and flipping around," says Vaughan.
She sees Stark as trying to go too far too fast. At the end of his book, Stark argues that coercive control--meaning all acts of oppression men submit women to, physical or otherwise--should be criminalized. "What Evan wants, what he's expecting, is that all these men are going to say, 'Oh my goodness, I'm abusing her personhood, I don't have the fight to do that,'" she says. "It kind of makes you gasp," she suggests, that Stark would argue for this in a male-dominated justice system, and in a society where many women still answer to men, not vice versa. "But" she quickly adds, with a nod to her radical roots, "that doesn't mean he shouldn't be saying it."
References:
Izenberg, Dafna. "Emotional rescue: has a focus on physical abuse hurt the battered women's movement?(HEALTH)." Maclean's 120.40 (Oct 15, 2007): 84(1).
Named Works:
Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life (Book)
December 24, 2007
Secrets and Evolution
I was stunned--although I probably should not have been--to hear that some people within close circles were questioning why I would "advertise" the domestic abuse I experienced on this forum. I found it difficult to believe that someone could read this personal blog and consider the sharing of a situation kept hidden too long among many women as "advertising" rather than reaching out to other women who have experienced or are experiencing this terrible and inexcusable crime against society. Keeping domestic abuse a secret out of fear and shame has been tolerated, encouraged, and normalized beyond its expiration date. Have we not evolved as a society...as people? To say nothing screams that this crime is socially okay. IT IS NOT OKAY! I would rather be criticized for speaking out against such atrocities than to silently tolerate it.
October 22, 2007
Counselling
Three years after my separation, and one month after my divorce, I am finally starting domestic violence counselling. It's something I wish I did a long time ago, but I never made it a priority in my life. I suffered from the "I can handle it" mentality; instead, my relationships suffered. Counselling is providing me the opportunity to get full closure with my abusive marriage. I may never understand the why of my marital experiences, but I am coming to terms with that and learning as much as I can along the way to ensure my future relationship is healthy. After all, I'm worth it.
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