Dr Emma Katz is widely regarded as one the world’s foremost academic experts in her area of research — how coercive control impacts on children and young people.
Emma specializes in the harms caused by father-perpetrated coercive control, as well as children’s and mothers’ resistance and recovery. Read more in her book Coercive Control in Mothers’ and Children’s Lives, published by Oxford University Press.
For victims and survivors of domestic violence and abuse, the question of why the abuser did what they did is often very important.
They wonder if the abuser’s abuse was:
(a) conscious and intentional, or
(b) an accidental (and therefore perhaps excusable) “mistake"
This article explores this question and ultimately suggests the following…
It is answer: (a) what they were doing was not accidental; it was highly purposeful.
Here is the key point -
Men usually use violence and abuse against women and children because it is FUNCTIONAL for them to do so.
It serves many functions in their lives and it brings them many benefits, benefits which, as we will see in this post, they can name and describe in depth.
Below, I tell a story about what might happen when a well-meaning sympathizer tries to understand domestically-abusive men. The remainder of the post explores:
… a court’s failed experiment based on a misconception that abusers lack communication skills
… how abusers were benefiting from abuse — I divide these benefits into 3 ‘dimensions’ and itemize each dimension in turn
… the link between abusers’ perceptions of their actions and our ordinary assumptions about how relationships between men and women should work
Chuck Derry was an American anti-domestic violence campaigner based in Minnesota who ran court-mandated groups for men who beat their wives.
Derry was trying to help these abusive men to ‘express their emotions’, thinking that it would make them better husbands. However, this was a failed experiment.
What happened?
These abusive men revealed something eye-opening to Derry about their motivations for violence — and it completely changed Derry’s understanding of what needed to be done with these men.
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