BATTERED MEN (It happens to men too)

At Family Court Services, Joanna Levy requests to meet separately with Lauren, the child custody mediator, expressing a fear of being in the same room with her husband, Barry, whom she characterizes as a highly controlling man who physically and emotionally abused her throughout their 8-year marriage. “He yells, puts me down constantly,” she says. “Always criticizing. Nothing I do is ever good enough. I have to beg for grocery money.” Upon further questioning, Joanna elaborates on her husband’s emotional neediness, the constant demands. “The last straw,” she says, “was when he beat me up. I felt like a rag doll, yanked around the living room like that.”
The month before, at a seminar conducted by the local battered women’s shelter, Lauren had learned that the unilateral use of physical violence and controlling behavior, along with the fear that they engender in their victims, are defining characteristics of male batterers. In her meeting with Barry, the mediator is struck by how closely he fits the batterer profile, first by denying having engaged in any abuse himself; and, secondly, by claiming abuse on the part of the victim. “Maybe she’s bipolar, or something,” Barry suggests. “I mean, if anyone needs therapy it’s her.” Trying to make the victim think she’s crazy, Lauren remembers, is one of the battering tactics from the “Power and Control Wheel” presented at the training. Lauren recommends to the Court that custody of the children be granted to the mother, and that the father enroll in a 52-week Domestic Violence Batterer program. When he is informed by his attorney that he is allowed only a one-hour weekly visit with the children, supervised by a court-approved agency, Barry gets on the phone and screams at his ex. Consequently, a restraining order is placed against him.
Eight months later, an extensive custody evaluation reveals that Joanna has been previously treated for Borderline Personality Disorder. Employment records, and interviews with extended family members and their last marriage therapist support Barry’s characterization of her as volatile and abusive. Barry had yelled at his wife on numerous occasions, but his criticisms were hardly gratuitous – e.g., in response to her inattention to the children’s needs and refusal to cooperate with the finances. His decision to take control of the money was made after she squandered $75,000 of the family income on personal vacations and shopping sprees. And in the “rag doll” incident, the children confirm that their father was merely defending himself against an onslaught of kicks and punches by the mother who, in the past, had also slapped their oldest daughter.
How could a case could be so poorly assessed, causing a father to lose access to his children and be forcibly separated and remanded to an extended program of batterer treatment while a neglectful, abusive mother is regarded as the victimized partner? The obvious answer would be a lack of adequate assessment tools and procedures. However, in the case above it will be argued that the mediator was also predisposed to arrive at the conclusions she drew. It will be shown that the bias she demonstrated cannot be attributed merely to procedural flaws, but rather to the gender paradigm, also known as the patriarchal paradigm, the dominant model of domestic violence etiology and intervention that has shaped public policy for the past 25 years.

Of particular concern is research showing that fathers with a violent history may sometimes secure custody of the children. The true extent of the problem is difficult to ascertain. Most of this research is based on interviews with battered women and selected, non-scientific case reports (e.g., Liss & Stahly, 1993; Zorza,1995), and murky about the amount of custody these fathers are able to secure, the extent to which they are violent, whether the violence was mutual, and the presence in the partner of possibly more serious problems, such as drug abuse. Some studies presume “battering” from the existence of restraining orders alone (e.g., Morrill, Dai, Dunn, Sung & Smith, 2005; Rosen & O’Sullivan, 2005), even though restraining orders are liberally issued, and are unreliable indicators of actual violence (e.g., Epstein, 1993).

To what extent false or exaggerated claims of abuse are used to secure custody and alienate the children from the father is still open to debate. Gardner (1992) and Turkat (1995) argue for high rates of alienation, primarily by mothers. Friedman (2004) has identified a sub-group of alienating mothers with what he calls counterdependent-borderline personality traits, who vigorously and effectively pursue their custody rights regardless of the level of pathology they may exhibit. Within Johnston and Campbell’s 1989-1990 sample (Johnston and Campbell, 1993), 13% of the parents had filed false or exaggerated domestic violence claims, at a rate seven times more often by mothers compared to fathers. Johnston, Lee, Olesen and Gans Walters (2005) found higher substantiated rates of “adult abuse” by fathers than by mothers; however, the degree of partner violence versus substance abuse was not clarified. Also, as with other child custody studies, this was a non-random study that may not generalize beyond the particular sample, criteria for substantiation were not standardized, and “the range or degree of severity of the abuse was not rated” (p. 16).

A recent offshoot of the gender-patriarchal paradigm, based largely upon the work of Michael Johnson (Johnson, 2005; Johnson & Leone, 2005), acknowledges that women initiate intimate partner violence as often as men, but only the less serious, conflict-related type he calls “common couple violence” or “situational violence.” More serious violence, resulting in greater injuries and motivated by misogynistic attitudes and a perpetrator’s use of abusive and controlling behaviors to dominate the partner - what Johnson calls “intimate terrorism,” or “patriarchal terrorism, ” and what others would simply call “battering” - is assumed to be perpetrated almost entirely by men (see table 1 for list of abuse and control tactics). In the disputed custody literature (e.g., Bancroft & Silverman, 2002; Dalton, 1999), these assumptions, mistaken as they are, are even further distorted. Thus, violence by women is not only dismissed or marginalized as “expressive,” but men’s violence is conceptualized in every case as coercive or “instrumental,” despite Johnson’s own admission that “situational violence” represents the far greatest share of the total. An example is Dalton’s (1999) critique of Johnston and Campbell’s (1993) failure to identify the men involved in mutual violence as “batterers.”