Husband abuse: Can a wife abuse her husband?
http://www.newsday.co.zw/article/2012-03-23-husband-abuse-can-a-wife-her/
When we think of abuse or domestic violence, we don’t often hear or think about the husband being the victim. It’s usually the wife who is the reported sufferer.
Yet more and more it’s coming out into the light many husbands are victims of spousal abuse as well. Not as many as women, true, but it still happens.
So why don’t we hear about husbands being abused by their wives? David L Fontes, Psy D, in the article titled, Men Don’t Tell gives insight into several reasons.
He writes: “When a man is a victim of his wife’s physical abuse he is both shamed by the assaults of his wife and shamed by society for not ‘controlling’ her better. Today, men are not made to ride backward on donkeys, but they are still considered ‘wimps’ for letting their wives beat them or for complaining about their wives’ attacks. For many men ‘Taking it like a man’ means don’t complain and don’t show you are vulnerable or in pain!
“With the prospect of being viewed as ‘wimps’ and/or having the assaults by their wives not believed or minimised by the general public and law enforcement, it’s no wonder few men report their abuse or discuss it openly.”
It’s difficult for men to report their abuse and find help — especially in the Christian community. Marriage Missions claims to have received a number of letters from husbands dealing with their wives abusive and sometimes very violent behaviour.
They write that they wanted to be honourable men and would not hit or abuse back, but they did not know what to do to stop their wives from hurting them in these ways.
Does that mean that it’s less important to minister to the hurting husband as it is to the hurting wife, even though the numbers are less?
Should a husband just accept and silently suffer from abusive behaviour, if it is directed at him from his wife? No. Abuse is still wrong no matter who is the one who is victimising the other.
Maxine Marz wrote an article titled, Husband Abuse Erodes Dignity (Metronews.ca, August 31 2004), and she had the following to say on this subject:
“While it is true that most physical assaults caused by women tend to be less severe when compared to a man’s physical assault on a woman with his fist or a weapon, the abusive woman’s slaps, bites, kicks and/or pulling of her partner’s hair are nevertheless still very hurtful because, in addition to subjecting physical pain, they attack the man’s dignity and erode his sense of self-worth. Many men also encounter emotional abuse when their abusive spouse turns to using their children to assert her control over them and their relationship.
“To add insult to injury, some abusive women not only victimise their spouses by abusing them verbally, emotionally, financially and/or physically, but they also attempt to manipulate the criminal justice system in their favour and against their partner. This unconscionable attempt of some abusive women not only revictimises their already abused husbands by denying them equal rights and fair protection under the law, but it simultaneously devalues and undermines the admirable progress women’s groups have achieved over the years in trying to protect the rights of legitimately abused wives and their children in the criminal courts.
“It is evident our society has made positive strides over the years to bring needed attention to domestic abuse and to better protect women from their abusive husbands or partners.
Unfortunately, based on what many abused husbands currently experience, we still have a long way to go to afford them with similar protection of their safety and security and to eliminate the current gender bias in our system that revictimises them all over again when they step into the legal arena.”
—marriagemissions.com/husband-abuse-can-a-wife-abuse-her-husband
Feedback:kmudzingwa@newsday.co.zw
In 2009 Joyanna Silberg of the Leadership Council attempted to both acknowledge and discredit parental alienation. She is mostly wrong and a little bit right. The part she gets right is that some parents can and do wage a campaign of manipulation and abuse against their former spouse by attempting to convince the children that the other parent does not love them. So far so good. She recognizes the possibility that some children can be manipulated to reject a parent who does not deserve the loss of their child's love. This is the essence of parental alienation and what I, among many others, have been writing about for quite some time—with much resistance I might add on the part of the Leadership Council.
Here is what she gets wrong:
First, she claims that this is only something that fathers do against mothers as part of an overall program of domestic violence. In making this claim, she denies the possibility that mothers can engage in this kind of behavior and she refuses to accept that it can occur in the absence of other forms of domestic violence. There is not a shred of evidence that alienation only occurs by fathers and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Frankly, I am shocked and dismayed at the gender bias and utter insensitivity to the many fathers who have lost custody of their children due to parental alienation. Not only that but this position—that it only happens to mothers—denies the pain of women by dismissing the experience of step-mothers, grand-mothers, aunts, and daughters, all of whom suffer when a mother turns a child against the father. This is an ideologically based decision that has no place in a scientific discussion.
Here is what she gets wrong:
First, she claims that this is only something that fathers do against mothers as part of an overall program of domestic violence. In making this claim, she denies the possibility that mothers can engage in this kind of behavior and she refuses to accept that it can occur in the absence of other forms of domestic violence. There is not a shred of evidence that alienation only occurs by fathers and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Frankly, I am shocked and dismayed at the gender bias and utter insensitivity to the many fathers who have lost custody of their children due to parental alienation. Not only that but this position—that it only happens to mothers—denies the pain of women by dismissing the experience of step-mothers, grand-mothers, aunts, and daughters, all of whom suffer when a mother turns a child against the father. This is an ideologically based decision that has no place in a scientific discussion.
Second, she claims that calling this behavior "parental alienation" is not strong enough to convey the criminal pattern of terroristic behaviors employed by batterers. This appears to be an aesthetic argument as opposed to a scientific one. I can only ask, "strong enough for what purposes?"
Third, she claims that, "Unlike battering fathers, PAS inducing parents, according to Gardner, are often unconscious of what they are doing." This is a misstatement as well as over-simplification of reality and of what Gardner wrote about. Gardner wrote about many possible motivational factors that could result in a parent engaging in alienation tactics but as far as I know he never claimed that all alienators were aware of their motives and the likely result of their behavior. Certainly, more recent parental alienation writers have acknowledged the multi-factorial nature of parental alienation and no one claims to know what is in the hearts and minds of all alienators.
Fourth, she writes, "The most dangerous aspect of Gardner's PAS theory is that that the alienating parent's behavior is theorized to be so subtle as to be unobservable." This is both untrue and misleading. No one in the field has made such a blatantly simplistic statement that it impossible to observe any parental alienation behaviors.
Fifth, she dismisses PAS as "overly general" and "not supported by careful research." While hundreds of articles now exist in dozens of countries documenting and describing parental alienation, there appear to be no published articles on the topic of domestic violence by proxy by the person who created the term, Alina Patterson, or anyone else. The scientific evidence to support the existence of PAS is mounting. In fact, July of last year I passed a Daubert hearing in the state of Massachusetts in which the science underlying PAS theory was thoroughly challenged by the courts, which ultimately decided that to accept the theory as scientifically sound. I call on the Leadership Council to cease its campaign of denigration against PAS and accept—as the courts have—that this is a real problem that affects parents—both mothers and fathers. To do anything less is to do great harm to children and families.