For the past several years Donna and I have attended the Battered Mothers Custody Conference and so we have been able to interact with domestic violence experts. Both of us were surprised to discover that although most of the worst spousal assault perpetrators have personality profiles indicative of sociopathy/psychopathy this fact is not recognized by many experts.
I have worked to become well acquainted with the scientific literature regarding intimate partner violence because I teach psychology of gender and because I very much want to understand why people who should know better often fail to diagnose sociopathy in perpetrators. This failure to diagnose has lead to intimate partner violence being erroneously interpreted as a gender issue related to male domination of females. This flies in the face of the real statistics which show that there are equal numbers of female perpetrators. The failure to recognize personality disturbance in female perpetrators has lead to male victims being further traumatized.
I am happy to report that the leading expert on intimate partner violence, Professor Donald Dutton of the University of British Columbia is fighting to correct the above misconceptions and to help people understand that domestic violence is perpetrated by disordered men and women.
In 1979, he cofounded the Assaultive Husbands Project, a court-mandated treatment program for men convicted of spousal assault. He has frequently served as an expert witness in civil trials involving intimate abuse and in criminal trials involving family violence. Dr. Dutton has published over 100 papers and four books, including Domestic Assault of Women, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile, Rethinking Domestic Violence and The Abusive Personality Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships.
I just finished reading The Abusive Personality and recommend it highly. In this book Dr. Dutton details the profile and personality structure of both male and female batterers. He makes a compelling case for his contention that personality disturbance is behind domestic violence in Western society. Next week I will summarize the personality profile of “Abusers” and explain how abuse relates to sociopathy/psychopathy.
Tilly, in the days before sun screen, my grandmother worked in the cotton fields with the family, and my egg donor as a young child. My GM covered them with long sleeves and huge bonnets. They were (as I am) all very fair skinned. Even though they were outside all day in the hot sun working, they were all very pale when they took off their “burkas” but I would not listen to her and went bare headed, and short sleeved and when Iwas in Africa I BAKED brown as saddle leather and burned and peeled many many times. Then moved to California and did the same thing at the beach again. Today my skin is apple doll wrinkled and with brown “sun spots” and small cancers (which I keep a close check on with a skin specialist doc)
Son D is very blonde (women would die for his ashe blonde hair) and also because of the burns he received in the aircraft crash 5 yrs ago, he must be protected from the sun. He is very good about wearing long sleeves and hats, though I can’t get him to put on sun screen. Son C is as hard headed as I was, so gets more tanned, but he does have the ability to tan without being basicly dark to start with (those two things are inherited separately) but I guess we all do things we know we shouldn’t like eat too much, exercise too little, smoke, etc. it’s a shame that everyone in the world isn’t as PERFECT as you and me Tilly! LOL ROTFLMAO At least we can “preach” a good “sermon” even if we don’t always live it ourselves. ha ha (((hugs)))) I hope your VISIONS keep you sane while you are around that woman!!!! I will be thinking of you and I’m behind you 100%.
Oxy, did your grandmother ever tell you that women of her day covered their skin from the sun because MEN preferred women with pale skin — as if they were pampered “city girls”? They didn’t do it for fear of skin cancer, believe it or not. Surely there were evidences of skin cancer back then but I don’t think medicine was advanced enough yet to have made the connection.
I think I was in my 30’s before I heard the connection of sun exposure and cancer!
Interesing, that my mother, too, (and her seven sisters) covered theiLir arms with their brothers’ stockings and wore wide brimmed hats as they worked in the fields. The four brothers were fighting in WWI. The girls did the field work. (My mom was 2nd youngest of 11.)
Like other teen girls of my generation, I spent my summers happily at the beach (of a lake). I never even wore baby oil because if I did, I couldn’t get a tan (or even a sunburn) at all. Frustrating! LOL! A few of our group were African-Americans and Native Americans (neither group had a “name” back then) and they had a great time teasing us “palefaces.”!! (It was interesting to me that one of the black girls had to slather herself with oil to keep from getting sunburned.)
Surprisingly, I never have had an occasion of skin cancer but neither do I have wrinkled skin at my age. (I think they WILL come some day!) I learned that the reason I didn’t “need” baby oil was because my skin was naturally oily already. Just this year, at age 72.5, have I had to apply lotion to my face (when I remember.) The oil must be drying up!
My conclusion is that there are a myriad of things that are GENETIC. Neither of my parents had wrinkled skin at their passing, at ages 67 and 76. I don’t know about my aunts because they have all passed and I hadn’t seen them at older ages.
Point of my post, really, is that I am truly beginnng to put more emphasis on the possibility of personality disorders being more genetic than nurture.
None of my mother’s 10 siblings were “disordered”. They didn’t marry men who were “disordered” and they didn’t raise “disordered” children. (Can’t comment on their further descendents because I have no opportunity to know them.)
I can’t comment on my father’s family, either, because both of his parents were passed before I was even born.
But, even though I didn’t know my EX as he was growing up, I did learn that there were A LOT of disordered persons; his parents and in his extended family back several generations.
I am most regretful that my children were fathered by such a man. And, yet, I’m glad, too, for the opportunity to learn more about how “the sins of the fathers” which are passed on to future generations, as noted in the Bible.
I’m also glad to know that genetic predispositions do NOT have to be permanent. They can be “conquered” by choice, by free will.
Look at how many wonderful people on this site have turned their “generational” curses around! Praise the Lord!
Sorry, folks. My weekend break has been productive with much introspection. I’ve become quite philosophical, I think. So, I hope you can follow my thinking in the words I find hard to express — and how I perceive them to be linked to the topic of this thread.
Maybe no one cares. That’s okay. There is value to me in typing out my thoughts when they are inspired by something someone else has written.
My brother used to say that I think too much. I was never offended because I knew it was true!
ANewLily:
I love your last post! Many years ago, when I lived with my ex P husband I used to be so worried about that paragraph in the Bible that said that the “sins of the fathers” would be passed onto the children. I used to ask ministers and preachers about it, but none of them had an answer that satisfied me. Yet it made me shudder.
It is only this year that I realised that psychopathic behaviour can be genetic too. When I finally realized, I immediately remembered that passage in the Bible ! UH HUH!
The “baby oil” we have here is an oil with NO PROTECTION that literally makes you FRY IN THE SUN! The oil was made to MAKE you burn FASTER! (and it sure did!)
(Just now, I am on a break from the P teacher)…..
Oxy:
Thankyou again for your support. I so agree with you about the domestic violence issues. I have been in many shelters with my kids over the years. These shelters are for the REALLY desperate as the conditions there are pretty bad. I’ve seen that the majority of the ones that do go back to their P iether die or might as well be dead.
The last girl I saw I will never forget. Words could never describe what was left of her, I would rather be dead. She broke my heart. It took me days to recover from just seeing her. I tried to help her. I told her I understood why she went back in the past, but not anymore, not seeing her like that.
I have just realised that you Yanks are much more LITERAL than us down under . Our language is FULL of irony, so I will have to be more careful from now on. I hope I havn’t offended too many in the past with it.
Back to my PHD in psychopaths, with my p teacher… a wonderful, walking example.
Thankyou for being there!
xo
Thanks, Tilly, for your interest in my post. I read it back to myself and was “horrified” (not really) that I said my mother had seven sisters. She only had six sisters, she was the seventh one.
Oh, well, I’m an English teacher interested in language and quite a bit mathematically challenged!
Just for the record, Tilly, I am a “Yank” raised in the north but there are a lot of people who still consider them confederates (the south). In medical school, we lived on campus in 2 story “quonset hut” type housing. One couple divided the floors by a “Mason/Dixon line” because the “Yankees” lived upstairs and the other couple were born and raised in Texas, the south. It was all in fun, though.
As a language specialist, it would be interesting to examine the Australia language as you mention — with lots of irony in it. New info for me. Thanks!
I hope you are coping with the P teacher as well as you seem to be! I’m proud of you!
Sabrina,
You asked a question (I am paraphrasing it) to Dr. Leedom about where some of the stats about the DV and numbers are coming from. I wanted to try and answer that in a hopefully respectful way.
DV places are slowly changing to make this a gender neutral issue with the understanding that it is a human rights issue and not a gender issue. Numbers depend on how you ask the questions, what you measure (i.e. reported to police versus self report, etc) and various other issues. There are numerous articles out over the past decade talking about male victims of DV, female victims of DV by other females, etc.
My personal stance is that even one person being abused is one to many and polarizing the issue into a gender argument hurts everyone. Anyone who has been hurt deserves our compassion and help.
Now for the stats question. Here is one example from the Dunedin study ”“ About 27 percent of women and 34 percent of men among the Dunedin study members reported they had been physically abused by their partner. About 37 percent of women and 22 percent of men said they had perpetrated the violence. ”“ http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/170018.pdf
There is also a place at California State University that states this:
This bibliography examines 254 scholarly investigations: 199 empirical studies and 55 reviews and/or analyses, which demonstrate that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 252,800.
And again I personally think it is one of the major issues of the DV field in trying to polarize the issue into genders instead of making it a human rights issue.
I have over the years dealt with both offenders and victims and have found that assumptions I may make about things like this can be harmful. For example the number of female sexual offenders is much higher than almost anyone can believe. For example In 2004 the US Dept of Education did a study titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature” and found that In studies that ask students about offenders, sex differences are less than in adult reports. The 2000 AAUW data indicate that 57.2 percent of all students report a male offender and 42.4 percent a female offender with the Cameron et al. study reporting nearly identical proportions as the 2000 AAUW data (57 percent male offenders vs. 43 percent female offenders) http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/report.pdf.
And even Harvard Medical has this on their patient education website (I only posted a tiny fraction of it here):
Almost 25% of the people surveyed 28% of women and 19% of men said there was some violence in their relationship. Women admitted perpetrating more violence (25% versus 11%) as well as being victimized more by violence (19% versus 16%) than men did. According to both men and women, 50% of this violence was reciprocal, that is, involved both parties, and in those cases the woman was more likely to have been the first to strike. – http://www.patienteducationcenter.org/aspx/HealthELibrary/HealthETopic.aspx?cid=M0907d
The Domestic Abuse Helpline has services for underserved persons (i.e. male victims, female victims of female abusers, etc) This is one piece from their site “in a recent research report published by the U.S. Department of Justice it is estimated that 4.5 million physical assaults against women and 2.9 million physical assaults against men occur annually. The 2.9 million assaults against men represent 39% of all such assaults. We estimate that males make up between 15-35% of all victims annually.” http://dahmw.org/
Relationships are a complex thing and for all the men, women, and children who have been abused I would hope that the entire system look past gender and take each case as the unique situation that it is. It does not really matter who does what more what matters is that it is wrong, it needs to stop, and the people who have been hurt need compassion, understanding and help.
So I hope this is helpful in understanding where some of the stats may have come from and how the understanding of DV is changing over time. I also hope this comes across as I intended and that is to be respectful and not trigger or upset anyone.
Okay…..call for help here
DOES anyone have any contacts in London, like a PI or Police contacts? I need some local London info…..?
If anyone has any contacts….(I know it’s a reach), but contact Donna and be intouch privately.
THANKS!
Blueskies,
I think the child abuse stats (and I also very much disliked the post by the so called advocate) may have come from the CDC in which they report that:
More women (58%) than men (42%) are perpetrators ofall forms of child maltreatment.1 – http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/dvp/CM_Data_Sheet.pdf
and that came from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families. Child Maltreatment 2006 [Washington, DC: U.S. Government PrintingOffice, 2008] available at: http://www.childwelfare.gov.
And from the same HHS agency they said this:
In 2007, one or both parents were responsible for 69.9 percent of child abuse or neglect fatalities. More than one-quarter (27.1 percent) of these fatalities were perpetrated by the mother acting alone. – http://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/fatality.cfm#perps
For FFY 2007, 56.5 percent of the perpetrators were women, 42.4 percent were men and 1.1 percent were of unknown sex.2 Women typically were younger than men. The median age was 30 years for women and 33 years for men. Of the women who were perpetrators, more than 40 percent (45.0%) were younger than 30 years of age, compared with one-third of the men (34.5%) (figure 5”“1). These proportions have remained consistent for the past few years. – http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/pubs/cm07/chapter5.htm
But then they also said this – Most fatalities from physical abuse are caused by fathers and other male caregivers. Mothers are most often held responsible for deaths resulting from child neglect (U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, 1995).
Though I would think it would be expected for it to be higher because women are, in a majority of cases, the primary care giver for children.
This again shows how tricky numbers can be based on how you ask the questions, definitions, etc.
The one thing that is clear is that it happens way to often regardless of the gender of the person doing it.
Mr. Miller:
Thank you for participating in Lf.
I respectfully ask you, as an advocate for abused ‘families’, men, women and children, that you please do not rely on your ‘statistics’ for advocacy.
You should be concentrating more on advocating than placing blame on female vs male or male vs female. This approach would serve your ‘clients’ better.
If you had a 1 in a million chance of developing cancer…..do you give a crap when you are that one???
Abuse is abuse and no matter who it is perpetriting it, we as parents must protect our children along with ourselves.
It doesn’t matter if you are or are not a feminist……what on earth took you down that road.
My ex S’s own behaviors were seen by the courts, ruled on by the courts and HE didn’t like it!
No perp. male or female, when they feel wronged or ‘lose’ is ever satisfied. Perps must ‘win’, one up, come out on top! At any cost! When they don’t…..it’s punishment time
I do not agree with your passive aggressive statements, villifying women. That is extremely ignorant! How dare you walk down that road, as an advocate? Do you talk this way to your clients? How can you advocate for anyone with such a strong bias?
I will totally agree, both men and women are in the perpetrators role as dv agressors. I will also agree that children are always the victims, no matter who is at fault.
Fault really isn’t the issue…..it’s the ‘change’ that occurs as a result of the violence. As an advocate you should be better prepared to look at the ‘why’ is this behavior occuring, no matter who is the perp, and advocating a safe environment for either man or woman.
Yes, the divorce industry is ugly. But, I do not agree that it villifies men alone. The system is not perfect, far from it……
‘Feminist’ is NOT, in any way, an issue that should be addressed in regards to DV. It is not about feministic issue, has nothing to do with ‘equal rights’, ‘equal pay’. This isn’t about ‘bra burning’?
I invite you to re read your post from anothers viewpoint, I think you may be surprised at yourself.
Have a nice night.
EB
TILLY:
I love your self prepared 12 step program!
Work the program girl…..tailor what you need to get and go after it. DO not let anyone stand in your way of your (PHD!) 🙂
We only have us and our shadow……
Take care of YOU!
Keep your strength girl….there are alot of cockroaches to smash……
XXOO
Thanks BloggerT165 for that:)That is very interesting. I guess we are pretty much taking the same tack though, and that is that this being a gender issue muddies the waters either way:) This issue of violence is about perpetrators and victims not men and women.
Erin:here is the main contact page for the MET, is this any use? You can call direct or e-mail and they might be able to point you in the direction you are looking for? http://www.met.police.uk/contacts/
blue
xxx