Those of us who have been psychologically abused by sociopaths—whether we’re male or female, and whether the abuser is male or female—know that the abuse should be criminal. It appears that in France, it just may happen.
A Lovefraud reader sent me a link to an interesting story in Time Magazine. Legislators from France’s ruling party are expected to introduce a bill that would outlaw “conjugal abuse of a psychological nature” in both married and unmarried relationships.
According to Time,
The legislation seeks to target the verbal and mental denigration, humiliation and manipulation that typically lead to physical abuse. The hope is that the bill will help prevent the emotional wounds that words often cause before a punch is ever thrown.
I hope the law gets passed. I hope it works. We’ll have to see what happens.
Read the article on Time.com:
LouiseG:
If thats his story…..GREAT!
Don’t think a judge hasn’t heard about ALL the over reacting crazy women that file for TPO’s and go for an extension.
The fact that your following through is great. It speaks volumes!
You can’t really document (on paper) emotional abuse….it’s contained inside your head/heart. BUT….you can document in words to the judge the affect it has had on your life…..easitly…..just like you stated here.
Typically, if you tell them you live in fear, the fear creates anxiety and it is very disruptive to your life……and state examples…(a few only)…..you’ll be heard.
Bottome line….you fear him, or his actions……get that point across to the judge. Along wiht your letters etc…..
Good luck girl….your going in the right direction!!!
Louise,
I’m struck by the comment on your eye. It really illustrates a point about abuse and the prevalence of “out of sight out of mind”. I was physically as well as emotionally abused. I still get headaches and have whiplash, but other than that there are no outward signs of the horrible damage that was done to me – not physically anyway.
The emotional abuse has left it’s mark in my behavior though – Post Traumatic Stress. The only thing with that is that people don’t RECOGNIZE that as SCARRING AND DAMAGE if they can’t see black and blue.
IF ONLY THE THE DAMAGE ON THE INSIDE, SHOWED ON THE OUTSIDE, PEOPLE WOULD TURN AWAY IN HORROR.
Laws such as this make it less likely that your “average” abuser will keep on abusing only if they are enforced. Unfortunately, like most laws regarding adult victims of abuse, laws are hardly enforced or taken seriously until the victim is in the hospital or a cemetary.
I wish that adult abuse in relationships could be taken just as seriously as child abuse, and that’s not currently the case. Somehow I don’t think that a person abusing an 8 year old child would get off as lightly as a domestic abuser who targets his “partner” in the same manner.
I believe that psychopaths need to be treated with an iron fist because p’s and s’s don’t care about laws, just about power and control. If they do care about the law, then it’s only when they can twist it to their advantage.
If I had my druthers, parents, siblings, and grown children of adult victims could file a restraining order on behalf of their loved ones in an abusive relationship. I believe that there needs to be an organization for parents and other loved ones of ADULTS in abusive relationships to change DV laws so they could pass this and similar laws.
Such a law would say to the sociopathic predator that “My child (or sibling, or parent) is important enough to me that I’m willing to advocate on her (or his) behalf even when grown.”
I would also like to see restraining orders AUTOMATICALLY apply to parents, siblings, and children of the victim of DV as well as the victim regardless of the age of the siblings or children, not just when the victim’s kids/siblings are minors.
I believe that parents need to keep an eye on their grown children’s relationships and be able to intervene in situations, REGARDLESS OF THE GROWN CHILD’S WILLINGNESS. With sociopaths, the rules are different than with regular relationships.
Other laws that could help include factoring a victim’s past abuse history as an aggravating factor in sentencing (i.e. if a grown victim was also abused by a teacher at 15, the court should factor in the previous as well as current victimization).
The language dealing with abusive adult relationships needs to be changed if there is to be success.
As stated in another thread, psychopaths in relationships are the adult victim analogues of pedophiles and hebophiles and can be described as adult molesters when they sexually coerce/manipulate/assault. A sociopath’s sexual attraction to adults serve the same ends and leads to the same results as a pedophile’s attraction to children or a hebephile’s attraction to teens.
We should not be referring to “partner” abuse at all because partners are peers/equals. Instead we should be referring to adult grooming, sexual coercion and predation.
When psychopaths meet a woman (or man), he is grooming, not dating the victim. They are not interested in relationships with their target’s best interest in mind. They identify vulnerabilities, create a position of power, reward the victim’s compliance, isolate the victim from their loved ones, and sexually, physically, and/or emotionally abuse.
Brian – powerful last paragraph.
personally, i want a spath vengence squad. and i am actually serious. i want covert groups of healed ex dupes to to band together to deal with those spaths still operating. i think we call this vigilanty justice in NA. we wouldn’t physically hurt them, but do recon around all their dealings, out them endlessly to law enforcement and taxation, community and new ‘freinds’.
the anti spath wing of the guardian angels. spath slayers.
Brian,
That is an excellent post. I agree with you 100%.
I’d like to see a national advocacy group on this issue along the lines of what Mothers Against Drunk Drivers has done.
Create media awareness.
Educate – go into the High Schools regularly.
Support – provide ongoing support for victims.
Brian,
Great post, indeed.
And yes, your last paragraph is right on the mark. I remember mine used to often say to me things like “you’re doing well. you’re almost there.” Like I had some kind of test to pass. In one of our last conversations together, he was pushing me to lie to my family about aspects of our relationship. I found myself saying to him: “I have to kill a very crucial part of myself to be what you want me to be.”
“So kill it,” he said.
When I left him, we stayed in touch for awhile, and he kept forcing me to rationalize why I left him.. Then he would try to turn the blame to me: “It’s your fault; you met me on the internet.” “It’s your fault; we got intimate too fast.” “It’s your fault; you should have read the signs.” And the great one: “It’s your fault; you loved too much.”
After I left him, he ultimately threatened to throw acid in my face. (While I was with him, he threatened to kill me if I left him.) This is how I got the Order of Protection.
I found this blog on line about a British model whose ex-lover had thrown acid in her face. He was, I guess, a member of some black sub-culture; she was a blond white woman. She met him on Facebook. People in the blog were saying it was her fault for getting involved with a man like that who she met on the internet. “She got what she deserved.”
Can we really have justice against folks who verbally and emotionally abuse us in a society as sick as that?
Erin, thanks for your applause! And yes, icanseeclearly, I think I’d be terrifically disfigured already, if people could see what he did to my spirit.
icanseeclearly,
Another thing is to make sure that you have all your ducks lined up in a row regarding both the statistics and the impacts of such abuse. There are many studies about DV, rape, and sexual coercion out there.
As you alluded to, I think that the most visible support from the public would come if such an organization was composed mainly of mothers of grown children victimized by DV and other sociopathic offenders. Mothers who know that a child doesn’t have to be a minor to be targeted by predators (sexual and otherwise).
Agree with the others – excellent post Brian – especially the last line about grooming rather than dating – that hit home with me – I am struggling to cope with the fact he has taken up with a much younger woman and is flaunting it in my face. This helps me remember what is really going on in this situation and to remind myself he won’t treat her any better than he treated me.
Louise – that is so scary that he threatened you in this way – I have seen many pictures of those scarred with acid – what a horrible act to do to someone. Thank goodness you got away. The ‘she got what she deserved’ phenomenon can also be clearly seen with rape victims “Well she shouldn’t have been wearing THAT and walking there” – as if there is an excuse and the attacker was provoked in some way! It’s all about Just World Theory – people like to think that everyone in the world gets what they worked for and what they deserve – it simply isn’t true as I am rapidly finding out. People don’t like to think about the injustices that exist so it’s easier to blame the victim “Well you must have provoked him in some way – you should know to keep your mouth shut”
NO NO NO!!! There is never an excuse for abuse. Abuse is soul murder and identity crushing. I do want to see a public education campaign – but how do we do it? It’s such a hard phenomenon to explain. If we could explain it in one sentence we might have a better shot at it. I tried writing about it for a character and after many tries gave up = I couldn’t clearly articulate what was wrong with this person.
It’s crazy!
The new French law is UNISEX. If you were a true professional not a misandrist you would have questioned the validity of such an obvious discrepancy as is stated in the title. You would have done this in either the interpretation or the validity of passing such a gender biased law.
Any DV related law that targets only one sex is erroneously based and abusive of human rights whether targeting males or females. To claim a gender neutral law is targeting only one sex, men, the sex who least frequently commits this particular defined form of abuse, is misandry.
If you were not pre-disposed to be prejudice against men, you would have spotted this, immediately.
Thankfully, most men and women are not abusive and the general public is beginning to spot the propoganda, these falsehoods and myths.
If you, representing yourself as a professional, cannot understand the well documented fact that DV with a couple of small variations is overall a gender balanced form of human abuse, you are either very prejudiced or woefully uninformed on your stated specialty.
The numbers of violent women and men are near equal in almost all categories, with women pulling ahead in overall numbers of perpetrators.
If you are having issues with recognizing that DV is a human problem, not a gender problem, you need some serious counseling to get back on track. You may have immersed yourself into rationalizing hate and demagoguery. Your apparant gender hate may be showing through the facade of ‘a kind and reasonable person’.
Review your own writings about psychopaths and antisocial personality disorders. Apply your own descriptions of symptoms and indicators to your own writings. You either need a self-check on your biases or you need professional assistance to get back on track. You are enabling the female abuser readers and providing secondary victimization of the abused men among your readership. You have both male and females from both categories as readers. If someone were doing this to women, would you react the same?
If you were being professional on this blog, as you claim, you would recognize each relationship is stand alone in addressing violence and cannot be fit into a gender defined mold. You would recognize that to enter into an assessment using your own prejudice and not professionalism, is to guarantee a destructive therapeutic relationship and outcome. This, applying your own amorphous cup of irrational personal bias and agendas in a statement as a professional, is called “transference”. You were trained to guard yourself against transferece to become a mental health professional.
Transference, a dangerous and destructive counseling/therapeutic prejudice, is only transference if you are unaware of your bias, if you are aware, which you are, it then becomes a form of abuse and false activism.
As long as the demagogues and male hate mongers, misandrists, continue to pander to the prejudice of pc man-hate, we will never be able to adequately address that abuse is a gender neutral dysfunction. And, we will never be able to stop it as long as we reward any gender for committing it.
If anything, the studies show that women are slightly more aggressive than men, but because of the extreme bias against men, the conviction numbers are readily acknowledge by researchers as being skewed and reflective of bias of courts, police, & prosecutors against men. Those conviction numbers are sometimes used to justify ever more contraindicated draconian legislative victimization of men that does nothing more than fuel ever greater DV by abusive women freely allowed to train their children in their own footsteps. The bias rewards and incentivizes abuse by the women in our world who are abusive.
When ’anyone’ expresses prejudice, an irrational hate of any human belonging to a targeted group, that same ’anyone’ will very readily rationalize hate and abuse to targeted others on race, religion, etc”.
Prejudice is very ugly and is the issue you, as a proclaimed professional, must address before realistically addressing any abuse by others. Domestic violence is, sadly, a gender equal opportunity life destroyer.
Much of the enforcement system is driven by the Federally funded training for these officials (judges, D.A.s, attorneys, and police) is filtered through shelter groups for personal self-aggrandizement, and allowed to be controlled and directed by women who have no professional qualifications and in some instances are themselves convicted of violence towards their own children and spouses. These gender activists have very serious financial incentives to maintain the bias.
Several states are now going outside this twisted, for profit, training system to look for unbiased professional training on gender neutral approaches to DV and joint custody barring violence or abuse to a criminal standard by either side.
An excerpt from a recent online study is provided below and the full text can be Googled and readily located. It states that psychological abuse is one where the female perpetrators outnumbered the males. The answers are not as cut and dry as being an all male or all female issue as you would present. Learn to be professional, once more.
“A 2005 study by Hamel[8] reports that “[M]en and women physically and emotionally abuse each other at equal rates.” Basile[9] found that psychological aggression was effectively bidirectional in cases where heterosexual and homosexual couples went to court for domestic disturbances. A 2007 study of Spanish college students (n = 1,886) aged 18”“27 [10] found that psychological aggression (as measured by the Conflict Tactics Scale) is so pervasive in dating relationships that it can be regarded as a normalized element of dating, and that women are substantially more likely to exhibit psychological aggression. Similar findings have been reported in other studies.[11] Strauss et al.[12] found that female intimate partners in heterosexual relationships were more likely than males to use psychological aggression, including threats to hit or throw an object. A study of young adults (N = 721) by Giordano et al.[13] found that females in intimate heterosexual relationships were more likely than males to threaten to use a knife or gun against their partner.
Numerous studies [14][15][16][17][18][19] report that lesbian relationships have higher overall rates of interpersonal aggression (including psychological aggression/emotional abuse) than heterosexual or gay male relationships. Furthermore, women who have been involved with both men and women reported higher rates of abuse from their female partners.[20]
In 1996, the National Clearinghouse on Family Violence,[3] for Health Canada, reported that 39% of married women or common-law wives suffered emotional abuse by husbands/partners; and a 1995 survey of women 15 and over (n = 1000) 36-43% reported emotional abuse during childhood or adolescence, and 39% experienced emotional abuse in marriage/dating; this report does not address boys or men suffering emotional abuse from families or intimate partners. A BBC radio documentary on domestic abuse, including emotional maltreatment, reports that 20% of men and 30% of women have been abused by a spouse or other intimate partner.[21]
Straus and Field[22] report that psychological aggression is a pervasive trait of American families: “verbal attacks on children, like physical attacks, are so prevalent as to be just about universal.” A 2008 study by English, et. al[23] found that fathers and mothers were equally likely to be verbally aggressive towards their children.”
It has been odd watching a person with observable asocial attitudes moderate an anti-psychopath blog formatted discussion group as the person slowly fragments and begins to expose themselves and their disturbed thinking. It should be a personal wake-up call. We can all slip into wrong-way generalizations, but mental health professionals need to be especially wary of their own humanity.
Sign me a survivor of physical and emotional DV, as well as secondary abuse by Misandrist Hate Mongers.
patriotdad, you are clearly angry about your idea that female-to-male abuse is not adequately acknowledged. However, if you spent much time on this site, you would be aware that a number of our regulars are men with histories of involvement with abusive women.
However, you may also note that the overwhelming percentage of people on this site are women. What that means in terms of overall interpersonal abuse numbers in the world at large is something we can’t estimate. You have your numbers. We have the evidence of our population here.
Just to keep things straight, the Time article that was cited in the original post above said specifically that the law is being written to protect women, as a result of general consciousness being raised by the murder of several woman by their husbands or boyfriends. Perhaps you think that Time magazine is also misandrist in their reporting.
Finally, this is a site for mutual support. It is unfortunate that you feel that your own cause is unrecognized. However, mutual support does not include calling each other names like “Misandrist Hate Mongers,” criticizing each other for things like “asocial attitudes,” and we try to keep straight on each other’s facts. The writer of this article is not a mental health professional.
I’m going to report your post as abusive, which it is. Anger is not an excuse. Donna, you are welcome to delete my response as well, if you wish.
Kathy