What's The Difference Between Anger and Abuse?

We face this question a lot in anti-domestic violence work. People like to write off batterers' behavior, even homicides, as explosive anger that should be treated by anger management classes, rather than as systematic, planned behavior that focuses on control. The Marriage Counseling Blog has a pretty good breakdown on the difference between anger and the behaviors typically associated with domestic abuse.

Anger is a natural and normal feeling. However, the behaviors people exhibit when they feel angry may or may not be acceptable. Abuse should not be tolerated.

The underlying reasons for angry behaviors and abusive behaviors are different. When people are angry they may lash out or say things they don’t mean out of difficulty being rational while feeling so upset. Angry feelings can cause people to do or say some things they might not normally do and say. This, however, shouldn’t be used as an excuse.

Abusive behaviors tend to be a lot more purposeful. Abusive behaviors are meant to control the other person. Various strategies ranging from intimidation and guilt may be used as manipulation tactics.

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When behaviors become abusive, the person doesn’t take responsibility for the behaviors. They may deny that the abuse occurred or minimize the seriousness of it. They may also blame the other person.

In contrast, people who exhibit angry behaviors can take responsibility for their role. They can admit to crossing the line if they became angry and yelled or behaved inappropriately. They also work on making changes so that it won’t happen again.

The final statement is possibly the most important. Those who use violence against their partners are much less likely to take responsibility for their actions than those who simply have difficulty controlling their anger. Thus, traditional anger management classes, and even many batterers intervention programs based on an anger management model, don't work for perpetrators of family violence because they don't feel that they have any changes to make. We need to acknowledge domestic violence for what it is - a series of behaviors that are tactics one partner uses to control the other - before we can begin effectively helping batterers to change.

A DV Double-Standard for Athletes?

Are athletes let off the hook more frequently when it comes to abusing their partners? Sports Illustrated's Jeff Benedict thinks so and outlines how:

Athletes are less prone to fear consequences, especially when it comes to their off-the-field behavior. [Carolina Panthers linebacker Mark] Fields confronted his ex-girlfriend outside a child care facility at 5 o'clock on a Monday afternoon. [Mets closer Francisco] Rodriguez couldn't have picked a more public place to berate his girlfriend and strike her father than at a ballpark, never mind the fact that there were security guards on hand.

Most of us would consider this behavior pretty brazen. Yet athletes who run afoul of the law are used to getting out of jams. Look at [Indiana Pacers rookie Lance] Stephenson. While starring at Abraham Lincoln High in Coney Island, Stephenson and a teammate were arrested in October 2008 for allegedly sexually abusing a 17-year-old girl inside the school. At the time, Stephenson was being recruited by schools like North Carolina, Kansas, Memphis, USC and many others. He was on his way to becoming the all-time leading scorer in New York state history and leading his team to four consecutive New York City championships. He'd become such a big phenomenon that a courtside announcer had nicknamed him "Born Ready" and a reality web series about him was being planned under the same name.

All of that was jeopardized by the felony sexual assault case pending against him. But here's where it pays for an abuser to be an athlete. After Stephenson pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct, the University of Cincinnati offered him a scholarship. He became the Big East's Rookie of the Year in 2010 and was selected drafted by the Indiana Pacers in the second round of June's NBA Draft. It was as if the incident at his high school didn't matter.

But these matters often come back to bite teams that sign players with a rap sheet. Now Pacers GM Larry Bird has to decide what to do. If Stephenson is convicted on felony assault charges for the incident last weekend, he'll face a minimum of seven years in prison. The team just signed him to a contract that reportedly guarantees him $700,000 this year and $800,000 next year. The only thing Bird has said so far is that the organization will send a clear message to the community that cannot be ignored.

The only person who needs a clear message is Stephenson. He may have been born ready to play hoops, but the game is doing him no favors by enabling him to keep skirting responsibility for his actions. Until his case is resolved, the last place he should be is in an NBA uniform.

The full article is well worth a read, if for nothing else than the list of high-profile athletes whose abusive escapes you may or may not have heard about. There is a real reason why researchers and activists like Benedict and Jackson Katz put so much emphasis on intervening with athletes. That's a good approach, but an even better approach might be to couple that intervention with some for GMs on why domestic violence should be taken seriously. Battering athletes aren't going to stop using violence until they see actual negative consequences for doing so.

Where Domestic Violence Comes From

Today in the New York Times, Maureen Dowd paints a disturbing picture of the culture that produced George Huguely V, the Virginia lacrosse player who has been charged with murdering his girlfriend Yeardley Love.

It was set up like a fantasy football league draft. The height, weight and performance statistics of the draftees were offered to decide who would make the cut and who would emerge as the No. 1 pick.

But the players in this predatory game were not famous N.F.L. stars. They were unwitting girls about to start high school.

A group of soon-to-be freshmen boys at Landon, an elite private grade school and high school for boys in the wealthy Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Md., was drafting local girls.

One team was called “The Southside Slampigs,” and one boy dubbed his team with crude street slang for drug-addicted prostitutes.

The young woman who was the “top pick” was described by one of the boys in a team profile he put up online as “sweet, outgoing, friendly, willing to get down and dirty and [expletive] party. Coming in at 90 pounds, 5’2 and a bra size 34d.” She would be a special asset to the team, he noted, because her mother “is quite the cougar herself.”

Before they got caught last summer, the boys had planned an “opening day party,” complete with T-shirts, where the mission was to invite the drafted girls and, unbeknownst to them, score points by trying to rack up as many sexual encounters with the young women as possible.

“They evidently got points for first, second and third base,” said one outraged father of a drafted girl. “They were going to have parties and tally up the points, and money was going to be exchanged at the end of the season.” He said that the boys would also have earned points for “schmoozing with the parents.”

His daughter, he said, “was very upset about it. She thought these guys were her friends. This is the way we teach boys to treat women, young ladies? You have enough to worry about as a 14- or 15-year-old girl without having to worry about guys who are doing it as sport.”

Another parent was equally appalled: “I think the girls felt like they were getting targeted, that this was some big game. Talk about using people. It doesn’t get much worse than that.”

This would have been the perfect time for an intervention. If the school had taken this predatory behavior toward women seriously enough and the boys had seen a meaningful consequence for their actions, this could have been a turning point. Men can be shown how their behavior negatively impacts the women in their life, and they can be persuaded to change. However, some of the parents don't think the boys were sufficiently punished. By not punishing young men when these mindsets and behaviors are discovered, we are telling them that punishment is not warranted and that what they did wasn't all that bad.

Maybe, to some, this wasn't all that bad. But this is just the early stage of a man seeing women only as sexual objects to be obtained, not as partners with feelings of their own. If a young man continues down this road of not seeing women as full people, something much worse could happen.

A gunman who shot and killed his wife and three other women at a South Florida restaurant before committing suicide was the half-brother of former baseball star Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez.

Police said the shooter bypassed at least two men when he fired at the women inside. Three women were hospitalized in critical condition, Hialeah police Detective Eddie Rodriguez said.

"He went straight for the women," Rodriguez said.

Four women are now dead, and three others are injured in what is only the most recent in our nation's history of gender-motivated mass murders.

This time it was Gerardo Regalado, half-brother of former baseball star Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, and the crime took place in South Florida. Last year it was George Sodini in Collier County, PA, who opened fire in an all-female aerobics class in an act of misguided revenge for a sexually frustrated existence. Before that, it was Cho Seung-Hui, the mentally unstable stalker of women at Virginia Tech, who ended up being responsible for the worst school shooting in U.S. history. In 2006, it was the school shootings in Amish country and in Colorado’s Platte Canyon. And in 1998, it was the murder of four elementary school girls and their female teacher in Jonesboro, AR.

I am sick to death that I have to keep writing some version of this same article or blog post on loop. But I have to, because in all of these cases, gender-based violence lies at the heart of these crimes — and leaving this motivating factor uninvestigated not only deprives the public of the full, accurate picture of the events at hand, but leave us without the analysis and context needed to understand the violence, recognize warning signs, and take steps to prevent similar massacres in the future.

Those steps are exactly what parents of the girls targeted by the Landon boys were advocating. They wanted the predatory mindset punished early. They took it seriously because they saw the negative impact on their daughters. The family and friends of the women murdered and injured in Florida will be taking the punishment of predatory behavior seriously, because they have also seen the negative impact. We take it seriously, because we see its impact every day. Won't you take it seriously, too?

Chris Brown Updates

We're a little late to the game on this one - Summer is a very busy time at WRC - but there has been a lot of recent Chris Brown news. We don't normally zero in on celebrities like this, but following the Brown case start to finish can really provide some insight into what abusive relationships looks like.

First off, after accepting a plea deal for no jail time, Brown was spotted at a party wearing a $300,000 custom-made diamond necklace reading "Oops". In light of that, his video apology rings kind of hollow. We're not the only ones who think so.

The obvious flaw in his apology is that you can't tell what he's apologizing for. He simply calls his brutal assault on Rihanna "the situation" or "what I've done". Anna at Jezebel provides a critique:

Brown says he's sorry about "those few moments," about "what I've done," about "the situation," about "what happened," and about "my mistake." Only once does he actually use the term "domestic violence," and this when he is mentioning the domestic violence that he witnessed growing up. Whether or not his apology is simply a calculated "ploy to encourage parents to let their children buy his records again," as entertainment.ie puts it, someone in Brown's camp clearly knows that if he said, "I'm sorry that I beat Rihanna," the apology would go down a lot less smoothly.

By going the vague route, Brown allows fans to forget the visceral reality of what he did — assaulting Rihanna until her face was swollen and bruised — and instead focus on all the nice things he says about his mother, his "spiritual advisors," and his commitment to change. By saying he's sorry he didn't "handle the situation better," he casts the beating as a response to a bad "situation" — and instance of poor conflict resolution, not of flying off the handle. And by implying there was something that needed to be "handled" in some way, this statement subtly implicates Rihanna too.

It seems that Oprah didn't buy it either. As promised in his apology video, Brown wanted to immediately begin doing interviews once his sentencing hearing was over. He wanted Oprah, but Oprah turned him down, so he turned to Larry King instead. His handlers believe that King will allow Chris the opportunity to get his apology across without facing “brutal questioning”.

But what does all this mean? Will Chris Brown stop being a batterer? Will his fans accept his apology and move on? No one knows, by Jaclyn Friedman at Huffington Post summarizes the implications of the sentencing, and of batterers intervention in general, nicely.

But what really may make the difference for Brown is a factor most programs sorely lack -- accountability. While all eyes will be on Brown as he completes his sentence, that's hardly the case for most abusers. In fact, few jurisdictions in the country have systems in place to enforce their own sentences when it comes to batterer intervention programs, resulting in a national noncompletion rate of about 50%. Given that abusers who fail to complete their court-mandated programs are more than twice as likely to reoffend than those who do, that's a gap which urgently needs addressing.

Go read Jaclyn's whole article. It makes some recommendations I'm sure that our friends at Men Stopping Violence would agree with.