PERSONALITY DISORDERS
Why Abuse Has Nothing to Do With Gender or Patriarchy
and everything to do with psychopathology
The current view on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) mainly focuses on the role of patriarchy and male domination of women.
Feminists ask the following question:
- Why do men beat their wives?
Instead of:
- Why do some people abuse?
- What psychopathology leads to abusive conduct?
What they seek to understand is why men specifically use violence against their partners because they consider IPV as a systemic form of domination and social control of women by men.
In other words, according to the feminist perspective, all men can potentially use violence as they have learnt controlling behaviours due to male sex-role socialization.
Research data shows a much more complex view of IPV.
Large sample surveys were conducted from 1975 to 1992 in the United States.¹
According to the women interviewed, in any given year;
- about 89% of their male partners were nonviolent.
- only about 3 or 4% repeatedly committed acts that could be injurious, such as punching or kicking.
These studies raise the following questions:
- Why are some men abusive while others are not, even though they were raised under the same socializing influences?
- If men raised in the same society exhibit such dramatic differences in their relationships with women, does this not indicate something other than gender and socializing influences are the problem?
Some Facts on Intimate Partner Violence:
- Mutual abuse is the most common form of IPV.²
- Women report using IPV in order to control or punish their partner at the same rate as men do.³
- Research on IPV has a gender-based perspective that dismisses female abuse as either self-defence or as having a different context. The result is an underestimation of the incidence and severity of female IPV.⁴
IPV is the result of psychopathology, which develops due to early childhood trauma.⁵
Most commonly, those who perpetrate IPV have a personality disorder, however, they can also have other mental health disorders such as psychosis.
Some studies show that people who perpetrate DV don’t always have a history of childhood trauma, but I would argue that this is because abuse is defined too narrowly in studies (physical and sexual abuse).
Trauma can also be caused by psychological abuse, including neglect, overprotecting, overcontrolling and not recognising the child’s boundaries.
And all this makes sense — at the core of abusive behaviours, we can find either fear of enmeshment or fear of abandonment or both.
- Where do these fears come from?
Insecure attachment styles.
- Why would someone have an insecure attachment style?
Because they failed to bond with their parents properly.
Being a woman or a man makes no difference in the chances of someone becoming abusive — a history of childhood trauma does.
It’s not a competition.
There are some facts that lead me to think women are more likely to suffer worse consequences from IPV:
- Men are more physically aggressive in general (not only towards women).
- Even in a mutually abusive relationship, the woman is physically weaker.
- Homicide rates are much higher for women; for every 100 men who kill their wives, 23 women will kill their husbands.⁶
My question is:
- Why do we look at it as a competition?
Abuse is the result of childhood trauma and insecure attachment styles.
- Why does it matter which gender is the most victimised?
- Why make it a competition if both genders are victimised because of the same reasons?
Victim mentality is dangerous.
There is a myth that there are people out there who had everything easy in their lives and become entitled as a result.
The truth is if you meet someone who’s had an easy life with a great family, it means they have learned that human connection is safe.
They have no reason to mistrust people or the world in general because either nothing bad happened to them or even if it did, they had a great support system they could trust.
So why would they be entitled? They would be empathetic, loving and open to forming connections.
Do you know who is entitled?
Victims.
And they have a good reason for it, but that’s the point — entitlement doesn’t come from having an easy life.
People who suffered enough hardship, eventually start developing a bias where they start focusing on where they are victimised but fail to see where others are.
- They start to see how everyone has it easy, but them.
- They see how everyone has advantages and privileges but them.
This eventually leads some to believe they have a right to mistreat others — after all if they are mistreated, they have a right to level the playing field.
Radicalism = Black and White Thinking
Victim mentality inevitably leads to extreme beliefs such as misogyny and misandry.
Here is how this develops:
- A lot of people with childhood trauma externalise blame because they lack empathy. This means they interpret people’s actions as something personal; something done specifically to hurt their feelings as they cannot understand others fully.
- This blaming mindset keeps their anger level high and prevents them from being willing to resolve arguments.
- Blaming and anger mutually reinforce each other and lead to abusiveness. If you are angry with someone and blame them for your own unhappiness, then you will inevitably become abusive towards them.
- As people who have experienced childhood trauma go from one failed relationship to another, at least partly sabotaged by their own impossible demands and anger, they blame the failures on their partners.
- At first, they blame one particular woman or man, then, after some more failures, women or men in general.
Healthy people can have biases and assumptions, but they do not have a high level of extreme and generalising thinking patterns.
This is because they have the tools to deal with trauma — their full-fledged empathy, ability to feel guilt and remorse and capacity for self-introspection prevent them from developing such severe black-and-white thinking even when they experience trauma.
Change comes from understanding.
Trying to blame IPV on a specific gender is not going to change anything.
If you want to change a situation that you find unjust, you must first understand.
Here is an example:
In the past, I had a situationship with a guy I could describe as a bully. He was always rude to the service staff and had a hostile demeanour in general.
He tried to initiate something with me but his attitude pissed me off enough that I turned hostile. Then I realised he would back down immediately from an argument when I expressed anger — he couldn’t stand up for himself at all. He couldn’t even say “no” to me.
His facade was therefore a defence — he knew he was unable to stand up for himself so he had to appear aggressive to deter people from attacking him in the first place.
He probably built up this persona after being in situations where people used his lack of boundaries to take advantage of him.
Understanding this stopped me from taking his behaviours personally.
Abuse is either compensatory or defensive. It helps someone protect themselves because that’s the only way they know how.
Change requires someone with a personality disorder to understand a hostile attitude is only going to provoke others and cause resentment in the long run and therefore is not to their benefit.
What they need to do instead is to work on their black-and-white thinking, tendency to project, ability to not react out of emotion, ability to assert themselves and set healthy boundaries.
Conclusion
Every individual has a reason for what they have become, and every behaviour serves a purpose. Nobody’s abusive and entitled because they are “evil” or society gives them permission to be. If you want to change people, you must seek to understand where they are coming from first.
References:
[1]: Dutton, D. G. (1995). The domestic assault of women: Psychological and criminal justice perspectives (Rev. & exp. ed.). University of British Columbia Press.
[2]: Stets, J., Straus, M. A. (1992). The marriage license as a hitting license: Physical violence in American Families. Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick.
[3]: Bair-Merritt, M. H., Crowne, S. S., Thompson, D. A., Sibinga, E., Trent, M., & Campbell, J. (2010). Why do women use intimate partner violence? A systematic review of women’s motivations. Trauma, violence & abuse, 11(4), 178–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838010379003
[4]: Dutton, D. G., & Nicholls, T. L. (2005). The gender paradigm in domestic violence research and theory: Part 1 — The conflict of theory and data. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 10(6), 680–714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2005.02.001
[5]: Dutton, D. G., (2007). The Abusive Personality: Violence and Control in Intimate Relationships. The Guilford Press.
[6]: Wilson, M. I., & Daly, M. (1992b). Who kills whom in spouse killings? On the exceptional sex ratio of spousal homicides in the United States. Criminology, 30(2), 189- 215.
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