DOMESTIC VULNERABILITY

Pia Zadora was recently arrested for domestic abuse -- SHE was the abuser.  So Pia Zadora, who has had a confusing career, all sixty-year-old, five-feet tall of her, may have a shining opportunity to become a sponsor of domestic abuse reform.  It’s clear that her problem is not testosterone or that her husband is wimpy -- he’s a cop and therefore familiar with domestic abuse. (Size-indicating photo above.)  The problem is not dark skin.  It might be alcohol -- maybe even drugs.  She was so out of control that her husband, his grown son, and her own teenaged son could not control her, nor did they cooperate with the police who had to sit on the doorstep waiting.  They have strong orders about domestic abuse, usually to protect the woman by arresting the man.  The original issue was Zadora making her son go to bed so she “could get some rest.”  Sounds like she was the one who needed a long sleep.

Recently on Good Men Project, Camille Hayes, who works on the issue of domestic violence as a professional in LA, said this:

However, the hard truth is that there’s a disconnect between the amount of work we put into solving this problem and the results we’re getting. We’ve built this massive retaining wall of shelters and criminal laws and advocacy organizations that do a solid job of protecting existing victims, but don’t seem to be able to change the fact that those victims just keep coming. I’ve come to believe that there’s something missing in how we have defined domestic violence. There’s a hole in our basic conceptualization, and that hole has created other holes, in our data sets and laws and intervention strategies. It’s like we have a blind spot, and the main reason the blind spot exists is that we classified domestic violence as a “women’s issue” from the start, and I don’t think that’s the best way to understand it. It’s certainly a women’s problem, in that it affects us disproportionately as victims, but seeing the issue exclusively from the victims’ perspective can only take us part way toward comprehending it—and how can you hope to change something you don’t fully comprehend?

Most of the domestic abuse theories are vulnerability-based.  They assume that the violent batter because they CAN, so the actions taken are meant to protect the smaller and weaker: women, children, elders, gays (IF they are smaller and weaker, which they aren’t always.) or even animals.  Yet, as Camille notes:  “Batterers persist in their violent behavior at tremendous cost to themselves. They’re arrested, imprisoned, they lose their jobs and their homes, their families leave them. They’ll pursue violence to the point of killing their partners and themselves. And as horrible as it is to imagine, it’s not unheard of for batterers to kill their own children. To all of which I say: what the f*ck? I mean seriously, what is going on here? What’s happening in batterers’ heads that’s so terrifying, so painful, that destroying the people closest to them seems like a reasonable alternative to feeling it for one minute more?”

In comments I noted that three violent men in my family had sustained closed-skull trauma, which correlate with violent behavior.  Of course, it is men who are likely to be hit on the head in the course of work and sports.  I also suggested that the high-theory ideology of radical feminists interferes with truly understanding men. This observation caused me to be attacked by exactly that sort of ideological feminist -- except that she added the twist that I was blaming men by saying such things and that Camille’s essay was a libelous attack on men.

But, as often happens, the newspaper brings a new angle:  Zadora can’t be accused of suffering from testosterone poisoning or dominating the weak.  She CAN be seen as demonstrating the frustration of being the one obligated to make big money in a world that often laughs at her, provoking an emotional storm that took her out of control.  The same issue of the newspaper tells us that forty-per-cent of households in the US now have women as the primary bread-winner.  Prepare for a wave of women who batter men, children, animals, granny . . .

My days of violence were long ago but they were real and they were on the rez where violence was for some a way of life, because in the Sixties we were ALL frustrated.  Life seemed full of opportunities, if we could just get hold of them, but they danced away.  The hard times were even harder because of that.  All promise, no delivery.

Later, my ministry was to well-educated, prosperous, admirable people, but the dynamics of battering were often there in marriages.  Men were the bread-winners, women urged them on.  Men hit road-blocks and dangerous passages at work and women pushed them harder, beginning to be scared and to demand reassurance.  But the men would become secretive, try to separate the women from their work, which meant the women became more suspicious and more determined to get to the bottom of the problem.  They lived far from extended families, were embarrassed to ask for help, and -- as happens when things get tough -- their “heads went flat,” as one counselor describes it.  They couldn’t generate strategy or new options, couldn’t understand realistically what might happen, didn’t use the resources they had. Had no faith that sitting down to talk it out would reveal anything but disaster.  It wasn’t testosterone that was the problem, it was the fight/flight/freeze animal mechanism deep in the brain.  They might fight intervention from outside.  Or simply rush to divorce and “go home,” essentially back to childhood.

Another commenter, evidently a male from another country, possibly India, suggested a good checklist of things to investigate with outside help:  jealousy, fear of being abandoned , severe issues with emotional distress in general, feelings of inadequacy, problems with impulse control, failure to express feelings in words and to talk about needs and wants, a background where violence in the home was the norm, alcoholism and drugs, lack of impulse control, and persons with the tendency to become violent when they feel the partner wants to leave.  Some need to punish or control the other.  Men are more emotionally dependent on lovers than we realize. (Male teen suicides are often triggered by loss of a lover.) Honor is also a part of this, murderously intensified in some cultures.

We could cross-index Pia Zadora and with O.J. Simpson and find many of the same forces.  O.J. was bigger, had weapons, had acted out violence in films, probably had brain trauma from football.  It is the difference between being bitten by a small dog and a tiger.  The trigger and dynamics might be similar, but the results are woefully different.  But this is not a celebrity problem.  On this street in this small town there was years ago a young husband enraged with his wife.  He was sitting in a pickup with his small son, across from a bar.  To punish the wife he shot himself and his son.  I don’t know whether this shows up in statistics on domestic violence.  But by that time the vulnerability of that young wife was beyond anything a safe house could address.