Just say NO!

I am outraged, affronted, chafed, choleric, convulsed, displeased, enraged, exacerbated, exasperated, fuming, furious, galled, hateful, heated, indignant, inflamed, infuriated, irritated, maddened, nettled, offended, provoked, raging, resentful, splenetic.

True, I preached compassion and tolerance and I emphasized this is what makes us human. I still believe in that. But let me be well understood. As a Buddhist acquaintance helped me open my eyes, a tolerant and compassionate person is not and should not be a pushover or constantly pleasant. Not so, not so, he added. True. Not so at all.

World is not a bed of roses and rage is a healthy and natural feeling. Injustice, intolerance, abuse and violence should outrage us all. Let me explain.

I love him

A good friend of mine has been abused by her husband recently. My incurably romantic friend has been married for 5 years. She described to me in detail how he mounted her, almost strangled her, squeezed her face and stopped one inch away from her face with his fist, then he threw her off bed. She told me the fear she felt didn’t equal with anything she experienced before.

Let alone the gesture itself, which is inexcusable, what happened was a point of no return.

Many couples reach to that stage, but some refuse to acknowledge it and resuscitate it with old and good memories, trying in a desperate attempt to patch a broken tie.

I asked my friend whether she was sure that was the end and to my surprise she didn’t say a bluntly “Yes”, but a half mouth “I don’t know”, leaving an open possibility to continue her disturbed relation. The husband went on apologizing saying he couldn’t be sorry enough, as if words alone would take away the instant that marked an evident rupture of their marriage.

For the moment, my friend seems decided not to go back, but she raised a question I didn’t know how to answer “what if I cannot live without him?”. As I do with all my friends that come to me for comfort and advice, I tried to fully and sympathetically listen to her and her arguments as per why she would go back to him, holding back my personal opinions about it. How hard it was to keep my mouth shut, though!

She then asked me what would I personally do? Cautiously, I replied that marital experts claim that a violent gesture leads to another violent gesture, and domestic violence is usually snowballing, and a slap never stops to a single slap leading to regular violence.

‘You think I should leave him, then?’

‘I think you should just leave. Not leave HIM. You leave the situation. You put an end to it’.

Bruises in numbers

According to a Romanian study, the number of women who are victims of domestic violence increased 7 times from 1996 until 2002, and in 2008 there have been over 5000 cases of abused women. Thirty-five of them died.

In Bucharest alone, over 1000 women come yearly to the centers that shelter abused women. At Polimed, within the Apaca center, come yearly 300 women battered almost to death with broken teeth, ribs, bruises and cerebral traumas. You cannot talk about it with respect for sensitive readers, and you cannot express it elegantly or less graphic: these women are not “traumatized, treated rudely, violated or molested”. They are battered! With fists, feet, baseball bats, chains, ax handles, pastry rollers, washing machine hoses.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, domestic violence affects more than 32 million Americans, or over 10% of the U. S. population. Estimates show that 248 of every 1,000 females are victims of physical assault and/or rape committed by their spouses.

Worldwide, at least 1 in 3 women has been abused or forced into sex at least once; a 5th of women have been sexually abused before the age of 15; half a million women die due to birth complication before the age of 20; violence kills more women than car accidents and malaria taken together; 70% of domestic violence victims have been killed by their partners; between 4-20% women that are being abused even during their pregnancy; between 10-69% of women have been abused at least once by their partner; at least 130 million women have been victims of genital mutilation; and the annual worldwide total of honor-killing victims may be as high as 5,000.

War rape

War rape is used as a weapon and traumatized millions of women during wars. War rape dates back to antiquity, and during armed conflicts rape is used as means of psychological warfare in order to humiliate the enemy and undermine their morale. Human rights associations and other non-governmental organizations estimated that during the Bosnian War between 20,000 and 50,000 women were raped. The Special Rapporteur on Rwanda estimated in his 1996 report that between 2,000 and 5,000 pregnancies resulted from war rape, and that between 250,000 and 500,000 Rwandese women and girls had been raped. It is also estimated that there are as many as 200,000 surviving rape victims living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today. Sexual violence occurred in a multiple ways, including rape with objects, such as broken glass bottles, chemical lights, broom sticks, guns and truncheons.

Tacit agreement

When comes to domestic violence, specialists claim there is a tacit agreement between the victim and her aggressor, that the former invites the latter to violence with a docile and submissive attitude, or words and gestures which instigate the aggressor to dominate the victim. And this domination must be done at any cost.

Logic claims that when people run out of verbal arguments and when their intellect fails to sustain their point of view in a debate, they make appeal to other arguments such as “argumentum ad baculum” (the argument of the bat), which means to make appeal to physical force or anything that inspires fear to your opponent. This argument then prevails and takes the place of logical reasons, motives or proofs one might have in a heated debate.

People make appeal to violence (domestic or not) then and only then they run out of logical arguments which they can use to sustain their point of view. People and most couples do not know how to fight, and most of the times their judgment is clouded by hormones and irrationality. “Fighting” in a couple should eventually be an exchange and presentation of different point of views and the result of such a fight needs to lead to a fruitful result where the debaters (partners) need to reach an agreement, a middle lane, a compromise. In reality, it is obvious people do not typically behave in optimal ways, when faced with a number of actions. The difficulty appears when we need to determine the optimal behavior in the first place and what it entails.

I told my friend, who is an economist, to use her knowledge to solve her dilemma. I know it sounded cruel and cold but what is the benefit of stuffing out brain with info if we don’t find a practical use to it. She has a decision to make: stay with her husband, who has violent tendencies and most probably and statistically he will recidivate or leave now, with all the regrets that she could have made things work, and abandoned the ship when it trouble.

To speak her language, I told her to make appeal to the decision theory used in mathematics and statistics which is concerned with identifying the values, uncertainties and other issues relevant in a given decision and the resulting optimal decision. Meaning identifying the best decision to take, assuming an ideal decision maker who is fully informed, able to compute with perfect accuracy, and fully rational. Like her.

My friend is facing a choice under uncertainty. Some decisions are difficult because of the need to take into account how other people in the situation will respond to the decision that is taken. We are all aware of the choice paradox: more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all. In this case, it should be simple. There is only one choice.

Why stay?

Couples fight. It is normal, say some. But to disfigure the person whom you promised to be with for better and for worse is humiliating not only for the victim but especially for the aggressor. To stay in an abusive relation is not normal. Why do victims choose to stay? Dr Nancy Faulkner explained the reasons. The Safety Seeker: (It may be familiar, and oddly enough, a comfortable lifestyle); The Blind ( Not realizing it is "abuse"); The Worthless (No one else would ever love me), The Defective: (I deserved it; I'll do better), The Manager: (I can keep it from happening again); The Gullible: (He's really sorry, and it won't happen again); The Pretender: (I know I make him sound terrible, but he's really a good person most of the time); The Defender: (He didn't mean to hurt me); The Caretaker: (No one else understands him the way I do); The Fantasizer: (But I love him); The Martyr: (He isn't hurting the children; if he ever did, I'd leave); The Helpless: (I can't support the children on my own); The Hopeless: He'll kill me if I try to leave him).

No excuse

There is no excuse for those who beat their wives and urban legends claim that there is only a typical category of men who beat their wives: drunkards, uneducated, etc.

There are a few myths according to which men beat their wives. The Kababaihan Laban Sa Karahasan foundation for abused women identified a few:

1) Only unemployed of drunken men beat their wives. False

The image of the irresponsible man who beats his wife is a myth. There are the so-called “responsible” or “respectable” men who aggress their wives. Eight out of ten men who beat their wives are governmental employees, engineers, doctors, businessmen, or they work in the army. Of course, some of the abusers are construction workers, drivers or unqualified workers.

2) Domestic violence is only caused by drug or alcohol abuse. False

Contrary to popular belief, six in ten men are perfectly lucid and are not under the drug or alcohol influence when they beat their wives.

3) Women instigate and provoke the beatings. False

Nagging or verbal articulation is women’s defense mechanism to cope with stress and domestic unhappiness. Nagging is NOT a reason for battering a woman.

4) Women can leave their husbands whenever they want. False

Most women don’t leave because they have no place to go or their own families don’t support them. Women can be caught in a trap of lack of social or economic opportunities and these alone create impediments to start a new life. Starting with lack of money which can insure transportation or departure, continuing with lack of self-confidence and ending with the lack of a proper emotional support, women remain blocked in this vicious circle of domestic violence.

Most women get battered when the husband detains more economic, social, physical or financial power than women.

This aspect is clearly related to the gender apartheid which at the end of the day is nothing but a violation of human rights and common decency. Men who usually beat their wives do it out of weakness, to exert control and most of the times due to an animal instinct to prove they are “real” men. But most of the times, to beat down their own feeling of uselessness. Real men don’t beat their partners and a slap marks always the point of no return. It is time you say NO!