I have to write about something that's weighing heavily on my head tonight, and that is the number of women in this country who are murdered by current or past husbands or boyfriends. I wasn't able to find statistics that are very current, but what I could find puts the number at about an average of three a day. Three a day. Three. Women. Every single day of the year. (Of course that's not how averages work, but bear with.) Before they were murdered, most of those women were not murder victims, but victims of domestic abuse.
The statistics for women being physically abused by an intimate partner are even grimmer. One in three women will experience some form of physical abuse, and for one in four women the violence will be severe at some point in
If you follow the link in the paragraph above I'm sure you will come away depressed and angry like I did. Not that I'm a stranger to the statistics. I have a degree in social work, and I used to work as a counselor in a women's resource center that was the umbrella organization for the battered women's shelter. So I have some professional experience in addition to the experience of living all these decades in a woman's body. I've seen what it looks like. I've seen what it does to women and children. I've seen monsters and hid inside locked doors while they pounded to get in and satisfy their bottomless rage.
The rage of some men -- of so many men -- is terrifying, from the president on down.
I have so much I could say about men and their narcissistic anger and the ways they visit it upon women and children. I've got my own rage about their rage .... without the power that comes with size, strength and social privilege. I could write for days and days about the rage of men. But I won't.
I will just say this. I may not have much personal power, but I can promise you this, my patient readers: If my son ever touched my daughter-in-law or any other woman with violent intent, it had better be to save his own life. If he did it because he couldn't control his anger though, he would no longer be welcome to be my son in this lifetime. He would not be allowed on my island.
(Disclaimer: I am not talking about my actual son, Drake, right now. Anyone who knows him will agree that unprovoked violence is antithetical to his character. He is a protector, not a harmer.)
You wouldn't have to know me for very long to know my kids and my grandkids are the stars of my life. I would do almost anything for them, and I do. It would be like ripping my heart out to turn my back on any of them. But I would do what I had to do to keep everybody safe if my son proved to be an abusive asshole.
One thing in particular I would not do is bail my son out of jail after he was physical violent toward a woman (or even a man unless he was protecting himself). I would let him rot there for a couple of reasons. First, actions have consequences. Why should the victim have to live with the consequences of an abuser's actions if he doesn't? Let the consequences be harsh enough that he thinks twice before he does it again.
And second, I would fear for the safety of not only his partner when he got out of jail, but of the people around her -- children, friends, anybody who supports her. And I would not ever feel safe around him myself. A man who is violent toward his wife or girlfriend is likely to take his anger out on anyone, including his mother. Or his child. A man who is violent toward the woman he claims to love is a man who is out of control. It would be better to cut him out of my life than to live in fear of him.
Abusers are good liars. They make all kinds of excuses for their behavior: work stress, money stress, depression, too much to drink, she pissed him off, she said something that hurt his feelings blah blah fucking blah. I'm not the kind of mother who would accept even my son's self-proclaimed victimhood. If I did, it might as well be my fists throwing the punches, because I'm no better than he is.
I will admit to some vague-blogging in this post based on recent personal experiences, but I've also seen several posts cross my Facebook feed about women who have been killed by their spouses or exes recently. It becomes news when the man is a judge or when the crime is particularly gruesome. Most of those three women who die at the hands of men who love them die unknown to us. We don't hear their stories, because their stories aren't that uncommon. I have to wonder how many times people made excuses for the abuser or believed his lies before he actually killed a woman. How many times our court system let him out with barely a slap on the hand. How many times a mother or father bailed him out when he could have been locked away and the rest of us safe from his rage. Most of them?
I have to mention that resources are available for women who are in a violent relationship. If my son ever put a woman in a situation where she needed those resources, I'd be focused on getting her the help she needs long before I'd be raising bail money for an abusive son. I certainly wouldn't fucking set him loose on the world to vent his rage again.
I can safely say I will never have to make that decision, and for that I'm grateful. But that's not true of all parents. How about you? Would you rush to post bail if your son went to jail for a violent crime? Or would you let consequences take their course? Would you be able to overlook the abuse or would you have to cut out the cancer, like I would?
I leave you with this song, which isn't everybody's bowl of black-eyed peas. (Don't you love ironic lyrics?) Then again, nobody asked Earl to be an abusive asshole.
