Do you ever have sympathy for abusive men?

I have sympathy for my cousins DH who has been emotionally and verbally abusive to her. I have known him for 27 years and he is a great guy and been brilliant to us, helping us out and like a brother to my DH. BUT he has a really shit childhood with a violent and drunk dad. He has been unable to form a good relationship which his 4 children.

I am in no way excusing him and I would of left him years ago if I was married to him but he has no other family left and he tried to change but he's just a really crap husband and dad. My cousin has finally chucked him out and we completely support her But i do feel sympathy for him as it's obvious he is really screwed up because of his childhood

I have sympathy for my own abuser to a degree. As awful as my father was, I’ve spent time with his mother, my grandmother. There is a reason my dd has never met her. My father is a deeply flawed man with mental health issues and a tendency to self-medicate with alcohol. I will never excuse the things he has done, but I understand how he got there.

I have all the sympathy for their past, for the child they once were. I even share their anger at a system,parents etc that harmed or failed them. I have no sympathy for the offender.
The only ones I have some sympathy for are the ones that are seriously mentally ill or severely mentally incapacitated and have been failed by system,left to roam free, homeless, no meds,no support etc.

Obviously not, since I don't know his childhood, other than that he was a child singer. No one can see inside your head and can presume to know any individual's reasons for expressing sympathy for a child abuser. Unless you say what they are, they are bound to remain obvious to you but opaque to everyone else. The same applies in general to expressions of opinion.

My father was abusive.

He had a terrible childhood, as an adult he did some terrible things.

I can feel sympathy and empathy for the child he was who suffered so badly and feel nothing but anger and disgust for the adult he turned into.

As humans we tend to simplify things into 'this or that' when in reality people and life are complex.

Yes. At some point we have to take responsibility for our actions. My xh gets a visible high from his abuse.

All childhood trauma is a tragedy. I know my abuser had childhood trauma in spades. I experience empathy for the child he was.

I don't feel sympathy for his adult choices.

I’m not sure sympathy is the correct word...but I do feel an understanding that people’s past experiences or disadvantages might impact negatively on the way they have developed and who they have become.

Abusers choose it. That's it.

I've been treated horribly and yet I manage to live an ethical life and treat others with respect.

Blaming a bad childhood on abusive behaviour just masks the fact that abuse is a choice.

Sympathy for abused or neglected children is useless unless we do something about it.

I had this discussion with someone once about Floyd Mayweather, the boxer. The other person was arguing how amazing it was for him to overcome poverty and an abusive childhood to be such an amazing boxer, and it was completely understandable how he would also be an abuser himself given his childhood.

I think it’s insulting. It’s insulting to the many, many more people who suffer an abusive childhood and grow up to do the exact opposite. Many more people suffer abuse as kids and achieve amazing things: become teachers, nurses, doctors, social workers, in fact any steady job which is just as great - more so - an achievement as being a champion boxer. They raise their kids well and don’t abuse their partners. They don’t ever get sympathy, recognition or even acknowledgment of what they went through as kids themselves because they don’t seek it out and they never do anything to warrant any attention to it.

The only reason attention is ever turned to an abuser’s past in which sympathy might develop is when they abuse themselves. If they’d just behaved themselves like all the millions of others who manage it no one would even look into it.

I have sympathy for those who suffer abuse as children and suffer mental health consequences as adults because it’s never addressed, but I don’t sympathise with those who use it as an excuse for their abusive actions as adults.

If you wander round any prison you can find a heap of undiagnosed autism, ADHD, SEN, learning difficulties, personality disorders, mental health problems, etc.

And also people with none of the above who have also committed horrendous crimes. I find those a lot harder. No fucking excuse.

Spot on! Prisons as punishment are so obviously logically flawed that I'm amazed we still rely on them!

Slightly better than the death penalty. We have at least moved on from that.

This makes for really grim reading and I'll add a trigger warning.

Richard Huckle from UK started raping children aged 19 when abroad teaching in S.E. Asia.

He got caught aged 33 by impressive "dark web" police intelligence based in Australia after being noticed as a "prolific uploader of content" including raping babies.

Over 200 South East Asian children estimated during his adult lifetime, maybe more. In 15 years, 200 children? Yknow what's that? A new one each month.

Come off it.
I simply don't care that he was maybe neglected as a child.
You don't go around raping babies.

Anyway, not sure if any of you followed this story but do not look up what happened to him in prison, needless to say after about a year inside he's not alive anymore.

It's even more depressing that his content was watched by ANYONE let alone so many men.

My ex H is a vicious, alcoholic, unhinged abuser. However I have seen photos of him as a little boy and its highly probable hat he had/has a spectrum condition. He looks so sweet and scared in those photos. He was considered by his family to have been very difficult and naughty but all the behaviour they describe are those of a child with ADD and possibly autism - I have a child with autism so am familiar. I don't think he got any help. His father was authoritarian and very aggressive. I think he grew up a terrified, confused and dominated little boy and it affected his brain development. I believe he has a personality disorder of some kind now and he is unable to function efficiently in day to day life. I cannot be in the same room as him these days and he is blocked everywhere because of his ongoing abusive behaviour but I do feel sorry for him and sad when I think of the little boy he was.

[quote Aubergina]@DandyMandy What's unbelievable is that a person would randomly choose to be a rapist or serial killer without having experienced trauma and/or psychological disorder[/quote]
Many have been proven to be sane and in their right frame of mind when they have committed these atrocious acts. So basically you're saying it's not a choice to rape or kill? Yeah I'm sure that's very helpful to those impacted. Blame everything on the childhood that may have actually been fine, but it's a way they can get instant sympathy.

[quote AnnaMagnani]@NotaNewbie I have similar feelings about my grandparents. I remember them as loving and amazing, but my DM has over the years revealed that they were basically abusive and traumatized by the war where my GM was a prisoner.

And so my DM wasn't that great at being a parent but how was she to know better?

These things travel through generations.[/quote]
DM shouted and smacked us with her bare hand (do you hear what I'm not saying?). I shouted at my dc but never struck them.

DM is undeniably damaged by her upbringing, as is my uncle, but, even though she denies that she was abused, DM made a conscious effort not to abuse us. I have huge respect for her for escaping her upbringing and not re-enacting it.

@DandyMandy What's unbelievable is that a person would randomly choose to be a rapist or serial killer without having experienced trauma and/or psychological disorder

I have more sympathy for those angry shouty men and women since working with people who have experienced trauma. Reactivity arising from the brain changes of PTSD is hard to stop without a lot of work and causes a whole lot more life challenges.

I can't think of any a single prominent case like that where there was widespread sympathy for the mother?

The different response to women, especially mothers, compared to men is evident in almost entirely male historians' work on Magda Goebbels' murder of her five children as part of her own suicide in Hitler's bunker at the end of WW2. In these descriptions of terrible men who did truly terrible things, she is always demonised and the historians never trace the facts of her situation, as if she just materialised on that night and committed the murders out of the blue. Looked at from a feminist pov there are very many complex causative factors for her crime.

But the historians' belief in the irrelevance of any of the women in that situation and the disproportionate blame assigned to the one woman who produced facts worth recording is plain across books for decades, from the 40s to modern day. It's never even mentioned that this was a decision made by a married couple that the man then handed off to his wife to do all the dirty work alone, and take the blame for.

Women tend to be viewed much more harshly than males who commit such crimes. Rather as in suicide-murders of families committed by men, the wife is rarely even mentioned by name but there is the inevitable 'good man' and 'what drove him to it' excusing his actions.