Do you ever have sympathy for abusive men?

We are all a product of how our genes interact with our childhood experiences. We have no control over that. So yes, I have empathy for all people, without exception.

I do feel sympathy for the child that they were. But the adult is accountable for their actions.

Thank you for starting this thread, it's such an interesting one and I concur with basically everything everyone has written!

I think one can fall down a rabbit hole of debating free will and why people do what they do but a big, pragmatic question is what do you do with people who have done terrible, incomprehensibly 'evil' things? In that regard I'm not sure the "whys" matter very much.

Personally I think the idea of prison for an arbitrary fixed period is quite an odd way to go about dealing with serious violent crime. Either you can reform someone so they're no longer a danger to society or you can't.

If you truly can, then great, that's something that should be worked on. Truly reversing the habits of a lifetime as opposed to teaching someone to talk the talk seems like a high mountain to climb to me, and at what point you can be confident enough in your judgement to effectively gamble the lives and well-being of the rest of society must be a difficult one to gauge, but in theory that's fine.

If you can't reform them, arguably you should treat the perpetrator with compassion and care (though not naivety!) while incarcerated on the basis something has gone wrong inside them one way or another - whether that's a bad childhood, a brain wiring issue or just having taken a few horrendously wrong turns in life. I have no problem with that and I'm not particularly interested in 'punishment' for the sake of it. But why you would release them back into society at the end of a random fixed period is beyond me. It smacks of rather too much consideration for the perpetrator and what's kind and 'fair' to them and rather too little consideration of the risk of serious harm to everyone else.

Just to branch the discussion out a bit! Possibly a bit controversial but just a line of thought to put out there!

In cases of child cruelty then a mother who stood by usually gets a lot more public hatred than the man who actually committed the horrific acts; look at Baby P, or the recent case with the boy little boy crushed to death in a car.

@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.

I work in a prison. Some of the prisoners have childhood histories of absolutely shocking abuse that you would not believe if you saw it reported.

Unsurprisingly they have grown up to have personality disorders, not be safe around women and be highly abusive.

So yes, I can be sorry for them, wonder what would have happened to the child they were if they had different parents who actually knew how to love and parent and gave them a chance, while still feeling their crimes are horrific, they absolutely need to be in prison and being concerned about WTF they will be like on release.

I always knew that my DM and her siblings had had it tough growing up, particularly DM as the eldest. Desperate poverty, malnutrition, emotionally absent parents who had been traumatised by the Holocaust, eldest siblings traumatised by war in the country where they lived after WW2. I knew that their parents had been strict disciplinarians. To us, DGPs were very loving and indulgent, but DGF was very strict and could be grim and frightening. Nonetheless, we loved them both and felt loved and safe with them.

In my early 20s I realised that, by today's standards, my grandparents would be considered so physically abusive (possibly even by the standards of the 1940s!) that my DM and eldest sibling might well be removed by SS.

That was a really tough realisation. How could I consider continuing to love and respect someone like that? Could the toughness of their lives ever excuse their behaviour? Could their achievements still be worthy of respect despite their behaviour towards their children? I tried to discuss it with DM, but she could not see my perspective at all. She could not see abuse in her childhood. I discussed it with my uncle, the next sibling, and he agreed with me. He had long ago realised that his childhood had been abusive, and had come to terms with it over the course of about a decade.

Eventually I decided that my relationship was with these people now, and my lifetime, my experiences. It was not my place to punish them for their pasts. DM and her siblings all had strong, loving relationships with their parents, and did not hesitate to stand up for themselves.

It probably took me a couple of years to accept my DGPs' past and to be able love them and to spend time with them again.

I don't feel a single ounce of sympathy for anyone who abuses children, even if they were abused themselves. At the very INKLING of an inappropriate urge, they should seek help.

We are also often asked to sympathise with mothers who drown their children in a bath tub or poison them to death with and over dose of adult cold medicine. We say, oh it’s post partum psychosis she needs a hospital not prison.

In fiction and media I feel like we are often encouraged to sympathise with men no matter what they have done, including serial killers.

So very much this - the Hart brothers were very vocal about how the media instantly took their father's side after he murdered their mother and sister. They wanted the story of a man who snapped.

A key thing they said is that they asked virtual strangers about him who, because they only had a passing acquaintance, said he was a nice guy, but that living in the house with him was a nightmare. Its very familiar to anyone who has experienced abuse from a "street angel, house devil" as to how quickly people want to give a man the benefit of the doubt.

I have sympathy for what some abusers went through but I don't think it should come into the sentencing decision.

Murders have often been abused themselves and you can get into a philisophical debate about the extent we have free will but I don't think a bad childhood should be a mitigating factor. It may be an explanation for someone studying the phsycology of the individual but it is not an excuse.

Look, I'm a CSA victim and I'm not a paedophile.

Many paedophiles out there had perfectly privileged upbringings. Particularly in this day and age of downloading child abuse online. Many of the blokes supporting that "industry" do it because they're bored of searching for the next wank high. They weren't abused they're just wankers.

It's slightly dangerous to assume all paedophiles must have been abused and feel sorry for them. I'm sure some of them indulge in an elaborate invented past to gain sympathy too.

Michael Jackson aside (I do feel some sympathy because he missed out on a free happy childhood) I don't have any sympathy for what he chose to do. He used his fame to groom children and their parents and provided lavish gifts to deprived families so he could ejaculate. He'll be remembered for that more than "the moonwalk" and good. He should have died in prison.

With Michael Jackson the whole thing is all over the place because we will never know the truth and probably wouldn't know even if he was still alive. I don't feel sympathy for abusers, I feel for victims. I find it quite disturbing how some on here are saying they feel sympathy for males in the public eye even if they've done disturbing things. I'm sick of the "bad childhood" excuse. Males get all sorts of sympathy when they bring that one up.

I was an abused wife. My children still have to cope with their basyard father. My own father, my hero, interestingly said (whilst I was sobbing my heart out trying to make sense of my then husband's atrocious behaviour) that there are not many victims of war sizing up to dish out the same penalties to their own kids.

“Your mother rejected you; that may go some way towards explaining your attitude towards women,” said Justice Geoffrey Venning in a New Zealand high court Quote of what judge said. I don’t think this is acceptable. Still blames a woman for his actions.

Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny is well worth a read on this subject. Her research and interviews with Stangl also. She was a journalist who really sought to understand how someone came to a position where they did what they did. It's very unsentimental or dewy eyed which is rare to read in this day and age, as she worked in some very challenging fields through the war and after it before beginning this part of her career. Likewise, Lundy Bancroft's Why Does He Do That makes interesting reading. Bancroft has a very clear eyed view on the men he works with.

@TheChampagneGalophe The judge in the case of the backpacker murdered recently in New Zealand said something that bugged me. He said something about how the man had been abandoned by his mother. Like that was an excuse to murder. It’s not. It almost felt like he was excusing his behaviour.

"I mentioned that I have quite a lot of sympathy for Michael, even though I do think he was guilty of abusing those children."

You haven't explained why. Seems strange to me.

What MichelleofzeResistance said!

There are some men I feel sympathy for. When does a victim (deserving of sympathy) become a perpetrator (presumably undeserving of sympathy)?

It's a big question.

This is an interesting article about how child abusers used to be, mostly, CSA victims themselves, but now that's changed and it's "normal" guys who have been watching porn for almost their whole lives
www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/15/how-extreme-porn-has-become-a-gateway-drug-into-child-abuse

I don't think this necessarily specifically relates to men who would go and physically abuse kids themselves - it focuses on users of CSA "material". Obviously there is a difference but a child is being hideously abused in both cases.

There’s a huge number of women who had shitty, abusive dreadful wouldn’t wish on anyone childhoods who don’t end up being abusers.

I have no sympathy for abusers.

Endless sympathy for those abused. My husband was terribly abused by his father. A gentler, kinder husband I couldn’t hope for.

In fiction and media I feel like we are often encouraged to sympathise with men no matter what they have done, including serial killers. ("He had a bad childhood! A shitty mum!") While women don't get the sympathy they deserve.

As a woman, you have been socialised to be kind, which is why you feel sorry for MJ.

This topic interests me, because sometimes I find myself feeling sympathy for the most appalling men (people in the public eye whom I should feel no sympathy for at all). Then I feel guilty, and then I have to remind myself that it's because I've been socialised to feel this way.