(CW Child abuse) Why do mothers not protect their children from abusive boyfriends

[OutWithTheMule]

There has been another horrific child abuse death and I have noticed in the majority of these cases the mothers boyfriend has been abusing the child, and the mother is aware and allows it to happen, and usually protects them by trying to cover it up from the police after the fact.

In the awful case that has been in the news today the mother had only been with her boyfriend for 36 days. She allowed the abuse to continue because she didn't want him to leave her. How the fuck can you choose someone you have known 36 days over your own child!?

I just can't understand why these women choose their boyfriends over their children, if anyone laid a finger on my daughter I would flay them!! Even if you wouldn't physically intervene you would take your child and leave surely? If the boyfriend isn't the child's father they have no access to them if you just take them somewhere else. I know women are sometimes scared to leave abusive partners but often in these stories the partner is not abusing the mother, they are only abusing the child and the mother either passively allows it or sometimes joins in.

I understand that the fault lies with the boyfriends obviously, they are monsters and there is no excusing their actions, it's horrific. But it makes sense, violent men abuse children, it's straightforward as disgusting as it is. What I cannot understand for the life of me is why a mother would allow a boyfriend to harm their child or actively choose a boyfriend over their child. It just doesn't make any sense to me. Can anyone shed any light on these women's behaviour?

I'd rather use the DSM-V as toilet paper given that is what it is worth! I don't read fairy tales especially ones where the authors admit they made it up! Not least something that is just the epitome of stigma and racism, homophobia, classism, misogyny, elitist book used basically as an abusers handbook and created using rock, paper and scissors and no science behind it either! Nah thanks! More so now it is being used to prescribe death to ppl who do not fit into societies' standards and need removing from them. In a field that actually says wandering womb still exists and that being black is a disorder then nope I will not respect that book at all.

Also the ICD.....a book that lists battered woman syndrome because a woman's reaction to being abused is that much of a problem for society that they label it and the pereptrator's behaviour is not problematic to need a label so their behaviour is not an issue at all - just hers? Then say it is not an issue being abused it was a syndrome you had that caused it. Really? Is being abused and battered a syndrome or do we just stigmatise and try and pathologise women's distress at being abused instead of dealing with the abuse?

By all means subscribe to that field and use stigma to harm others but I'd rather shit in my hands and clap than believe anything written in those 'books' (toilet paper).

Nah this was about evaluating the psychiatric disorders. The one that basically has a tick list inside it and if you meet certain criteria then you are labelled as abnormal with a condition that there is no proof exists.

All three of them are a crock of shite.

It would be nice to think that,
but when you look at countries in the Middle East where they treat woman with such disregard and contempt, I think some of them are monsters. I’m thinking of the poor Afghan Women who anren’t allowed to leave the house, no schooling, battered if they look in the wrong direction. They are abused in every way yet it’s considered absolutely fine, in guise of religion there of course.

There is always an excuse and justification but some people are just pure cun*s

@SugarandSpiceandAllThingsNaice

While I agree that most schmeirer's posts display a very poor understanding of causal reasoning, I think her point here is indisputably correct.

The systematic review you posted shows that abusers are more likely to report abuse than the average person. However abusers have a direct incentive to lie about being abused, because it is one of the factors that may result in more lenient sentencing. Therefore, even if they got abused at the same rate, you would still expect to see them reporting higher levels of abuse, through dishonesty. Unless you have a credible way to estimate what percentage are lying (which I think you don't) there is no principled way to say that the link is causal.

The other confounder that hasnt really been touched on in those studies is genetic confounding. If there is a certain genetic architecture which makes people more likely to abuse (which there is) then it follows that the children of abusers would be more likely to commit abuse, for biological reasons. As such, even if you could credibly demonstrate that abused children were more likely to commit abuse, it would not be correct to state this shows that the abuse was a causal factor -- they might just have the "abuser genes" (to put it very simplistically).

I think this lack of credible causal reasoning is sadly a cornerstone of much social science research, and those studies are prime examples. Without actual RCTs or quasi-experiments, all you really have is correlation.

@BeDeepKoala
I think @schmeler point of possible dishonesty inflating the rates of reporting past abuse has already been taken into account. The systematic review looked at 97 studies across the globe and the rates reported were equal to or greater than 75%. Sugar&Spice taking the lowest reported rate was adjusting for dishonesty imho because only a few countries allow past abuse as a mitigating factor in sentencing. The incentive to be dishonest doesn’t exist in most of the countries studied, and would not have affected the lowest 75% rate reported out of all the studies.

There are no known “abuser genes.” They have sequenced the entire human genome. No scientific researcher qualified in science is going to put that in a study as a limitation without any evidence such genes exist due to the history of eugenics. There were numerous other applicable confounders assessed and adjusted for though.

Finally, in looking at the review Sugar&Spice posted there was never any claim of a causal link, but rather an association that past abuse increased the risk of future abuse. Therefore, the evidence shows that victims of abuse are more likely to abuse their children. We may not know why or the cause, but the association is clearly present across the planet. Sclemer was incorrect in her posts saying they were less likely.

Likelihood doesn’t have to have causality as it is about probability. There was no assertion that past abuse causes future abuse.

Also the ICD.....a book that lists battered woman syndrome
created using rock, paper and scissors and no science behind it either! Nah thanks! More so now it is being used to prescribe death to ppl who do not fit into societies' standards and need removing from them. In a field that actually says wandering womb still exists and that being black is a disorder then nope I will not respect that book at all

No, that’s not in the ICD. No, “wandering womb” isn’t thought of as still existing and hasn’t for over 400yrs. No, nowhere does it say that “being black is a disorder.” You have really been de-educated on psychology.

By all means subscribe to that field and use stigma to harm others but I'd rather shit in my hands and clap than believe anything written in those 'books' (toilet paper). Nah this was about evaluating the psychiatric disorders. The one that basically has a tick list inside it and if you meet certain criteria then you are labelled as abnormal with a condition that there is no proof exists.

Geez. Everything you write is from the right wing conspiracy playbook.

So you don’t believe that any mental disorder exists. So people who are suicidal, anorexic, seeing hallucinations are what? Lying? they aren’t really feeling these feelings? Or seeing things that aren’t there? What about trauma, is everyone with PTSD lying about that too because trauma doesn’t affect you at all. Like a Marvel comic character you just bandage your wounds make a funny quip and carry on like nothing happened?

@LoremIpsumCici I'm so sorry you had to endure abuse from your mother too, and I wish you had been safe ❤️. The religious element must have been a whole other dimension of horribleness to have to contend with. Mother-child abuse is much more prevalent than many people realise or care to believe, and it's often seen as a much lesser crime with a much lesser impact. I told multiple professionals about the abuse I was experiencing and none took me seriously, even when I tried to take my life over it. I remember being told that mothers and teenage daughters famously don't get along, I was ultimately just thought of as a 'problem child'.

I can’t get my head around how/why anyone can do such things to a defenceless child either. I agree that no matter what abuse you may have suffered, there are certain extreme abusive behaviours anyone will know are going to be wrong.

The only thing I can think in these cases is that their ability to feel empathy is seriously impaired. I think it's unusual for someone to feel the same lack of empathy for everyone, so maybe whatever nerve the child is touching runs so deep that it somehow results in the same kind of lack of empathy the average person might have for, say, a person who mugs someone. It would be interesting to do an fMRI to see which parts of the brain are most active when an abuser thinks about the person they abuse. I might have a look to see if there's any studies on this.

I wish we could better identify them and keep children safe too. I wish the care system wasn’t full of abusers too- you’d think the government would care enough to ensure children in care aren’t being abused but that isn’t the case.

I feel like there's so little awareness of it in general. I get the impression that a lot of people think of children's homes as some sort of Victorian thing that no longer exist. John Lewis are doing some good work on this.

For example, its easy to be a parent that doesn’t hit if you’ve been beaten as a child, but not so easy to realise that belittling and shouting while less abusive than hitting, is still abuse. A survivor needs parenting classes or support that advise them on what they should do, and as well as to learn what is abusive as they may think, for example, that belittling is banter or tough love and screaming is ok when you angry because it’s not physically hurting another person.

This is true. Something a bit like the Freedom Programme but for parenting. I guess the hardest part is finding a way to get people to sign up to it. The John Lewis Building Happier Futures campaign looks great and I wish something had existed like this when I left care. I remember going to a care leavers' youth club type thing a social worker had directed me to. Nobody was employed or in higher education, and some already had children. A group asked me if I wanted to get some cans and smoke weed with them down the seafront. It was a sliding doors moment for me.

@LoremIpsumCici

Of course there are "abuser genes" (again, this is obviously a simplistic way of phrasing it) -- essentially every human behaviour is at least 40% hereditable, which has been confirmed across hundreds of studies. Every trait which is linked with propensity to abuse has a strong genetic element (violence, anti social behavior, narcissism, alcohol abuse, etc). Exposure to childhoose abuse has also been shown to be hereditable in multiple studies

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266717432300037X#bib11

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266717432300037X

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3696520/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3920596/

@BeDeepKoala your first link isn't about abusers (maybe that's intentional), it's about how certain genotypes have been associated with traits that can make someone vulnerable to poorer outcomes having experienced childhood maltreatment, such as how predisposed they are to PTSD or whatever.

I've only had time to skim through the second link but similarly, it appears to be talking about how certain genotypes have been linked to certain traits, and how a particular combination of genotypes together with certain environmental factors have been associated with an increased probabilistic risk of aggressive behaviour. That's not the same thing as saying x genotype is known to make someone an abuser, lots of people will have genotypes associated with undesirable or abusive behaviours but won't exhibit the phenotype. Plus SNPs aren't necessarily functional, many just sit there not doing anything.

There is a lot of arguing back and forth on this thread regarding the reasons why, but it all boils down to selfishness. Women prioritising their wants and needs over that of their children.

I am a stepmum, my stepchildren live with their father and I the majority of the time. They see their mum every other weekend. Their mother is remarried and decided to have another child, this is one of the reasons why the custody arrangements changed from 50/50 to EOW.

During the pregnancy the children were devastated at the introduction of a half sibling. To this day, she takes absolutely no accountability for the results of her choices, instead she insists that the children were manipulated into living with us and employs emotional blackmail (the kids have gladly got wise to this tactic)

Bottom line is, some women will refuse to accept they make selfish decisions that affect their children because they are too busy pursuing what they want. It baffles me but I know of at least 4 women IRL who behave in this way.

She sounds like a shit mother for sure, but the argument could be extended to say it’s in the interest of the children to not introduce a new partner in to their life, at all, including a man moving in a new GF.

@Betchyaby so it's not OK for the ex-wife to have a new relationship but it is OK for her ex to do that?

And given the number of step mothers on here who demand their right to have a child, regardless of how many existing children there may be (on both sides of a a new partnership), presumably you extend your argument to include them? Or is it just ex-wives who shouldn't be allowed to have additional children once they have 'moved on'?

I don't disagree entirely, it would depend on the new partner. Anyone can be a stepparent but it is very difficult to be a good one. Her partner is actually an alright guy, so it was never the introduction of stepparents that bothered them, it was the idea of a new sibling that tipped the scale so to speak. I don't think it's an uncommon reaction for existing children, I've certainly read enough comments from others on MN regarding their experiences growing up in a blended family.

Of course it's ok for both parents to move on and have new partners, in some cases I think it is beneficial for the children. If children have grown up seeing a tumultuous relationship between their parents, going on to see a healthy relationship can only be a good thing, massive emphasis on healthy! This thread is obviously about the perils of poor choices.

It is also ok for parents to have additional children, they do however have to accept that their existing children may not like it and accept the potential consequences of doing so.

My situation is different because it was my SC biological mother that was causing them distress, her having another baby was the nail in the coffin but they had decided they didn't want to live there long before the pregnancy announcement.

No excuse for it. Anyone who can watch their child endure abuse is as bad as the perpetrator. I will never understand why you wouldn't give your last breath defending your child no matter what