Women who return to abusive partners

[BertieBotts]

I notice a lot of people on here saying frequently that they don't understand why some women keep returning to violent or abusive relationships, and I read this book on the subject recently and found it really interesting, if hard going. It's written by Erin Pizzey, the founder of Women's Aid and is about women who are drawn to abusive (predominantly violent) relationships time and time again.

There are graphic descriptions of abuse in the book so just be warned if it is likely to upset you. If you think you can cope though it's well worth the read - it's quite short, 183 pages in print.

The book is called "Prone to Violence" and the whole text is available online here, (which is where I read it) or amazon link here.

Yep, LRD, she's always been overbearing

I think it is emotionally led, with very little input from fact and research. It's awful .... her comments about children's pain thresh-holds are ill-informed and based more upon her emotions than her observations, her comments on people's reactions are assumptive with no factual basis - the research levels are lazy at best, and to p[ronounce one's opinions as if you have actually found out the facts is irresponsible.

I'm very sure I will be vilified for these comments. The fact is, she does very good work but that is a very poor book.

Dittany: I agree with you 100% that any political movement is going to contain some people who are basically ego-driven - and also some people who are themselves abusive (as in the way that a percentage of people who go into the caring professions are abusers: they get off on having power over others, power over the vulnerable coupled with respect and admiration of others is addictive stuff to a nasty personality).

But I do think there may be some small something important in what Pizzey was trying (very badly and without proper thought) in that book - that someone who has grown up in an abusive situation, or experienced abuse early on, may find it hard to break the pattern of seeking out abusive relationships, finding them comforting and familliar. I have met at least one woman like this, and I do hope that at some point she got the help she needed to understand why she was making bad choices, and to stop doing it.
I can also see that sometimes people who work with victims of abuse can become frustrated with people who make what the helpers feel are 'wrong' choices. (Look at some of the threads on here where someone describes a toxic relationship they are in and, despite all the practical advice they are given and even offers of actual physical help, they don't leave - other posters get very frustrated and most of these other posters don't have the benefit of training in how to help and support others in trouble...)

"I had noticed at the Refuge that he had a large area round his navel that was constantly sore and covered in half-healed scabs. Our wonderful health visitor Cilia had given us a special cream for it, but now I saw why it would not heal. As he drank from his bottle, he would tear at his skin until it bled. His pain and pleasure were already confused"

yes, eczema is often a manifestation of a tiny baby having witnessed a murder and linking it inextricably with pleasure of being fed ... or maybe, just maybe, it's eczema.

Ridiculous. She has cast herself as the hero of every scenario, and where she hasn't been able to 'save the day', she asserts that the situation was beyond saving.

the amateur psychologist in my heart maintains that this book is a letter to her parents.

Dittany, "The dynamics of abuse are weird - it's almost never a one-way street" is not victim-blaming fgs. I grew up in it, I've re-enacted it, psychologists name syndromes for it. The dynamics of abuse are weird. To say "all abused women are innocent victims & all abusive men are evil" is ridiculous, black-and-white thinking. If nobody ever took the trouble to understand the shades of grey in between, nobody would have learned how to help victims become survivors.

I'm not standing up for everything Pizzey says and does - I thought I'd made that clear. I'm certainly not trashing everything she's done, though.

"When I published 'Prone to Violence', a book about my work with violent women and the children in the refuge, I was picketed by hundreds of banner-waving women. 'All men are bastards!' read some of the banners. 'All men are rapists!' shrieked another. 'If those banners said Jews or black people, you would have arrested those women,' I told the policeman who had come to say that I had to have a police escort all around England for the book tour."
Life, as always, is shades of gray.
The really dangerous people are the ones who see everything in definitive blacks and whites.
I would sooner be sitting next to Pizzey, than waving a banner around defaming all men as evil.

Don't be silly, Dittany.

I'm assuming you aren't old enough to remember those demos?

So, because you, personally, are not on first name terms with man-hating banner waving uberfems, then they don't exist?
You might also, hypothetically, be sitting next to Pizzey whilst she had tea with a man who had been violently abused by his ex-wife. But then I would imagine that Erin hates men who abuse women, hates women who abuse men, and hates women who seek to hijack and superimpose their own hate filled agenda onto an already wretched set of circumstances.
As far as "victim blaming" goes, why do you imagine that the following statistic exists?
Or perhaps it's a bit inconvenient, and so we'll just pretend it doesn't exist?

"Adults who were sexually abused in childhood are more likely to be victims of domestic violence. One study found that almost half (48.9%) of childhood sexual abuse victims became victims of a violent partner as an adult. This compared to 17.6% of non-victims of childhood sexual abuse. (Briere and Runtz, 1988).

Thanks to arfarfa for the sensible reply.

Dittany, I'm amused that the views of 'women you know' outweigh my own observation, which is that those banners were there. Now you know another woman who was there (me)!

Have you asked your aged pals? Not what their opinion was, but whether those claims were made by media-seeking feminists of the era?

You're quite funny sometimes.

They burned bras, too

Standard bullying behaviour. Manipulation of the argument by firstly attempting to be the sole arbiter of what is and what isn't fact, swiftly followed by character assassination of anybody who has the temerity to question your viewpoint. Have you ever met Erin Pizzey? Have you ever discussed her opinions with her? Have you ever even bothered to send her an email before you slag her off with your non-facts and half truths? No?
Quelle surprise.

Yeah, but Dittany owns feminism.

Bu babes, they DID burn bras!! I remember being on a march with my pals, and going "No! I can't believe they're really doing it!!" At the birth of the feminist movement, bras were burned symbolically but some feminists seem to have become very wedded to underwear-fuelled conflagrations.

The man-hating banners and chants all really happened, too.

I'm not sure whether to confess to this, but your posts did actually produce a panic response in me. Which, experience tells me, you were being bullying - pretty much in the way arfafa outlined.

Pizzey bullied me, too. She came for lunch at my boyfriend's in - must have been 1975, I think. She didn't like that I wore makeup, didn't like that I had opinions, told me to keep my uninformed chatter to myself (I would have been 20) ... and visibly gave 80% of her attention to the men. She really pissed me off. But I admire what she did, and am grateful for it.

BNP? Risible. I could call you a chocolate teapot. It wouldn't make you one, would it?

These Pizzey snippets are in the public domain, too.

"Those were the placards('Rapists' and 'Batterers') that surrounded The Savoy Hotel when I was there for a luncheon and the launch of my book Prone To Violence."

"I went to Universities to lecture and was roundly hated when I pointed out that 62 of the first hundred women who came into the refuge were as violent as the men they left."

Are you saying that she was lying?