How can a parent let their child be beaten by an OH

[JugsyMalone]

I just don't get this. I am a single parent to 2 boys.

I would never be with a partner for one second who hurt my kids. I would batter the bloke back and be straight down the police station. Even if I was mortally afraid I would be out of the house with my kids at the corner shop or anywhere public asap.

But it's always the boyfriend who batters the baby to death. Yes, he's the nutter. But what is wrong with the mother?

Yes, I stood up to my dad as a child, not my mother. I stood up for her instead of her standing up for me. And she quite happily let me do it as it meant she escaped a verbal beating whilst I bore the brunt. As I keep saying some women like my mother, are just weak and unfit to be a parent. The reasons for that don't interest me and perhaps it's not my mother's fault that she is weak and inadequate. But I cannot stand the fact that she refuses to accept her failures and insists on believing she was a brilliant mother and everything was my dad's fault. She's despicable and I have nothing but contempt for her. I have more courage and decency in my little finger than she has in her whole body.

She is a complete waste of space.

and your father?

jasmin I'm a bit reluctant to post this because for you this is a deeply personal experience, while I'm discussing it from an uninvolved perspective. I hope it doesn't offend you as I really don't mean it to.

I think it's totally understandable that you have such anger toward your mother. A child cannot be expected to understand the social dynamics of patriarchy and domestic abuse. Even though you are now an adult and capable of looking back on your childhood with all the analytical skills being an adult brings, the fear, betrayal, hurt and anger you experienced as a child will be burned on your memory as it felt when you were little. You have the right to your own memory. No one else knows what it felt like for you.

But holding your father accountable for his abuse doesn't mean you have to forgive your mother. A child should be able to count on the love and protection of both parents and both parents failed you in that respect. Recognising that your father is ultimately responsible - as your mother would not have had to protect you from anything at all had your father not been abusive - does not make your mother innocent. So by asking you to consider the wider picture - about how it is the abuser that sets up a situation where the abused ends up becoming an abuser herself - no one is asking you to make excuses for your mother or to forgive her. They are simply pointing out that her behaviour needs to be set in context, and the context is one made by men. But it's hard to do that when it's a personal experience.

Your mother's continued denial must be awful. A real slap in the face after what you experienced as a child. But I suppose if she was the sort of person who could admit what she'd done was wrong, she'd probably have been capable of leaving her husband and protecting you when you were little. Why wasn't she? What was it about her own childhood/life/personality/society that made her unable to do this? It's a complicated question and one the child in you doesn't know the answer to. All you know is that it hurt. I get that and I'm loathe to dismiss your experiences in the name of discussion.

I don't really know what I'm trying to achieve with this post, other than to try to show that understanding how families go so badly wrong is not the same as saying that it's acceptable. Pointing out that abuse is always the responsibility of the abuser does not absolve those complicit in the abuse. But it's necessary to look at the source of such awful behaviour if we are going to prevent repeat experiences in the future I think.

Haven't had time to read the whole thread, so apologies if this has already been said; but it is not always the boyfriend who batters the baby to death, plenty of mothers beat and go on to kill their children.

I do think its important to debate why some women stay in relationships which put their children's lives at risk, but it is naive and unrealistic to think that only men are a danger to children. In fact it is exactly this sort of thinking that has lead to the deaths of some children (as SWs have believed that the children were safe once the father/boyfriend was off the scene only to find that the mother posed just as great a risk)

did you read the OP nigella? it was about women who witness their children abused by their partners/husbands and don't leave/stop the abuse. so clearly it wasn't going to be looking at women who kill their children.

Yes swallowed I did read the OP and the phrase But its always the boyfriend who batters the baby to death suggests that its always the boyfriend who kills the children, all I am saying is that is not the case.

yes she did say that, you're quite right nigella. think she was talking about those particular relationships where a woman gets together with an abusive man specifically rather than making a general statement that women never kill their children.

Actually, considering the amount of time women spend with children versus the amount of time men spend with children, women kill children far less often than men do per hour spent with children, IYSWIM.

Basil I haven't suggested that statistically women are more likely to kill children than men are; I simply responded to the OP's phrase that it is always the boyfriend who kills the children. From a child protection point of view this is very dangerous thinking.

swallowed the OP may well not have been making a general statement that women never kill children, but that was not clear to me from her post. It is always surprising how many people (including professionals involved in CP) do believe that once a man is off the scene children are safe from physical threats within the home.

By no means did I intend to derail the thread, but I do think its important that people remember that for some children their mothers pose just as great a threat to their safety as their fathers (or their mother's partners) do. This is not about being anti-women or unfeminist, its is simply an horrific fact.

Most professionals that are involved in CP know that the man being of the scene, isn't going to be the end of it.

Unless the woman understands why DV is harmful to everyone in the household and is given self esteem buliding courses and confidence the likelyhood of her going on to another abusive relationshipis high. That is why attending victim groups are on the CP plan.

I recently had a situation where as soon as the family was de-planned (he was well out of the picture) , yet she let him babysit the children and sleep on the couch, even though he had been drinking and drink was a factor in their DV.

She was attacked the next day by him, but before that even happened she had put the children at risk by letting him be in the house drinking. This wasn't a woman who had no family for support or babysitting.

She knew that there was a possibilty of the children being removed but still went ahead, it isn't easy to make sense of.

She wasn't reliant on him in any way.

Yes, but what's it got to do with this discussion?

This isn't about mothers who harm their DC's directly, it's about mothers who don't prevent the men they live with, from doing so

Sunshine, thankyou for your post. I'm not offended. I understand that you are trying to say that we need to work out why our parents behaved in this awful way in order to prevent it happening again.

However, I disagree with you. I will never know why my parents behaved the way they did. Only they know that answer to that. But despite not knowing, I am NOT repeating their behaviour. I know how they made me feel and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, least of all my own DC's, so I don't behave the way they did. It's a conscious choice and decision about how I want to live my life.

So, understanding my parents is not necessary for me. And it's a futile exercise because I will NEVER understand how my dad could be so cruel and abusive and how my mother could stand and watch and do nothing. And how now they can forget and deny it all and believe they were wonderful parents. They are alien beings, as if from another planet, living in another reality of their own construction. I have walked away from their madness and it was the best thing I ever did.

Dustinthewind Sat 04-Feb-12 08:22:49

Fuzzy, that's often why the cycle repeats. If that is your normality, it is frequently what you recreate as an adult in your own relationships.

This kind of opinion makes me want to scream.

This is exactly why the scale of abuse seems to be getting greater because people who suffered abuse as a child and are parents now are scared to say anything.

Please think before you speak.

And as a teacher you should have had plenty of trainign to tell you that this is not the case. Sometimes it repeats, soemtimes it doesn't, but OFTEN is bullshit.

Interesting and narrow interpretation of my comments.
I was also including males who have grown up in an abusive and emotionally-stunted environment not knowing how to form non-abusive relationships with women and becoming abusers as adults.
Where do you think so many partner-abusers come from? Why do so many adolescent males struggle?

'And as a teacher you should have had plenty of trainign to tell you that this is not the case'

I've had training on child protection and spotting signs of abuse, rather than adult DV.

Not read the whole thread, but I know of at least 1 woman whose confidence/self esteem was so low, and she didn't trust her own judgement, to the point where she didn't totally trust what she had seen with her own eyes.

The man would slap/hit her DC, push them around, and tell her that the DC needed discipline, that the DC knew what they had done was wrong, and the mother just didn't believe the DC when they said they hadn't done wrong. Of course children tell lies to evade punishment don't they?? I don't think the mother believed she was a good mother, and looked to her H, who was the stronger person in the relationship at the time, for the answers.

A lot of the violence towards the DC happened when the mother was not present, out at work.

If you are frightened to be without someone, if you are frightened to be alone, if you are frightened of your relationship ending, it is surprising to many how much a frightened person can and does justify to themselves.

Some of the justifications I have heard are:
If only the DC learnt how to behave/not piss him off, he wouldn't have to punish them like that.
It's H's upbringing, he had a rough time, he was picked on at school.
He is only trying to bring the DC up to be decent people.
He is good in other ways.
He buys them everything they want and they are so ungrateful.
The DC annoy me sometimes, but everyone deals with their anger in different ways.
I was disciplined physically as a child and it never did me any harm.

It seemed to be a combination of four things...DV being the biggest problem, but the reason she didn't leave is mainly because the mother was frightened of being on her own, she had a sexist attitude (against women) and she blamed violence on the victim, so lots of justifications going on. Not sure if part of this was a generational thing. As time goes on, we are realising more and more how victims were (and still are) blamed for the crimes perpetrated against them. I hope, as a society, we continue to move in the right direction wrt this attitude and continue to move towards blaming the perpetrator of the crime rather than the victim.

Yes, it was a narrow interpretation of that one sentence. Said in isolation by you. How strange of me not to spot the undertones.

My point about the training was exactly that you shoudl never have been told about a 'cycle of abuse' mentality during CP training so I would love to knwo where that little bit of bullshit came from?

First hand experience of working with abused children to try and help them move on through the shit childhood their parents had put them through, or were continuing to put them through and to begin to enable them to find other ways of dealing with situations rather than by either tolerating abuse or becoming a bully and abuser themselves.
Doesn't always work, doesn't fix things and is still a constant issue as the years roll by.
It would be easier to stop bothering, it isn't part of my personal experience or my children's or my relatives. I could just think they were all fucked from the moment of conception and leave it at that.

There's a lot of people posting on this thread without experience or children though, how limited do you want to make the discussion?
Are you saying that it is bullshit that some children from abusive backgrounds grow up to become abusers themselves due to lack of alternative experiences?
Do they all just spring fully-formed from under a rock?

"I will never know why my parents behaved the way they did. Only they know that answer to that. "

Sadly, they probably don't.

Abusive people rarely have enough insight to know why they are abusive. They have excuses in plenty, but not actually reasons. If they did, they'd stop being abusive (on the whole).

Basil, you're right. They'll never know why they behaved that way because they never look at themselves and their own behaviour. They think I'm the problem. The problem child. The difficult one. The horrible unloveable child. They think behaviour was my fault.

Just wanted to add in here that evidence for intergenerational transmission of violence is far, far from conclusive. There are some studies that show men and women who witnessed their mothers being abused or experienced abuse will later become abusers and abused respectively. However, there are others that show that particularly women who witnessed or experienced abuse in childhood are more likely to leave a relationship when abuse starts, and leave earlier on in the relationship than those who've not experienced or witnessed abuse before.

It maybe that many daughters of abused women are able to spot the early danger signs while other women may not recognise these until it's too late.

One of my close childhood friends experienced the latter. She said she actually couldn't get her head around what was happening to her and felt ashamed to say anything to her family because she knew they had no experience of it. When she did tell them, they were 100% behind her, but she spent nearly a year feeling isolated and living on eggshells, totally unable to make sense of the emotional as well as occasional physical abuse she was suffering.

I can't lay my hand on it now, but I do recall studies that show the most important factor that will determine whether a woman is likely to be in an abusive, controlling relationship as an adult is a history of low self-esteem in childhood. That can of course happen if she's being abused or witnessing her mother being abused. But, there are other reasons why young women may feel very negative about themselves ranging from peer pressure to bullying, from mental ill-health to painful shyness. I suppose it makes sense that they may be more likely to fall for men who pay them compliments, show them lots of attention and make them feel "special" (as abusers often do early on,) and feel less equipped to extract themselves when this morphs into possessiveness, emotional mind games and control.

Although I talked mostly about women in the last post, I wanted to add that I've met many men who witnessed their mothers being abused who took the conscious decision NOT to follow that path, getting skilled help if needed and in one case, deciding never to be involved in a relationship with a woman, just in case. That might seem extreme and he has had alot of therapy to deal with crap that happened during childhood, but he honestly feels it would be unfair to put someone he loves at risk in that way, so he chooses not to even go there.

God, that is terribly sad Kritique.

What a momentous decision. A bit pessimistic if you don't mind me saying so, but your friend has obviously thought it through.

Interesting that, about that research. Do you have any more info about that?

I agree that it can't be black and white, because there is such variety across women and across men.

My grandmother and father's family were horrendously beaten and abused by my grandfather. The terror they lived with was extreme. Culturally and financially, there were no options available to my grandmother. She had to stay.

In contrast, my aunt when in her mid-30's had two children of 5 and 7 and she took up with an 18 year old. They went to Ibiza to live, taking the kids with them. She didn't put the kids in school. She totally neglected them and allowed her young lover to treat them with cruelty, disdain and violence, often joining in herself. She was living some childish dream of being abroad with a younger man and pretending she wasn't even really a mother. Our family should have done something about it but didn't. And no, she didn't come from a history of domestic violence or ill-treatment herself. She was just selfish and putting her own desires and needs ahead of those of her children. She thought the way he treated the kids was hilarious. She behaved abominably.

I am very wary of always placing the blame solely at a man's door, particularly in situations where the man is a boyfriend and not a blood relation. In that case, I do feel the mother has a responsibility. And sadly, some women do put their partner and a good sex life ahead of the needs of their children. I don't think that it's fair to always act as though women have no culpability as it suggests that they are weak and victim-like and excuses behaviour on their part that is inexcusable.