Do you ever have sympathy for abusive men?

[COVIDcausesCHAOS]

Does anyone fancy a chat about this?

I'm asking on FWR, as I know that many here are well-versed on this subject.

Last night, my partner and I were talking about Michael Jackson. I mentioned that I have quite a lot of sympathy for Michael, even though I do think he was guilty of abusing those children. My partner had far less sympathy, and said that he didn't feel anything but revulsion towards Jackson. My dp also pointed out that it is perhaps inconsistent to have sympathy for the likes of Jackson, but then not similar abusers, such as Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris.

Is it wrong to have sympathy for some abusive men but not others?

Also, I feel guilty that I have sympathy for someone like Jackson. It must hurt his victims to hear people say that.

I'm wondering what other people's thought are on this?

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.

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.

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 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.

@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.

@AnnaMagnani

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.

Well said. Child abuse is a burden that last for life, unfortunately some are damaged beyond any hope of a normal life or place in regular society.

@PlanDeRaccordement

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.

I can't think of any a single prominent case like that where there was widespread sympathy for the mother? And in anyway someone with postpartum psychosis isn't a good comparison point to someone who was abused as a child and turned abusive as one is an acute mental health crisis and one is part of the formation of them as a person. Both men and women in psychiatric crisis get lighter sentences for acts of violence committed in that state, though I don't think they get much sympathy.

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.

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!

@AnnaMagnani

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.

Well put.

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

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.

@PlanDeRaccordement

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.

Thats because they are sick and need a hospital there is a difference between post partum psychosis and an abuser

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.

@Aubergina

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.

Even rapists and serial killers? Unbelievable.

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.

@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 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.

@PussyMalanga

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.

Unfortunately our society erroneously conflates pedophiles and child molesters, and the resulting stigma discourages help-seeking and therefore increases CSA.

[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.

@AsIWasSaying

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@Abitofalark

"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.

Surely the reason why I have sympathy for MJ is obvious? Everyone knows that he had a terrible childhood. He was neglected, beaten, starved, and forced to work relentlessly. The abuse and neglect clearly impacted him throughout his life.

I don't have sympathy for him as an abuser, but I do have sympathy for his childhood.