If you would like to know what domestic violence, or intimate partner abuse (newer terminology) is all about, don't look to the Control Wheel or the Cycle of Violence. These descriptions represent the earliest attempts to understand what goes on behind the closed doors of partner or dating relationships.
They have been supplanted by a much more accurate model called Coercive Control. Evan Stark, who appears in this video, has been instrumental in researching and formulating this new model.
Please take the time to watch and listen. He is an excellent speaker as well as knowing the field of supporting victims of toxic relationships inside and out.
Have you ever wondered what happens when the children or siblings of famous anti-homosexual advocates tell them that they are homosexual? These gay disclosures make the news when somebody involved is prominent, for example, Michele Bachmann's half-sister, Dick Cheney's daughter, Oral Roberts' grandson, and the list goes on.
Here's the fly-on-the-wall recounting of the "I'm gay" moment from Richard Socarides (gay attorney, writer and commentator who served as President Clinton’s senior adviser on gay rights) when he told his father Charles Socarides, one of the controversial founders of so-called gay conversion therapy, that it was time they openly acknowledged what both knew to be true.
Aside from the curiosity factor, this elegant video is worth viewing as an example of how to talk about something difficult with dignity, and how to handle the aftermath. I would hope to do as well in such a difficult situation.
Whether it's the family we grew up in or the families we form as adults, under all the stability, commitment, communication, and trivia of daily life lurks the question of information control: Who gets to know what and when. We have some mental laundry bins to help sort bits of information, bins with names like "privacy," "need to know," "never to be mentioned even inside the family," and "age-appropriate." Stuff gets put in those bins with little thought about the consequences, what happens later. Perhaps we assume it will all come out in the wash, like stains on the laundry.
The purpose of this post is to drag the family secrets subject out of the laundry room and onto the internet, and to suggest that not only do we need to re-assess what secrets we keep within and without the family, but whether secrecy serves any reasonable purpose at all in the current century. Is it even possible to keep a secret?
A family secret is a secret kept within a family. Most families have secrets, but the kind and importance vary. Family secrets can be shared by the whole family, by some family members or kept by an individual member of the family.
The secret can relate to taboo topics, rule violations or just conventional secrets. Issues like homosexuality, adultery, divorce, mental health, crime, substance abuse, physical or psychological abuse, human sexual behavior, premarital pregnancy or cohabitation, alcoholism, or deviance. More simple secrets may be personality conflicts, death, religion, academic performance and physical health problems.[1]
Any topic that a family member thinks may cause anxiety may become a family secret. Family members often see keeping the secrets as important to keeping the family working, but over time the secrets can increase the anxiety in the family.[2] The confidentiality of family secrets revealed by a patient is a common ethical dilemma for counselors and therapists.
WNL: The view here at WNL is that imagining there is such a thing as a family secret, some fact or occurrence that can be blotted out across generations, is a fantasy. The reality is that these facts (like dad not being the one who contributed half the genes to some of the kids) or events (molestation, jail time, financial ruin among many others) DO come out, and those who are not in on the withholding of information are more relieved than shocked to know the truth, and incredibly angry at the information withholders for lying to them.
MORE: "Family Secrets" by Deborah Cohen - If you'd like to know more about Victorian-into-modern secret keeping, with a continuing discussion of the pull between privacy and secrecy, this ground-breaking book is worth reading. (Follow the link to an intriguing review by Kathryn Hughes at UK's Guardian website.) Here are Hughes' concluding remarks:
What marks out Family Secrets as an important book is not so
much its breadth – there are also chapters on race, divorce and family
therapy – as its depth. Each chapter has a painstaking architecture of
original sources, Cohen having spent years working through the archives
of institutions including the Tavistock Clinic and the Edinburgh
Marriage Guidance Centre. The result is a clear-sighted investigation
into what our forebears felt was private, and what they kept secret –
and, most importantly, the difference between the two.
"Keep Grandma Upstairs: Jackie Kennedy’s Family Secrets & The Lie Her Mother Told" by pop culture writer Carl Anthony. Nothing that will knock your socks off, but a beautifully researched account of how a family used secrets and misdirection to advance the interests of each generation. She's famous, but I'll bet your family did similar things with their history.
From the famous to the down-home version, blogger Toxic Mom Tool Kit writes a post many can identify with about crazy stuff she was told as a child and some tips on how to look back and evaluate it all as an adult. She makes a good point when she says "When we don’t go back and review the things we were told about ourselves
as children with our adult brains we are risking accepting false
information that can limit our whole lives."
Vice, the off-beat online journalism website, has posted a half-hour video, in Spanish with subtitles, about the female journalists of Juarez, Mexico, where over 10,000 people (out of a population of 1.5 million) have been murdered by drug lords, gangs, and federal police in a monster fight over turf and access to US drug routes. Things have calmed down for the moment, but nothing has been solved, and justice is delayed while basic safety denied to the people of Juarez.
There are many courageous men telling the story, but this film centers on the women journalists. Here's the Vice lead-in to the video. I hope you will take the time to watch it. What would you do if this was your city?
The violence that escalated during Felipe Calderon’s term mostly took place in Ciudad Juarez, right on the Texas border. Over the last five and a half years, more than 11,000 people have been killed in Juarez. It’s thought that the violence escalated once the Sinaloa Cartel tried to kick out the local Juarez Cartel in order to control this entry point into the US. During the last year, the violence has decreased a bit, perhaps because the Sinaloa Cartel won, and perhaps because the federal police and the army, who were also fighting the cartels, finally left.
We went to Ciudad Juarez to meet the journalists who cover politics and crime for the Diario de Juarez. All of them are women and they have covered more crimes than anyone we can think of. They are also some of the bravest women we've ever met. We followed them around the city as they covered political rallies of the ruling party, PAN, and to crime scenes, to try to understand what happened there over the past few years and why the candidates were not fully addressing the most glaring issue in Mexican politics right now.
It is huge, overwhelming, destroying Mexico day by day. So why don't we hear about it in the US and elsewhere? Because anyone who speaks up gets decapitated, shot multiple times, disappeared, or kidnapped. It is so dangerous to be a journalist in Mexico that ordinary citizens are trying to use social media - just like in Syria and Egypt - to let neighbors and a potential world audience know what's going on. These ordinary folks, like you and me, with cell phones or FaceBook, are also targets. Report a murder, you sign up to be the next body in the road.
CommunityRED, a brand-new nonprofit, seeks to bring technical brainpower to the problem. Listen to the founders (who recently spoke at SXWX about the project).
Spread the word. Give them your support via e-mail or their FaceBook page (CommunityRed).
Shauna Dillavou (@shaunalead) and Melissa del bosque (@MelissaLaLinea) from Community Red (@CommunityRed).
What do we owe our tormentors? It’s a question that haunts those who had childhoods marked by years of neglect and deprivation, or of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of one or both parents. Despite this terrible beginning, many people make it out successfully and go on to build satisfying lives. Now their mother or father is old, maybe ailing, possibly broke. With a sense of guilt and dread, these adults are grappling with whether and how to care for those who didn’t care for them.
Kudos, Emily, for bring up a painful subject! She gives her readers lots of latitude in making the debt calculation, and along with some therapist/psychologist strategies (which you may have run into if you have read a book about toxic parents or reached out to a therapist), she most helpfully includes the experiences of famous people who also grappled with visiting, care, re-involvement, reconciliation issues. Here's a taste:
Abraham Lincoln couldn't stand his brutish father, Thomas, who hated Abraham’s books and sent him out as a kind of indentured servant. As an adult, Lincoln did occasionally bail out his father financially. But during his father’s final illness, Lincoln ignored letters telling him the end was near. Finally, he wrote not to his father, but his stepbrother to explain his absence: “Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant.” Lincoln didn’t attend his father’s funeral.
One hallmark of growing up in a frightening home is for the children to
think they are the only ones in such circumstances. Even when they reach
adulthood and come to understand that many others have had dire
childhoods, they might not reveal the details of their abuse to anyone.
“The profound isolation that’s imposed on people is a very painful and
destructive thing,” says Dr. Vincent Felitti, co-principal investigator of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
about 3.3 million cases of abuse or neglect were reported to child
protective service agencies in 2010. This vastly undercounts the actual
number of horrific and painful childhoods, as most never make it into
any official record. The CDC notes that some studies estimate that 20
percent of children will be the victims of such maltreatment. That means
a lot of people are wrestling with this legacy.
This example [of a women who decided if she could not visit her mother as a loving daughter, she would not visit] is not designed to suggest that one should on no account be a loving child to one's parents when they are near death. This is something that everyone will have to decide for themselves. But if our bodies remind us so sternly of the cruelties we once suffered, then we have no choice. We must listen seriously to what our bodies are telling us. Sometimes, complete strangers may be better companions for parents facing death because they have not suffered at their hands. They have no need to force themselves to tell lies, they have no need to pay for what they do with depression, and they can show their compassion without having to pretend.
While therapist have their place in helping us fill the gaps left by those cleverly-named "adverse childhood experiences", it may be that surrogates in the form of less-damaged family members or strangers who work in the helping professions can be the answer to the debt question.
Sexual assault - rape - has been almost impossible to talk about until last year. It was an election year in the United States but rape has never been part of the election cycle before. I think the tipping point between silence and chatter everywhere was the web and it's little sister, social media.
We finally have a way for everybody who wants to speak up to have a voice. We've seen and heard the Arab Spring, we've read and made comments on the web, and updated our status by phone and laptop on Facebook. "Talk about your experiences and opinions" is the new normal.
I've watched the emergence of sexual assault - which happens everywhere to a LOT of people of all descriptions and ages - from the shadows to just another topic of general conversation with great interest, and with my collector's eye, I've been stashing links of value to pass along to you. I hope you find this compilation of information on a difficult subject useful in educating yourself. I'm not promising solutions, but thinking about a subject is a great first step to figuring out what to do next. Here's my stash:
About the rape/murder of a college student in New Delhi, the subject of assaults on women exploded in the Indian and world press. I followed these stories as news about India's problems, but soon realized I was reading about incidents and attitudes that exist in my own country through the lens of other, far-away place names. You also may learn something about attitudes concerning sexual assault where you live.
"The Unspeakable Truth About Rape in India" by Sonia Faleiro (New York Times Editorial). What it's like to be a woman in India. "In retrospect it wasn’t the brutality of the attack on the young woman that made her tragedy unusual; it was that an attack had, at last, elicited a response."
"To Stop Rape, Fix the Police Force First" by Sobhi Mohanty (The American Prospect). "The Indian police are also notorious for humiliating and emotionally violating female rape victims during the process of lodging reports. As in the United States, police behavior in India is tied to personal prejudices regarding gender, class, race and ethnicity; a certain demographic not only receives little help from the police but is itself a target of police abuse."
"India’s New Focus on Rape Shows Only the Surface of Women’s Perils" (New York Times again). "...discrimination against women is so endemic and wide-ranging in India that deaths from domestic violence account for only a fraction of the overall risk of unnecessary death. “Other aspects come into play, like female infanticide, mistreatment of young girls in terms of access to resources, maternal deaths, unequal access to health care and so forth,” said Ms. Anderson, the economics professor. “Indian women face more dangers.”
"By choosing candidates facing rape charges, the country's political parties have implicitly sanctioned the crime" by Jason Overdorf (GlobalPost via Salon.com). "According to mandatory self-declarations filed by candidates with the Election Commission and tabulated by National Election Watch, India’s leading political parties have offered tickets to 27 candidates accused of rape and a whopping 260 candidates facing charges for crimes against women ranging from assault to harassment over the past five years. As a result, two members of the current parliament and six members of the various state legislative assemblies are facing rape charges, while 36 others face charges for lesser crimes against women."
Turning to the United States, we have been treated, thanks to organizations demanding laws which prohibit ending any pregnancy, any time, under any circumstances, to a consideration of our own views on rape - what it is and isn't, the truthfulness of anyone claiming to have been raped, and the possibility of becoming pregnant after a rape (that this is impossible is the difficult debate position put forth by those who want the "rape exception" removed from abortion restriction laws). Here's my American stash:
"Laws about pregnancy by rape, state by state" (Huffington Post) Don't miss the opportunity to find out what the laws are where you live. "Of the 26 states that require waiting periods for abortions, only Utah makes an exception for cases of rape or incest. When women impregnated by rape carry their pregnancies to term, 31 states allow the rapist to sue for rights to the child."
"An indie look at the global epidemic of violence against women" by Rebecca Solnit (Salon.com). "We have far more than 87,000 rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident. We have dots so close they’re splatters melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects them, or names that stain. In India they did. They said that this is a civil rights issue, it’s a human rights issue, it’s everyone’s problem, it’s not isolated, and it’s never going to be acceptable again. It has to change. It’s your job to change it, and mine, and ours."
"Rapists Explain Themselves on Reddit, and We Should Listen" byKatie J.M. Baker (Jezebel.com). Katie allows the redditors to speak for themselves (and since the thread has been cancelled, read it here only), concluding "Nothing will change if we discuss rape culture in a vacuum. Taking the discussion beyond that vacuum, however, means opening it up to a wider audience that isn't necessarily sympathetic. Reddit may not be the best place for that, but it's certainly a start — and that's important. It's in these less-protected, less-sacred spaces where the conversation is needed the most." The thread was opened by Jim Hines. He cancelled it when responses reached 400. Here's where he gives his take on the answers and why he cancelled the thread. (IMO, his analysis of the answers is better than reading the answers themselves.)
WNL: There you have it. If you have comments or another link, let me know. This is a big, hard subject, but this flood of reporting and comment comment, both thoughtful and foolish, is way better than the dead silence and blank stares we have been living with while unspeakable behaviors are unacknowledged and unpunished.
For fifty years there have been voices in the social sciences, neurobiology, and psychology asking hard questions about how we were raised and how we raise our children. Questions about the possible harm from spanking, slapping and corporal punishment of children in general. Questions about the use of children to satisfy family sexual appetites. And questions about the nearly universal demand that children remember and memorialize their parents with glowing evaluations no matter what the reality may have been.
If you have heard any of this discussion, you have unusually sharp hearing. The prevailing conversation is that children don't remember what happens to them, if they claim they remember "things" they are making them up, and even if society in the form of social workers have to intervene in a home because things get so outrageous, the future therapists of the children involved (if they are lucky enough to have any therapy) will listen sympathetically up to a point, then recommend forgiving and forgetting as the only way to "get past" being damaged as an adult by insisting on remembering the reality of their childhood rather than re-framing it to give parents a pass - "they did the best they could."
An important premise of this worldview was shaken not long ago by a large, long-term study of adults who happened to have Kaiser health insurance and lived in the San Diego, California, vicinity. Called the Adverse Child Experiences Study (ACES), it established that adverse childhood experiences like sexual or emotional abuse, absence of a parent and a few others, made it much more likely that in adulthood the child would have social and physical negative risks directly comparable in intensity to the number of adverse items they had experienced. Read about the study here.
So much for children forgetting. Apparently even if the mind forgets (or declines to remember), the body enjoys no such out. The ball keeps rolling.
What if you have some questions about how you were raised and you decide to get some therapy? Or you want to prepare to be a parent yourself and would like some parenting lessons? There are a lot of books and a lot of therapists who would like your dollars and your attention. If you are impressed by the ACES study, WNL suggests you look to European therapist Alice Miller's books, especially "The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting".
Alice is from the first wave (a very small wave at that) of people in the helping professions who take the side of the child, believe children, and stand up for them. In her role as crusader and pioneer, Alice has taken a lot of heat over the years (she died in 2010), and her German upbringing makes her uniquely aware of all aspects of cruel parenting, parenting universally approved by church, state, and tradition. It takes a courageous person to hold on to her insights over a lifetime of being challenged. Fortunately, before she died, she knew of the ACES study which supports her lonely crusade, and referenced it in the latest edition of "The Body Never Lies."
The seeds of advocacy for children's safety are growing and, while still in the minority, you can find therapists and parenting mentors to support your personal growth and your parenting efforts. Check out these videos by Daniel Mackler, therapist and filmmaker, for a great introduction to Alice's groundbreaking ideas today:
(Part 1)
(Part 2)
The revolution in child/adult relationships has adopted the name Nonviolent Parenting, and a google search brings up books, online and real-life organizations, schools and more, all designed to produce an ACES for today's children of 0.
WNL is especially fond of Echo Parenting & Education, a bright light in the Los Angeles area for one-on-one parenting advice, workshops, educational seminars for parents and people in the helping professions. Read, learn about ACES, find resources in your area. Make this your year to believe in your own childhood memories, and support nonviolence in your sphere of influence.
(Art - "Companions II detail", oil painting by Lyn Southworth. See more at www.lynsouthworth.com.)
Like all good investigations, this one has many parts. Rather than begging to you to check it out, I'll lead you into temptation, so to speak, by giving you some can't-miss bullet points.
What goes on inside meat packing plants.
Staggering quantities, risks from tenderizing.
Building bigger cattle, an industry overdosing on antibiotics and beta blockers
Natural methods for American Royal steaks
How the project was done
Costco outdoes government on testing
With over 20 different articles embracing history, regulation, the bad and the good, you will finally know enough, thanks to the KC Star, to approach the meat counter with some facts in your head. Not that women are stupid or thoughtless shoppers, far from it. It's just that we so rarely get quality information about a major food group to help us guide our choices. Soak up the information and demand the same kind of investigation for chicken, fish, and maybe corn as well.
Wondering how the KC Star info might affect you?Wired Magazine offers an article about a company that mail-order analyzes your poop, revealing among other things, whether you have antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your bowel - the result apparently of eating meat and poultry laced with antibiotics. The article offers the author's personal experience, results, and the name of the company providing the service.
Happy end of year celebrations and remembrances to WNL readers around the world. Thanks for dropping by.
United States candidates for office on the Republican side of the ticket have been quoted all year saying some pretty strange things about rape and what laws about rape should look like. Perhaps you remember
The Republican push to distinguish between regular rape and forcible rape, the implication being that many or most rape accusations are vindictive or morning-after regret situations. (This, just when the FBI modernized it's definition of rape from the 1929 language - "carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will." - to defining rape as any kind of penetration of another person, regardless of gender, without the victim's consent. It also includes a broad range of rapes involving both males and females in which attackers use objects to penetrate their victims.)
Missouri Republican candidate Akin's famous discovery that women who are "really" raped can't get pregnant for obscure and mysterious reasons unknown to medical science. (The link takes you to the actual video interview where Akin made the statements.)
If a woman (we are leaving out the many male victims of rape here) does get pregnant, it's a miracle of divine intervention (according to Republican Richard Mourdock). (Video of his statement in context.)
Most recently, an Illinois Republican House member stated abortion was “absolutely” never medically necessary to save the life of the mother because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance.” Medical professionals immediately buried his fantasy with facts.
Do Republicans really care about rape or rape victims? No! In the US, the rape discussion has made political headlines only because it is a problem for the highly-energized part of America motivated to eliminate legal abortion, a medical procedure the vast majority of Americans would like to see minimized but definitely available to protect the life and health of the mother, and when the pregnancy has resulted from incest or rape.
Thus we are hearing that there is no such thing as pregnancy resulting from rape, so no need for the exception. No deaths resulting from pregnancy, so no need for the life of the mother exception. And all of this aimed at making abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization illegal - the passionate crusade of relatively few very vocal people.
However you feel about conception, abortion, and other women's health issues, the issue you have a right and a responsibility to be outraged about is rape. It's a crime everywhere and occurs everywhere, to persons of all ages, sexual orientations, ethnic and economic groups. It's rarely reported, and when reported, the victim is often treated with such disrespect and callousness that the lesson for the community is "don't bother to tell" and the message to rapists is "go for it."
Why should talk about rape consist only of blather from men who are completely insulated from the realities for life for women and at the same time beholden to zealots who have what they laughingly call a "pro-life" agenda (if you define life as what happens between an egg being released from some woman's ovary and the emergence of a baby from the birth canal)?
In Michigan, the Wayne County prosecutor, Kym Worthy,
said she was shocked to discover more than 11,000 rape kits lying
around untested — some dating to the 1980s. Worthy said that her office
is now going through the backlog and testing those that are running into
statute of limitations deadlines.
So far, of 153 kits tested, 21 match evidence in a criminal database and
may involve serial rapists. But Worthy, who herself was raped while she
was in law school, says the broader problem is indifference to sex
crimes.
“Sexual assault is the stepchild of the law enforcement system,” she
said. “When rape victims come into the criminal justice system, they are
often treated poorly. They may be talked out of pursuing the case.”
The bottom line, Worthy said, is that “sexual assault is not taken as
seriously as other crimes.” That — more than any offensive words — is
the real scandal.
Kristof even gives you a way to make a difference:
One way to start turning around this backward approach to sex crimes would be to support the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Registry (Safer) Act, a bipartisan bill in Congress that would help local jurisdictions count and test their rape kits.
Wouldn't it be WONDERFUL if repeating the word "rape" a million times in the public consciousness this year - even in manipulative, false, and ignorant contexts - served to wake up the caring side in all of us, motivate us to make the reality of rape a priority in law enforcement, and make us responsive to the needs of those who are violated. We come across them every day in our jobs, schools, churches, nonprofits, and among our families and friends.
