Family Violence in America: Part 7

Outside Help

All three interviewees have been outside of these violent relationships at the point of the interview. The previous chapter already points to how violent situations were resolved. At the end of the interviews, I asked them how their violent relationships had ended. What became clear was that all of them had had outside help, meaning people outside of their family circle helping them, first and foremost, to realize they were in abusive relationships. D’Andrea and Graham-Berman’s recent study on the social context of IPV takes into account macrosystem factors such as economic status, race and ethnicity in order to measure the social and cultural context in which violence occurs. They conclude that while violence takes place in families of all income levels, women in low-income families may be particularly impacted because leaving an abusive partner requires economic resources (D'Andrea and Graham-Berman 147). While this is a relevant issue, which can be measured in a quantitative study, it cannot give an account for individual cases and in how far acceptance of violence within the family and getting out of violent situations are tied together and how emotionally important support from non-family members can be for a victim.

Her father had grabbed her and shoved her against a wall as she tried to leave the house because her father was drunk and she felt uncomfortable with the situation.

Interviewee 2 and 3 describe that their grandmothers have always accepted the violence in the family. After one incident, when her father physically attacked interviewee 3 for the first time when she was an adult, she fled to her grandmother who lives only 20 minutes away. Her father had grabbed her and shoved her against a wall as she tried to leave the house because her father was drunk and she felt uncomfortable with the situation. She describes her grandmother’s reaction after she told her about it: “‘it's okay, take some time to calm down but he's your dad so you need to go back home,’ you know the ‘he didn't mean it, he had a long day’ sort of thing.” Interviewee 2’s grandmother also did not judge her father’s violent behavior and even made her mother responsible for it, as the previous chapter discusses. After one of the beatings, her mother brought her to her sister’s house where she stayed for a few weeks. She had hoped at that point that her mother would leave her father, but she went back immediately and left her alone with her sister. She describes that her sisters said she was sorry this happened to her but “she did never say ‘let's get you out of there,’ or ‘do you wanna come live here?’ Even if she had wanted to take me in I don't think my mother would have let her take me in permanently because I still had one more year of school.” All three interviewees describe tendencies of family members to accept the violence and to excuse it. Violence also does not seem to be a reason to end a marriage, at least for their parents. The parents of two interviewees are still married, interviewee 2’s parents were married until her father had died about ten years ago.

She continued to see her counsellor in secret because she feared her boyfriend would not allow it if the outcome of it was that he was the problem and not her.

All three interviewees saw a counsellor during their relationship or shortly afterwards and claim it has helped them to realize how violence in the family and IPV has impacted their life. It has also helped them to be able to talk about the abuse and to recover from it. Interviewee 3 describes that her counsellor has opened her eyes about the abuse and that it is not normal that her father was punching and shooting holes in the wall and that she should not have had to go through it. Interviewee 1 went to her counsellor during the relationship with the abuser and on his advice because he convinced her that she was mentally ill. In her case, not even his friends, who are outside of the situation and who are not family members, offered help in terms of getting out of the relationship. Her counsellor gave her a book called The Emotional Abused Woman and while reading it, she realized that she was emotionally abused in the way the book describes. She continued to see her counsellor in secret because she feared her boyfriend would not allow it if the outcome of it was that he was the problem and not her. I asked her if she had been completely honest about the violence with the counsellor at the beginning, and she said: “No, I was not completely honest. Maybe honest is a bad word, I think I was unaware.” This is a tendency that all three interviewees describe. They excused most of the violence and held in secret until they were either out of the relationship and saw a counsellor or during the relationship, as in interviewee 1’s case. For her, it was also a friend who kept on telling her to get out of the relationship. Combined with the counsellor’s help, she was able to leave him eventually.Catch up on b-flat's research by starting at the beginning with Part 1.