Thanks.Richard Dworkins wrote:This is not just your experience I have had first hand run ins with that too. I'm not sure if it became national policy but I know of many many young boys in the Inverclyde area who were all but abandoned by the social services. As I have mentioned my career mostly involved educating children with learning and behavioural difficulties outside of a school environment. Most of these children came from abusive households and if it was father who was abusive then both mother and child got support. If it was mummy who was abusive they were often dumped into care or failing that the mantra was "The child was better off with its mother." This went on from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties when I changed my position and moved over to working in mental health which was about the point they went from "boys will be boys" to lets drug them up and see what happens.Dick Strawkins wrote:
I understand that - but I think it's a separate point.
This was a policy to deliberately exclude male children, even if they were newborn babies, which meant that women who had male children would be forced to choose between abandoning the male child to the abusing parent, or stay with that abuser.
From what I hear still it was much worse with boys in the states where it seemed that ineffectual parents and teachers conspired to dope up on kids on Ritalin. I wonder how that affected those boys in the long term.
Regarding your previous post, I think you were correct, but have one quibble, it's not maleness they fear, its masculinity. It's that part of the male drive to be aggressive and dominate. Yet they seem oblivious to the fact that the submission and domination dynamic is inherent in all human relationships. They mistake one for the other and use that mistake to malign men and boys as a group.
Cheers Dick, good posts.
I haven't lived in the UK for over a decade so I don't know how things have changed in this regards. During the time I was with this partner I do remember that there appeared to be very fixed ideas as to who could be abusive in a relationship and who couldn't - and anything that seemed to contradict this was almost impossible to deal with.
As an example, this same partner and I had what could probably be described as a 'volatile' relationship. I came to the conclusion that she was bipolar and was in need of medication and tried for years to get her to go into treatment to get the help she needed to stabilize her condition - and she fought violently against this idea until in the end we split up.
The thing is, I was dead wrong.
This was in the early nineties - a time before the internet was widely available. My knowledge of psychiatric conditions was very limited; I knew the general symptoms of schizophrenia (it wasn't that), depression (that was involved, but she had manic episodes too, so it was likely to be something else) and bipolar disorder - which sounded pretty close to her symptoms.
It was only years later, long after our relationship had ended that I described her behavior to a friend who was a psychologist and he immediately suggested the real problem - borderline personality disorder - she was a definite 9 out of 9 classic symptoms on the DSM IV checklist. But I had no idea about personality disorders at the time. Now, of course, you just type the common features into google and you find out in a second, but back then this option wasn't available.
My question about how things have changed over the decades relates to one incident - a scenario probably familiar to anyone who had a borderline partner. An argument started over something which was probably trivial. At the time these argument usually involved her accusing me of infidelity or wanting to have sex with one of her friends - or someone we passed on the street, or someone who was on TV in a movie. In other words it was an extreme and irrational form of jealousy. Anyway, the argument heats up and she starts to smash anything of value I had in the apartment and throws my clothes out the window onto the lawn below.
I say, 'that's enough, I'm not putting up with this any more', and tell her I am leaving and begin walking towards the door.
She immediately runs to the door and blocks it and strikes me repeatedly in the face when I get close to try to exit.
I ask her to please move aside, to which she replies that if I try to leave she will ring the police to tell them I have assaulted her.
I say, "Go ahead then!"
- and she goes ahead and does.
So, fifteen minutes later the police turn up at the apartment. This is Golders Green in central London.
A policeman rings the doorbell and I open the door and politely invite him in.
I had bruises and scratch marks on my face while she had no marks at all on her (because, of course, I hadn't touched her.)
I could tell from his expression that the situation was familiar to the police officer - it was clear that I hadn't been violent - in fact I had been the victim of violence. He asked us both together what had happened and I explained that we had an argument in which she had begun to destroy my property and clothes and that I had decided to leave. I told him that I had not put a finger on her but that she had been violent towards me - as evidenced by the bruises and scratch marks.
He took her to a separate room and asked her what had happened (which is the correct thing to do in these situations.) I could hear them through the door - she agreed that I hadn't assaulted her and admitted that she had assaulted me, but says she had to do it because I was trying to leave!
The officer comes back into the room where I am and tells me this is a 'domestic situation', and that I should stay with her and work things out between us!
When I look at the Karen Stollznow DV arrest situation I actually feel good that some kind of progress is happening in society (although I don't know if this is only the case for the US or if Britain has moved on too.)
In my case, London, early nineties, it was apparent that the police at that time had no way of dealing with domestic violence scenarios that weren't 'abusive husband battering his wife' cases.
I would add one thing to my own story, which is that at the time I never felt physically in danger from her. The police officer may have been justified in not regarding me as being bodily in danger (although my property, clothes, camera, guitar, were lying around the apartment in pieces when they arrived.)
Then again, I was wrong about that too, but that's another story.
