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Blacks Seeking Escape from Abusive Relationships Have Poorer Outcomes

Date: 2006-10-17

The numbers from studies and government reports are simply staggering:

Four million women experience a serious assault by a partner during an average 12-month period.

One out of three women has been beaten, forced to have unwanted sex or otherwise abused during her lifetime.

One in five female high school students reports being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner. And one in three teens say they have a friend or peer who has been physically abused by his or her partner.

Domestic violence is an equal opportunity employer. It crosses all races and socio-economic backgrounds, and women are its biggest victims. According to the St. Vincent de Paul Society of San Francisco’s Web site, while men are battered, too, 95 percent of heterosexual domestic violence cases involve men abusing women.

And abuse hurts everyone.

Abused girls are much more likely to engage in risky behavior, four to six times more likely to get pregnant and eight to nine times more likely to have attempted suicide, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Even if they are not victims of physical abuse, the St. Vincent de Paul Society said, children who live in a home where domestic violence occurs also suffer emotional and psychological abuse, even if that abuse happens between the adults in the household.

A 2003 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report said that violence against women cost companies $72.8 million annually due to lost productivity.

Even though domestic violence touches every corner of society, there are particular stressors on the black community that exacerbate the problem, said Oliver Williams, executive director of the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community, an organization based in St. Paul, Minnesota that works to end or reduce domestic violence in the black community.

Williams told BlackAmericaWeb.com that black Americans have poorer outcomes, in terms of women getting away from batterers and men becoming less likely to be repeat offenders.

Because black people are often disproportionately poor, come from high stress and low-income communities and have fewer opportunities because of limited education, the opportunities to get out of abusive situations are fewer, he said.

“The average stay in a shelter is six weeks. If you haven’t found transitional housing, then what?” Williams said.

In addition, Williams said, “there is a silence issue in our community. We tend not to put our business out on the street. Women feel you have to support black men because we don’t like the police and criminal justice system. (Women) want to call to get the violence to stop, but don’t necessarily want him put out.”

Williams said some women have expressed concern “about being black statistics. They want a two-parent household and the stability that comes with that, and they want their children to have contact with their father.”

Culturally, through both the black church and street lore, there is a feeling that women must put up with the abuse for various reasons.

“There is pressure to adhere to the idea that ‘I’m a good wife and I’m doing all these things,’ and that she needs to be a better woman than he is a man.”

Some men also have a sense that “women are like children who need to be led,” or as a couple of men told Williams in separate interviews, “You got to check a bitch.’ They knew they had to be in control. You can’t let a woman upstage you. They had to learn to undo that and learn how to value a woman.

“There is a degree of sexism involved here that gives men license to be violent toward women -- It makes someone an 'other' and dehumanizes that person and gives you permission to do bad to them.”

Sometimes, Williams said, “the best thing for these men is the pain that they have to go through (by losing a relationship) to realize they need to be different.”

Making that happen can be particularly difficult for abuse victims when a natural disaster, such as an earthquake, tornado or hurricane occurs.

For a battered woman, a disaster like Hurricane Katrina can be her ticket to freedom or a descent into an even more intense personal hell.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, domestic violence programs in Florida reported increasing numbers of individuals using crisis line services and shelters nearly six months after the state was hit by four hurricanes in summer 2004.

“Disasters may compel battered women to return to abused partners when left with no other housing options and temporary emergency shelters afford batterers an opportunity to abuse their partners,” according to the coalition’s Web site.

The British Columbia Institute on Family Violence and the Feminist Research, Education Development and Action Centre (FREDA) funded a research project in the late 1990s to determine what makes women so vulnerable after natural disasters and how prepared women’s services are to respond to women and children in shelters or transitional housing.

Seventy-seven Canadian and U.S., provincial and state coalitions, shelters and transition homes were surveyed by mail and telephone to create baseline data on women at risk of violence and disaster.

The report by Elaine Enarson, a visiting scholar at the Disaster Preparedness Resource Center University of British Columbia, said “a family home destroyed by fire may loosen the ties binding women to violent partners; disaster relief money can buy a bus ticket out of town for women ready to leave.” However, Enarson noted, “Severe weather events like mudslides or blizzards isolate women at home in unsafe environments without working telephones or accessible roads; contact with courts and crisis counselors may be lost when major disasters disrupt or destroy lifeline services, including law enforcement agencies.”

Such stressors may exacerbate domestic violence, Williams said, but just as alcohol and drugs don’t cause violence, the absence of the additional factors that disrupt a normal life won’t end the violence. So returning to the home of an abuser because you find yourself in a new crisis doesn’t mean the violence will disappear.

“Not everybody has the skills or are taught the skills that are important” for coping with stress, Williams said. “Men who batter and men who do not handle conflicts in different ways.”

Batterers, he said, want “to make someone feel as badly as they do about the situation. They make the person feel as harmed or that they are as psychically harmed as they are.”

In other words, an abuser doesn’t take the other person’s feelings into consideration. It’s all about him and he’s not above using the enticement of shelter or stability for the children to get what he wants -- the victim back in the home.

And what about the children?

While the conventional wisdom suggests that children who are exposed to violence are more likely to become victims or abusers, Williams said that doesn’t have to be a certain future.

He cited the example of a 48-year-old man who grew up in a violent home, but when his mother got out of the environment and changed her attitude it made a major difference in his and his ability not to be drawn into a cycle of abuse.

“She was an angel in his life. She continued to have conversations with him about how he saw women, how he saw her and she would confront him with ways he dealt with issues,” Williams said.

“I believe men can change and I know men who have changed,” Williams said. “The reality is men can change, but you have to have several ingredients.

“First of all, there has to be clear self-assessment to acknowledge what they have done and to develop the skills not to do that anymore. They have to learn to reframe their anger and ways of dealing with it.”





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