In this episode we plunge into the web of lies men construct to shroud their patterns of abusive behavior with expert and author Lundy Bancroft. Exploring façades of helplessness as a guise for manipulation, the twisting of narratives that paint victims as aggressors, and the chilling ease with which abusive men deceive authorities and loved ones are all part of our unflinching look into domestic violence tactics as well as the lives of the women who endure it, often in silence and isolation.
The conversation also addresses the systemic issues plaguing the fight against domestic abuse. We reveal the startling imbalance in how society responds to male and female victims of abuse, dissecting the gendered nuances of power dynamics that often tip the scales in favor of men. Bancroft offers insights into the damaging effects of sexual mistreatment within these dynamics, the disturbing incidence of post-separation violence, and the formidable hurdles women face in custody battles. This episode serves as a reminder that despite progress in women's rights, the struggle against ingrained misogyny and the societal structures that enable it is relentless.
Ending on a note of empowerment, this episode calls upon the spirit of activism that birthed the battered women's movement and insists on its necessity today. We discuss the urgent need for activism that ignites change and challenges the status quo, alongside the critical support structures like Genesis Women's Shelter, which offers help and hope for victims of domestic violence. This episode is a rallying cry for every listener to take action, to raise their voice in protest and support, and ensure that the flames of progress continue to burn bright against the darkness of abuse and inequality.
In this episode we plunge into the web of lies men construct to shroud their patterns of abusive behavior with expert and author Lundy Bancroft. Exploring façades of helplessness as a guise for manipulation, the twisting of narratives that paint victims as aggressors, and the chilling ease with which abusive men deceive authorities and loved ones are all part of our unflinching look into domestic violence tactics as well as the lives of the women who endure it, often in silence and isolation.
The conversation also addresses the systemic issues plaguing the fight against domestic abuse. We reveal the startling imbalance in how society responds to male and female victims of abuse, dissecting the gendered nuances of power dynamics that often tip the scales in favor of men. Bancroft offers insights into the damaging effects of sexual mistreatment within these dynamics, the disturbing incidence of post-separation violence, and the formidable hurdles women face in custody battles. This episode serves as a reminder that despite progress in women's rights, the struggle against ingrained misogyny and the societal structures that enable it is relentless.
Ending on a note of empowerment, this episode calls upon the spirit of activism that birthed the battered women's movement and insists on its necessity today. We discuss the urgent need for activism that ignites change and challenges the status quo, alongside the critical support structures like Genesis Women's Shelter, which offers help and hope for victims of domestic violence. This episode is a rallying cry for every listener to take action, to raise their voice in protest and support, and ensure that the flames of progress continue to burn bright against the darkness of abuse and inequality.
Award-winning author and domestic violence expert, lundy Bancroft, is back to talk about the behaviors of abusive men and how they impact women, children and even other men. I'm Maria McMullin and this is Genesis, the podcast. Lundy Bancroft's work focuses on working for justice for abused women and their children. Toward these goals, lundy strives to write and disseminate accurate information about abusive men, including their strategies and tactics, their ways of getting away with what they do, their ways of keeping women trapped and their realistic potential for change. Additionally, he writes and trains about the impact abusive men have on children in their lives. He has authored seven books, including why Does he Do that and when Dad Hurts Mom.
Speaker 1:Lundy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. We've talked before on this show and you've been in person training people at the Conference on Crimes Against Women. You've worked extensively with men who are abusive partners and thereby very often abusive parents. One of the things I noticed in your work and that you're often keen to call out is that abusive men are pretty much lying to everyone, including themselves and that includes other men as well and this manifests in many ways blaming others for their behavior, saying they are being abused themselves, and so on. Let's talk about these and other falsehoods, and how they could help to continue the cycle of violence for all of us. What are the lies men are telling themselves and others about their abusive behaviors?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's so many. I mean abusiveness and oppressive behavior in general is just so rooted in dishonesty. And I think you know probably the first one, and the one that has the greatest impact day to day, is his claim that he's not in control of his behavior, that he's helpless. You know, these things just happen. I just do these things and I can't help it when I do them and some of them I kind of know are sort of wrong, but I can't stop myself. And we know what a lie this is.
Speaker 2:Because the abuser is in all kinds of other very upsetting situations, because we all are in all kinds of upsetting situations in life. He'll have times at his work life when he's furious. He'll have times at dealing with friends on his softball team or at his chess club or whatever where he's furious, and yet he doesn't get violent there. And in all my years of working with abusers I would ask them you know, have you ever lost a job because of violence at work? None of them had ever lost jobs because of violence at work or because of calling their boss some vulgar names or whatever. So they got fired.
Speaker 2:It's like, oh so you're not really out of control. Whenever you consider it in your best interest to behave differently, you're perfectly capable of doing so. So that's a really the helplessness is a really crucial why doing so? So that's a really the helplessness is a really crucial why. And then they create an entire false image of who the abused woman is as a human being. And that's so crucial to how the abuser justifies the way he's treating her is to paint this whole picture of her as someone who's mean, irrational, stupid, incompetent, mentally unstable. The list just goes on and on and on and on, and he will work very hard to convince other people that these things are true about her. And so there's a lot of lying to outsiders about what the woman is like. And if they have children, he commonly starts to lie to the children, to indoctrinate the children about what their mother is like. And this helps him in a number of ways. It helps him to keep her isolated, because if other people start to think badly of her, then they tend to kind of stay back from her a little bit. And the more isolated the woman is, the more power the abuser has over her. If she's cut off from other people, then she doesn't have other sources of help. She doesn't have other sources to confirm her sense of what's real, so he can convince her that falsehoods are truth, because she's not in contact with other people to help validate her sense of what's real. And so isolating her is one of the things he gets by lying about her to other people. Another thing he gets is he gets her to be less likely to tell people because people have distanced themselves from her. And if she does tell people in other words tell people about how he's treating her, she's less likely to be believed. Now he's going to do his best to make it so she'll never tell people, but he does recognize that that risk exists that she will tell people, and so he wants to make sure, just in case, that the outside world is prepared to not believe her or to put her disclosures in such a spin that people will be able to dismiss them. And so even someone who maybe does believe her that he shoved her will think, oh yeah, but I know enough about her to know that he was just driven to his absolute limit and I know what he was going through and I know how absolutely impossible she is. Not that that should justify a man shoving a woman anyhow, but unfortunately in our society it does, in a lot of people's eyes, lay the groundwork for people to think, well, yeah, maybe he did do those things. I doubt it. But even if he did do those things, it's really understandable, you know, given what she's like.
Speaker 2:Anytime there's the risk of him being held accountable. He will lie to whoever is in a position of authority who could have some kind of impact on him. So, for example, if police are involved, he lies and lies and lies and lies and lies. If a custody battle ensues, he lies and lies and lies and lies and lies. And even some abusers who weren't necessarily the biggest liars before become incredible liars when either the criminal system is involved or the custody system is involved.
Speaker 2:And this is a very hard thing for the public to accept. It's a very hard thing for professionals to accept and they'll say to me in a sort of disparaging way oh, you're saying that he's just completely inventing these stories out of whole cloth. He's just made them up out of nowhere. And I'll say, yes, absolutely, abusers do that all the time. That's almost built into the nature of abuse and there's no cause for you to be so skeptical that he would just completely make something up. Oh, they do it right and left, so they get a lot of power from the lies they tell and it's one of the key ways that they get out of ever having consequences for their actions. They're very persuasive in the criminal system and they're very persuasive in the custody system.
Speaker 2:So anytime they're dealing with courts, people find them really, really believable, and they've been practicing this for a long time.
Speaker 2:It's like they're not telling their first lies when they get to court.
Speaker 2:It's like they've been lying to her and, as you say, to themselves and to the children and to outsiders for 10, 15, 20 years, usually by the time they're facing a court. And they've had a lot of practice and they've gotten really good at it and they can make eye contact and they can often show quite a bit of emotion. They're known sometimes to pass a lie detector test because they're good at it. They've learned how to keep themselves calm while lying. They've learned in many ways, how to almost believe their own lies, and that'll help you pass a lie detector test if, to some extent or to a great extent, you actually believe your own lies, actually believe your own lies, and this is one of the things that's very frustrating about abusive men is how skillful they are. Again, because people's image is that an abuser is kind of berserk and out of control and doesn't know what he's doing. Then they can't quite believe it or can't quite grasp it. Actually, abuse I hate to say it, but abusiveness is a skill and abusers get good at it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they definitely hone those skills over time and figure out what is going to inflict the most pain, power and control over their intended victim, as well as the children. And, to your point it is, they begin to believe what they're selling. They believe that they are entitled to behave this way because the people around them, particularly their partner, has caused them to have that reaction. Because another thing that abusive men are often quick to point out to you is that women abuse men too, and that you, lundy Bancroft, never address that in your work. If you work in the field of domestic violence, this is not a new statement. We hear this all of the time. But how is this example a telltale sign of an abusive person and what is your response to this accusation?
Speaker 2:Well, and I could talk for so long just about this subject alone, but let me keep this as concise as I can. So, first of all, when a man starts saying, well, you know, women abuse men too. That's not how a victim would talk. That's how a perpetrator would talk. A victim would talk. That's how a perpetrator would talk.
Speaker 2:A man who really was being horribly mistreated by his female partner would not feel like, hey, men get abused too. He would feel like, wow, I really get what abused women are going through because I'm being treated really horribly in my relationship. And his reaction should be sympathetic, not hostile. And I've talked to some men who were genuinely being mistreated by their female partners and that was how they reacted. They said like, wow, you know, I really feel for what women go through, because I'm kind of going through this myself in my relationship and I sort of see what it's like. So the hostility should immediately make you very suspicious, because that's not how a man who was being genuinely mistreated would feel. He would feel sympathy and connection to abuse.
Speaker 2:And next there's a level of power that an abuser has that a woman is really almost can't exercise over a man, and people overemphasize the physical differences and sort of who's stronger or who's more confident in a fight. Although who's more confident in a fight is a factor, the physical difference is very little, but the power that an abuser has comes from so many sources. It comes from how he's been brought up and believing, as you were saying, the entitlements that he's grown up with. It has to do with what his experience is of who's going to back him up the fact that police officers are going to be overwhelmingly male, that judges are going to be overwhelmingly male, that everywhere he goes he's going to get support. And I see all the time the remarkable differences in how systems respond to males than to females.
Speaker 2:Just to give you an example from the custody court when a man presents in a custody dispute as very angry, the response from court personnel tends to be sympathetic. They'll say things like well, you got to understand why he's so angry. He's feeling really messed over in this divorce. He's really missing seeing his kids. He's got a lot of reason to be angry.
Speaker 2:Whereas when a woman presents as very angry in a custody dispute, court personnel start to say oh, she's a really angry woman, you know, oh God, you know. She's like. Oh, no wonder you know, and so, like either way, whether it's his anger or her anger, either way that counts in his favor. And so we have these huge societal differences in how being what's considered acceptable, who you know, who, in in what people anger is considered acceptable, and then there's a level of hatred that goes on and abusers that you're just not going to find the same thing in women. I was just thinking because of something that I was reading just a couple of days ago about the famous Montreal massacre, where the man trapped a bunch of people in a building, then let all the men leave and proceeded to kill 14 women. And you're not going to be able to find any comparable example in history where a woman trapped a bunch of people in a building, let the women go and killed the men.
Speaker 2:In fact I don't know of any murder that there's ever been where a woman appeared to be randomly deliberately targeting men to kill, whereas we see incidents every few years where a man is deliberately killing women. And so it's just this. There's such a severe level of denial about the power differences in modern society between men and women and such a severe level of denial about the level of hatred and violence that abusers carry. Even abusers who don't carry out a lot of physical violence, whose abusiveness is mostly psychological. Even those men are so full of a level of hatred and of a preparation, of feeling prepared to do physical violence if they decide it's necessary. They may spread it out, they may do it once every five or 10 years instead of every Friday or whatever. But it's there, the potential is there. You can just feel it vibrating in them. And I'll say just a couple more things and stop myself on this subject. But one of the most common dynamics that's present almost half the time in abusive relationships is sexual mistreatment, where he's insulting her body or insulting her sexuality in all kinds of ways. I mean, feeling really horribly sexually treated is such a common part of an abused woman's experience, and this is so rare to find a man who was in a relationship with a woman who says, oh yeah, and she would force me to have sex all kinds of times I didn't want it, or guilt trip me into having sex all kinds of times I didn't want it, or guilt trip me into having sex all kinds of times I didn't want it, or she was constantly insulting my sexuality or she was humiliating me sexually in front of other people. That's just so rare. And so one of the most common dynamics of the abusive relationship is almost completely missing from dynamics where the woman is the one mistreating the man. And then I do have to talk actually about homicide, which is post-separation homicide, in other words homicide that happens after the couple has split up, is close to 100% male on female. It's extremely unusual. I think I've seen three or maybe three cases in my entire 30 years in the field where a woman killed a man post-separation, whereas the male on female homicide is more post-separation than not for a domestic violence homicide. Why do I point to that? Because if homicides by women on men are happening almost entirely while the couples are still together, that suggests that those homicides are mostly being carried out by the victim, not by the perpetrator, in that relationship, because why would those homicides disappear post-separation if they were being carried out by the perpetrators? And so I think that's very, very revealing of what the power dynamics are in heterosexual relationships and who really lives in fear.
Speaker 2:And are there couples where the man is the nice guy and the woman is the really unpleasant person? Absolutely. Are there men who are being is the nice guy and the woman is the really unpleasant person? Absolutely. Are there men who are being mistreated by their female partners? Absolutely, that's really different from living in fear, from being raped, from having your whole personhood systematically torn down, from losing all your freedoms. Suddenly you're not allowed to see your friends and you're not allowed to control your own checkbook and you're suddenly don't think, you're not sure how you could ever get out of this relationship, and then you're at risk of being killed. I mean, it's just such a radically, radically different experience, and so I'm not going to be unsympathetic to a man who's being mistreated by his female partner.
Speaker 2:But I'm not willing to let people divert a discussion into like, well, let's talk. You know why don't you talk about, about you know, women abusing men? It's like, no, we're not, we're not going there. That's a way to take the focus off of the much more common problem, which is men abusing women, and that the last thing I want to say about this is is growing from what I just said, which is, anytime in society you try to make women the priority, men get angry about it.
Speaker 2:Men are fine with men being the priority, and we've lived for hundreds of years with men being the priority. But anytime you try to make women the priority, it's a big deal. You know, somehow you're being unfair and you want to create a space that's for women only. Suddenly, that's a big deal. Even though there's all kinds of places where only men feel comfortable to go, suddenly you try to create a space that's only for women. You're being really exclusive, and so we need to push back and loudly against that and say you know, I have another reason. Why I'm only going to talk about men's abuse of women is because that's what I choose to talk about and I have the right to make that the focus, because that's what I'm interested in, and I don't even have to justify it. As you know, from what I just ranted on about for the last 10 minutes, I also can justify it, but I also shouldn't feel obligated to justify it. I should say I'm making that a priority because I have every right to make it a priority.
Speaker 1:Well, when you're working in any field related to women's rights or equity, you always have to justify it right. There's always someone who will ask you to explain yourself and why you choose to focus on women rather than men. And it's true, as you said, there are men who are abused by their female partner. We can't rule that out. However, the large majority one in four that we know of in the United States now this is a highly underreported crime. One in four women in the United States, one in three women in Texas, will experience domestic violence in a lifetime, and somebody needs to talk about it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit about lies Actually, we've talked a lot about lies so far and these are all common myths that men like to spread in a system that was established by men for men, for the rights of men. Never for the safety of women, never for the consideration of children, always for this kind of patriarchal platform that we're trying to tear down through the work that we do in the field of domestic violence and other human trafficking, sexual violence, femicide movements. But there is also another misconception that you address, related to the root of domestic violence or abusive behaviors, the misconception being that men's relationships or experiences with women make those men abusive toward women or make them hate women. So the emphasis on a man's experience with a woman will make him love her or hate her, decide to abuse her or decide to be in a healthy relationship with her. But you say that is not so and that it's actually men who influence other men to be abusive toward women.
Speaker 2:Tell us about that idea, men who influence other men to be abusive toward women.
Speaker 2:Tell us about that idea. So let me begin by saying that one of the ways that this issue emerges in women's lives is that sometimes a man will present himself as, yeah, I'm really mistrustful or I'm really suspicious or I'm really hostile because of these terrible experiences I've had with women, like my mother was awful and my last partner was awful and my ex-wife was awful, and I've just been so mistreated by women, and so I have this chip on my shoulder against women and that will tempt the woman to try to become what I call the ambassador for women. She feels like I'm going to show him that women aren't so bad, because I'm going to be really good to him and I'm not going to be mean to him like his mother was and I'm not going to cheat on him like those other partners did before, and then he's going to see that women aren't so bad. So it's really tempting to get sucked into this role of hoping that you're going to be the ambassador for women.
Speaker 1:And let me just interject one thought there that is the beginning of manipulation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:That is the beginning of the coercive control, so he's laying the groundwork.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And because of this misconception that you already talked about, this misconception that his hostility towards women is because of his experiences with women, she can really get sucked into believing that by being really good to him she can heal, that she can get that to change. And it never works and I've literally never once seen it work. And the reason it doesn't work is, as you said, because his problems with women aren't from his experiences with women. His problems with women are from his experiences with men. And I start when we go into the subject, I often start with an analogy that tends to click for people, which is when you meet a white person who's very hostile towards black people or whatever dark skinned people but I'll just use black people as the example for the moment Hostile, suspicious, perpetuate stereotypes, whatever you know really racist, you don't think, wow, this person got really hurt by some black people. That's not what goes through your mind.
Speaker 3:At least that's not what goes through most people's minds.
Speaker 2:What goes through most people's minds is this person's been hanging around with the wrong white people or grew up around the wrong white people, or has been influenced by the wrong white people, so our thinking shouldn't be any different. When we see a man who's got all these issues with women. We should think about it just the way we would think about a white person who's racist. It's like the white person is obviously because of their experiences with white people, not because of their experiences with black people, that they're so against black people. Why would we think any differently about a man who's got all this hostility and suspicion and negativity, hatred towards females and suspicion and negativity you know, hatred towards females. There's some interesting research on this, by the way. There was a study that specifically compared male attitudes towards women among men who'd been raised by abusive mothers and men who had been raised by non-abusive mothers, and the study found no significant difference in their attitudes towards women in general based on whether they'd been abused by their mothers or not. So the experience of being abused by your mother does not generalize into how you look at women in general and, on the other hand, if you've grown up around men boys and men who speak really negatively about females and encourage you to hate females and encourage you to use females as your scratching post, as sort of who you're going to blame for everything and who you're going to blame for what's wrong in the world, then that's going to creep more and more into how you think about the world and how you think about women. And then, in the current times we live in, I want to add a couple of additional concerns. We live in a time when social media really encouraged the fostering of hatred, because that's sort of what gets you the most attention and the most clicks and so forth on social media, and we live in a time when I feel like there's a greater tendency than ever to blame the problems in modern society on the people who have the least power to influence modern society.
Speaker 2:The people, in other words, who are the least responsible for why we're in the mess we're in, are the people who suddenly are really the targets for blame. So people are going to blame immigrants, for example, who have some of the least impact on what the quality of life is in the United States. They're going to blame women, who have much less say than men do in modern society. It's not true in all societies, but in modern society, women have much less say than men over all the decisions that get made.
Speaker 2:You're going to blame people on welfare. It's like they're using 3% of the federal budget. They're not the cause of our budget problems. They're the people, again, who have the least ability to determine where the society goes. So we're in a historical moment when there's just this urge to blame the exactly wrong people, to blame the people who have the least say over things instead of blaming the people who have the most say over things, and to blame the least powerful instead of the most powerful for what goes wrong in the world. So I think it's really important to be aware of that dynamic.
Speaker 1:So I think that's also lying right.
Speaker 2:I think so Once again it often is particularly on the part of the powerful. They're often deliberately lying to get people to blame the most disempowered. Yes, the message I really want to get to women is you will not be able to heal to change his view of women by being good to him, and it doesn't have anything to do with how women have treated him, and it's going to as you're saying. It's just going to suck you into getting manipulated and controlled by him. If he's got an issue with women, stay away from him. Don't try to fix it. The only way that's going to be able to get fixed is if he comes under the influence of a very different set of men and sometimes that happens in a man's life where later in life he so we're talking about all of this lying, and I think what's worse about these lies is how they have contributed to what you call the disappearance of the battered women's movement.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about that. And how have the lies and manipulations of abusive men influenced what you refer to as the degenderizing of domestic violence services, and what are the consequences of doing so and what are the consequences of doing so.
Speaker 2:So I want to say just a little bit first about sort of the typical history of social movements, at least in the United States, which is that when a movement starts pushing really hard for change, changing systems, changing how justice works in society, there's this period when there are a lot of people involved in it, there's a lot of protesting, the numbers are big, there's a lot of fervor to the movement, and you can see that. You can watch any history of movement in the US, whether it's the populist movement or the poor people's movement in the 30s, or the civil rights movement in the 60s or the you know the movement, the battered women's movement, which was very, very powerful in the 70s and 80s and into the 1990s. Lots of people involved, lots of fervor, lots of challenging of the system and standing up to the system. And what happens typically is that the movement makes some gains, makes some improvements, wins some concessions from the system, and then the system, people in power say, okay, you won, even though you didn't, you won like 10% of what you needed to win. People in power say, okay, we got it, you're right, you win, and they give you like 10% of what you deserve and then say well, now you don't need a movement anymore because we see, we've agreed that you're right and now you should work within the system and we're actually going to offer you jobs, the system and we're actually going to offer you jobs. You can see very much how this played out in both the poor people's movement and the civil rights movement Actually the welfare rights movement in the 1960s also, governments started to give people well-paying jobs, saying here you're going to be able to help people much more this way than by protesting, so we're going to give you good jobs.
Speaker 2:Except that people being hired into jobs gradually turned them into bureaucrats instead of activists and they gradually takes the teeth out of the movement. And so I've watched the same pattern, because I've been around for 30 years. I've watched this same history in the battered women's movement, where it was a very, very feisty movement. When I first came into it. I came into it when it had already been existence for more than 10 years, probably 15 years by the time I got involved in it, because I came in in the mid to late 1980s. But there was another 15 years or so there where there was a lot of fight in the movement, but it was fading and people were starting to say, well, we've sort of accomplished what we want to accomplish. We've made the changes. Now it's time for us to stop being adversarial. It's time for us to start working within the system, be more polite, get along with everybody, stop ruffling feathers, stop making people mad, basically get more money and, of course, more and more and more money poured into the battered women's programs.
Speaker 2:It was never enough mind you, it was never nearly enough, but just a lot more than it had been before. So it felt like a lot of money and there were some law, improvements in laws, and they felt like, yeah, so in case we can settle down. And I remember hearing a judge once actually speaking to an audience saying, you know, it was really good that the Better Women's Movement put so much pressure on us for a while, like they really needed to wake us up. But now we've got it, you know, and now it's time to move beyond activism and work, you know, together on how we improve this system. He put it right out there. He said it in those words it's time to move beyond activism. And I've known a lot of people in the bad women's movement themselves who make that same argument. I've just watched this play out recently in Connecticut where a successful activist, after they got a law passed, then declared okay, now we need to get along, Now we need to be polite and get along, and now it's time to work on the inside. We're going to be more effective. It doesn't work. I wish it worked. I'd be in favor of it if it worked. But the thing is it doesn't work Because once the teeth has gone from your movement. The powerful always start immediately. Little by little they don't start overnight, but little by little they start taking back the concessions that they made.
Speaker 2:And what has happened over the past 15 years is that the system in the United States has just been chipping away at the gains that the battered women's movement made. Chipping away, chipping away, chipping away. Police are back to arresting women again as perpetrators of domestic violence, even though 90% of the ones they're arresting as perpetrators are actually victims, and we stopped that for a long time. But that's back. And the blaming of women in all kinds of ways is back. Police leaving without doing anything about situations is back. Prosecution not taking domestic violence seriously again. We've really slid backwards and that's why you can't say no, no, you passed a law. That means your effort has just begun. I say don't build a movement in order to pass a law. Pass a law in order to build a movement and then you've got to keep your movement going. Don't let your movement fade away because you've passed a law. It's the opposite. Since you've passed a law, you got to keep your movement strong so that that law will actually be enforced and come to mean something.
Speaker 2:And to your point about what role have abusers' lies played in this. Well, abusers have lied their ways to all kinds of policymaking commissions. They've lied their way at hearings a lot about laws and say oh you know, this is gone too far. Men are constantly being arrested now who haven't done anything. It happens, but it's not common at all, it's rare. Now the system has tipped too far the other way. Now the system has become anti-male. No, it's moved to 10% of where it needed to go. It hasn't nearly gone too far. It hasn't nearly gone far enough yet. But there's just so much lying and then they'll just make this stuff up Like abusers routinely and through their organizations, through the so called father's rights organizations, will routinely say that women win 95% of contested custodies.
Speaker 2:That is totally false. The research shows that men win a majority of contested custodies, that a majority Women not only don't win 95%, they don't even win 50% of contested custodies. The 95% figure is a deliberate lie. Where it comes from is that women win 95% of uncontested custodies. Well, why do women get 95% of uncontested custodies? Because non-abusive fathers are not out to take children away from their mother, and it's only abusers who want to take children away from their mother, and so, of course, women are going to win 95% of uncontested custodies, because non-abusive men don't tend to contest for custody. So those things get settled peacefully. And so the lies have really, really been bought. And now, state after state, year after year, some states every year they have to try to fight off a law that's going to require 50-50 custody post-separation. A lot of states now have a law that requires 50-50 custody post-separation. That's got nothing to do with what's good for kids, that's just treating a kid as a loaf of bread or as a house. So we're going to divide this in half between the parents.
Speaker 1:Well, a lot of family courts do that. You know the child is considered property and it's like who's going to get the sofa right? Exactly, who's going?
Speaker 1:to have this sofa, and you can't cut a sofa in half and still call it a sofa. I want to go back to something that you said when we first started responding to this idea, and that is the little bits that have been thrown to women over the years in response to activism and the women's rights movement and the battered women's movement. Someone recently said to me we keep marching, we keep fighting, we keep working for equity and equality and you keep feeding us crumbs, and what you're talking about is basically like giving crumbs to starving people and they're just going to eat them up because they don't have anything else, and you're going to take them and accept them as hey, this is an improvement, this is a good thing for us, and we should go along to get along now, because it looks like people are going to really understand what it is that we're fighting for and they still don't.
Speaker 2:So that's absolutely right. And so the message is don't stop protesting, don't stop having your boycotts, don't stop having your email campaigns, don't stop all Icotts, don't stop having your email campaigns, don't stop all I mean. Activists use a huge range of different strategies. I don't want to suggest that a march is the only one. They all matter. You know, there's so many different strategies that activists use Letter writing, campaigns, art projects, theater projects, writing powerful songs that somehow catch on, because that happens sometimes. Movement sometimes has almost been fueled by a song or a movie. All those things matter and don't stop and don't listen to promises. You wait until the signature's on the paper or until you see the changes before you're going to stop being on top of people, because the systems will always promise you. They'll always say, okay, we get it. Now, we get it. We're going to stop the abuser. By the way, the individual abuser does the same thing. Okay, I get it now. Okay, I get that what I did was wrong, I'm not going to treat you that way anymore.
Speaker 1:And it never stops well that that typically does not happen, right, and we're going to talk about that in a minute.
Speaker 1:Um, when you mention social media, I think about how easy it is to use social media to perpetrate lies. People are reading and watching, but you can say whatever's on your mind, whether it's true or not. You can spark something for good, you can spark a movement for good, and you can also fan the flames of hatred can also fan the flames of hatred. It is the perfect storm in many ways for abusive men to perpetrate violence through the spreading of misinformation, and an example that I'm, the example that you make me think of, is the incel movement, because incel movement are men who believe they're entitled to be with, or in relationships with, or partners with, certain types of women, and those women, for whatever reason, are not interested in relationships with them, and so the incel movement then spreads lies about these types of women and what they're like and why they're not interested in him in particular. And that community right, there is a community that's built completely on lies and on hatred of women, and it is a community of men supporting the lies of other men.
Speaker 2:It's amazing that that movement can get in any way taken the least bit seriously. But they do, and that's part of why they're able to do harm is because they do get taken seriously. But they I mean they are starkly saying because I am so unbelievably unpleasant and unattractive, women don't want to be with me, and they should have to be with me anyhow.
Speaker 1:Or die.
Speaker 2:Or die, and that is just so. It speaks volumes about them.
Speaker 1:It's hard to believe that anyone could say that and find it believable.
Speaker 2:Exactly exactly. It's so morally repugnant. It's like complaining about your slaves not being willing to work hard enough, and I mean it's actually to me entirely parallel to being complaining about your slaves not being willing to work hard enough, and they really think that women's bodies and women's psychologies, women's whole being belongs to them. And it's like if women don't want to be with you, they got every right not to be with you. You might consider making yourself appealing instead of being a total jerk. I can't promise you that that's going to work for you, but it might work better than being a total jerk.
Speaker 1:I don't, you know. I can only think that this type of sick idea had to have come from being around, as you say, other men with the same sick idea, Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. They collect together to compare notes about what women are failing to do for them. And so much of how sexism is taught to boys is the messages that boys get. As you may have guessed, I'm a former boy, so I know a lot of this stuff from direct experience. The messages that boys get about what kind of service females owe us and what sorts of punishments we get to mete out if women are not giving us adequate service, and it's all different kinds of things you know it's whether it's you know when you're old enough that it's sex, then women owe you sex.
Speaker 2:When you're smaller, it's that they should let you have more food off the female should let you have more food off the table than they get, and that you shouldn't have to wait in line. You should get to just push past them for who's going to get to get in the swimming pool, whatever it is. Or that you should get to take up two thirds of the swimming pool, while when there's three of you and the 10 of them get to play in the little corner of the swimming pool. I mean just all that sense very early of like women just owe this females because it's girls and women just owe this stuff to us and we get to retaliate if they try to have anything close to their share, if they in any way resist doing everything they were put here to do for us, and if anytime they're not doing for us, that means they are wronging us. And this is so much of what you get in sort of male victimizations. I've been wronged because women didn't do enough for me. It's no different from the slave owner mentality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is really terrifying, I want to say like horrifying that women, whether subconsciously or not, are thought of as slaves in the predominant male psyche. Kind of terrifying.
Speaker 2:It's really rampant and we have. I believe that over the last, say, 30 years, there's been big changes in the United States and Canada and a lot of places probably all over the world in how people are raising girls to be able to be a little stronger, be a little tougher, whatever to have maybe more of a complete be, more of a complete person. There's been almost no change in how we're raising boys, and that's a huge problem.
Speaker 1:On a national level.
Speaker 2:You're saying yeah, yeah, no, in some individuals definitely it changed. Yeah, but I'm saying from a point of view of societal or cultural trend, there's no trend toward raising boys to be more respectful, towards females to be more open to having feelings, to be less exaggeratedly courageous and, you know, unfeeling and unafraid and all that stuff that to be able to whatever play with dolls or whatever you know to be able to be a whole human being. And so this is one of the things that I think is urgent now is that, yeah, it's great that we're making some changes, improvements as a society and how we're raising girls. Now we've got to bring those changes to how we're raising boys.
Speaker 1:There are some glimmers of hope that I've been made aware of.
Speaker 1:As the mother of two teenage boys, I'm kind of familiar with the behaviors and what's out there to redirect those behaviors and turn these two teenage boys into what will someday be very fine young gentlemen. So there are some movements out there, but you know, I'm really glad what you said about you know these changes to how we raise girls, because when you were talking about the analogy of the swimming pool, all I could think of was how women or girls, as they're being brought up, are taught to make themselves smaller. You want to be polite and you want to be petite and you don't want to take up a lot of space, whether that's a physical space or a kind of the just hypothetical space of being too loud in a room, your hair being too big or your perfume being too strong. You do not want to call attention to yourself. You need to make yourself small if you want to be respected in this society.
Speaker 1:Men, however, need to be big and they need to be bold and they need to take up space and they need to make sure that people know who they are and what their name is, before and after they leave a room, and so I think we need it all to your point. We need better ways of upbringing and educating young men to live in an equitable space with women, and not just women who are their partners, but women who are their co-workers, their sisters, their daughters, just in society in general.
Speaker 2:And the you know.
Speaker 2:One thought I have and I know this is very controversial, but I think it's important to say that with this sense that women should always be smaller, they should be the ones to give up the space, they should be the ones to not be the center of attention, all those things that you're talking about Now.
Speaker 2:One of the places over the last 20 years or so that's become a really positive experience for girls has been women's sports, where they get to be the focus, they get to be the ones up there and be the center of attention, be standing up on the podium and suddenly, once again, girls and women are under pressure to make themselves smaller, to make space for biological males, to compete as women, and they're starting to win all kinds of records. The world records and a number of things are suddenly held by biological males and the women are being told, once again you're the ones that should get smaller, you're the ones that should make the sacrifice. Trans people are treated terribly in society, which is true, but they're treated terribly in society by males, not by females. Every time you hear of a killing of a trans person, it was done by a man, not by a woman, but women are being told you're the ones now that should make the sacrifices, and the loss of what's happening to girls sports is really heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:Well, women are always left behind. Okay, it could be in any arena. We're getting left behind or ignored, and to those points, we could do episode upon episode about women in sports and and all of the things that you just mentioned. But one thing I want to say about women in sports and all of the things that you just mentioned, but one thing I want to say about women in sports is that once we get out of college playing these sports, there are very few places for us to go professionally. There are professional leagues I mean the Women's Soccer League has been incredibly successful there's gymnastics, there's Olympics, but there's no NFL. And if you live in the United States, the NFL or the NBA, those are the big sports, those are the headliners, those are the money makers. There are not as many places for women to go in sports.
Speaker 2:It's a real shame. I happen to be a competitor. Even into my old age I'm still a competitive baseball player and I play league baseball with people who are half my age or less. And there are women who want to play hardball and they all get told no, no, women play softball. And there are women who want to play baseball and they just get pushed out of that by the time they're in high school and as adults, yeah, there's generally no adult ball for a baseball player. So what you're talking about about what goes on in football and other sports definitely is a problem in baseball as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we are seeing a lot of hope with soccer right. There's women's soccer, there's men's soccer. There's a lot of opportunities to play soccer. I live in Texas where I mean there's so much soccer and I have children who play soccer, so it's it's starting to become really part of the culture, so we do see some opportunities there. But the big headline sports again, they're just not. They're just not for women and and and never really have been.
Speaker 2:Some in basketball, because the women's NBA, the WNBA, has become fairly popular, but overwhelmingly what you're saying is absolutely right.
Speaker 1:And you know well. We could say a lot about that, but we should probably go on. In addition to all of this, we can tell that abusive men are manipulating most everything, including other men and quite often even their own children, and ultimately, it is the children who pay the biggest price of abuse. I want to touch on what the predictors of child abuse and domestic violence situations are and how mothers can respond to their children's experiences with an abusive father.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, unfortunately, the abuse of the woman is itself statistically the best predictor of who will abuse children. So men who abuse women are involved in far more child abuse than other men, and there's actually extensive research on this, showing that men who abuse women have about seven times the rate of child abuse that other men do, and about half of the abuse of children is perpetrated by men who are also abusing the children's mother. And so, unfortunately, that's the number one warning sign. And so when people say, well, he abuses me, but he's good to the children or I hear professionals saying this all the time, oh yeah, he may abuse women, but he's a good father it's like, no, that's.
Speaker 1:Is that even possible?
Speaker 2:It's just not so Well. It's actually literally impossible, because abusing children's mother is so psychologically destructive to children, as over a hundred studies have shown. So it actually isn't possible to abuse women and be a good father, even if you're never hit the children, don't, you know, don't sexually abuse the children, don't even call them names. You're abusing the children by how you're treating their mother. And so, yes, it's not possible to be an abuser of women and be a good father. That's something that the custody system, that's an idea that the custody system really perpetuates. The judges, the custody evaluators, the lawyers, they're all perpetuating this idea that you can be an abuser of women and be a good father, and it's simply not so. But the next predictor is how he behaves during pregnancy. So is he present, kind, supportive during pregnancy, or is he selfish during pregnancy? Or is he selfish during pregnancy? Is he criticizing the woman that she's gaining too much weight? Is he showing other signs of not being able to focus on the child's needs? Because if you're focused on the child's need, you're going to want to make sure that your partner is getting enough to eat. You're going to want to make sure she's getting enough sleep. You're going to want to be kind to her because you're not going to want her to be under stress, because you know the stress is not good for the growing baby. Those are all signs of caring about the child. Obviously, they're also signs about caring about your partner. But a man who can be lousy to his partner during her pregnancy or who's off cheating with another woman during his wife's pregnancy, as some men sometimes have done, he's going to be an abusive father or very, very likely to be an abusive father. Another warning sign is whether he pressured her to have an abortion when she wanted to keep the child or the opposite pressure her to keep the child when she wanted to have an abortion. Those are again, statistically proven warning signs of someone who's going to be a really destructive father.
Speaker 2:And then some other things. Those are the things I would look at the most seriously. Basically, just how does he treat mom? And then, particularly, what was his behavior like in every way? How he treated mom and all kinds of other ways? What was he like during the pregnancy? Did he show signs of capability of being a responsible parent by what he did during the first pregnancy?
Speaker 2:But other things we can look to are how does he talk and think about children. Does he just think of them as in the way? Does he have sort of negative ways, negative attitudes about children? To begin with, was he mistreated himself as a child and he hasn't processed that? It's different.
Speaker 2:If he was mistreated as a child and he's really worked it through and really gets it and has developed an analysis of it, then that's not statistically connected to child abuse. But if he was abused as a child and is still defending the way he was treated or is still in denial about the way he was treated, that's going to make him a real risk to become an abuser of children himself, of children himself. And we want to look at how he handles boundaries, how he handles boundaries with everybody. That's going to tell us something about what kind of risk he's going to have to be a violator of children's boundaries, which is such an important aspect of child abuse. So those are some of the key things that I would look at, for which men are going to be the greatest risk to children.
Speaker 1:And how about how mothers can respond to these experiences of their children?
Speaker 2:Actually, let me step back before I answer that and say please don't get pregnant on purpose or have a child with a man because you think that's going to improve your relationship with him.
Speaker 2:It does not work and like, oh he'll finally know I'm not cheating on him because if I'm home pregnant then I'm obviously not cheating on him. It's like men who are into using jealousy as a weapon. It does not stop because you're pregnant, it's not going to go away and then suddenly you're tied to him forever Because even if you break up with him, he has the power through the courts to make your life horrible and to keep taking your child away from you for weeks at a time and months at a time, summer vacations and all this stuff. So please don't have a child. I mean, if you're forced to have a child, that's not up to you, but if it is to the extent that it's up to you, please don't have a child with a man to try to fix him or get him to settle down or get him to grow up and become more responsible, or believe that in any way it's going to improve your relationship or improve him. It will not do it.
Speaker 1:And to your earlier point, it's not your responsibility to fix him.
Speaker 2:It's not. It's absolutely not. But you also can't. Right, but you also can't. So both things are true. You're absolutely right. It's not her responsibility, but she also can't do it. It won't work when children are in distress about how their dad is treating them or how their dad is treating their mom, because they may come to mom upset about how he's treating them, but they also may come to mom upset about how he's treating mom. Children really need you behind them, so that means they need you saying I get why you're upset, that you have every right to be upset by that. What he did was wrong. They need to hear these things. Please don't stick up for their dad. You don't have to say bad things about him. In fact, it won't even help the kids for you to say bad things about him. So don't say oh yeah, he's horrible or he's an abuser or he's mean.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, you're just finding ways to justify his behavior Like, oh, that's just how he is, you know your dad?
Speaker 2:And that, and, unfortunately, moms. Again, I blame the society. I don't blame the mother, because moms tell the mother that's your job, you need to cover for him. And I don't agree with that. I don't think it's her job to cover for him, but the society tells her that she ought to, that she's being a bad mother if she doesn't cover for him. So she feels that she's supposed to say, oh, but he really loves you, or oh, he means well, or oh, he's doing the best he can the kinds of examples that you just gave.
Speaker 2:And please don't do that. That doesn't help kids. It actually makes them more vulnerable to what he does in the future. It confuses them, it gets them blaming themselves and each other and it gets them blaming you. And so don't say bad things about him, but do confirm that his behavior was not acceptable and do say that's not okay. He can't talk to you like that, or he shouldn't talk to me like that, or no, he shouldn't have scared me like that or he shouldn't have scared you like that. That's not okay. That's not your fault. And what he does to me is not my fault. And what he does to me is not your fault, because kids feel like they're made to feel like they're to blame for what he does to them and they're made to feel like they're to blame for what he does to mom, and they're made to feel like mom's to blame for what he does to mom. In other words, everybody in the family is responsible for his actions except him.
Speaker 1:And there's the ultimate lie right there.
Speaker 2:That is the ultimate lie. I completely agree. And so kids need to hear from you. He's responsible for his own actions. Adults are responsible for their own actions. That's right, and you're not making him do it. I'm not making him do it, and let's stay by each other. You might not say that in words. You might say it in words, but at the very least show it in behavior, Like in this family we're going to stick by each other. We're not going to let him drive wedges between us. And be there for your kids. If they need the extra hug, give them the extra hug. If they need to fall asleep in your bed that night, let them fall sleep. Or they need you to fall asleep in their bed that night, do it to the extent that you safely can depending on what your partner will retaliate against you for but to the extent that you safely can be there for them.
Speaker 2:It's painful. Of course you want to deny their pain, because their pain is painful for you, but please don't deny their pain. They need you to acknowledge the reality of it. That's actually what's going to help take their pain away. Isn't telling them not to be in pain. That won't take their pain away or telling him he didn't mean it. That's not going to take their pain away. What's going to take their pain away in the long term is you really being there with them through their pain in the short term. That's what's going to help them live a pain-free life in the long term. Let it be confirmed that it's real and accompany them. What they need from you is not to take their pain away. What they need from you is to feel accompanied in their pain. So that's a parent's job.
Speaker 1:Make your child feel accompanied in what they're doing. Yeah, that is really powerful advice. Before I let you go, I wanted to talk a little bit about the future of the anti-violence against women movement and you mentioned a little while back in our conversation kind of the backward slide of policy, the you know moving away from policies that support women and women's rights. Can you speak again to that and give us some examples of like that backward slide and what options we have or do we need in the future if we're to fully address a woman's experience of domestic violence?
Speaker 2:So some examples of backsliding the police response, which improved a lot for probably 15 years, has now been going backwards for 15 years, back to very insensitive responses to women, back to arresting women as the perpetrators in cases where they're clearly the victim, which, as I say, 90% of arrests of women as perpetrators of domestic violence are done in error. 90% of those arrests are arrests of a victim. The huge backsliding in the child protective response. Child protective systems across the country are going right back to being very mother blaming, not taking the domestic violence history seriously, not responding according to a proper domestic violence protocol. This isn't true in every state, but I'm talking about the national trend. You have a neighbor that's doing this job very well. Oklahoma is really, I would say, the national leader on child protective response to domestic violence. So if anybody wants a model of how to do it right in child protection, go to Oklahoma and they're happy to share their information with you about how they're changing child protective response in domestic violence cases, there's the court, the child custody courts. I don't know if I can say they've exactly been a backlash, because they never really improved, but what they have done is get steadily worse and they are worse now than they were 10 years ago. And 10 years ago they were worse than they were 20 years ago. It's gotten worse and worse and worse. It's just become an absolute nightmare. And then the other thing is money. You know the money is now being cut more and more to the abused women's programs, domestic violence programs whose resources were growing for a couple of decades or their resources are now shrinking again. This is the history of movements, because then the resources then also shrink. You know they give you funding in order to sort of take the teeth out of your movement. Then little by little they take the funding away. So people really need to go back to basics of not don't just think about providing services. We do need to provide services, but we have to think about a sort of social change mentality, not just a social service mentality. We've got to go back to organizing women's rights groups, and that's great if they include allies. Men have a really important role to play in those groups where they're wanted, but the women's groups, they're focused on fighting for rights, not for the providing of services. Both things have to happen, but I'm saying we have a lot more groups now focused on providing services than on fighting for women's rights.
Speaker 2:And the example I give a lot is a woman will call a domestic violence program. She'll be like a young woman, she's in college or just out of college. She's all fired up about women's rights. Where nowadays there's some men young men were all fired up about women's rights, which I love seeing. It's much more common than it was when I was young to get these young men who were all fired up about women's rights.
Speaker 2:So, but let's say it's a woman, okay. So she's calling the domestic violence program and she's saying I'm all fired up, I want to fight against male violence. What should I do? And the typical domestic violence program response is going to be well, you can come and take our 40-hour training and then you can volunteer on our hotline. That's a mistake. The woman who calls because she wants to volunteer on the hotline should be sent to the 40-hour training to work on the hotline.
Speaker 2:The woman who calls because she wants to raise hell should be sent to the hell-raising committee. And the thing is that most domestic violence programs nowadays don't have a hell-raising committee because we've gotten too polite. And so what I say to domestic violence programs nowadays is if your funding will allow you to have a social action committee, what I would call the hell raising committee. Create it and if your funders will pull back from you, if you do that, then informally create it, not visibly as part of your organization, Say oh no, that's a separate organization, that's not part of us, but that you're actually supporting and funneling people towards it and behind it, because we've got to get back out there. We got to get back out there with the marches, with the art projects, with the protesting at offices.
Speaker 2:There was this great protest a few years ago that a bunch of women did in New Jersey, where they all picketed the court. This was wearing t-shirts that had the judge's face printed on the t-shirt of the judge who had done this horrible thing to a woman. And we have to be back with that kind of really in-your-face, cage-rattling type of activism, and I think it's great, as I say, for male allies to be part of that. I also think it's important for some of that stuff to be done by women only, and those are strategic decisions that activists have to make, but I do think it's a really important part of the movement for some of that stuff to be women only and, speaking as a man, I love it when I'm included in certain kinds of activism, but I also totally get it, and in fact support it when people say, yeah, but this one, we want to have to be just women.
Speaker 2:I'm like yeah, go for it. And so, yeah, I think we've really got to get. We've got to get back to cage rattling or this stuff is just going to keep getting taken away and take. The gains that we've made are just going to keep being taken away and taken away.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, let's get out there. Lundy, thank you for being on the show. It's always interesting and informative and I appreciate all of the work that you're doing to help spread awareness about violence against women, and education and also activism.
Speaker 2:Well, you're very welcome. I'm really glad that I get to be part of this conversation. Good luck to you. Thank you so much and I'm going to run. I'm sorry to say.
Speaker 1:I'll see you at the next march, okay.
Speaker 2:I hope so. Okay, be well, man, bye, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Attention, Spanish-speaking listeners. Listen to the end of this podcast for information on how to reach a Spanish-speaking representative of Genesis.
Speaker 3:Atención hispanohablantes.
Speaker 1:Escucha este podcast hasta el final para recibir información de cómo comunicarse con el personal de Genesis en español. If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, you can get help or give help at genesisshelterorg or by calling or texting our 24-7 crisis hotline team at 214-946-HELP 214-946-4357. Bilingual services at Genesis include text phone call, clinical counseling, legal services, advocacy and more. Call or text us for more information. Donations to support women and children escaping domestic violence are always needed. Learn more at genesisshelterorg slash donate. Thanks for joining us. I'm reminding you always that ending domestic violence begins when we believe her.
Speaker 3:Genesis. El podcast anuncia servicios bilingües disponibles en Genesis Women's Shelter, esupport. Si usted o una conocida está en una relación abusiva, puede recibir ayuda o dar ayuda a or by calling or sending a text message to our 24-hour crisis line at 214-946-4357. Genesis Bilingual Services include text messages, calls, counseling, legal services, counseling and more. Call us or send us a text for more information. Call us or send us a text for more information. Donations are always needed to support women or children escaping domestic violence. Learn more at our website at genesisshelterorg. Thank you for joining us. Remember that ending domestic violence begins when we believe in the victim.