A regular reader who also works in book publicity sent me a copy of Why Do They Kill by David Adams, and it took me a long time to get through it, because its so sad, but it was fascinating and well worth the effort of muscling through one banal tragedy after another to learn what Adams and his research team found out about men who kill their wives or girlfriends. Adams and his team conducted in-depth interviews with 31 men who killed their wives or long-term girlfriends, and as a counterbalance, interviewed 20 women who were victims of attempted homicide by husbands or boyfriends. They also went back and read all the court transcripts, police reports and any other evidence about the murders, attempted murders, and preceding relationships in order to fill out a bigger picture of what exactly leads men to try to kill their wives.
Most of what they discovered violates cultural assumptions, but only some of it will surprise feminists. The biggest non-surprise (to feminists) is that the mythological wife-killera man who is generally a good husband but snaps when he discovers an infidelityis a myth in every sense of the word. To the last one, the murders and attempted murders were the finale of a long history of increasingly violent domestic violence. In pretty much every situation, the man was attempting to control his wife or girlfriend through violence. Since it was an attempt to control, the violence escalated when the victim showed resistance, so unsurprisingly, most of the murders or attempted murders occurred after the victim left her abuser, made plans to leave him, or threatened to leave him. There were a few infidelities, but they were never the direct cause of the crimemost of the jealous killers made up the infidelity in their minds (some even accused their wives of having sex with male relatives like uncles or fathers, they were so out of their minds with paranoia) or attacked their ex-wives after the women terminated the relationship and moved on. Some of the killers were not jealous, but just killed or tried to kill because they were irate at losing their wives and the services/money they saw provided by their wives, but regardless of the nuances, across the board Adams paints a picture of men who feel that women are their property and who try to control their property through violence. Only one man seemed sincerely sorry at all that hed objectified his wife repeatedly throughout their marriage in such a way.
Adams was interested in seeing how men who make the move to murder differ from the majority of abusers who dont, and his research mostly points to the conclusion that the difference is in degree more than kind. Murder-minded abusers take the beliefs that they are entitled to control women further than most abusers, and they tend to be more violent than most and abuse more often than most. There are some surprising differences, but on the whole, men who try to kill their wives after a long period of abusiveness are just what youd expect.
What surprised Adams was that women who are the victims of such severe abuse do differ significantly from women who are victims of lesser kinds of abuse in one big waytheyre all very realistic about whats going on. Adams has a long history of working as an anti-DV activist and researcher, and he says that a lot of battered women are in denial about the situation, making excuses for their abuser and blaming themselves. But the women at this upper end of severely violent abuse all have a highly accurate take on the situation, which is that their abusers are the sole cause of the abuse, the abusers were trying to control them, and the women mostly report staying in the relationship out of a rational fear that their abusers would try to kill them or family members if they left. From the victim interviews, Adams paints a picture of a group of women that were basically kidnapping victims, held in captivity by their abusers and a society that all too often values saving marriage over saving women, and like kidnapping victims they cultivated a series of survival strategies that were a mix of compliance and resistance that varied according to the situation.
A lot of the women admit that they were in denial at the beginning of the relationshipsince people still blame women for staying with abusers, its hard on the ego to admit that yours is a genuinely abusive relationshipbut after awhile and it became more obvious that they werent in control of their situation, the women came around to blunt fear-and-survival mode. They still concealed their situation from others, but as much out of fear for the safety of others as out of shame. Many of the women pointed to the fact that their abusers quit apologizing for the abuse as the turning point for them in admitting that they were basically victims. Interestingly, once a woman admits that shes not in control of her situation, its probably easier for her to start taking measures to leave and regain control over her situation, which can make the abuser start seeking other ways to control her, possibly through death threats or threatening her family. So being in denial is in itself a survival strategy.
The book is depressing but the microcosm of the dance between an individual man oppressing an individual woman has some larger implications that are worth examining, so even if you have to muscle through the depressing nature of the book, its well worth a read.
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Why Do They Kill: Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners by David Adams
http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2007/09/15/6047/
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