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Sunday, June 19, 2005
No Appetite For Grim Statistics
Yesterday I spent eight hours listening to presenters drone-on about the percentage of mediation clients who arrive for their appointment enraged and ready to go bananas. Hour after hour, story after story re. men who went crazy. Wild tales about individuals on-site to mediate a domestic abuse situation, and they did not handle the pressure appropriately. How to identify trouble early in mediation and how to divert hopelessly troubled people back into the court system. How to avoid ugly wars, how to keep self and female client safe. Awful things that men have done to women in the past...war stories of how and why people become crazed beasts. Then several hours of practice mediation, role play with imaginary domestic abuse clients.
All shocking stuff, but after the first hour, I tuned it out. Just could not make myself listen. Partly I felt overwhelming exasperation with the abused women whose stories we heard. A little voice in my head repeated over and over throughout the day, "You wouldn't have tolerated a second of that. That man would not have lived to go out the door. You'd have killed him with a chair/ball bat/ skillet." Endless pictures of women dripping blood, black and blue, faces swelled up like a giant yellow and purple sponge, broken limbs, bullet holes, long jagged knife cuts...and every one of those women said something like, "I had an accident. I ran into the door. I fell downstairs..." Some of them confronted with the facts, defended their abuser, "But I deserved it."
Very soon I couldn't listen anymore. Too terrible and idiotic.
One reason why abuse continues to be a problem is that so many think like I did, "What kind of idiot would put up with that?" We blame the victim. Those of us not so humble and lowly as a typical abused woman, we think of her as less than human, some kind of worm. It's her fault she keeps getting beaten and threatened.
The thing is, I'm a human chihuahua, a small person with a ferocious attitude. With Porque, the bigger the dog, the louder she barks and the more she strains and pulls, wants to go get him and chew him up. She actually stands up on her back legs so as to look bigger, and walks forward on two legs, barking savagely. That's me. If I'm frightened or threatened, I do not cringe and get quiet. I go right after the threat. For years my mother said again and again to me, "Someday you're going to get killed." Nope. It works the other way. Those meek women are the ones beaten and damaged, sometimes killed outright.
Yesterday I was reminded of the many times I've witnessed an abuse situation during the years I lived in a town house. Lots of times after sufficient alcohol, a neighbor's boyfriend would go off the deep end and the screaming started, "Help! Help! Oh, God!! Someone please help." I'd just get on the phone to the police and let them handle it. One night, though, the running and screaming, sounds of crashing and falling , it all sounded like someone was about to get killed. I knew that police were on the way but decided that I'd better go to the rescue in the meantime...HA! The man was a huge Detroit police officer. The woman was young, strong, very athletic. I was small, old, sick, bad heart. In my flannel nightgown, I ran over and pounded on the door. The man answered the door completely naked and drunk out of his tiny mind. I didn't give him a second to say anything. I tore into him so loudly and so fast that he was completely bewildered. Then I heard sirens approach and figured the woman should survive the remaining seconds. I ran back to my house, leaving the abuser standing naked in his girlfriend's doorway, his mouth hanging open. Police took him into custody and took her to the hospital. Next morning, she came to visit me and said, "Why didn't you mind your own business?" The previous night she had desperately screamed for help. Now in the light of the next morning, she wished that I had left her to her fate. What a mutt. After that, every time their performance repeated, I let her scream, ignored her bruised and broken face the next day.
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