The Mind of the Intimate Male Abuser: How He Gets into Her Head

By Don Hennessy

The Mind of the Male Intimate Abuser presents some ground-breaking ideas and prompts a radical reappraisal of how we think about and understand male intimate abuse and violence. Over the last fifty years an array of resources and interventions have been brought to bear on domestic violence and abuse between intimate partners. Yet intimate abuse continues to be endemic in our society. One of the principal reasons for this lack of effective intervention is that we have ignored a critical ingredient which is the foundation of long-term intimate abuse and violence. This book uncovers the layers of covert tactics which men employ to establish and maintain control over their intimate partner. By deepening our understanding of what is going on the author suggests that we can develop a more efficient and consistent response to the issue.

Working with both the perpetrators and victims of intimate partner abuse has given the author a unique insight into the tactics employed by the male abuser. He suggests that male intimate abuse and violence are driven by an entitlement to sexual priority and that the other tactics of control and violence are motivated by this entitlement. It is this motivation that distinguishes male intimate violence from other forms of ‘domestic violence’ such as female to male violence and elder abuse.

The author details the similarities in tactics and motivation between the paedophile and the male intimate abuser. He has found that by explaining these tactics to victims he has released many of them from the mind-control that they have experienced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cork University Press
• Release date: Aug 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781782050087

Don Hennessy

Don Hennessy is the Director of the National Domestic Violence Intervention Agency and the author of the best-selling How He Gets Into Her Head. He is a relationship counsellor who has worked for many years with women who are experiencing difficulties with abusive or controlling partners. Don has been interviewed in the Irish Independent, Irish Examiner and Irish Times, and is a regular contributor on the subject of intimate control in the broadcast media in Ireland and internationally.

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Preface

For the last half century the Violence Against Women Movement has struggled to design an effective response to the issue of male intimate abuse. The Cork Domestic Violence Project [CDVP] was initiated in 1991 in an attempt to protect women and children who were the targets of this abuse within their homes. The project was also willing to protect men who were the victims of partner abuse. The six founding members of the project discovered a large body of literature on the protection of women and children. These writings existed and grew as the story of women’s abuse emerged. There was very little literature based on the experience of abused men. While the project was open to all referrals we had very little experience of working with abused men. The project team were very concerned that we might be influenced by the lack of literature about male targeting. We carefully screened for female abuse but found very few cases among our clients. What we did find year-on-year was an extraordinary procession of women who were being controlled, violated and raped by their intimate partners. This constant volume of women who were the victims of repeated crimes almost overwhelmed the resources of the project. We found it difficult to accept that our project would have more than 200 referrals each year. Though the centre operates in the middle of the city we had clients from both rural and urban areas. We also found that some of our clients travelled long distances to avail of our services.

The team for the CDVP consisted of three women, Jean O’Flynn, Teresa O’Grady and Noirin Foley along with three men, namely Dr Colm O’Connor, Dr Eoin O’Flynn and myself, Don Hennessy. The development of the ideas that are presented in this book is a continuation of the process that was begun in the CDVP project. After about ten years the CDVP was merged into the fulltime National Domestic Violence Intervention Agency (NDVIA).

The NDVIA was set up as a pilot project by the Department of Justice and Equality in 2002. It was launched by the Minister for Children, Mr Brian Lenihan in the presence of the Garda Commis sioner and the president of the District Court.

Here the work was continued by members of the Cork project and some dedicated people on the national stage. Those especially active in developing and maintaining the NDVIA were Martina Boyle, Monica O’Connor and Grainne Healy. This book is the culmination of a professional approach which encouraged all of us to constantly challenge each other about the effectiveness of everything we did.

The book is an acknowledgement of the graciousness of the target women who allowed me to explore their experience with them. These women feature throughout this book in the stories and case histories that I have used. Their courage and generosity allowed me the time to work with them in uncovering the details of the covert tactics that were used on them.

I must also acknowledge the skilled offenders who by their presence and behaviour in the project challenged me to find a way to describe the tactics that were used. We learned over time that these same tactics were used by these men to develop and maintain their long-term relationships.

(The names of all the clients and their abusers used in this book are fictitious and some other details have been changed so that no person can be identified)

After two hundred years of psychology it is clear that there are still areas of ignorance about abnormal and evil behaviours. This book is written in the hope that others might begin to develop strategies that will produce the evidence that will confirm the deliberate and effective tactics used by some men to enslave the women who love them. I also hope that the relief that my clients experience when their story is uncovered might be shared by all abused women. For this to happen we need to be diligent and energetic. It is time for some change because without change the offender will remain in charge.

Don Hennessy

Chapter 1

Introduction

In 1991 the Cork Domestic Violence Project (CDVP) was initiated as an attempt to develop an intervention with couples who presented for marriage and relationship counselling. The issue of adult intimates who were violent was occasionally presented by the clients but mostly it remained hidden during our engagement with them. The agency was aware of the presence of violence and abuse in these relationships but through fear and uncertainty we were reluctant to explore the extent of the violence. We were also unsure of the prevalence of abuse among our client population.

The project began to screen for adult intimate violence and, at the same time, we began to explore the possibility of a more effective response.

The intake process, for all our clients, asked some very simple and direct questions about the existence of abuse and violence in the couples who were presenting. This was a rather unique process in the 1990s. We have since learned that very few groups in Ireland were asking any questions about the existence of this behaviour in their client population. We were unsure ourselves if our direct line of questioning was the right approach as we had concerns that we might add to the risk for the abused.

We asked the initial questions in an invitational and nonthreatening way. This invitational approach allowed both the perpetrator and the sufferer to respond in whatever way they felt was useful for them. Sometimes the question was ignored on the form and sometimes the existing abuse was denied by one or both parties. As the project developed we began to identify other ways of behaviour which suggested to us that violence and abuse might exist. In these cases we would repeatedly re-check on the prevalence of abuse. I will discuss some of the other indicators at length later but it may be sufficient to say that as we became skilled in working with the issue we began to realise that the incidence of abuse and violence were part of a pattern of behaviours which were being played out in front of us during our client contact. We also discovered that our front office staff could identify some patterns of behaviour which were common to most of the perpetrators who contacted them to arrange or re-arrange their appointments.

While we were tentative in pursuing the information about the abuse we were surprised and even shocked to discover that more than 30 per cent of our clients had adult intimate abuse as the underlying difficulty in their relationship. This amounted to over 200 couples each year. While our questions were gender neutral we also found that in our client base the violence and abuse was primarily perpetrated by a man on an intimate female partner. Over the nine years of the project the prevalence of male abusiveness and female fear informed most of our intervention strategies.

We also became aware of the exposure of children to this behaviour and this also placed an onus on us to intervene in an effective way. We were concerned that most couples we worked with had children. Initially we were reassured by some couples’ insistence that their children were unaware of the abuse and violence. But gradually we learned that even when children did not witness any assault they were fully aware of the fear and tension that inhabited their home. As one of our perpetrators said, it would be impossible for anyone living in the small community that is the family not to be aware of the violence and terror that accompanies adult intimate abuse.

At this stage I need to say a little about the language used throughout this book. As the project developed, we found that the words used when we first started to engage with domestic violence became inadequate to describe the issues involved in a comprehensive way. So our language skills were challenged to accurately describe the process and the range of the abuse. We were also challenged to put words on our own experience and the confusion and anxiety that accompany the work. We also had difficulty in relaying to the person experiencing the abuse, what it was like for us to engage with the perpetrator.

All these issues demanded that we developed a language that was helpful. In other words we found ourselves developing a language that was detailed and accurate. This language has allowed us to better explore the issue with both the perpetrator and the sufferer. For the benefit of clarity I will try to demonstrate this process as we go through the publication and I will indicate and try to explain why our language changed.

One word that we have used consistently since we began the project is safety. This refers to our core ambition to do nothing that would further endanger the sufferer. This core ambition became the yardstick by which we measured every move and detail of that move. The challenge to do nothing that would increase risk led us to question even the very notion of doing anything in the context of a stand-alone counselling agency.

The project engaged with both local and national services in an attempt to review our actions. We sought reassurance from both voluntary and government agencies about our strategies. We modified our processes to conform to inter national best practice. We did all this so that we ourselves would be less afraid of endangering anyone. We recognised that good intentions alone were dangerous and that experience and caution were prerequisites of any form of intervention. It is my hope that this publication will also be acknowledged as a project that will at least avoid adding to the risk already existing for many of our clients and people we may never meet.

Another word that we have used since the beginning is accountability. Initially we were concerned with holding the project accountable to the sufferers, the witnesses and the wider community. This we did by publishing our position right from the start. We met with other groups in Ireland and we began to correspond with groups in the UK and in the USA. We were also interested in developing relationships with the Irish legal system.

We were anxious to find out how the perpetrator was held accountable. We realised that the system of accountability was weak and that the perpetrators were seldom, if ever, held accountable for the full extent of their abuse and violence. This weakness in the system was dramatically exposed in the report of Safety and Sanctions published in 1999. Here it was confirmed that in spite of a very visible and chronic problem the level of response was haphazard and sometimes dangerous. Kelleher and O’Connor (1999) clearly demonstrated that the possibility of an effective response by the justice system was remote then. Despite the efforts of many well-intentioned people, the criminal and civil justice system continues to operate in a way that primarily depends on the approach of local agencies and personalities. Without any legislative changes, well informed Gardaí and judges have managed to encourage some abused women to avail of the protection of the law. But in many cases the response of the justice system has been biased or misinformed.

It will probably require some form of constitutional modification, which recognises the gender imbalance that permeates our laws, before we will see effective legislation in the area of intimate abuse. In the meantime abused women will continue to rely on the goodwill and basic humanity of many legal practitioners. These practitioners unintentionally operate in a world of myths, half-truths and disbelief.

What was clear from our initial studies was that the level and pattern of abuse and violence were unrecognised by most of the people who were trying to respond. It was also clear that the perpetrators had an uncanny instinct for deflecting blame and avoiding sanctions. We quickly realised that the abuse and violence continued even when the issue became known to the community and that most efforts to intervene failed to stop the behaviour.

The effect of all this initial exploration left the project with an acute sense of fear. This fear ran like an invisible thread through all our thinking and planning. The anxiety we had was that we might intervene in ways that inadvertently increased the risk of further violence. We were also concerned with the difficulties that might develop for our agency if we were to engage openly with this issue. We were afraid of the possible effects that this exploration might have on the team members and the support staff. But primarily we became aware of the huge reservoir of fear that our initial clients carried throughout their daily lives. This fear was palpable in the first encounters with our clients. We knew that our clients were afraid of what we might do. We knew that this fear compromised their ability to share their experiences with us. This universal fear led the project to its first decision, which was that the sufferer is always our client and that we must hold ourselves accountable to the client.

This decision changed our standing with every perpetrator as it meant that even when we were working with these people our primary concern was not their wellbeing but rather the wellbeing of the person who was suffering. This client identity was new for us as counsellors because it meant that the person in the room with us might not be our client. It also meant that the effect of our work was not measured in terms of the effect on the perpetrator but rather by the effect on the client.

This decision required that we had some very clear and useful policies and procedures. It required a complete rethink on the counselling position that the client is the one asking for help. We were forced to be grounded in our principle that any and every step we followed was designed to increase the safety of the sufferer. If we were to work with perpetrators we were doing so not for the benefit of the perpetrator but to protect the sufferer. This principle informed many of our practices. It challenged us to carefully monitor our procedures by checking and re-checking the effects of our actions on the lives of the sufferers. Even when we were following some established procedure we would monitor its effect on our clients. Over the life of the project we introduced, modified and eliminated many practices and procedures on the advice of our clients.

We developed some initial principles like working towards the safety of the sufferers, holding ourselves and the perpetrator accountable and working with and informing the wider community. The idea of working with the wider community came primarily from our realisation that as a stand-alone project we were not in a position to hold the perpetrator accountable. From extensive literature reviews we learned that the most apparently successful projects worldwide were ones where the interventions were set within the context of an integrated civil and criminal justice response. These successful projects had as their foundation the development of an effective and accurate response to adult intimate violence. Most of them had well-developed services for sufferers and those in recovery. Some of them had also engaged with perpetrators. They also had clear connections with other agencies. The very successful projects were always embedded within the local civil and criminal justice systems.

We began to study the possibility of doing all of the above. The project team decided that if we were to be effective we needed to work both in the private sphere of each individual case and the public sphere of the inadequate community response. We began the public work of the project under all four strands. These strands included working with victims and survivors, working with perpetrators, developing an inter-agency approach and encouraging practical reforms within the Irish civil and criminal justice system.

We decided that all our clients who were suffering from violence and abuse in their intimate relationship would be interviewed by the project team. These clients were to become the touchstone of our project. They informed us of their experi ence and they responded to our anxieties. They continually allowed us to debate with them the efficacy of our methods. They helped us understand the complexity of their experiences. They co-operated with us in monitoring our approach. They told us very clearly of the dangers inherent in our work. They advised us of pitfalls that we had ignored. They challenged some of our initial assumptions. Above all they encouraged us by their generosity to us and to other clients of the project.

In the interest of our clients we also decided to engage with the perpetrators to see if we could effect a reduction in the abuse and the elimination of the violence. We had learned that some relationships are such that what we might regard as abusive behaviour was embedded in the behaviour of the couple without any sense of fear or terror. Because of this exper ience we did not aim to eliminate abuse but rather to stop the continuing growth of fear. We were also aware that the violence nearly always resulted in fear and we could not be effective if the behaviour continued and the fear continued to grow. We required that the violence would stop before we engaged with any perpetrator in the group.

These decisions were based on research in other countries where such engagement seemed to have the desired effect. Some other projects had developed a model of engagement with perpetrators which included structured group work. These groups had also a built-in mechanism for regularly monitoring its effects. We developed a structured group approach which would fit within the limits of the project team. This approach needed to be developed in a careful and deliberate way. This gradual and initially very tentative engagement involved extensive training both for the team who were to engage with the project and the support staff who would administer it. It also resulted in our putting in place an effective supervisory process which would allow the team to explore and manage the personal effects of working with this issue. This exploration was invaluable as it allowed all six team members to examine our attitudes to male and female issues of control, abuse and violence. As the team was gender balanced, what emerged was recognition that if we were to get a clear understanding of the dynamics of abuse the three male members needed to develop a picture of the constant level of risk that women experience. The men on the team needed to try and appreciate why it is different for a man or a woman to walk alone in a public place. We needed to recognise the sense of being alert that most women develop in response to risk. We began to acknowledge that a woman is at greater risk because she is a woman. This continuum of danger is the basic underlying force that sets the foundation on which the perpetrator builds his tactics.

As a team we also explored some of the language and myths that continue to denigrate the victims and to minimise the behaviours. What we didn’t acknowledge initially was the deviousness and evilness of the long-term male intimate abuser.

Other project elements

The third and fourth elements of the project set goals which we found most difficult to attain. These elements were outside our immediate control and involved the energy and commitment of other agencies. This energy and commitment to working toward the safety of sufferers was well developed in a small but powerful group of non-governmental agencies, some of whom were financially supported by the state. The government or statutory agencies were at best lukewarm and at worst dismissive of our goals. What was most difficult to understand was the initial reaction of goodwill and support which failed to translate into effective action. The ability of these agencies, both voluntary and statutory, to work collaboratively with each other was mired in self-protection and mistrust. This lack of interagency co-operation is exploited by the perpetrators, who come to know the weaknesses in our community response.

Because the project was acutely aware that the issue of adult intimate violence and abuse was regarded as a crime, we felt sure from the start that any intervention that failed to integrate itself within the justice system would run the risk of colluding with the perpetrator. In order to minimise this risk we were anxious to hear from the client at every step of the process. We operated a policy of limited confidentiality which allowed us to engage with other agencies in the interest of safety for our clients. This limited confidentiality clause was very specific and was signed by the perpetrator before any working engagement was commenced. We also developed connections with the police at both local and national level.

We began a correspondence with the Department of Justice and Equality which has developed over the years. Some funding eventually came through this department’s Probation and Welfare Service with the hope of integrating our project in a formal way with the courts. All these efforts were driven by a realisation that we had on record evidence of crime which we felt obliged to share with the justice system. We were unable to create a formal route through which this information could be shared.

Initially our connection with the Gardaí and the courts was informal and based on the support of individuals within these systems. Our aim then in the area of the justice system was to design and develop a model of intervention which would be integrated within the framework of the Irish justice system. We did not look for legislative change because we were aware that change of law does not always lead to change of practice. We were more interested in the development of consistent practices and procedures that would lead to the greater use of the judicial system by the clients of the project. This consistency we believed would also encourage other sufferers, who might never be clients of the project, to make better use of the judicial system in the interest of their safety and that of their children.

During the first few years of our project and while we were screening in a gender-neutral way, we recognised that the vast majority of our clients were women and an equally vast majority of the perpetrators we encountered were men. This encouraged the project to work with groups of male perpetrators while also engaging with any female perpetrators who presented themselves to the project. In all the years of the project we encountered very few male sufferers of adult intimate violence. We did work with a number of abused men but found that most of these men were unlikely to be afraid of their abuser. We learned that the level of fear was an indicator of the level of risk in the relationship. But we also learned that all risk indicators were only indicators of the possibility of danger. We also came to recognise that while the clients might not themselves be aware of the risks they were exposed to, they were very alert to anything that might increase the risk to themselves. These women had become used to the daily routine of intimidation and degradation in a way that diminished their anxiety, but their levels of fear and terror could be heightened by any change in the routine.

Many of our clients had already absorbed the minimising language of their abusers. They had learned to speak about their experience in terms which did not reflect the seriousness of their situation. They would relay stories of violence and abuse almost as if it was about someone else. They would describe scenes of aggression and terror in a casual and dismissive way. They would almost persuade us that their situation was fairly routine. They would find it hard to accept that their minds were already contaminated and that their bodies and spirits were in danger.

Carol was one of those partners who told me that she was repeatedly punched in the lower back by her husband. But when I asked her to give the details and the context of these assaults she told me that he was ‘only playing’ and that she was able to cope with the discomfort. What I later learned was that Carol had only one functioning kidney. Her husband knew this and even though he was ‘only playing’ she was terrified that she might suffer some damage to her good kidney. When she was invited to re-examine his assaultive behaviour in terms of intention and manipulation she tried for a few meetings to resist my analysis. It was only when she attended some group sessions with other victims and survivors of intimate abuse that she began to be less dismissive of her experience. She also began to acknowledge that the psychological pressure she was under was even more frightening than the danger to her physical wellbeing. She became more aware of the risk she was exposed to, yet at the same time was able to see how she instinctively managed the risk. By agreeing with her abuser that he did not intend to harm her, she managed to avoid the anger she might feel if she saw his behaviour as intentional. By avoiding this anger she instinctively protected herself from escalating the tension between them. Sadly Carol had become part of the majority of targeted women who would want us to believe that their partner’s behaviour was reactive. The target women who live under the influence of skilled offenders have become, unwittingly, the most persuasive voices in the campaign to excuse the abuse and minimise its effects.

Yet clients like Carol were instantly dismissive of any change of behaviour that might increase the risk to themselves. They had learned over time how to survive in the danger zone. These women had developed strategies that had allowed them to monitor and even anticipate what behaviour their abusers might adopt in some circumstances. But they were all very alert to the danger of introducing some new element into the relationship. Even the knowledge that she was meeting with us could add enormously to the danger she was in.

One of our clients was referred to us by another agency. She needed to get her husband to drive her to the appointment as she lived in a rural area. She did not make it back