While driving home yesterday I listened to a report on NPR about Domestic Violence courts in Chicago.
During the course of the report they mentioned the following statistic:
The two most dangerous times for a women subject to domestic violence from her partner are when she’s trying to leave him and when she’s pregnant.
I suppose I can see the leaving part as a way to piss off the asshole abuser…
…but pregnant women?
I was thoroughly shocked! I’m not second guessing this statement (although if someone knows that it should be feel free to mention it…wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen something like that happen).
I mean, it’s bad enough that someone is knocking the snot out of someone else…especially when you’re supposed to be in love with the other person. How in the hell does someone knock around a preganant woman? Those guys aren’t despicable enough beating their wives/girlfriends already?
I’d seriously like to hear an answer for this. You’d think that some protective instinct should kick in if a woman is preganant with your child (let’s go with the assumption that the baby is the beater’s and some other guy’s baby). You have a woman who is now much more vulnerable and the beater is putting at risk two lives!
I guess I’m looking for a sociologist or a psychiatrist (or a criminal psychologist) to explain what the hell is going through those guys minds when they do something like this. Beating women goes against the grain of most everything guys were taught while growing up…beating pregnant women seems almost unbelievable (at least for all but the biggest sicko’s…certainly not to be as common as that report suggested).
Well, I’m a member of none of the professions you described but I’d assume one of two things:
(A) Moodiness. Women may act more moody during pregnancy, or else more needy which irritates the man and drives him to beat her.
(B) Resentfulness. The man is jealous or resentful of the baby which is going to mess up his life, give him another mouth to feed, keep his woman from waiting on him, suck up his cash… etc etc. The beating is as much an attack on the unborn child as it is on the mother.
Assuming the child is unplanned, resentment, fear and anger might be triggers. But even if the pregnancy is a planned one, being an expectant parent is a high-stress situation, and negative behaviors (like overeating, drinking to excess or beating on one’s spouse) tend to be exacerbated by stress.
I will have to challenge Jophiel’s suggestion that the expectant woman’s behaviors (neediness, moodiness) are a factor. As I understand it, the motivations behind spousal abuse (physical or emotional) have everything to do with the abuser’s issues and very little/nothing to do with what the victim does or does not do, says or does not say. If an abuser feels the need to abuse, he will find an “excuse” when he needs it.
Robin, I agree with you about finding any excuse. However, it seems that many battered wives/girlfriends learn to be meek and quiet and stay out of the way around their battering husband/boyfriend. It stands to reason that this might be harder to do the more needs the woman has. While it might not actually be the fact that the woman needs help off the couch that triggers the event, you’d have to agree it’s a lot harder to stay in the woodwork during the pregnancy.
This probably doesn’t even make it the status of WAG, but there are those men out there who suspect (occasionally with justification I suppose) that a woman might have intentionally gotten pregnant as a means to “trap” him. I’ve heard the “I bet she didn’t really take her pill” theories before. It’s still pathetic even if it were true.
I’ve known a lot of women who were abused when they were pregnant. There are a few reasons. 1. they are home more 2. they have more needs so they may ask the guy for more things. Most of the time, guys just flip out & beat the crap out of the woman & she loses her [their] baby.
BTW, Victims of Crimes can get free hospitalization.
[[BTW, Victims of Crimes can get free hospitalization.]] Hey, where do I sign up?!
Actually I’m going to look into this. I think the oft-quoted statement that pregnant women get beat up most may be an urban legend, just like the one about Superbowl Sunday being a high risk day for domestic violence.
I’m not a psychologist either, but I had a good friend who was beaten during her pregnancy and did manage to get out of the marriage. The ‘reason’ the guy gave for the beating was ‘he felt out of control of her’ as if * the baby was in control, or he felt Mary had MORE control. *
Not that I think males who are prone to violence towards their wives NEED that much of a reason, other than to be in control of another person. They are cowards at heart, because so few beat other men, so when they claim, ‘they can’t control themselves’ they prove themselves to be liars too.
My father could beat us, or my mom half senseless, and let the police be called and you never saw someone get in control faster!
Regardless of the fact that violent abuse of others is reprehensible (and especially pregnant women), within the cohort of those pre-disposed to abuse their significant others it shouldn’t be too surprising that pregnancy is often a high stress time for both women and men (for several of the aforementioned reasons) that can exacerbate tendencies to act out with violence.
In reading some of the recent articles on domestic violence, however, some odd facts that I would not have expected have come to light. Apparently just over 50% of domestic violence episodes (ie hitting, slapping, smacking etc.) are actually started by women but finished by men and due to the relative (average) disparity in size and strength women typically come out on the short end of these encounters and the men wind up getting packed off to jail (as well they should be). This is really kind of surprising insofar as I would never have guessed that women would be that violently agressive in those proportions.
Until seeing that I had never really believed the stories I heard from law enforcement friends that the absolute worst domestic violence beatings they saw were typically when two gay women of relatively equal size got into it. They explained the reasons were typically that when women really fight no quarter is given and the level of ferocity is sometimes stunning and because one person is not overwhelmingly stronger than the other the fights can last quite a long time and more injury ensues.
In response to Astro’s statistic regarding 50% of violent episodes being “started” by the woman, I offer this scenario:
My father regularly beat my mother. The scene inevitably went like this: they would have a verbal argument, he would back her into a corner, yelling, cursing, shaking his finger in her face and making threatening gestures, but never actually touching her until she finally pushed him away. My layperson’s theory here is that her shoving him away gave him “permission” to hit her, because “she started it.”
I think that this sort of pattern is very common in relationships in which there is abuse. The abuser goads his victim into some sort of violence against him, (and the victim, who has her own learned patterns, complies) giving him, in his mind, reason for “hitting back.” He can say that he couldn’t help it, she made him do it, and she may very well believe that this is true. Hence the number of women who stay in abusive relationships, convinced that if they can just be “good enough” the abuse will stop.
Domestic violence is not uncommon and it is an abhorrent crime. But the fact is that there is no evidence that it occurs more often against women when they are pregnant. In 1993, Patricia Ireland, then president of the National Organization of Women made a statement in a PBS interview, saying that “battery of pregnant women is the number one cause of birth defects in this country.” Another person around the same time claimed that a recent March of Dimes report showed the same thing. It was printed in a variety of places, including Time magazine. The myth spread, with no one providing any evidence of it being true. The March of Dimes even asked Time magazine to make a retraction, because they had never issued such a report and indeed had never heard of any such thing. Time finally did apologize for its misinformation on Dec. 6th, 1993 under the heading “Inaccurate Information.”
For more info. on this, check out the book, “Who Stole Feminism” by Christina Hoft.
Your contention in the post above suggests that Domestic Violence is not a leading cause of birth defects. I’m not a doctor but this seems reasonable…I can’t really see how a defect could be caused by beating the mother (although it could certainly kill the baby).
This does not mean, however, that the two most dangerous times for victims of domestic abuse is when they are leaving and when they are pregnant is wrong.
‘I think the oft-quoted statement that pregnant women get beat up most may be an urban legend’
I didn’t say ‘most’. It can’t be most because it would only occur for pregnant women. It does occur, however.
You can get back hospital costs, work related costs, etc, for violence, from prisoners making money doing license plates, etc, for California, the forms are at: http://www.boc.ca.gov/Victims.htm
There is a time limit of one year, however. I think that they pay to $40,000, but am not sure.
[[I didn’t say ‘most’. It can’t be most because it would only occur for pregnant women. It does occur, however.]]
It does occur, and it is beyond detestable. The question is whether there is a higher rate of violence against women while they’re pregnant than at other times. That seems to be the premise of this thread. I haven’t seen epidemiological data that show this.
I would suspect that pregnant women probably do not actually get abused more (looking at overall numbers, rather than the beatings a specific individual woman takes). They probably just report more. The women are no longer just fending for themselves. They are now also fending for someone with whom they feel a very strong bond that involves a protective instinct. I think this would lead to a higher report rate.
As to why would a man continue to beat his SO if she were pregnant… Why would a guy give a rat’s ass about beating his pregnant SO when he was perfectly willing to beat his SO? The guy is already beating someone that he claims to love, so why should beating the same person be any more taboo in his mind if she is now carrying someone who he’s never met, and who may end up causing him problems?
There is probably an increase in beatings from some men due to stressors listed in above posts. I think the increased beatings may be (at least somewhat) offset by men who actually do have respect for the baby (it could be a boy after all), and quit beating their SO (at least for the duration of the pregnancy).