Breaking the Mold Before the Abuse Begins

Talk about tense.

Normally, it’s just the guys, 14 batterers in court-ordered therapy, and the group’s two male facilitators.

Add a woman to this mix and the atmosphere becomes charged, electric with unspoken sentiment: They want me to understand that they aren’t really that bad, that they understand what they have done, that it only happened once, that it will never happen again.

I, on the other hand, have no urgent need to be understood. All I want is for them to carry on as they always do, to act as if I am invisible.

Fat chance.

They are no more capable of ignoring my presence than I am of listening to their introductions without probing the words for signs of blame and denial.

These men, most of them anyway, have been attending the group at Santa Anita Family Service in Covina for many weeks. They have moved past the bitch-made-me-do it phase, but before long, someone will utter a slightly twisted sentence, betraying his need for distance from the crime: “I came up behind my wife and grabbed her like this,” he says, “causing her to injure her knee.”

Aha. Why didn’t he just say: I wrecked her knee when I grabbed her and forced her against a wall? Or onto the floor? Or wherever?

Maybe he’ll come to that conclusion eventually. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe he will never lift a hand to his mate again. Or maybe he’ll kill her.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to judge so harshly. These guys may not be here of their own volition, but they seem to be trying. For their wives or girlfriends, and their children, this may be the only shot they’ve got at leaving the violence behind, at rebuilding the wreckage at home.

As one of the men puts it: “I took the quick, easy way that I saw growing up. Now, I gotta break the mold.”

Whether he can is a question with no clear answer.

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Time was, in this state, a man’s first conviction for spouse abuse was essentially a freebie. He could punch out his wife and get the first one “on the house” if he agreed to counseling. A judge might require him to spend several months in a program such as the one I am visiting. If he completed the program, his conviction would be expunged, the criminal record simply erased.

On Jan. 1, however, a new law went into effect. Authored by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), the law says a batterer, whether or not he gets jail time, must spend 52 weeks in counseling. And the conviction, once written in disappearing ink, is now indelible.

This is good, clarifying news for a society that condemns spouse abuse and minimizes it at the same time. Often, judges unconsciously collude with the abusers. They may be reluctant to jail a man because of the economic stress it could put on his family. Or they may be incapable of believing that the charming, educated person standing before them is wreaking havoc on his loved ones behind closed doors. Or, as one judge in Michigan proved last week when he literally slapped the wrist of the man he had just convicted of spouse abuse, a judge may believe a man was provoked to violence by his wife.

To give judges a little shove in the right direction, the Family Violence Prevention Fund, a San Francisco-based advocacy group, has just created a primer on the subject of domestic violence--a “virtual conference” on CD-ROM.

One thing judges should learn, one thing that the convicted batterers at Santa Anita Family Service are hearing this night, is that when it comes to predicting which child may become a batterer, witnessing abuse is a greater determining factor than being abused.

These men may never raise a hand to their sons, but they are molding them just as surely into batterers as if they were handing them a road map and keys to the car.

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And so tonight in Covina, the subject is children.

The facilitators, psychology doctoral students Jim Ali and Jason Williams, hope the men, who range in age from 20s to 50s, will grasp two ideas: that witnessing violence as children has played a part in what they have become, and that beating their wives is birthing the same demons in their own kids.

“How many times did we say, ‘I looked at my father hitting my mother and said, “I never want to be that way?” ’ And here we all are in this room tonight,” Ali says.

The men nod.

“What screwed me up as a kid,” says one, “was when the police would come to our house, they didn’t arrest anybody. Now they take you to jail automatically, but it’s like 20, 30 years too late for me.”

In a sense he’s right.

But I still have the urge to correct him, to tell him that he’s not the victim here, that if it’s too late for anyone, it’s too late for his wife and kids.

I keep my counsel. It’s already tense enough in this room. And that conclusion, after all, will only mean something if he comes to it on his own.

* Robin Abcarian’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.