So I just read a piece in Alternet, about the alarming numbers of women in jail who have a long and varied history of abuse, and how that plays into their incarceration rates. The word that is not being used is PTSD (or acronym I should say). Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
You see, when you abuse any child, when you traumatize them, you change them for life. And if you sufficiently traumatize them severely enough, or in systematic fashion, you alter their ability to fit into “normative” society to a great degree. If they develop PTSD from that abuse and it is never treated, their brain chemistry will be permanently altered.
For this piece I am focusing on females, but much of this will be true for males too.
Females already face alarmingly fluid rules about what is acceptable behavior. As the story pointed out one rather crazy fact:
“Women nationwide are often incarcerated if they fail to protect their children from their abusers. If they harm their abusers to save their children, they are prosecuted, but if they fail to do so, they are incarcerated for allowing the children to be injured.”(Alternet)
Talk about a catch-22.
1. If a woman is abused and she fails to protect her child, she is arrested for allowing the child to be injured.
2. If she fights back she is incarcerated for assault and battery.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. After all, I am sure if she fails to kill him, “He was only joking your Honor!” Seriously, who runs this circus?
But back to the back story.
Why is it that these women are more likely to end up on the wrong side of everything?
Because when you allow someone to be systematically abused, you condition them to be victims in perpetuity. At some point they have to make a choice. Keep taking it over and over til someone chokes the life out of them, or beats the life out of them, or they send a terrible message by using deadly force.
Because remember, women are not going to generally be strong enough to go fist to fist with a man. This won’t be some boxing match where they bloody each other and walk off to drink as best friends. So if she has to stop an attack, she has to hit him so hard that he can’t get back up. There is a fine line between killing and maiming when you are playing that fucked up game.
This is the untenable position every woman is put in during the commission of a violent assault against her as an adult or child. Take your beating and possibly your rape, watch your kids get beat or worse too, or hit that fucker so hard he can’t get back up and hope he don’t die as a result. How the courts missed that rather unmissable factor is beyond me. I guess it’s just a testament to how stupid this patriarchy really is.
Hey don’t get mad at me—someone has to say this shit out loud. Otherwise it never gets into the discussion where it belongs.
As a woman who has been beaten by a grown man (not by my husband thank you very much), I can tell you that a grown man will just pick your ass up and throw it. A man can hit you hard enough that you will grab air. And you can hit him, but even as a strong person, the possibility of that penetrating his testosterone fueled rage is unlikely to do anything but piss him off. Without using some kind of weapon, you have no hope against most adult males intent on hurting you.
Let that sink in for a moment.
When a woman fights a man, it would be the equivalent of an 18 year old man beating up a 10 year old boy in a total knock-down-drag-out. That is about the strength differential you are looking at, especially in terms of upper body strength.
So what do we do in this messed up situation? We throw them in jail for winning, we throw them in jail for losing. We don’t even throw them in jail for fighting at all, just for being in the presence of an abuser.
The edict against women ever being angry or aggressive is so incredibly powerful in this culture. So powerful that she is not allowed to defend herself against a much stronger and larger opponent.
But again—what does living in a world where people can systematically abuse you any way they choose do to a child as they grow into womanhood?
First it normalizes abusive relationships. You think—okay this isn’t normal or good, she will just avoid this situation in the future. Yea, but it doesn’t work that way. Living like that for years as a child, conditions women (and men) on a very deep level --a subconscious level to recreate situations that feel normal to them. If their childhood was full of violence, then try as they might as adults, they will at some point, if not repeatedly find themselves in work-places, in relationships and communities where abuse and violence is “normative.”
It’s not a conscious thing. And that is what people in the world, even in the courts and law enforcement fail to recognize. A person with that past doesn’t sit down and say to themselves, “hmmm my current job is good and that cute guy treats me right, but I think I will hook up with that violent loser next door and quit my good job, and work at some shit stand for minimum wage.”
Nope, you get sucked in. It’s all very subtle. It’s the kind of stuff that only a therapist could help you untangle, because it’s expectations, habits and conditioning deep in your brain. It’s right up there with the Manchurian Candidate, only you-yourself are the target.
Then there is the “substance abuse”. Hmmmm, well you notice how veterans often have substance abuse problems? That’s because a combat vet—like the survivor of systematic abuse and torture, sometimes have to deal with emotions and feelings that normal people don’t generally deal with. So they self medicate. They find something to bring the anxiety down, they find something to slow the flashbacks, the feelings of shame and degradation because they cannot figure out themselves, how to make this insanity stop.
You can make good grades in school, you can be successful professionally, live in a big mansion and be the toast of the town, but that won’t save you from the land mines in your own psyche waiting to be set off by your triggers and fears.
These survivors often live on the fringes of society. Not because they don’t like people, but because they cannot relate to you. If you have had genuinely normal, non-violent life, and you are happy and well adjusted, then the things you think about when the world gets quiet, are not the same as the thoughts and memories that constantly haunt them. They speak a different language. They value different things. These experiences breed loneliness because of these differences that go to their roots as individuals.
When regular people are telling happy stories about childhood—these people have nowhere to go in their heads to tell similar stories. Every part of their life is tinged with sadness and cracked by violence. So when you are talking about Christmas or school plays, they are thinking about beatings at Christmas, or how they ran away or told on an abuser and no one believed them. Their lives are an incredible departure from what we push as happy and well adjusted. Even on a good day, a happy day, that darkness is waiting for them when they go home, when they are alone in the car, when they do or don’t do anything. These are the ugly voices and memories that they try to silence with drugs and alcohol, because there is no peace in their lives. There can’t be, because they cannot find peace within themselves.
So these kids, these girls learn early on that there is a terrible double standard. That what happens to girls isn’t as important, if it’s even considered at all. It’s okay to beat them, molest them, rape them, sell them, use them as disposable things. So at some point these women give up, trying to fit in, trying to follow the rules of an insane society that has no interest in saving them or helping them.
If it’s okay to sell them as sex slaves or beat them—why would anyone care if they stole something? How could that compare to rape or human trafficking? How could the systematic destruction of their being, possibly compare to a blunt or a weekend bender? Why on earth would they give a shit about what you think of them? They know, everyone knows anyhow, and no one does nothing, but now suddenly their comportment THEIR COMPORTMENT matters more than the crimes against their persons. WTF? Really? In their experience, the world is a fucked up place, and everyone is looking for a person to hustle and their choice at some point may be to be hustled or to join in.
Sort of like bullying. In some places one gets to choose only, to be bullied or to become a bully.
When you do that to a child, you stunt their growth emotionally, and psychologically, and you set them up to be more likely to become dependent upon others for their living later in life.
These women grow up, learning so much about human behavior, about sexual politics, at the expense of learning anything else—maybe even at the expense of learning to read. Their PTSD takes hold and they can’t hold a steady job, they cannot seem to stop themselves from finding more abusers as life goes on, and they sink deeper into poverty, abuse, and possibly addiction—maybe eventually homelessness.
None of this is surprising. None of this is unpredictable. On the contrary, all of this is very predictable. But what boggles my mind is how people who have a reasonable education, have failed to figure this out, or worse yet, don’t seem to care.
These women don’t just need programs to show them life skills. They need mental health counseling to help them unravel and defuse those ticking abuse bombs in their heads. Otherwise their successes will be measured in weeks --not years, just like their relationships, their jobs, and living arrangements.
One thing that PTSD does to a person is that it causes them to hit that “reset” button in life frequently and not at good strategic times. But often at the worst time, so that their behavior alienates friends, lovers and family, and employers, forcing them to start all over again, and over again, and over again; rebuilding over and over support systems they never had in childhood. Why? Because it was not normal to have a support system and so the subconscious brain says you have to get rid of that, and then it goes along sabotaging whatever one has built for a life.
Meanwhile people on the outside who don’t understand this process or what drives it, shake their heads and mutter and walk away. They can see that you are doing this to yourself, but they cannot figure out how or why.
When you abuse a child, when you allow a child to be abused—this is the life you are setting them up for.