If Your Man Knew What to Say, Here’s What He Might Say If He Knew You Feared His Potential For Violence...

Excerpted from Warren Farrell's Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say.

(Permission to reprint granted by Warren Farrell.)
See www.warrenfarrell.com and www.warrenfarrell.info.

 

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Domestic Violence, Female Style

“Reputation Ruining” via False Accusations of Abuse

Thomas Kiernan, author of Citizen Murdoch (as well as 25 other books), reported in the New Jersey Law Journal his experience attending four different seminars for wives contemplating divorce. He reported that in all four cases, a female lawyer conducted the seminar and “recommended, with knowing winks and smirks, the ‘advantages’ of ‘establishing’ or ‘creating’ a ‘record’ of spousal violence, whether true or not, prior to the filing of a divorce complaint.”89

What upset Kiernan was that a law designed to prevent domestic violence (the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act) was openly being used to falsely accuse men of spouse abuse. But the devastation to a man’s reputation and career is the less important consequence. The false accusation allows the woman to obtain the children because the father is a suspected abuser. The false accusation also justifies a woman being able to obtain an emergency restraining order to kick a man out of his home prior to the commencement of divorce proceedings, thereby also increasing her likelihood of obtaining the children because they are “living with the mother now and stability dictates their remaining with the mother.”

But this is what most astonished Kiernan: “the number of women attending the seminars who smugly – indeed boastfully – announced that they had already sworn out false or grossly exaggerated domestic-violence complaints against their hapless husbands, and that the device worked! To add amazement to my astonishment, the lawyer-lecturers invariably congratulated the self-confessed miscreants.”

Unsubstantiated and false accusations of spouse abuse or child abuse ruin a man’s reputation even if he is ultimately found to be innocent.

Why are men so damaged by “reputation ruining”? Men’s ability to earn leads to their ability to gain love. Destroying earning potential means destroying love potential. Observe how frequently a man will die from a heart attack or cancer – or just commit suicide – shortly after his reputation is ruined. Yet these deaths are recorded as heart attacks, not husband abuse. And not murder.

Property Abuse and Career Destruction

Item. As I walked into the Pannikin – a coffee shop where I occasionally edit my writing – I spotted a friend of mine who looked depressed. It turned out that he and his wife were divorcing; his wife had just destroyed all the architectural plans he was working on.

We have traditionally thought of the body of work that men produce over the course of a lifetime as the psychological equivalent of the children that women produce over the course of a lifetime. Is “husband career damage” via property abuse a female style of abuse, albeit unrecognized and therefore invisible? The only hint we have is that more than two-thirds of lesbians who were abused had their property destroyed or damaged.90 We don’t have any data for men. It is interesting that only when women are the victims of property abuse do we care enough to study it. In contrast, when I am watching a film and the woman is ruining a man’s career, as in First Wives’ Club, I am saddened to hear the cheering from among so many in the audience, especially women.