Around the same time that Hamish Sinclair was asking his seminal question on why men beat each other up, a community organizer in Boston named David Adams ran a monthly gathering that he refers to as “very ’70s”—by which he means consciousness raising, hand-holding, and kumbaya—out of the Boston Men’s Center. One day, Adams was approached by a group of women, friends of his in the community, who’d begun a battered women’s group. The women asked Adams for help. It was one thing, they said, to help victims after they’d been abused, give them support through the community, but what about the men who’d done the abuse? Why couldn’t that be stopped in the first place? The women didn’t feel it was in their purview to help abusers, so they asked Adams to step in. The formation of Sinclair’s ManAlive was still a few years away. There was no real research on how to address men’s battering. Adams and the women were far ahead of the rest of the country; VAWA was still decades away.
The first meetings were held at Adams’s apartment, and they’d invite battered women in to discuss what abuse did to them and their children. Adams didn’t know to categorize it as batterer intervention at the time, but what he was really doing was a kind of restorative justice. But there was no plan to follow, no protocol, no best practices guidelines. Adams and his colleagues were learning as they went along. “We were so naive,” he said. “We just thought we’d tell them we think it’s wrong [and they’d stop].”
His work in those early days led Adams to write a dissertation that tried to dissect what happened in abusive households that didn’t happen in households where there was no abuse. Adams had grown up with a violent father, had seen and felt firsthand how such hidden violence could devastate a family. In his PhD dissertation, he’d looked at childcare and housework in houses where there was abuse versus those where abuse was not present. He assumed the research would support his theory that abusers did far less of the housework and childcare. But Adams was shocked to find that both men did about the same amount in each home, 21%.1 Where the two groups tended to differ was that the non-abusers knew they were getting a good deal and appreciated and acknowledged their wives’ double shifts, whereas the abusers would say things like, “I do a lot more than most men, but does she appreciate that?” Adams’s research showed that the abuser’s perspective was that they “weren’t being appreciated for what they did, rather than what their wives were doing.” Non-abusers, on the other hand, “would say things like ‘I’m lucky. My wife does a lot.’ And that acknowledgment meant a lot to the wives.” Abusers also tended to be more critical of their wives’ housekeeping.
What Adams realized, then, was that the clinical narcissism of these men kept them from being able to really see how their behavior impacted their victims. “Narcissism filters how they see everything,” Adams told me.
David Adams, like Hamish Sinclair, seems to embody the geography and culture in which he resides. He holds himself more rigidly, speaks more carefully. He is serious, less cheerily confrontational with the men in his groups, on the quiet side. He has graying curly hair, a mustache, and, like many who work in the social services field, his own story of childhood violence. An abusive, emotionally stunted father. A mother who looked away. His oldest memory is one from when he was four years old, his maternal grandmother taking him to the granite quarry where his father worked. He said his grandmother hated his father and vice versa. He stood at the edge that day with her as she pointed to one of the tiny dots—men working deep in the hole—and she said, “That’s your daddy, there.” Adams told her no, his daddy was much bigger. It was impossible, that tiny little speck of a person, no bigger than an ant from his vantage at the edge. But then eventually he got the point. How very small his father was, how he could be a different man than his father had been. It was one of the most lasting and profound lessons of his life, something that today he calls his greatest gift from his grandmother. As he grew up, he made it his mission to be as different as possible from his father, who belittled education and thought boys should be tough. Adams kept his face in a book for two decades, until that education so despised by his father could offer him an escape. “Kids are quite literal,” Adams said to me, “and it was a revelation that I didn’t have to be like him.”
Adams eventually formed what is widely recognized as the country’s first batterer intervention program: Emerge, a program for controlling and abusive behavior. Along with the Duluth program, Emerge is perhaps the nation’s most widely emulated. The program is forty weeks long and covers topics ranging from effects of abuse on family members to jealousy and healthy communication. A few years ago, Emerge also began offering classes on parenting as well. No one wants to identify as being a “batterer,” Adams says, so Emerge reframed how they talk about what they do. About 30% of their participants come voluntarily now, and the rest are court-ordered. (Nationally, most batterer intervention programs are 5% voluntary.)
Hamish and Adams share an essential origin story in that it was women who compelled them both to act, feminists who pointed out the need for male allies. They wanted men to join in their fight.
One day, early on, Adams told me the story of a woman who brought in a recording of her abusive husband to his group. On the tape, the husband said things like, “I wouldn’t have such anger and rage if I weren’t so crazy in love with you.” It was the first time he really heard and understood how manipulative abusers could be. How they romanticized both their abuse and their jealousy. The “I love you so much you make me this way” excuse. The “I wouldn’t do X if you didn’t do Y” rationalization. Blame and denial. Adams and other researchers point out the framework of these kinds of sentiments. They minimize the violence, rationalizing abusive behavior and blaming the victim. And it works. The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming. And then comes the remorse. The deep, tearful apology, the promises of better behavior, the adoration and claims of love. The script is strikingly similar no matter who’s saying it.
One morning, I sat in on a series of domestic violence cases in a Cleveland courtroom and in one case, an offender had broken his no-contact order by calling the victim repeatedly. In fact, he called her more than four hundred times in a three-week period. She accepted the calls about 20% of the time. The prosecutor, Joan Bascone, played for the court just a small collection of the recorded calls, while the offender, with a shaved head, in a forest green prison uniform stood smirking in front of the judge, Michelle Earley. Here is a small sampling of things he said to her:
“Give me one more chance. One more. Jail’s not worth it. This shit ain’t worth it.”
“You’re blowing it out of proportion. I was just fucking with you. I wasn’t trying to kill you … Why you keep fighting me instead of helping me get outta here? Why ain’t you apologizing, too, for staying out all night?”
“I am in love with you, bitch, and I wish I wasn’t, ’cause you’re putting me through fucking misery. Why you doing this to me?”
“I don’t owe you no explanation … You done nothing but put me in jail. You ain’t sent no letters or pictures. I don’t care if you come to court on me. I ain’t calling you no more.”
“You don’t got to come to court. They talk about me, you tell them to shut the fuck up. They lying to you. Just tell them you’re going to file for a dismissal. Don’t let the prosecutor give you another chance to come to court.”
“You ain’t gotta sign. Don’t answer the door … I trust you. I don’t think you’re doing anything. You’re not dumb enough.”
“Let’s go down there and make it official. I believe in marriage. It’s a commitment for life, dude … Wait till I get out. I have people watching you.”
Blame, minimize, rationalize, and apology and promise: they were all right there, laid out in his words. The coercion, the manipulation, the emotional and verbal abuse, the threats, the dehumanizing. His attempts to make her believe that he is stronger than the system, that he knows more than the system. The tapes went on for more than an hour in court that day, far more than what I’ve included here, and in that time I noticed this, too: he failed to use her proper name even once.
Batterer intervention groups like Emerge and ManAlive have proliferated over the past two decades; there are now more than fifteen hundred nationwide. While they aim to stop physical abuse and intimidation, the more nuanced programs also work to help an abuser recognize destructive patterns, understand the harm they cause, develop empathy for their partners, and offer them an education in emotional intelligence. But their methods and philosophies vary widely. There is a persistent attitude, particularly among law enforcement, that they are a waste of time and money, which Adams finds perpetually frustrating. Certifications vary from state to state. The court orders vary. The curriculum varies. The quality of the group leader varies. The length of time in the program varies. And in terms of social impact, it’s a new field, still finding its way. Judges, too, are often not trained in the differences between, say, batterer intervention and anger management, so you might have a judge order an offender to anger management, even in a jurisdiction where batterer intervention groups proliferate. The fact that only 55% of the men who go through Emerge actually complete the program is a sign of its rigor and efficacy, Adams says.2 “I’m always distrustful of programs that complete higher numbers. It’s like bad schools. They graduate everybody.”
If it takes the average victim seven or eight times to leave an abuser, why do we expect offenders to get it right the first time? So many studies on efficacy measure all offenders equally, meaning both those who drop out of programs and those who finish, he told me. And of course those who finish will have different outcomes. The longer participants stay in the program, the more likely lasting change can be. “It’s not an all or nothing thing,” Adams said. An expansive book by Edward W. Gondolf that looks at the current state of batterer intervention, The Future of Batterer Programs, says essentially that we are still in an early phase of such treatment and he cautions against putting too much stock in the idea of a predictive risk assessment: “The tough question facing batterer programs, and the criminal justice field in general, is how to identify the especially dangerous men … The shift, therefore, has been from prediction to ongoing risk management that entails repeated assessments, monitoring compliance, and revising interventions along the way.”3
Anger management is often conflated with batterer intervention as if they are equivalent—indeed courts across the country today still often sentence abusers to anger management courses, as happened with Ray Rice in 2014. After he clocked his girlfriend—now wife—in an elevator so hard he knocked her unconscious, a New Jersey judge tossed the domestic violence charges and sent him to anger management counseling.4 Such outcomes speak to a deep misunderstanding of the nature of abuse. (The NFL, despite public promises, has made almost no progress when it comes to domestic violence. In the fall of 2017, at least half a dozen new players faced domestic violence charges, but were drafted anyway, and at the time of this writing the NFL had failed to implement a single reform recommended to it by a commission formed in the aftermath of the Ray Rice scandal, according to Deborah Epstein, a law professor at Georgetown University, who resigned from the commission in protest in 2018 as a result of the NFL’s failure to take seriously the problem of domestic violence.5) A 2008 assessment of 190 batterer programs, in fact, showed that most participants did not have substantial levels of anger, and that only a small percentage were in the unusually high range.6
Adams’s group and others like it typically provide information to the courts about the compliance and authenticity of an abuser’s willingness to change. They file a monthly report with probation officers on each abuser and are in regular contact with victims about a batterer’s participation in the group. It’s one of the most useful elements of any batterer intervention group, frankly. Accountability to probation, court, and the victims. “We can be the eyes and ears of the court,” Adams said. “Victims are trying to make decisions about staying or leaving; if she’s hearing back from us that he’s still blaming her, that’s useful to know.”
One night, I attend a session at Emerge. The sessions are held in a basement conference room in a generic building in Cambridge, outside of Boston. It’s not the leafy, red-bricked Cambridge of Harvard University, but the less rarified, squat gray industrial Cambridge of the working class.
Seven men file in and sit in folding chairs, joking around uncomfortably with one another. The demographics run across age, race, and economic spectrums, though they are not the inner-city, underprivileged culture I would later see in San Bruno. One wears a suit and tie and smells of aftershave. Another has plaster caked on his jeans. It is my first time sitting in on an offenders’ group. I don’t yet know ManAlive or Hamish Sinclair. By now, I’ve been talking to victims for years, but haven’t spent any time with perpetrators. I still carry a picture in my mind of an abuser who is a rageaholic, a monster, a person visibly and uncontrollably angry. Someone easily identifiable as a “bad guy.” I may even have operated under the idea that my own gut instincts would alert me to such a man. And what strikes me immediately—in fact, deeply unsettles me in a way—is how incredibly normal they all seem. Like a bunch of guys I’d go have a beer with. They are charming. They are funny, gregarious, shy, high-strung. Good-looking or not, well-dressed or not. They are Everyman. One of the hallmarks of domestic violence, Adams told me, is this false idea that abusers are somehow angry generally; rather, their anger is targeted—at a partner or at the partner’s immediate family. As a result, friends and acquaintances of abusers are often surprised to hear that they committed an assault. “The most surprising thing is that [abusers] seem like such normal guys,” says Adams. “The average batterer is pretty likable.” For Adams this is the whole point: that we look for talons and tails, but find instead charm and affability. It’s how abusers attract victims in the first place. “We look for the rageaholic,” Adams says. But only about a quarter of batterers fit that definition. What he sees, instead, is an inflexible personality. “A rigid black-or-white thinker is what I most imagine,” Adams says.
The night I attend, Adams explores how the attendees felt about their parents and, in particular, their fathers. One of the men came from a home in which his father ran a prominent undergraduate university education program. Another has a father whom he characterized as a sexual predator and addict. At least five of the seven men have witnessed their fathers abusing women. Unlike RSVP and many (perhaps even most) other batterer intervention programs, Emerge always has one woman who is a co-facilitator. The reasons for this are twofold: first, a male and female team operating as equals can model for group members what that looks like. But also, Adams found that in the early days of Emerge, men participants would rarely exhibit the kinds of behaviors that reflected their general attitudes toward women, things like interrupting women, challenging their ideas or ignoring them altogether, and in group they call attention to such attitudes immediately. Adams asks the seven participants to rate their fathers as “good,” “bad,” or “mixed.” Of the seven, only one rates his father as “bad.” Yet they tell stories of fathers with alcohol addictions, of fathers bloodying their mothers, of belts taken to them throughout their childhoods. I sit there listening, amazed that they fail to see either themselves or their mothers as victims of their fathers. It struck me in such a specific way at that moment, how men and women truly see and decode the world so differently. Of course, I’d experienced this in my own life, in moments with my then-husband—I remember saying to him, on so many occasions when he’d claim I wasn’t listening to him, that I was indeed listening. What I was doing was disagreeing. But sitting there that night, maybe because I was on the outside of these lives looking in rather than trying to argue a point from inside my own life, the concrete illustration of this abstract idea somehow chilled me. I remember thinking it was a marvel that anyone stayed married for the long haul.
At several points, Adams has to remind them that they can love their fathers and still be critical. Over and over, the men talk about how their mothers had provoked their fathers.
When I speak to Adams later about it, he isn’t at all surprised that the men excused and contextualized the bad behavior of their fathers, while demonizing their mothers. “That’s part of what happens,” Adams tells me afterward. “They’ve internalized a selfish, narcissistic father … [But] you can’t lecture people. You give them information, and hopefully over time it begins to make a difference.”
The next day, I had lunch with one of the attendees from Adams’s group. We rode in his truck to a burger place in Cambridge; he opened doors for me, told me to order first, made sure the restaurant was to my liking. He was, in other words, polite, charming. He wore a baseball cap with the brim low over his freckled face. Though I knew he was in his late twenties, he had the baby-faced appearance of someone who’d started shaving a week earlier. He had been court-ordered to complete Adams’s program and he admitted to me that he had lied to his group the night before about using alcohol—a violation of his probation. He minimized the abuse he’d perpetrated on his former partner, telling me that yes, while he had choked her until she nearly lost consciousness, he had only done it once, after she’d come at him and scratched him. His view was that they were both responsible for the violence done to each other, but only he was having to pay the price for it. He failed to see that scratches didn’t carry the lethality of strangulation and so he saw his behavior as simply quid pro quo. It would turn out that this man would never finish the program; he would move out west and, presumably, bring all of his bad behavior with him. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe something from those weeks he attended stayed with him, even though he didn’t complete the program. Just before we’d finished with our lunch, he’d admitted to me that once he had overcome his initial hostility to the group, the program had made an impact on him. “When you find yourself in a class like that, you can’t lie to yourself about the decisions you made,” he said. “My life has taken me to a point where I can’t tell myself I’m not that bad.”
When Adams first began studying how to change the behavior of abusive men, before he’d made the connections to narcissism, nearly all the research from the 1960s and ’70s described violence in the home as the product of a manipulative woman who incited her husband. That victims provoke their own abuse is an attitude that persists today. In the early 1980s, Ellen Pence, a domestic violence advocate in Minnesota created the Power and Control Wheel.7 The Wheel highlights the eight ways a batterer maintains power and control: fear, emotional abuse, isolation, denial and blame, using children, bullying, financial control, and brute force and verbal threats. Advocates point out that abusers don’t walk around with a conscious notion that they’re seeking power and control. Instead, they say things like, “I just want her to be sweet [obedient and subservient] and have dinner on the table at six.” Or, “I just want her to have the house cleaned, and the kids in bed.” Or, “I just pushed her a little. She’s overreacting.” Or, “I wouldn’t have broken that plate if she hadn’t screamed.” All of these are variations on the same thing. (Later, I would hear Jimmy Espinoza tell a group of men to be on guard for the words “just,” “if,” and “but,” which seemed to me a fairly decent summation).
Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent. In a 2002 paper he cowrote with Susan Cayouette, the codirector of Emerge, on abusive intervention and prevention, he wrote, “Many batterers conduct some, if not most, of their nonfamilial relationships in a respectful manner, which indicates that they already know how to practice respectful treatment of others when they decide to.”
For Adams this extreme narcissism is at the root of understanding batterers, and while we may think of narcissists as conspicuous misfits who can’t stop talking about themselves, in fact they are often high-functioning, charismatic, and professionally successful. The narcissists are “hiding among us,” Adams says, “and they’re clustered at the top.” Such people are not easy to identify, in part because they have outsized people skills, and “we live in a world that is increasingly narcissistic. We extol success more than we extol anything,” he says. Adams points to the kind of “charismatic narcissist who is worshipped by others.” This is the kind of white-collar batterer who—through money and connections—manages to evade judicial and law enforcement systems. A man for whom status and reputation are everything. He and other researchers I spoke with often talk about our collective vision of criminals, especially murderers; how we tend to picture rageaholics when the reality is that they are impossible to divine from the general population.
The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers. Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t lose their kids.” In fact batterers often see themselves as saviors of a sort. “They feel they’re rescuing a woman in distress. It’s another aspect of narcissism … And there’s a sense of wanting to be eternally appreciated for that.” In contrast, he said, “a lot of victims come across as messed up. Because that’s exactly the point for him: ‘I’m going to make it so no one wants you.’ ”
Victims’ lives are messy. Often they are substance abusers, or they live in extreme poverty. Many have suffered traumatic, abusive childhoods. Such cases are the most difficult to prosecute, not least because the victims can be unreliable witnesses. “This is why batterers are so often able to fool the system,” one domestic violence advocate told me. “They’re so charming, and the victim comes off as very negative.” Even in court, a detective named Robert Wile told me some years ago how he has come to understand that “the majority of [victims] who we’re going to bring into court are going to be people who have a lot of mental health issues, and we have to portray them as good people so we can put away the knucklehead who beat them up. And who gets to say not a word? Him. He just sits there.”
Wile’s remark reminded me of a woman I’d met once just as she was managing to get her life back together after years of abuse. One of the questions that is so difficult to really explain is how abuse slowly erodes a person, how often survivors talk about emotional abuse being so much worse than physical abuse. Indeed, Gondolf’s book talks about domestic violence as a process, rather than a single incident, and yet our entire criminal justice system is set up to address incidents, not processes. This particular woman had a social work background, and I spent many hours with her as she tried to explain how her ex-husband’s abuse just whittled away at her. The first time, she said, was so sudden and so strange she assumed it was just a onetime event. They’d been walking on a busy Manhattan street, arguing, when he suddenly leaned over and bit her on the cheek so hard that half her face bruised up and she had teeth marks for days. When he saw what he had done, he took her to the drugstore to buy makeup to cover it. Like so many others, he claimed to be deeply remorseful. Horrified by what he’d done. He cried. He apologized. He made promises. “I was still like, this is unacceptable,” she told me, “before I had just got so broken down and it was just about survival.” And yet he continued to abuse her, escalating the abuse year after year. He’d throw golf balls at her face as she drove down the highway, or toss a blanket over her head and strangle her. By the time things had reached the level where she feared for her life, he could go to the store on his own, buy the makeup she needed to cover up his assault, and present it to her without apology. By then, she says, she was so beaten down as a person she felt as if there was nothing left, a husk of skin and bone with no spirit, no agency of her own, only a kind of slow, painful slog toward unconsciousness. And yet, at the same time, she felt if she could only help him see himself through her eyes, he’d change, become the person she’d always felt him capable of being. It’s a common narrative. Women are given the message over and over that we are the holders of the emotional life and health of the family, that the responsibility for a man to change lies, in fact, with us. “The only way that I can really describe what happened to me is like part of me, like, died, and then part of me got ignited in terms of, like, my love will heal us,” she said. “But I had to stop loving myself and only love him.” His narcissism, in other words, didn’t even allow the room for her to care for herself.
She was ashamed by the turn her life and marriage had taken, so much so that she didn’t admit it to anyone for a long time. After all, she told herself, she had a promising career and a graduate degree; she’d been raised to “know better” by a feminist. She wasn’t impoverished. She wasn’t uneducated. She was liberal, middle class, white. She had long blond hair, a white-toothed California smile. And still, here she was, with this man who’d somehow carved away the humanity in her. The abuse must have somehow been partly her fault, she thought. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. She needed to be more patient. He’d fought for his country, serving in overseas wars. She owed it to him, she told herself. Hadn’t everyone else in the world given up on him? Wasn’t she the only person he really had? Wasn’t that the promise she’d made him? Love, honor, sickness, health, poverty, wealth. It was her duty to stay, to help him see clear to fixing his own pain. She couldn’t imagine what he’d been through. Where was her empathy? Her patience? Someday, somehow, she thought he’d get better and the abuse would end and it would all be okay.
And then one day she woke up and she fled. And her case was so extreme that she qualified for a witness protection program that kept her address confidential, that had her mail delivered by private courier, that installed security cameras at her doors and windows. It took her years to return to herself. Years where he was put on a GPS ankle bracelet and given a lifetime restraining order and barred from even entering the county, never mind the town, where she lived and worked. He did jail time. And eventually, several years after she left him, she did something she’d forgotten she once loved: she went jogging. Outside. In the open air. And that was when she knew she was really free.