Have you ever been in a group of your friends talking about whatever it is that's going on in your lives or your bad opinions or jokes or whatever and you see someone you kind of know leaning towards you and listening in? Like it's kind of flattering but also kind of creepy but it mostly makes you very self-conscious. You start realizing how banal every conversation you have is. You think you're being profound and hilarious, but all of that is based on the shared experience you have with the people with whom you're talking.
The reason you know this is because when you're alone and bored and listen to a table full of friends talk about their lives it's almost universally horrible and makes you feel like the bad guys in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the eponymous lost ark gets opened. I can't be that awful, you say to yourself as your eyeballs recede into your bloody face before you turn to dust and blow away into the wind like so many delusions of your own importance.
Most of us have 5-10 social media friends who we interact with regularly, which may actually reflect your closest friend group but probably has more to do with the handful of us who check it every day and have similar opinions about the kind of stuff people talk about on social media--but who we've maybe never met or have met only briefly decades ago. It's kind of easy to assume that we're just talking among ourselves and nobody even cares. Maybe they don't. I kind of doubt it, though, because of how much I quietly soak up about people I barely know based on their own Facebook activity.
I don't do this on purpose. I'm just curious sometimes. If someone "likes" a marriage and family therapist, I don't dive into their lives and search for evidence of anything going on, but maybe I just log it back there in my head. Maybe it's your friend who you are supporting in her new business, it's not any of my business. But it kind of sticks in there, you know? Not even in a gossipy way but in a way that says, I hope she's OK. I know a lot of stuff about people who I barely know just because it's so easy to be out there about your life and you forget that there are hundreds of people who quietly watch what's going on without any context.
So then I think about my end of that. If you follow me on Instagram and read my blog, then my Facebook probably makes some sense. If the only interaction you have with me is that we worked together for one season in the field seven years ago, or we went to high school together and didn't even actually hang out, then my feed is probably... really weird? I went through it just now and it's basically divided into thirds: one third is jokes (most of them kind of bad in retrospect), one third is family stuff, bird pictures, and food I made, and one third is about domestic violence and rape.
If you don't know me well, that last one must make you shake your head. If it were me reading it, I'd be speculating too. What did this guy go through? That would be my first impression. I would assume, if I were you, that there is abuse in my history. That seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion. But there isn't. I haven't been personally affected by domestic violence or sexual assault. It wasn't even on my radar until a few years ago. The closest I got to even thinking about it was when I was trading in my ancient flip phone for my first (and only, so far) smartphone and I was asked if I wanted to donate it to battered women and part of me thought about keeping it as a toy for my kids instead.
One question that comes up every time I'm at the shelter or on a hospital call is "why did you start volunteering?" For a lot of people they do it because they need to in order to get college credits. Or it's an internship for a career in social work. When I'm asked, I rarely have the same answer. Looking back, I'm not even sure how it happened myself. The rough timeline is that I got a job in which I work four ten hour shifts and have Fridays off and on my day off I would stay in bed until 11 staring at my phone and then feeling guilty about it so I started googling volunteer opportunities.
For whatever reason I started with the domestic violence shelter and once it stuck in my head, it was the only thing I wanted to do. The other stuff sounded great--mentoring kids who are struggling in school, food bank, etc.--but I couldn't shake a memory of walking into the grocery store in my old city where a couple of college girls were asking for donations to the shelter there. A white-haired man in his 60s with his wife walked past, and when he was addressed, he scoffed at her and said, "No thanks. I won't contribute to organizations that tear up families."
That guy stuck in my head. I thought about him when I was told that I'd have to wait a couple of months before training started. And when I went to training for four hours a night, three nights a week after working a 10-hour shift, I couldn't shake it. I lived in a society where men, distinguished looking men who looked like grandpas and bishops and stake presidents, believed that a woman should stay with an abusive husband because apparently living with an abuser is better for her and her children than living as a single mother.
I remembered a time when I was on my mission in Mexico, where we ate once a week at the house of a woman who was being physically and emotionally abused. We asked her why she stayed, and she said that her bishop told her that if she divorced her husband, he would take away her temple recommend, which she considered her most prized possession. I remembered a friend telling me about her first marriage. That she told her bishop she'd rather go to hell than spend another day with her husband.
Even then, I was just looking for something to do. It was during that training we listened to the recording of a tiny girl calling 911 while her stepfather beats her mother in front of her and her baby sister that I started feeling like an activist. It's awful. You should listen to it. You should also read up on the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study done by Kaiser Permanente between 1995 and 1997. Over 9,500 people participated in a questionnaire in which they were asked a series of questions about their lives before the age of 18 and then compared them with multiple questions about behavior and disease.
Persons who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure, compared to those who had experienced none, had 4- to 12-fold increased health risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt; a 2- to 4-fold increase in smoking, poor self-rated health, ≥50 sexual intercourse partners, and sexually transmitted disease; and a 1.4- to 1.6-fold increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity. The number of categories of adverse childhood exposures showed a graded relationship to the presence of adult diseases including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease, skeletal fractures, and liver disease. The seven categories of adverse childhood experiences were strongly interrelated and persons with multiple categories of childhood exposure were likely to have multiple health risk factors later in life.
There's plenty of evidence showing that infants under the age of one who are exposed to violence against a parent show long-term effects, even if they didn't have the cognitive ability to understand what is happening. A Michigan State University study even showed that unborn children show symptoms of trauma when their mothers are abused. "The study of 182 mothers ages 18-34 found a surprisingly strong relationship between a mother’s prenatal abuse by a male partner and postnatal trauma symptoms in her child."
In Utah, one third of the homicides are related to domestic violence. And occurrences are higher than the national average. "147 Utah children were directly exposed to an intimate partner-related homicide from 2003-2008 and 78% of these children were under six years of age."
Part of the reason so many children are victims of lethal domestic violence in Utah, Oxborrow said, is because the state has a high birth rate to begin with, and many mothers fear they will lose custody of their children if they report domestic violence because they have exposed their children to a dangerous environment.
Also, the wage gap in Utah between women and men is bigger than in many other states, she said, and women are often afraid they won't be able to survive financially if they lose their household's main income, provided by their abusers.
"It's just a really bad combination of factors," Oxborrow said. "People are staying in really dangerous relationships for a long time." - Source
I’ve been told that men are important at the shelter. I go back and forth on it. I like being told I’m important but also cringe a little when people say it’s because of my gender. I’ve been told that my whole life and have learned over time that it’s consistently not true. I can see the logic in the importance of showing victims of domestic violence that there are good men out there too but I get self-conscious thinking I’m some kind of avatar of a quality specimen. Kids also very much gravitate to a dad type, and I hope my two hours a week of beard-having and football-throwing makes a long-term impact of some kind but my goodness if there’s a hero in this situation, kid, it’s your mom. She got you out. She’s fixing things. She takes you back when it’s time for me to go home.
Like a Matt Damon saving the Great Wall of China or a Tom Cruise being a samurai(I guess?!) I am cautious about the idea that my swooping in and playing tag so Mom can finally take a shower is any kind of heroism. It’s what we should all be doing. I wanted to start writing here to give a bit of perspective of what it’s like to be a man in these spaces, not because I think it’s a particularly unique take, but because I want other men to do it. Not because we bring anything special to the job, but because we need to see what tragedies men are inflicting and do whatever tiny thing we can to push back. Even if it makes our Facebook weird.
Matt, I love this piece. I enjoy how, like many scientists, you too observe everything, and then find a little space inside to file it away. I also was pleased to see your reference to the ACE study, it is confounding evidence. Thank you for being an advocate, a helper, and for contributing to a healthier society-I like to believe that a healthy society creates healthy individuals, but I also know that the work begins in the home, in our ability to parent, which can be greatly compromised when there is abuse and/or neglect in the household.