TRANSCRIPT
I was recently following a very polarized discussion about domestic violence, where there was a group of people, mostly women, saying that domestic violence is largely perpetrated by men, by husbands against their wives. And there was a group, a minority group of men, saying, “Yes, but this leaves out how often and how common it is that men also are or could be abused by their wives.” Some of the guys in this group had been domestically violated, had violence perpetrated against them by their wives. I was watching this discussion, and the women were like, “That’s wrong, that’s wrong.” It turned into this male versus female thing in this discussion.
I was listening to it, and I realized I had a very different perspective on it, and that’s what I’d like to share. First, I would like to say, in my experience as a therapist, also in reading the data that I’ve read, yes, by and large, very largely, domestic violence, in terms of couple partner violence, happens with mostly men against their wives. That’s what I’ve heard as a therapist, that’s what I’ve heard from friends of mine, that’s what I’ve read about.
Now, yes, I also have heard quite a lot of cases—there are a minority of the cases of men being abused by their wives. I’ve had friends who’ve been attacked by their wives, sometimes even when they’re sleeping—scratched, punched, kicked, had stuff thrown at them. One guy even was shot by his wife, etc., etc. So I want to say, yeah, both of those arguments have validity.
But to me, the discussion never went into what I see as the most common type of domestic violence—societally sanctioned type of domestic violence—and the type that I experienced in my life. And that’s violence by parents against children. That happened to me—like literal physical violence with my dad physically attacking me in front of my mother, hitting me, literally hitting me in the face, grabbing me, dragging me physically out of the house, throwing me out of the house, saying the most ugly things imaginable to me, cutting me down—like really with an attempt to destroy my self-esteem, but even more so to destroy my very sense of self.
And my mother doing nothing. If that’s not domestic violence, then in a way, what is? Because this was the domestic situation—dome, dome being the home, the house. This was within the house, this was within the family system, and nobody said anything. If my dad had done that to my mom, I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom had left. I wouldn’t be surprised. My mom would have called the police if he’d done the exact same thing to her—called the police, had him arrested, showed the big red handprint on her face because he left a big red handprint on my face.
My dad never touched my mom, never laid a hand on her, and yet she didn’t stick up for me. She didn’t care. In fact, she actually liked it that he did that to me because it made me like him less; therefore, it made me go more to her side because she was always trying to undercut him, psychologically harm him. We could call it psychological violence against him in all sorts of different ways. And so when he did that to me, ooh, she suddenly found, “Oh, I have an ally in Daniel,” and she could use it to bond with me. But she never did anything to stop him from doing that, and it happened again and again and again.
And then I think about all the situations I’ve heard of children being hit, attacked, violated, physically attacked, had violence perpetrated against them by their parents, by their fathers and their mothers. And I think, actually, that’s far, far, far more common than any of this partner violence—men against women, women against men.
And when I say societally sanctioned, a lot of times it’s literally considered a good thing. I hear people say, “I’m so grateful that my mom, my dad—often my mom—raised me with a tough hand. You know, spare the rod and spoil the child.” Even with that video that I could make a critique of Jordan Peterson, he was giving arguments why it’s good to physically discipline, aka use violence against your child—that that’s a good thing.
Or Dr. Dobson, oh, that really important doctor who talks about child rearing, and he like literally said—I remember I critiqued when I wrote an Amazon.com book review about his book, “The Strong-Willed Child,” some years back. The strong-willed child, the bad child, the child who won’t listen—you must hit them. And he said, “Don’t hit them with your hand, hit them with a stick, and then they won’t associate the attack with you as much.” But it was like, no, he’s saying do it, and it’s legal in so many places in America. It’s legal in most places in the world. In fact, when parents don’t do it, often they are criticized.
And what I see, my personal experience, but I was spanked once by my dad when I was very young for doing something naughty. This isn’t—I’m not talking about the physical attack where he just blew up, lost his temper, and raged at me. There was no discipline in that; that was just a straight-up attack. But when I was much younger, once he—I don’t remember it, but he told me, he told me that as a good thing, how he took me over his knee and really spanked me hard to teach me not to do something naughty.
And what I think about with my dad in that case and what I’ve seen with so many parents who do this, I see they even do it on the street sometimes—that’s how legal it is, that’s how socially acceptable it is. Parents actually hitting kids on the street. I see nannies doing it, even nannies doing it to the little kids, thinking, “Do that right on that,” they cry. And it’s like, wait, you can’t do that to anybody else, but why do you do that with a child?
What I see first, the psychology of the parent who does that—even the parent that Jordan Peterson, I guess, was with his own children but recommends that other parents be—it’s a psychologically primitive parent that doesn’t have a better way to guide their children, a better way to teach their children, a better way to behave. Often, too, it’s a parent who induces all sorts of problems in the child through their neglect, through their abandonments, through other sorts of weird behavior, through violations, through having bad boundaries.
And then when the child reacts to that, has their own reaction, sometimes even post-traumatic reactions, that’s when the parent comes in and says, “That child must be disciplined physically.” So that’s what I critiqued in my Jordan Peterson video that I made. It’s like a lot of the times when I think he’s saying it’s good to use physical discipline, corporal punishment against a child, it’s really that the parent has created the problem in the child, and then that in a way justifies the parent using corporal punishment against the child. But really, it’s domestic violence.
And then what I think is, imagine a world where it was okay for husbands, let’s say, to physically discipline their wives—spank them over their knee, hit them the way that, you know, parent—or hit them with a stick like Dr. Dobson says because the wife didn’t do what she was supposed to do. Well, actually, this does happen in certain countries in the world. I think, God, I have not seen that, but I’ve heard about it a lot in certain places in the world where it’s considered completely socially acceptable for a husband to physically discipline his wife, aka to use domestic violence against her to cause her to behave in a different way—basically to treat her, in our screwed-up world, what we would say like a child.
But why is it even okay to treat a child like that ever? And what I think is in common between these countries where it’s considered okay for a husband to physically discipline his wife, what’s in common between those countries and where it’s okay for—considered okay for a parent to physically discipline their child, what’s in common between those places is those wives and the children in our world, by and large, are not considered to be people. They’re considered to be objects. They’re considered to be like animals sometimes. Actually, they have even less rights than animals. I know some people, yes, who use physical discipline against animals, but I know people who…
Say it’s okay to use physical discipline against children but not against animals. Like, animals have more rights. So the big thing, this is where I’d like to just wrap it up a couple of minutes here, is in a world so commonly in our human species where children are not considered really to be people, they’re not considered to be full-fledged human beings, they’re not considered to have real feelings, they’re not considered to have real human rights. That opens the door to physically disciplining them, physically attacking them, using domestic violence against them to cause them to behave in a different way. Basically, to traumatize them, to traumatize them, to change their behavior. And it will change their behavior, but in all sorts of horrible negative ways that have all sorts of terrible consequences in their future because that’s how they learn to relate to other people.
And also what I’ve heard, I’ve heard from a lot of people in some of these cultures where the wives are being beaten by their husbands and that’s considered okay. The wives then turn around and beat their children. They take out their rage on their children, and that happens in our world so often. I have heard parents beat the child. The child then grows up, has all this buried rage inside from having been treated as less than human. That rage doesn’t go away. That abandonment, frustration, fury, pain, that doesn’t go away when they grow up. It’s all buried inside. And then what do they do? They create children who they don’t look at as people, and they take it out on them.
The reason they don’t look at their own children as people is because they don’t still look at the roots of their own self as a person because it’s too painful. Because for them to look at themselves as a person, as a real human being with full human rights, they would have to go back and remember, not just remember what happened to them, but feel what happened to them. They’re going to have to feel the pain. They’re going to have to feel the rage and sadness and abandonment of having been violated, not just by their parent, but by the person who is the primary love creature in their life, the primary love object in their life. Their basic model of love is the basic one who totally abandoned them by physically violating them, by committing domestic violence against them for a purpose to reform them. And that’s terribly painful for a human being to sort out.
I think part of why I can talk about this is so much, by and large, I have sorted it out. And it’s horrible. It’s a horrible thing to have to go back and figure out what actually happened. It’s like to realize how much my parents violated me, undercut me, treated me as non-human, less than human, inhuman, worse than an animal, like an object that didn’t count, didn’t have feelings. That’s a terrible thing to have to go back and figure out, to sort out that the primary people in my life who loved me were also the primary people in my life who discounted me, violated me, abused me.
So I can understand why a lot of people wouldn’t want to go back and look at this. They’re still very tied to their parents, their family. Sometimes their parents are still, even when they’re adults, the only ones that they have who still they feel loved them. So it’s very hard to have to face that abandonment and that rejection. And the consequence of that is that they don’t look at themselves still, even when they’re adults, as a human, as a person. And by extension, they do not still look at other children as people, as human beings with rights.
So when they have their own children and somebody comes along, like Jordan Peterson or Dr. James Dobson, both with their authority of being, you know, professionals and medical professionals and mental health professionals, and says it’s okay, it’s actually necessary to use physical discipline, punishment, aka domestic violence against your child, that is what you need to do. People who already don’t look at their children as human beings are suddenly given a carte blanche to do what they want to their children, to commit domestic violence against them. And it’s not called domestic violence.
And so when I was listening to this discussion and listening to all this debate, oh do men abuse women more, women abuse men more? Yes, interesting discussion, but missing the main point that adults in our world have so many more rights than children. And that’s why it’s so much easier and more common to commit domestic violence against children.