Where the truth lies…

I keep hearing the myth that the truth lies somewhere in between two versions of a story. This discredits the truth teller and gives more credibility than due to a liar. The truth only lies between the statements of two people if both people are telling the truth with just slightly altered points of view. If both people are lying then there may be no truth in their words. If one person is spilling their guts and opening their heart and the other person is a pathological liar, only telling watered down versions of the truth when the entire truth cannot be denied, then the truth is nowhere near the middle. Telling a domestic violence survivor that their story is only half right because the abuser denies his actions provides a deep feeling of invalidation. Of course an abuser is going to lie, deny, and minimize his behavior because that is what abusers (with few exceptions) do, it is a primary characteristic of a controlling person. The lies of an abuser do not mean that the victim is lying or exaggerating.

I do understand how difficult it is to comprehend the experiences of an abuse survivor, I didn’t understand it myself until I personally experienced the manipulation, fear, guilt, and emotional trauma. But even if you do not believe an abuse survivors plight, please refrain from expressing this to the victim. Abuse survivors already have enough self doubt and loss of confidence due to the abuse and being blamed by the abuser. Being told by everyone that you know that you are not telling the truth about the abuse, as hard as it is to talk about the abuse at all, only pressures the victims to keep silent.

I almost dropped the case against my abuser, after struggling with the courage to file for a restraining order in the first place. My abuser told me that nobody would believe me. This was further reinforced by the people who stared at me in disbelief as I told my experiences. People told me that “the truth lies somewhere in between” and “if this happened then why did you stay?” I stayed because of the many reasons that other victims stayed; children, finances, fear, and I was plain ol’ beat down and had no confidence in my ability to rebuild my life. I gave up all hope. An abuse victim is in the middle of traumatic circumstances, it is difficult enough to survive in those situations let alone to claw your way out of them. Society can step up and report abuse, when known or strongly suspected, to help break this cycle. Someone could have reported the abuse and sent an officer to investigate my situation, I was too terrified to expose my abuser. Neighbors certainly heard the screams and yelling on many occasions. My mother knew some of what was happening, she even witnessed a few of the tamer incidents (which were enough to frighten her and damage her wall.) My in-laws knew of the abuse and they are registered nurses, mandatory abuse reporters, yet they said nothing to the authorities (because they firmly believe in protecting the abusers in their family.) My in-laws even testified in court that they knew that there was something wrong (they would not admit to the extent that they knew of the abuse), they testified that they are mandatory abuse reporters and have reported people who were not members of their family for abuse. Yet, they lied and covered for their family (there are many abusers in their family.) Too many people still believe that violence in the home is a private matter and too many women and children are left to defend themselves because society tells them this.

Abuse victims need more understanding and better safety nets to escape, they need a little more support than being told that they chose this for themselves and their children.

Limbo

Anxiously awaiting news. My lawyer filed a petition to stay the order requiring my son and I to move back to the city where our abuser has ready access to us. We are requesting to stay here pending an appeal. Unfortunately, the process has been so slow that I still don’t have word on that petition and we are supposed to move by August 1st.  We live in limbo as we wait for the judge’s decision.  Hopefully I will receive an answer by Friday since there won’t be any legal progress on the weekend.

Patrick Stewart addressing Domestic Violence

Domestic Violence and marital rape should not continue to be treated as minor crimes. These forms of violence are treated as more of a joke than as a serious assault. Domestic violence and marital rape are NOT lesser crimes than assaults and rape by strangers. These assaults by “loved ones” are even more psychologically scarring than the same event by a stranger due to the implied trust and emotions attached to a significant other. Our laws must change to address these issues more effectively and place responsibility on the perpetrators rather than the victims.

We need a Nationwide protest…

To every woman who has been denied a restraining order against her abuser because the judge didn’t think the danger was imminent enough, we need you to speak up. To every woman who has been raped, impregnated, and then forced to regularly face her rapist because he impregnated her, you are not alone. To every family member who has lost a loved one due to domestic violence, we need you to represent the loss of life. We must bind together to change legislation so the courts recognize and protect victims of violence. Children need stronger protections, not enforcement of parental property rights. We need to stand strong and create a united front. While we remain scattered and enmeshed in our own personal battles for healing and safety, the courts continue to favor protection of the abuser and deny us and our children basic rights. Every battle for our rights and safety affects us all. I am not seeking an exception in protecting myself and my child, I am seeking better protections for us all. Our children, our society, cannot improve without better protections for victims of violence. We can make a difference for those that walk this path behind us. Unite!

Blog About It.

Please support your local domestic violence center.

Funds are in short supply to assist domestic abuser survivors in their escape and recovery. Helping women and children heal and find safety is essential for not only their well-being but society as a whole. Domestic violence accounts for excessive medical bills, loss of work hours/wages, loss of employment, and sometimes loss of life. Domestic violence does not just create another generation of abusers and victims, it creates criminals. According to a study shown here http://www.nber.org/papers/w12171 , there is an approximately doubling in crimes committed by child abuse/neglect survivors. Domestic violence creates a high stress environment with little emotional support. This can affect a child’s grades and future success in school and work. It also damages the self esteem and confidence of victims of all ages. To break the cycle of violence, we need a better safety net to help women and children escape and we need laws that better address the situation.

Any support that you can offer in this mission of hope will be greatly appreciated by the victims. If you cannot donate money, consider volunteering. You can also donate your unwanted household items to a domestic violence thrift shop (most centers have one.) Support politicians that are protective of victims of violence (not just Domestic Violence but all violence). Sign petitions to close the loopholes that abusers use to continue to stalk, harass, and abuse their victims. Anything that you can do will make a difference to someone and we cannot do this alone.

In Great Appreciation, Domestic Violence Centers that have assisted my son and I:
Peaceful Paths in Gainesville Florida
Child Advocacy Center in Gainesville, Florida
The Favor House in Pensacola, Florida

An amazing Domestic Abuse survivor.

My son with a canine Domestic Abuse survivor

6th Annual Gulf Coast Hot Air Balloon Festival
June 18-20, 2010
Foley, Alabama

The Disc-Connected K9’s were a great group of Frisbee-catching dogs but when Lawrence Frederick introduced Easy Rider, I was impressed as much by his caring nature as I was by the dog’s abilities. Easy Rider was a black and white, hairy performer and he was an amazing Domestic Abuse survivor. He came from a home where domestic violence was common. Police had been called to the home multiple times before the dog, and the abuser, were permanently removed. Easy Rider had been thrown against a wall with such force that his hind leg was broken in three places. His crime? Urinating inside the home. Apparently, Easy Rider was so terrified of men that he peed whenever he met one. Due to Easy Rider’s injury, he was not getting interest from adopters at the animal shelter that took him in. So, when all of the other dogs rescued from the home were adopted and Easy Rider was on his last days, the animal shelter contacted Disc-Connected K9s. They were told that he would probably never play Frisbee. They agreed to take him in and he was flown to Jacksonville Florida to start a new life. He received rehabilitative care and training and he doesn’t just play Frisbee now, he is one of the highest ranked Frisbee-catching dogs in the nation. He still has the pins in his leg but his heart has healed. My son even got his picture taken with Easy Rider.

If you want to read more about Disc-Connected K9’s or Easy Rider, visit their website at http://k9frisbee.com/new/index.php .

The dilemma of reporting abuse

If you are accused of abuse, just pull the PAS card. CHA CHING!

If a child is afraid of a parent who has been accused of abuse, It must be PAS, Yup Yup YUP!

TIPS FOR ABUSERS TO CONQUER YOUR VICTIM, EVEN WIN IN COURT!!!

PAS. If you have a child together and you abuse the child, pull the PAS card and it will get you off in most cases. Nobody believes abuse reporters and if she reports it, the abuse either never happened or is also her fault, she LET you do it right?

LIE

BLAME. It really IS all her fault, right? She made you do it. She cried for no reason on those occasions that she said that you abused her. You are a great guy, never would hurt a soul much less a lady or child. She just nagged you until you couldn’t take it anymore and then you snapped.

MINIMIZE. You never “hit” her, you just pushed her away from you. You accidentally tripped her and tried to help her up after wards when she fell again. Or maybe you were just joking when you punched her, you thought she could take a joke.

DENY. It just never happened, she is making it all up just to get back at you for leaving her or cheating on her or because she wants the kids all to herself.

EXCUSE. It never would have happened if she hadn’t been so crazy, if she hadn’t been a slut, if she hadn’t started it. And anyway, maybe you have an addiction or a mental illness?

DIG UP ALL THE DIRT FROM HER PAST, even if it has nothing to do with you. If she has ever been assaulted by someone else, all the better for you. It must be her fault, even if it happened when she was a child.

Get your family to lie too, abusers like to cover for one another. It’s like a clan.

Get a dirty, aggressive lawyer that will find every loophole and method of intimidation. They know how to twist the truth and get away with it, they can manipulate the system because they know the right words to throw around. Even if the terms don’t apply to your case, if the lawyer says it enough then it can affect the ruling. All the lawyer had to do is put the right spin and change terminology to sound like it might apply. You can often get a victim to drop the case entirely or back off if you intimidate, embarrass, harass, or indirectly threaten her enough. Tell every witness that she presents “you do know that she is crazy, right?” You can get away with indirect threats easily but let a lawyer do it for maximum benefit. If you are the one to make the threats and they are vague enough, even if SHE knows what you mean, she will look crazy if she reports you. You can get away with a LOT and you can accuse her of harassing you every time she reports you. She ends up looking like a lunatic and you walk away smelling of roses if you smile when the police question you, if they even bother to do that.

Use angry letters and emails from her as evidence that she is mentally unstable. The assault/abuse never happened so if she complains about what she says you’ve done to her in writing, she must be crazy. If she was angry enough to call you names for abusing her, she must be an abuser too.

If she becomes pregnant, you have her. All you really have to do is get your unprotected dick into her at the right time of the month and BAM! You’ve used her own body and fertility against her. That is your greatest weapon and way towards controlling her. Rape her, manipulate her, trick her, whatever you need to do. You have legal access to her for the next 18 years, even if convicted of rape in most cases. And we all know that most victims don’t report rape or report it too late to prosecute. Rape cases are very hard to win, almost impossible if you were in a relationship when it happened, so it’s likely that she won’t even get a conviction even if she does report it immediately. She’ll have no one to protect her and the law will tell her that she is not allowed to hide or protect herself. You will legally have her address and even be able to tell her where she may live, whom she may live with, and she will likely be forced to have face to face interactions with you where you can intimidate her some more.

You can also use threats against the kids to control her, women hate that. If you abuse the children then all you have to say is “the courts will give me 50/50 parenting” and it will send chills down her spine. She can’t protect them if she’s not there. And children are more easily intimidated than an adult, if she reports the abuse then all you have to do is threaten them and they will tell the courts that daddy didn’t hurt them. She will look like a liar or crazy or both. And even if the kids do tell on you, look up PAS and use that.

The more humiliating the abuse/assault, the less likely she is to report it in time to prosecute you so make sure it counts. And if she fights back then use that against her too. Just accuse her of over-reacting and being the one who assaulted you. You were the innocent one here, you were just trying to protect her from herself or help her in some way and she attacked you for no reason. And no one will believe her anyway so, in most cases, all you have to do is lie. The law presumes your innocence and they cannot force you to take a lie detector test so lying is VERY effective. Even if they catch you lying, she will still have to prove the assault happened the way she said it did and that is almost impossible without video footage. But if she does have video footage, don’t sweat it too bad, the right lawyer can usually suppress that evidence.

The District Attorneys hate to try cases that they are not pretty certain about winning. They rarely get involved in domestic violence cases. All you have to do is fool her into thinking that you are a nice guy for long enough to call it a “relationship” and then you can go nuts on her.

Make SURE to cheat on her. Leave little clues. If she ignores the little clues or is too stressed about the abuse to notice or care, let the girlfriend leave real evidence. Make sure she knows and, preferably, wait for her to confirm that she knows. This way, you can always accuse her of being bitter and jealous about the girlfriend. Even an abused woman is likely to get angry about infidelity. She has suffered so she either won’t want you to hurt anyone else or she will be mad that you feel entitled to intimate relationships on the side.

If there are children involved, make sure that everyone knows that she is trying to take your children away from you, even if you’ve shown little to no interest in them in the past. Let her know that if she tries to leave, YOU get access (alone) with the children. That will show her! Most women are too afraid to risk their children being alone with an abuser and the courts want to give you your rightful time alone with the kids.

If she leaves, stalk her. The stalking may cause her to move or flea for her safety, you can use that in court against her too. When accused of stalking, claim that you just want to know where your kids are, this will garner you pity and her cold stares.

Tell her that if she reports the abuse, the kids will be taken away from BOTH of you. Make sure that she knows that her children will be taken and put into foster care and she’ll be lucky to ever get them back. If she didn’t report the abuse right away because you intimidated her enough or lied to her and denied it ever happened or convinced her that she was making too much of it or begged for forgiveness and swore you’d never do it again, make sure to tell her that she is just as responsible as you are, or MORESO because she is the MOTHER. She is responsible for protecting her children. DCF HATES non protective mothers and even if she is not there when the abuse happens, she knows about it, right?

If she protects her children, she is the abuser because keeping a father from his kids is clearly abuse.

If she loses jobs or quits school because of the abuse, use that against her. If she seeks counseling due to the abuse, that is proof that she is unstable. If she is diagnosed PTSD and/or depressed due to the abuse then she is frickin’ insane, she has a diagnosed mental illness so the abuse is either not real or she caused it. If she tries to kill herself to escape the abuse then YEEHAW! You’ve really got her now! The courts will LOVE to hear how unstable, even suicidal, she is. They’ll never believe her now!

Tell her that you will kill yourself if she leaves. Let her know that she won’t be getting any child support from a dead man and she will be responsible for your death and taking away the father of her children. Tell her that your family will all hate her. For good measure, hint that you can take her and the kids with you. If you self harm while making these threats, it will be more effective and convincing. If you restrain her and force her to watch you self harm with weapons, scream into her face, shove her and hurt her just enough that her primary concern is fear of you and not the pain you are causing, really frighten her then she will be terrified out of her wits. If she reports you, you can claim that all you did was self harm, you didn’t do anything to HER. She will feel even more defeated when law enforcement won’t help her. She will know that you are capable of anything and there is nothing that SHE can do about it. She may be so terrified that she tries everything to make you happy so you won’t do it again. Do it again anytime you think she might leave you or whenever she doesn’t do what you want her to do.

Let her know that if she leaves you, she will become homeless. If she takes the children with her, use that against her in court. Be hyper critical of any location that she finds to live. A low income woman with children will be very limited in her choices. You can say that she lives in a dangerous neighborhood or trash the people that she lives with if she is forced to share a residence. Make her move and then tell the courts that she does not have a stable home life, she keeps moving. Even a woman with a full time job may not be able to pay for child care and all of the bills alone. The courts will probably take the kids from her and give them to you. If she tells you that you’ll have to pay child support, let her know that she’ll have to fight you for it. It can take the court months or over a year to take action in a child support case, meanwhile SHE has to provide for herself and the children without your help.

These TIPS are provided not as a guide but as a WARNING to parents attempting to protect their children or themselves. Some of these same tips may be used against men. Until we change our legal system to STOP THE USE of these abusive and manipulative tactics in court, we cannot protect the children or ourselves. We are afraid of reporting abuse, either towards us or our children, because of the situations described above. The courts ALLOW the use of these tactics and it protects abusers. Abusers are given a great deal of control in the legal system, especially when children are involved. This ensures that the cycle of violence will be passed on to as many children as possible because it is hard to STOP the cycle of violence while still dealing with abuse and violence.

Believe it or not, most of the tactics listed above were used against ME in court recently. I have learned the hard way the corruption of the legal system. I have met other women in my situation and this has happened to them too. It DOES happen and it CAN happen to you or someone you know.

Domestic Violence and the courts

I failed to protect myself in court yesterday. I also failed to secure a petition to permanently relocate so that I can provide a better life for my child and I. It seemed to come down to opposing council shouting “parental alienation” and all of my expert witnesses and evidence being ignored. I was told that if I cannot adequately financially provide for my child and I in the city that we recently escaped then I could just go on welfare. I do not have the right to protect myself and I was told that protecting my child was abusive on my part. I was not even allowed to speak to the false allegations made against me, out of nowhere, by my ex and his parents (who will cover for each other to the bitter end no matter what their crimes.) My ex was permitted to speak to every allegation that I have made and I made only allegations that I know to be true. I was not given the same opportunity to defend myself from the lies that he told and I could prove that he was lying on many statements because his deposition (under oath) was totally different than what he said in court.

It makes no sense, the perpetrators have far more rights than their victims. I know it’s become a clique but I am experiencing that clique. Something has to be done to protect abused women in children in the US. We balk at the human rights violations happening in other countries while he thumb our noses at what happens in our own backyards.

Escaping an abusive relationship.

You are better off living in a car than living in fear. BUT – if you have children together then he can and will use that in a court of law to stalk, harass, and threaten. He will use the children against you in every possible way. I don’t say this to frighten those who are dealing with an abuser but to inform. Unless we address each issue that makes escape even harder for victims, beyond fear of the abuser, then we cannot make a real change and help put a stop to long term abuses.

I do want to note that I will often say “he” when referring to an abuser and “she” when referring to the abused. It is natural for me to use gender terms in that order because that has been my personal experience with abuse. I do not do this to discount that men are sometimes abused too. Male on female abuse tends to be more brutal but I have heard of violent women as well. I acknowledge that there are different challenges for men in escaping abusive relationships, especially when children are involved. I do intend to address those issues in the future. My intent is not to divide women and men but to draw attention to what is needed to prevent further abuse by the same perpetrator and to protect children so we end the cycle of violence (to the greatest extent possible.)

Casey Anthony and other highly publicized cases.

What benefit is there to publicizing legal cases to this extent? Do we really need to know how much evidence is being presented? Do we really need to see her party pictures? I know that American’s find this stuff entertaining but I bring this up because the defense uses publicity as a stall tactic, it increases court costs because they demand a change in venues to locate “impartial jurors” who have not heard of the case in depth, etc. Maybe if we kept this stuff a little more private (only publishing the crime and the outcome, not the entire trial proceeding) then it would be a more efficient process? It might also discourage people who seek notoriety for particularly brutal crimes.