He Has A Crush On You

I happened across a blog posting that I thought was brilliant and so on target. The blog is called Views from the Couch, written by the Queen of the Couch. The topic for her post this particular day was called "You Didn’t Thank Me for Punching You in the Face".  As you can imagine, that caught my attention so I read the blog and all I could say was, “Yes! Way to go!” What a brilliant way to discuss the concept of how we talk to our young children about abusive behaviors.

This blog was about how, as little girls, many of us were taught that when young boys pull our hair, hit or tease us, their behavior is excused because it means “he likes you”. 

The blogger shares an experience of her daughter having her bracelets physically stolen off of her arm by a classmate. She went to the school to address the incident with the teacher. The teacher responded by smiling and explaining it away to her daughter by saying “he probably has a crush on you”.  

When we teach our children that this type of behavior is acceptable and a form of flattery, we are setting our children up to fail, both boys and girls. We need to teach our children that when we like someone, we show them that in respectful ways, not verbally and physically abusive ways.

When abusive behaviors are considered forms of flattery, we perpetuate the notion that violence, whether verbal or physical, is okay, teaching long standing patterns of behavior that are destructive to children and adults. How do you go from learning the behavior is flattery as a young child, to knowing as an adult that it isn’t flattery, but abuse? You don’t without a great deal of difficulty.

As I have said many times before, the only way we are going to stop abuse is to break the cycle with our children by teaching appropriate behavior and boundaries. If a boy doesn’t know how to show a girl he likes her, then let’s teach him the right ways rather than condoning abusive behaviors and setting up long term inappropriate patterns of behavior.

If you want to read the entire blog post I mentioned earlier, you can read it here. ALERT: This blog contains a great deal of cursing, if you are opposed to this type of language, I would urge you not to read this blog.

Does the Economy Cause Domestic Violence?

I have been asked many times in the past months how the economy has affected domestic violence. Does the economy cause domestic violence? What is economic abuse? I thought I would take this opportunity to provide more information about those issues.

Domestic violence is a pattern of controlling behaviors used by one partner to maintain power and control over his partner. Economic abuse is using economics/money to maintain that power and control.

Examples of how this is done include:

• Controlling finances
• withholding money or credit cards
• ruining credit ratings
• requiring an accounting of money that is spent and punishment if not spent on things the abuser approves
• preventing the partner from working or causing them to lose their job
• withholding necessities such as food, clothing and medication
• stealing from their partner or using their personal identification fraudulently 

Does the bad economy cause domestic violence? The answer is “no”. However, it doesn’t help in situations where there is already abuse present. Economic stresses often lead to more frequent and more violent abuse when domestic violence is already present. It also creates more barriers to a woman’s ability to flee the situation.

• Domestic violence is three times as likely to occur when couples are experiencing high levels of financial strain as when they are experiencing low levels of financial strain.
• Women whose male partners experience two or more periods of unemployment over a 5-year study were almost three times as likely to be victims of intimate violence as were women whose partners were in stable jobs.
• Three out of four domestic violence shelters report an increase in women seeking assistance from abuse since September 2008 (NNEDV, Impact of the economy on domestic violence)

Hope House is one of the shelters that have seen an increase in the numbers of people seeking services. We are seeing the impact of the economy in the length of time people are staying in shelter. People are staying longer, because it’s more difficult to secure employment, get bills paid and access services from other agencies that are at capacity due to their own diminished resources.

We are seeing more people in our outreach programs and have a waiting list that is longer than any time in our history. We turned away more than we served in shelter last fiscal year.

The struggle for Hope House is to find the balance between the increase in the demand for services coupled with decreases in our funding. We are doing more with less but will continue to work to provide the absolute best service for our clients, while we work to increase our resources.