NWI Times
March 03, 2013
http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/gary/paper-protection-power-and-control-dynamic-sets-batterers-apart/article_9ad1a240-8b0c-51be-bea0-cdbbdfe851b8.html
In a follow-up visit to determine if TJ Myricks wanted to keep an order of protection she had against her abusive boyfriend in 2008, the young Gary woman went into a judge's chambers and pondered the jurist's questions:
Was she still in fear?
Did she want to keep the order of protection?
With no advocate present, and her abuser standing beside her, she lied, replying no to both.
"I didn't want the reaction from him," Myricks, 34, recalled. "Even though he probably would not have done anything right then and there … once we leave there …"
Not long afterward, the boyfriend resumed the abuse and shortly after one confrontation came knocking on doors and windows of Myricks' home. She braced herself against a bathroom door, calling police on her cellphone.
Her abusive boyfriend had entered the residence by throwing a hammer through a window. His search ended at the bathroom, where he forced the door open enough to strike Myricks with the hammer, leaving her bleeding from a head wound.
If she hadn't relinquished the protective order, she acknowledges, she probably wouldn't have been in that situation. A responding officer told Myricks she was lucky, that a high percentage of women who rescind the order of protection wind up dead.
Regardless, in the aftermath, Myricks still kept company with her abuser, whom she had known for nine years, ultimately doing the unthinkable.
She married him, readily pleading insanity.
"Crazy," she conceded. "I told no one. To this day, my mother doesn't even know that I was married to him."
The human behavior dynamics in domestic violence can be unfathomable, as Myricks' 180-degree turn suggests, which is why police find themselves in a vulnerable position responding to them.
"One (combatant) might be very angry or both," said Cmdr. Dan Kijurna of the Merrillville Police Department. "There may be weapons involved. You never know what you are walking into in one of these."
There are times, said Lt. Jeff Snemis, then commander of the Merrillville detective bureau, when a wife will want to have her abuser/husband arrested.
"So you start arresting him and he resists and he starts fighting us. You might get the wife jumping on your back. She's changed her mind," he said. "Emotions are highly charged, and usually bad behavior goes along with it."
"It is one of the least popular calls police go on," said Paul Haluska, a retired sheriff's police officer working in the Protective Order Assistance Program at the Lake County Government Center. "They don't like 'em. I know I didn't particularly like 'em when I was a cop, either.
"You go into these situations and you're dealing with all these dynamics. The people may have children in common, they may own property in common. (It's) he said, she said. And you've got to find enough probable cause to make an arrest."
Haluska, who has trained more than 2,000 officers in how to deal with domestic violence cases, knows from experience that simply counseling an abuse victim to leave the relationship is advice many would like to take, but can't because of finances, children or other factors.
In the three years he has worked in the county program as well as served on several domestic violence awareness boards, he has gained some insight into violence perpetrators.
"Batterers are not angry," he said. "They don't beat up their boss. They don't beat up their co-workers. They rarely want to fight that cop when he gets there. Batterers act angry to justify what they are doing. It's a power-and-control dynamic. As best as we know … and we've barely scratched the surface of taking these guys apart and figuring out what makes them tick … they're basically very insecure individuals or they grew up in a home (where there was abuse).
"They can't do anything about their boss. They can't do anything about the traffic on the way home. They can't do anything about how Congress is going to vote on this. But, by golly, I'm going to control this house."
There are times when Haluska is questioning an abuse victim that he'll cite so many common traits, the controlling behavior, the denigration of the victim, threats to take the children: "They'll go, 'do you know this guy?'
"No, but I know how he operates. There are certain traits all abusers have. The interesting thing is when, rarely, we do get a man (as a victim), there's no difference in the male and female abuser. The female abuser will do the exact same things the male abuser will do."
The one thing many women victims have in common is that they "prize relationships. Women will hold families together, not men," said Haluska, pointing out they will try to keep a relationship going despite repeated physical assaults.
Myricks, who authored a book about her experiences called, "Phat Phat Memoirs," was a case in point.
Her batterer once told her much of his aggression toward her stemmed from his broken relationship with his mother, an alleged substance abuser. An abuse victim himself, he had a negative view of women but professed a sex addiction, Myricks said.
He had three relationships with three other women, fathering children by all three, she said. When she confronted him with the knowledge of his other affairs, she said he told her, "They don't mean anything. You're the main one. But I didn't want to be the main. I wanted to be the only one."
Domestic battery victim assistance clinic a 'baptism of fire'
The "baptism by fire" that Valparaiso University Law School students get in professor Geneva Brown's domestic violence clinic has Rachel Doty acknowledging "studying law and practicing law are vastly different" as she deals with domestic violence victims and the system to assist them.
"I can see how people can get burned out," said the 25-year-old third-year law school student from Greenwood, Ind., regarding overburdened court and clerical staff she has observed.
Most clients the undergraduate psychology major has encountered in her semester of the program have been either mad, distraught or withdrawn, not unlike what she saw as a domestic violence shelter volunteer. The difference is she has to quickly size up their case, gain trust and prepare herself and the client to appear before a judge almost immediately.
"Some are supertalkative," said Tajanae Mallett, a third-year law students, "and others it is like pulling teeth" to get details of their case. Learning to deal with different personalities from all walks of life is one of the most important lessons the Naperville, Ill., resident said she learned in the clinic.
Unlike Doty, and fellow VU clinic staffers like Sylviane Elessie, Caitlin Broo and Elizabeth Broadbent, who wants to continue working in the field, Mallett's undergraduate degree was in business. She aspires to be a corporate lawyer. But the experience was valuable nonetheless.
"There is such a wide range of domestic violence victims," Mallett said. "Anybody can find themselves in that situation."
Those who do can count on the VU students to help them fill out paperwork for orders of protection along with the staff of the Sheriff's Department Protective Order of Assistance Program.
The 4-year-old Lake County program was initiated by Judges John Pera and Lorenzo Arredondo, said Paul Haluska. Its caseload has risen each quarter since it started, he said, with more than 150 clients each quarter in the early going rising to 719 in the last half of 2012. College interns are assisting it this year, said Patti Van Til, the Lake County sheriff's spokeswoman.
The caseload surge is fueled, in part, by an increase in the number by men seeking orders of protection from their new girlfriend's ex-spouse or boyfriend and families seeking protection from a daughter's boyfriend who won't take no for an answer, Haluska said.
Statewide, the number of orders of protection cases have increased steadily since 2008, rising from the 32,484 courts disposed of then to 33,953 in 2009, 34,521 in 2010 and 35,774 in 2011, according to figures from the Indiana Supreme Court.
Few batterers respond to interventions
CROWN POINT - Days after she experience a domestic assault by her husband over the 2010 Thanksgiving weekend, Phyllis Roy, who suffered two skull fractures and multiple bruises, encountered him.
"What happened to you?" she said the man who eventually pleaded guilty to felony strangulation in the attack asked.
His reaction to Roy's appearance doesn't surprise Suzy Bonaventura, owner of Crown Counseling. It's typical of domestic batterers because they usually are in denial about what they did to their victim, she said.
"They don't get it," said Bonaventura, who has established a batterers' intervention group in Lake County with the help of the state's Department of Child Services. "They choose not to look at the issues.
"The other party is to blame. They don't even consider verbal abuse abusive nor the emotional abuse. They're not even taking that into account – that it is abuse."
She is convinced the only way the group has managed to keep its 18 clients coming back in the 26-week program is because DCS has mandated they participate.
"None of them think they should have to be here. It's all a mistake. It's a misunderstanding. They only did it once. Lots of excuses."
The numbers on the efficacy of the Duluth model program — the same used by the state — not surprisingly, are not encouraging.
"I hate to have to say it, but they come back low," said Bonaventura, adding batterers' intervention is virtually the only game in town.
Just as marriage counseling is no remedy because it implies both spouses contribute to the marriage's dysfunction, "anger management," she said, "is not the answer to the issues with batterers."
For the program to have any measure of success, she believes courts must begin mandating participation, perhaps as a community service component for batters' sentence.
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