How To Tackle The Root Cause Of Domestic Violence

The problem of domestic violence has been in the news again, as it seems to be every few months or so. As usual the out-of-control perpetrator is male, the victim female, innocent children are involved and the consequences are devastating for everyone. It’s a story we hear far too often.

While it is true that not all violence is committed by men, the majority of violent behaviour involves men. Violence is not the only form of domestic abuse happening behind closed doors in our society: emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse can be equally damaging. The simplistic innocent-female-victim/evil-male-perpetrator model is not always the full truth. However, the stereotype does tends to cover the majority of domestic violence cases.

Despite the excellent work done on by various organisations working to prevent domestic violence, the problem of men’s violence towards women and children continues to hang around like an offensive odour. How can this be, when it’s in the news so often?

I believe it’s because we aren’t tackling the root cause of the problem. When domestic violence is in the news, I very rarely hear commentators asking the obvious question:

Why was the man violent?

Which seems bizarre to me. Surely if you want to solve a problem, the first step is to ask what is causing it. I believe this question can be answered with one simple word:

Anger

The root cause of domestic violence is the inability to manage anger.

People only resort to violence when they are angry. It’s pretty obvious really. Domestic violence is the end result of the inability of the perpetrator to manage their emotions, particularly anger.

I grew up in a household where anger wasn’t handled well, and I’ve experienced first hand the damage that it can cause. Anger doesn’t have to lead to violence, but it happens when a man hasn’t learned to regulate or channel his anger constructively. The anger builds up until the pressure cooker explodes in violence.

This raises the next question:

Why was he angry?

The answer to this is more complex. Anger is our last-resort response when we feel under threat because we think we won’t get our needs met. It’s a primal emotion that evolved to motivate us to stand up for ourselves when we feel powerless, and act to make sure that we do get our needs met. I suspect unresolved emotional trauma from all the previous times that they didn’t get their needs met also adds to the pressure.

Now as I’ve said, anger doesn’t have to lead to violence; in fact, violence is usually a very poor way of getting our needs met. It generally doesn’t work long-term; instead, it pushes away the people who would otherwise be most interested in meeting our needs, and leads to a shame and guilt cycle.

The needs that I saw behind the anger in my family of origin were things:

• Security
• Respect
• Significance
• Connection
• Intimacy
• Mutuality

I suspect these needs are typical of those that remain unmet in men who are violent to their partners and children. Some of these needs may be either physical or emotional in nature. We live in a society that does a fairly good job at teaching men how to meet their physical needs like shelter and food, but most men receive virtually no instruction whatsoever on meeting their emotional needs like connection, significance, respect and intimacy.

Not only are we not taught to express our anger constructively, we’re generally not taught how to meet the other emotional needs that cause us to feel frustrated, powerless and angry in the first place. Ultimately, each of us are responsible for meeting our own needs; It’s not a woman’s sole responsibility to meet her partners needs.

In a stereotypical example, a man has a bad day at the office where his need for respect and significance isn’t met; but he lacks both the confidence and assertiveness to stand up to his superiors, and the communication skills to express his frustration constructively to other people like his wife… so he goes home and explodes with violence when she doesn’t give him the attention he would like because she’s stressed out and exhausted from a day at her office, or at home looking after the kids.

If we really want to tackle the root cause of domestic violence, we need to teach men how to manage their emotions, and how to meet their own emotional needs.

Our brains are wired for socialisation so many of our emotional needs can only be met in relationship with other people; and again, our society does a poor job in educating men on how to make relationships work.

We need to teach men how to manage and express anger constructively. Anger is a primal human emotion that’s a little out of touch with today’s world that generally lacks the significant physical threats that our primitive ancestors faced. But our capacity for anger is wired into our brains, and it’s not going away any time soon. It’s also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the challenge many men face regarding emotional regulation. I believe that to really tackle this problem, we need to teach men how to manage all their emotions, including anxiety, sadness, grief, guilt and shame.

Violence against women and children is never OK. There are no excuses for it. But there are reasons why it happens, and we can only really deal with the problem by tackling the root cause.