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4 Surviving Childhood “I Learned to Stand up for Myself”

Medea endured a distressing childhood filled with abandonment and mental abuse by her parents. She did not feel that she fit in anywhere, whether it was in her home among her family or at school with her peers. As a result, Medea acknowledged, “I learned to stand up for myself.” Medea’s poor treatment by several of her family members left an indelible mark on her and, in retrospect, helped her understand how she came to be in abusive relationships and her resulting responses to the intimate partner abuse:

Using my relationship with my father as a filter, I could understand why I made the choices I made. But I also had to understand that I couldn’t continue to make those choices and the only person who could help me be whole was me. And I could get to that place, but I could not depend on having a relationship with men to get me to that place. I had to look at my life and fix what was wrong, the same as if I had a health issue. Ultimately it would be up to me.… You have to co-create the life you want.

Medea was a spirited child in spite of the neglect and isolation she suffered. Even though she found herself in a number of abusive intimate relationships during adulthood, during childhood Medea visualized her life beyond her depraved youth: “I felt like the world was bigger than that small space. I was kind of doing time.”

At the beginning of this project, I expected that, like Medea, many of the women would have childhood experiences riddled with abuse and neglect. This was indeed a sad reality, as most of the women had suffered from an extensive assortment of abusive experiences during their formative years. Taking into account all forms of exposure to abuse and violence, 33 of the 40 women underwent some type of introduction to violence during their childhood. They experienced abuse from parents, witnessed intimate partner abuse among parents, witnessed other acts of abuse and violence, and exhibited destructive behaviors. To be sure, I do not suggest that battered women cause their abuse because of their abusive backgrounds, but I do wish to move toward determining the significance of the link between childhood trauma and entry into abusive relationships and to enlighten the field of interpersonal violence regarding factors that determine these women’s reactions to intimate partner abuse. These experiences helped the women to develop at an early age their dynamic resistance as Black women in a society based in racial, gender, and class inequities.

Individuals who have been the target of intimate partner abuse have often experienced some form of abuse or violence during their upbringings, although this is not necessarily an antecedent to their being in abusive intimate relationships as adults. Researchers on intimate partner abuse have found that experience with violence in the family of origin often begets future family violence.¹ That is, if an individual is raised in a violent and abusive home, some existing research maintains that she or he often learns violence and abuse as a normal event or appropriate response. Further, some scholars have reported that battered women raised in violent family homes are stymied in their ability to recognize warning signs that an intimate partner is abusive.² These types of reasoning and findings are based on the concept of social learning theory.³ But Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes warn that this link may also be explained by differences in individuals’ propensity to disclose their experiences in surveys, because “it is possible that respondents who reported one type of victimization (e.g., child maltreatment) were simply more willing to report other types of victimization (e.g., intimate partner violence).”⁴

Although these prior discoveries on the abusive childhoods reported by many battered women are related to the accounts presented in this chapter, additional investigation based on dynamic resistance must be included when addressing issues of battered Black women specifically. Family dynamics within Black culture, as well as societal pressures outside the family unit, must be given considerable attention in any examination of battered Black women and their childhoods. This is concluded and proposed by Gail E. Wyatt and her colleagues, who have reported that “[f]ew studies have examined associations between domestic violence and exposure to current or past crimes and injustices in one’s home or community.… [T]here is little empirical documentation of the types of early experiences that may better predict risks for domestic violence among African American women.”⁵

Childhood Abuse

Twenty-three of the women in my study experienced a form of verbal, mental, nonsexual physical, or sexual abuse during childhood. Perpetrators of these methods of abuse included parents, stepparents, siblings, other relatives, and acquaintances. To better facilitate the analytic presentation of abuse during childhood, I have separated sexual abuse (9 women) from verbal, mental, or nonsexual physical abuse (20 women); the perpetrators of the latter were parents or stepparents,⁶ whereas those who committed the sexual abuse had a greater variety of relationships to the women. These two categories will be discussed separately. Although the women shared stories of neglectful behaviors by those outside their close relations, such as schoolteachers, their most painful, abusive, and noteworthy accounts involved the people they most trusted, who eroded that trust by employing abusive behaviors. This is not to devalue the effect of community- and societal-level violations but serves to place the focus here on interpersonal violation. Accordingly, the abuse addressed here is that committed by parents, other relatives, and family friends.

Verbal and mental abuse of children refers to abuse that degrades, insults, and humiliates for the purpose of denigrating a child’s self-worth and for which the intention is not to offer constructive criticism. There is a view, based on widely held perceptions of Blacks, that Black children suffer from greater rates of parental abuse than other children. Although this is reported in a substantial amount of research,⁷ other inquiries question the accuracy of these depictions. As with most if not all deviant acts, it is difficult to measure the frequency of child abuse, particularly with regard to racial and ethnic differences. Kathleen Malley-Morrison and Denise A. Hines surmise that the difficulty in measuring the amount and rate of child maltreatment within Black families arises because there has been overreporting of abusive incidents within these families due in part to overreporting by medical personnel. Malley-Morrison and Hines question whether in fact a higher proportion of Black parents do abuse their children.⁸ A recent analysis by Blanca M. Ramos and her associates found that Black and White women have similar rates of childhood physical abuse.⁹ These contradictory data surprise some researchers, as is evident in the work of Richard J. Gelles and Murray A. Straus:

One of the more surprising outcomes of our first national survey of family violence was that there was no difference between blacks and whites in the rates of abusive violence toward children. This should not have been the case. First, most official reports of child abuse indicate that blacks are overrepresented in the reports. Also, blacks in the United States have higher rates of unemployment than whites and lower annual incomes—two factors that we know lead to higher risk of abuse. That blacks and whites had the same rate of abusive violence was one of the great mysteries of the survey. A careful examination of the data collected unraveled the apparent mystery. While blacks did indeed encounter economic problems and life stresses at greater rates than whites, they also were more involved in family and community activities than white families. Blacks reported more contact with their relatives and more use of their relatives for financial support and child care. It was apparent that the extensive social networks that black families develop and maintain insulate them from the severe economic stresses they also experience, and thus reduce what otherwise would have been a higher rate of parental violence.¹⁰

There was variation based on socioeconomic status during childhood among the 20 women who experienced verbal, mental, or nonsexual physical abuse by parents and stepparents. Almost two-thirds of the middle-class women endured this type of child maltreatment, while fewer than half of the women within each of the other two socioeconomic classifications (low-income and working-class) did. Nine women experienced verbal or mental and physical abuse, but there was no major variation by socioeconomic class among these women, and within this group each socioeconomic class was equally represented. Nine women were subjected to verbal or mental abuse but no physical abuse, and two women experienced only physical abuse but reported no verbal or mental abuse.

Much of the explanation provided by the women to explain why their parents abused them was expressed in terms of socioeconomic status, race, gender, or substance abuse issues. Regarding socioeconomic class, the source of the abuse was attributable to financially unsupportive fathers, the need to acquire and retain assets, and the preservation of the family’s general financial interests. The women identified the uneasy feelings experienced by mothers or othermothers who were stressed by financially neglectful fathers and who took their frustrations out on the children. The second area of economic stressors experienced by some of the women’s parents that acted as triggers for verbal, mental, or physical abuse was the maintenance of material goods for appearances (“keeping up with the Joneses”). Related to this were the pressures or failures of the parents or their children to become accomplished members of society as evidenced through education and employment. Such pressures were described as catalysts for abuse.¹¹ Keeping up appearances as a source of tension for the women’s parents was evident in all levels of socioeconomic status. Medea described the neglect by her father and stepmother, which took place in their upper-middle-class setting and was based on upper-class measures:

Their lives revolved around clothes, a big house, cars, that kind of thing. But there was an absence of affection.… He never really wanted to spend money on me unless there was instantaneous credit in it for him. For example, when I was a debutante, I remember him saying, “Smile, that looks like a $500 dress.” Whenever I accomplished or I achieved anything, it became his accomplishment. He never complimented me. He always criticized me. Nothing I did was ever good enough.

The final theme concerning socioeconomic class as grounds for abuse is the general pressure on the parents to maintain the household finances. Forty-three-year-old Danielle suffered from extreme verbal and mental abuse by her single mother, who used an assortment of techniques to maintain her economic well-being, which included forcing Danielle to leave the family home at the age of 11:

She hated me. She wished I wasn’t born and she used to beat me all the time.… I got pregnant when I was 13 and had my baby when I was 14. [My mother] made me move back in when I was pregnant, and after I had my baby she put me back out and took my baby away. It hurt me. She put me out of her house again and told me I couldn’t take my baby.… It was just so she could get more money from the welfare. It wasn’t out of no care and concern. But she grew to love my kids. My grandmother told me [that my mother] gave my kids the love that she couldn’t give me.

Billie was pushed by her single mother to secure and maintain employment simply to support her mother’s gambling addiction. Similarly, when 33-year-old Victoria’s grandmother died, she left several thousands of dollars to each of several family members, including Victoria and her mother. Regrettably, as Victoria and her mother struggled financially and her mother’s drug addiction progressed, Victoria’s mother used both her and Victoria’s inheritance, chiefly for her drug dependency.