Charming But Dangerous

In previous articles I have spoken about the psychology of our behaviour, why we do things that are not good for use. In those articles I have applied those principles to health and fitness, why we eat junk food, why we don’t exercise etc. However, in this article those same principles will be applied to domestic violence. Now I am not apportioning blame, I am just explaining the psychology.

The basic theme is that when people begin to enter into relationships they do not chose partners who are violent (in most cases). In fact the partner who becomes violent can often be quite charming and it often comes as a surprise to people outside the relationship that there is violence in the relationship. So if these people can be charming why do they choose to be violent? This article will argue that these people don’t have a choice, as much as they might want to be good they simply can’t.

Let us consider something called Social Learning Theory. Basically, social learning theory says that when we are born we know nothing, we have no personality, we are a blank page; we have to learn everything about ourselves even learn our gender. Importantly we learn how to interact with other people, and this is a long process stretching all the way from the cradle, through kindergarten, high school, and our first job; in fact we never stop learning. Also we learn how to act in different situations, so as an example we might learn to act differently at school and at home. So the Social Learning Theory is pretty simple; violent people either learn to be violent (probably during childhood) or do not learn more appropriate ways to behave.

There are two ways to apply this theory. In the 1930’s a researcher called Sutherland at the University of Chicago developed a social learning theory called the Theory of Differential Association, and there are multiple research studies that support this theory. In this theory people learn crime, how to commit crime, how to profit from crime and how to justify crime from others skilled in crime. Being able to justify your crime is an extremely important part of committing crime; very few people would be able commit crime if they did not have a way of justifying that crime. Even criminals are worried that other people might think badly of them. In the case of domestic violence, it is my opinion that being able to justify violence is very important. To use a crude analogy, I read an article about a man who hit his wife because she burnt the toast. How could anyone justify this sort of action, you need to have some readymade justification at hand that you have learnt somewhere. Sure you might be able to invent a justification, but in my opinion it is much more likely this justification has been learnt, probably during a dysfunction childhood.

One feature of Sutherland’s theory is that people choose to commit crime. Now in the case of domestic violence it might be tempting to think that the offender chooses to be charming and then chooses to be violent. I would argue that the offender has learnt how to be violent over a long period of time without consciously recognising it. So people from violent or dysfunctional homes learn how to be violent and they revert to this behaviour under times of stress. It is not a matter of choice.

So what is the mechanism for this transformation from charming to violent? The offender might not set out to be violent, however this is not a position they can maintain. These offenders or potential offenders are able to interact with people when other people are at a distance, say work colleagues. However, close personal relationships put much greater stress on us and it is these stresses that the offender cannot handle. Also, as I stated above people can learn different behaviours for different situations, so the work environment and home are quite different. In a normal relationship partners have disagreements, but both partners grow and mature together and times of stress can even accelerate this process. In short they learn. People who have not learnt how to deal with people cannot cope with this process and revert to what they do know, which is often their dysfunctional upbringing. Then a second process that kicks in, normalisation. The violent person begins to introduce bad behaviour such as yelling into the relationship. Now if the other partner responds by yelling, then the behaviour of yelling is normalised. The process then progresses to physical violence, maybe not a level of violence that would leave bruises or would allow the police to act but violence none the less. After a little while this level of violence has become normalised. The process then continues to greater levels of violence. Now the violent person might not plan this out, but they fall into the process because they don’t know better. The violent person might even recognise that the behaviour is wrong but they just cannot help themselves. An analogy might be if you went on holidays to say China and you try to take a taxi somewhere. Now the taxi driver doesn’t speak English, the taxi driver only speaks Chinese. The English speaking tourist will continue to speak to the taxi driver in English trying to explain where they want to go to and the taxi driver will continue to speak in Chinese. Both the taxi driver and the tourist know that what they are doing is of no help at all, but they don’t know what else to do so they keep speaking in their own language. It is the same with domestic violence; the violent person does not know how to act in any other way.

The second way to apply Social Learning Theory is a process called Behaviouralism. As a child you are rewarded for good behaviour and punished for being bad; hence you learn that doing the right thing is beneficial for you. If you have every watched Super Nanny you will know how simple and effective this process can be. In a dysfunctional family this process breaks. There are several common problems; children are used as pawns by warring parents or there is a lack of structure in the home where children cannot tell what is good and what bad behaviour is. Such events can be very traumatic and learning and development can stop all together. This is the difficulty of a dysfunctional upbringing; people are often stuck in adolescence type behaviour. So you start life as a baby with your parents doing absolutely everything for you. Then you grow up a little bit and you are asked to do little jobs around the house for pocket money. Your parents let you go out at night provided you follow certain rules, such as being home by midnight. And so on, there is a continual process of exchanging responsibility for additional freedom. Importantly people learn how to learn.  In a dysfunctional family this simple process often stalls and people find they are continuously treated as children, so people enter adulthood with an emotional development of say that of a 15 year old. Of greater concern, people from dysfunctional upbringings have not learnt how to modify their behaviour; they have not learnt how to learn. The end result is people from a dysfunctional family not having the emotional maturity to function in a romantic relationship.

This brings us to the final question, is this process inevitable and can people change. Well this is a vexed question; my position is that all people can change to some extent. Indeed some people are able to mature and grow overnight. It is like there is a crossed wire in the brain, when the wires are uncrossed the brain works normally straight away. The problem with domestic violent is that violent person might not even realise their behaviour is wrong and they certainly would not be able to change without considerable professional counselling and support. If anyone is thinking that they can change their partner and continue in the violent relationship they may be putting themselves in mortal danger.