Battered: The Cycle of Family Violence

In a week-long series, Erika Johnson Spinelli and Ellen Liburt took a detailed, thoughtful look at domestic violence — and what it takes to break the cycle of abuse. The series shows how abuse starts and the many factors involved in why it continues. It also describes support services that help women and children and explains why it’s important for victims to seek help.

In this story, an abuse counselor for men speaks frankly about growing up watching his father beat his mother. Although he vowed not to repeat those brutal mistakes, he failed. He learned how to control the physical abuse and some of the emotional battering, but as the end of the article demonstrates, abusive behavior is entrenched and even unconscious.

Traci Quinn Duffy, Assistant Managing Editor/Features, coordinated the project.

SUMTER, S.C. — Wallace Smith left home when he was 14 because he couldn’t stand to watch his father beat his mother any longer. Before leaving, he had offered to buy her a gun so she could kill him. “I swore I’d never do what my father did,” Smith said.

It was a vow he didn’t keep. Four years later, Smith was married and “slapped [his wife] around” weekly. The nine-year marriage dissolved after he threatened to kill her.

He married again and verbally abused his second wife, much as his father had abused him. “You’re stupid,” “You’re just like your momma,” his father had taunted Smith and his seven brothers and sisters.

Smith has escaped that cycle of abuse, but he still struggles every day to control his anger. “I have always been kind of a mean person,” he said.

Smith has been married to his second wife for 27 years. He has never hit her and says he has not verbally abused her since he entered counseling 13 years ago, when he went to the Men’s Resource Center in Columbia, South Carolina. He blames his abusive past in part on his father, but through counseling he has learned to accept responsibility for his own actions. Now a peer counselor at the center, Smith encourages other abusers to do the same. “I tell [abusers] they can’t be responsible for what their wives do,” he said. “I’ve got to reprogram their minds.”

In the five years he’s been a counselor, Smith has seen more than 400 men pass through the center’s doors: military men, police officers, blue- and white-collar workers, and even a minister. Some men think it’s OK to hit their spouses, that it’s even funny, Smith said. One man laughed at a photograph of a woman’s beaten face.

Abusers like Smith, who witnessed abuse as a child, are conditioned to believe that such behavior is acceptable. That’s where the cycle begins.

Smith entered the cycle when he was 6 years old, when he realized his father abused his mother. “When she woke up to fix breakfast, she had swollen eyes and lips, and she couldn’t move her arm,” he said.

Although he hated his father’s behavior, Smith re-enacted it four years after he left home. He would get angry at little things — if his wife, for example, didn’t cook exactly what he wanted for dinner. “I’d come home to her half-drunk,” he said of his first wife. “So then I’d have a couple of beers and slap her around.”

Abusers often have to control every aspect of their spouses’ lives. For Smith, the 22 years he spent in the Air Force reinforced that mentality. “The control thing is hard to let go,” he said. “In the military, if I told someone to do something, they did it. But it doesn’t work that way in the home.”

Smith’s first wife took the weekly beatings, although she tried several times to stop him. She reported his abuse to his Air Force commander, who threatened to throw Smith in jail if he beat her again. Smith didn’t believe him, and his wife’s visit to the base angered him. He went home and beat her up. The next day, he was behind bars.

His abuse landed him in jail two more times. Each time, he only grew angrier. After nine years, Smith called the marriage quits. He was stationed overseas when his commander decided his wife would be safer at home. Smith was taken to the airport in handcuffs to see her off. He threatened to kill her if she didn’t divorce him.

After that, Smith swore he would never marry again. He didn’t think he was cut out for it.

Three months later, he married a second time.

A friend had a New Year’s Eve party and wanted Smith to meet a woman. Apparently, Smith wasn’t very nice to her, and his friend demanded that he call her and apologize. She suggested they might see a movie if he ever got sober. He did. They did. And he married her because she didn’t drink or smoke, he said.

The cycle started again. Smith verbally abused his second wife, calling her names and demeaning her. “But I never hit her. I was scared if I hit her, I’d hurt her really bad,” he said.

Her family’s daily involvement in their life finally pushed Smith to the edge. He threatened to kill her if her family didn’t leave them alone. They filed for divorce and were separated for more than six months.

“She said she didn’t want a divorce, but she didn’t want me to call her names anymore,” he said. “I told her to keep her family out of our life.”

They’ve now been married for almost three decades. Smith has struggled to end the cycle of abuse in his life and prevent it in his children’s.

He doesn’t know if he’s been successful. Smith’s oldest daughter is in a bad relationship, he said. “She takes a lot of garbage. I tell her she’s stupid.”

Excerpted by Marc Miller.