When I taught in a batterer intervention program—an educational, not counseling program—we’d draw a triangle on the board to help the men look at their belief system. During this lesson on the hierarchy of power, we’d use different ‘systems’ so they could identify the ways they classified people. Schools, corporations, and prisons were just a few of the organizations we sliced and diced.
They stratified prison, showing the prisoners on the bottom, squashed under the guards, wardens, politicians, and everyone else in the world. When I asked if the guards had any chance of having an “authentic relationship” with the prisoners as they loomed over them as shown in the hierarchy triangle, their laughs were loud and derisive.
When we asked them to define the layers of family, the woman usually laid on the bottom of the heap. Some men argued that the women rated a place above the male children, but they were always wedged under the husbands and fathers. Men who’d grown up in single mother households still stuck the father figure on top.
This doesn’t come from the air.
Last July, the Boston Globe reported on a domestic homicide, the sixteenth in Massachusetts since January. Sarin Chan was murdered by an ex-boyfriend. The murder was witnessed by her 4-and 6-year-old children. (The article does not say if they are boys or girls, and it is not known if the alleged murderer is the father.)
Honestly? I feel a bit shaky writing the above. My novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, revolves around young girls witnessing their father murdering their mother, I worked with men who savagely beat (and some murdered) their partners. My father tried to kill my mother, and still I try to pretend