IN MEMORY OF EARL SILVERMAN

What happens, typically, is this.

A man and a woman have a child or children. Usually, it will be more than one child.

A woman begins by being verbally abusive, usually demanding things that the man cannot provide or produce, perhaps because he is not earning enough, or he is working too many hours to be able to meet all the other demands.

Frustrated that she cannot get what she wants or feels entitled to have, she complains to her female friends, who, too often, reinforce her sense that she is not getting that to which she is entitled. Too often, there is a sense of mutual empowerment going on amongst them.

Still not getting what she wants, and what he, for whatever reason, is unable to give or provide, she moves from verbal tirades to short physical attacks, to which he does not respond, save by, perhaps, trying to contain her by holding her arms in his own.

The attacks, and the verbal tirades, become more frequent. Sometimes the woman starts drinking, and begins to launch the attacks even when the children are there. The man is rarely significantly injured, but he begins to live in a highly stressed state, and the stress gets worse as soon as he leaves work, and thinks of returning to the hostile environment which is his home.

The man refuses to strike the woman back: he has been brought up to believe that it is always wrong to hit a woman, even if she is hitting him. At the most, he may contain her. If that does not work, he knows he should walk away. After all, real men do not hit women. And, with what little shreds of self-esteem he may have left, he wants to believe that he still is, appearances notwithstanding, a real man.

Every now and then, advertisements campaigning against domestic violence appear on the TV. He and his wife may even be watching these advertisements on TV. The victims are all women and children, and the abusive monster is always a man. Nobody in the room, including the man himself, considers the possibility that a man can EVER be abused, let alone the idea that the particular man, in that particular room, is being abused.

The verbal and physical attacks increase in frequency. The man wonders whether he should leave. But as soon as he looks at his children, he knows he cannot leave. He cannot leave them behind. And might the woman not turn on the children if he goes? Perhaps, when she has been at the bottle, there have been instances where she has ended up screaming at the children, or smacking them, or worse.

Meanwhile, the world continues to assume that only men can be perpetrators of domestic violence, at least so far as adult victims are involved. Advertisements seeking donations for a child abuse charity (such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) appear on the TV. The implication is that only men abuse children. Sometimes the abuse in the advertisements may suggest indirect abuse: the children are emotionally abused by seeing their weeping mother physically abused, or screamed at by some monstrous male.

Again, there are no adult male victims.

He does not conceive of himself as a victim: nothing in his upbringing has led him to think of himself in this way. He begins to realize that stress is eating into his health, but he blames himself: he seems to be poor at coping.

In general, he is inadequate. Why else would his wife be so frustrated and angry with him?

Indeed, he is so useless that she gets angry enough to attack him. Everyone knows that women are not normally violent. When their relationship began, she never attacked him like this. He has failed her. He has failed his children. What if his friends, or work colleagues, realized the truth about him?

Did he say "friends"? The reality is that he has become socially isolated. He is forever either working, or trying to keep his wife from exploding.

At home, he is always walking on eggshells, in an effort to stop his wife exploding into rage. Stress has now turned into depression, and his health is going.

Now, when he should be going straight home, after work, he cannot quite face it. He starts driving his car to somewhere where he can unwind. Somewhere where he can park and be still, so as to unwind, perhaps with music. He might even have bought some relaxation tapes. But there is a problem. If he is too late getting home, there will only be more trouble, although he cannot understand why she might want him at home: she seems to hate him with a bitter vehemence.

He would leave, but what about the kids? He must protect them. He must support them.

Most shamefully, most pitifully, his children are now his only reliable source of love. He knows it should not be this way. He knows he should not be dependent on the love of his own children. Try as he might, he knows, in his more lucid moments, that he needs them just as much as they need him. This makes him yet more ashamed.

Respect is no longer anywhere to be found. He used to be good at his job, but now, even his boss, who used to congratulate him, and perhaps give him bonuses, is beginning to lose confidence in him, because the stress is affecting his work performance.

So he goes to the doctor, and the doctor prescribes an anti-depressant. He takes the pills, and waits for them to work, but they really seem to make very little difference.

Little by little, he starts to break down. The attacks continue. He becomes unable to concentrate at home or at work. He may end up resigning or losing his job. Or, when the latest restructuring exercise comes around, he might find himself on the list of those being considered for redundancy.

What is he to do if he loses his job? He can only just afford the expense of maintaining one household, never mind two. And if he gets himself a single room somewhere, where will he be able to see his beloved children, the only beings in the world whom he can rely upon to return his love?

Eventually, he becomes incapable of functioning normally, and starts missing work. His wife's attacks, verbal and physical, redouble in intensity. If the kids are at school, she has an untrammelled opportunity to launch vitriolic attacks on him. Still, he does not strike back. He has his pride, after all: that tiny bit of remaining masculine pride which stops him hitting her.

Eventually, one day, he goes out for a walk, and he cannot face going back. He may end up sleeping in his car, if he still has a car. If it is Canada, it may be too cold to sleep outside in a car.

And now, he begins to take the steps on the road which will lead to his complete social isolation, failure, and final collapse.

In the most extreme cases, he may end up homeless.

And there seems to be nobody to help him.

But there WAS someone. Just one person, mind.

His name was Earl Silverman. He ran a shelter for men, in Canada, out of his own house, because no funding was ever made available to help men.

And this, broadly speaking, is how it fucking goes.

Peter B Harvey 27 April, 2013

EDIT: I did not write this