Dr. Judith Herman is a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and  the co-founder of the Victims of Violence Program at Cambridge Hospital, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dr. Herman has dedicated her career on helping victims of violence work through their pain and free themselves of those who subjected them to trauma and pain. She has authored numerous books and has provided guidance to domestic violence groups across the nation during her long and remarkable career.

This is one program in our series on Trauma, Abuse & Sexual Assault that everyone should see and understand to better understand how women and their children suffer, and what it takes to help them break free of their tormentor and their pain.

Also see our other programs on Sexual Assault and Trauma.

hello and welcome to the legal edition i'm your host attorney mary kay elloian our show topic today the sound of silence the hidden epidemic of domestic abuse and trauma our discussion is on the insidiousness and pervasiveness of domestic abuse and the mistreatment of victims by the very people and institutions that should be protecting them our guest is author and professor dr judith herman she is a professor of psychiatry at harvard medical school and co-founder of the victims of violence program at cambridge hospital in cambridge massachusetts let's welcome dr judith herman welcome dr herman thank you for having me why is domestic violence and trauma so insidious and pervasive still in the united states well it's not just in the united states first of all it's a worldwide problem and it has to do with power and control it has to do with the subordination of women to men you can think of violence domestic violence as one of many methods that men use to keep women in their place to keep women subordinated there's often a misconception that that what offenders need is anger management right i hear that all the time well it's not i mean most of these guys do not beat up their bosses they don't beat up random people on the street they um they have control of their anger they you know they don't just lose their temper indiscriminately they beat up people who they want to control and where they believe that they can get away with it um and behind closed doors mostly behind closed doors yes exactly and violence is really only one of the methods that offenders use to keep victims subordinated and sometimes the violence doesn't have to happen that often there's a saying in the battle women's movement that a good beating is good for a year because once she's you'll you'll hear survivors say things like i saw that expression on his face i saw him i looked into his eyes and i thought he really could kill me he he's capable he could do that and once that's happened and once the been beaten or you know particularly dangerous methods like smothering strangling that sort of thing then he doesn't need to hit her again in fact he that may not even need to raise his hand he just needs to give her that look and she will be an alert for that look and so these cues these cues have been generated over the past because of the violence so that she's actually on notice on notice that he could explode or erupt or that she should uh recoil from right that he needs to be on the alert all the time hyper vigilant hyper vigilant which is one of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress of course but it means that your adrenaline is running all the time um your whole cis fear system your system for alert for danger is running all the time and that's why people have things like in some terrible insomnia when they have post-traumatic stress um because they kind of can't calm it down they can't turn that switch off because it's in the domestic violence situation it needs to be on all the time this is true of abused kids as well i wonder if you're familiar with a graphic called the violence wheel yes the domestic violence wheel yes was a graphic that for education that was developed by a battered women's program in duluth minnesota and the center of the wheel they list power and control and then the spokes of the wheel are all the different methods that are used to keep victims subordinated so there's violence and threat of violence there's verbal threats there's things like capricious enforcement of petty rules like you know i don't want you doing x y or z and but she never really knows what it is that's going to set him off so she's got to be when walking on eggshells walking on eggshells exactly and not initiating anything that sort of what that does is create a climate where he makes all the rules and she just has to obey them but she can't herself and say i want to do this or i want to do that it's sort of like you do what you're told now what is the tipping point though for most women when they decide they have to leave well a lot of that depends on social support and economic circumstances those are the two big ones let's talk about that social support system well that is so key because what another spoke of that wheel is isolation he sometimes it's masked as pathological jealousy i don't want you going out with your girlfriends because i know what you're really doing you know you're you're if you're you're gonna go out to a bar and pick up other men or flirt with other men which maybe you know she has no plan to do that but what it does is it means she can't go out with her friends and then he doesn't really want her to see her family because the reasons x y or c now are these men really psychologically unstable so that they have this um this jealousy that isn't really based on anything of of logic that is tangible well you know the pathology of offenders is not as severe as in general as what we would expect i mean a lot of times um people will say oh he seemed so normal or he was so well respected or i would never has have thought that he would be the sort of person who would do this sort of thing so they look good on the outside um and we don't partly because offenders don't really volunteer to be studied we don't know that much about them honestly well the catholic church was one of the most insidious institutions that not only kept it quiet but perpetuated these crimes upon the most vulnerable by just moving them around that's right and um i mean they really had rings of pedophiles that targeted oftentimes i mean they could they could target a kid who was lonely who was um hungry for adult attention vulnerable vulnerable and also they also targeted very devout families um who wouldn't question well who thought of of priests as representatives of god on earth and who would suspect and so even when children would try to report they would say how could you say such a thing about father so-and-so you know he he's so kind and you know he get he takes you out to the park and he buys you ice cream and you know how um and yes the the it wasn't just the perpetrators but in that case as in many cases the institution that perpetuated it basically covered up covered it up they were much more afraid of scandal for their institution than they were worried about the well-being of the children um and certainly you go that goes against the teaching of uh any religion really yeah and and to this day i think i mean there are a number of survivor organizations one in particular that i'm familiar with called bishopaccountability.org that kind of traces how you know how many of the credible claims that have been made how many were actually how many perpetrators were actually held accountable and it's a very small number um it's a very small fraction and certainly of the bishops uh and the cardinals who allowed this to to be perpetuated by simply transferring getting getting the perpetrators out of the communities where their behavior was starting to view one of the things i wanted to bring into this issue is the institutions that have failed we even see this in our government i see this with our especially with our elected officials for example when donald trump let access hollywood tape came out and he said those terrible things about women most people thought that would be the end of his career but instead he gets elected i mean what does that say about the american people well i'm i'm sorry to say that patriarchy is alive and well in in the us as it is around most of the world and and to some degree that creates a culture a deep culture of entitlement for uh sexual violence sexual exploitation sexual harassment and um violence against women so all the whole spectrum of gender-based violence i i think it also was significant that that he was running against a woman to run on a major party apart from for president and i think there was a lot of misogyny that he was vulnerable to even though i mean as a woman politician you have to walk this incredible tightrope because if you uh look sort of stern and business-like and organized and not taking any crap from anybody then you're a b-i-t-c-h but if you're warm and uh empathic and uh relatable and show your feelings then you're kind of weak and um you know what about that time of the month you know you're you're not up to the job uh you're not strong uh so it's kind of a no-win situation and i think she tried to go more on the side of i'm i'm all business and i just you know i know how the government runs and i can do this and i can do that and that alienated a lot of people they the idea of a woman in charge the woman being in power and control was still very threatening i think to a lot of people and i think that was also threatening to some women because a lot of women didn't vote for her and i find that really very interesting that here is a woman who's highly educated highly uh trained is has been in multiple positions to know what she would be getting into as president and then a lot of women didn't vote for her i don't understand that dichotomy there well i think there was another way that she was actually compromised but what did compromise her i think was her relationship to her husband and her tolerance not only tolerance for his indiscretion multiple indiscretions um his abuse of women but her complicity um i mean she really went along with the trashing of monica lewinsky and sort of the blaming of i mean here talk about power and control here's the most powerful man in some ways on the planet and an intern who's all right she's over 21 but barely and the power and power differential is enormous and okay the fact that she flirted and um you know snapped her thong underwear or whatever she did to ins attract him you know with a more disciplined person who understood about uh not abusing his power he would have said you know i i like you very much but this is not gonna happen and you know you're you're very very sexy you're a very attractive young woman um and uh if i were your age and unmarried that would be another story right i'm not i'm your boss and she went along with that and i think that alien needed a lot of women now the story with donald trump all these women are coming forward um yeah of some indiscretion on his part we start with um christine blasey ford coming forward when with justice kavanaugh as did anita hill with now justice clarence thomas yes but nobody seems to listen why are victims not usually believed or listened to why does that keep happening well i think victims are not in positions of power and i mean in in the case of justice kavanaugh it seemed clear that in some ways as as it was with anita hill that the agenda of getting a conservative justice on the court was a power agenda and it didn't really matter what she said she was going to be smeared and discredited uh in the interest of getting this man on the court no matter what you know having a republican-controlled senate meant that was what was going to happen um but i do think many of the survivors i've talked to since then have spoken about those hearings as as a moment of awakening where they realized you know what it's not just my private problem it's a big public problem and i think the me too movement has really begun to organize the voices of survivors so that uh that there start to be some consequences so there's start to be some accountability um i you know survivors have to get together they have to have the bravery of an anita hill or a christine blasey ford to stand up there and deal with all the threats and all the these women were humiliated by the senators yes that should have been really wanting to know what really transpired but they were more focused on destroying her character than to finding out yeah it was really wrong not only that but they just for the optics because all the all the republicans on the judiciary committee were white men and they didn't think the optics would be good about a panel of white men all grilling blasey ford which is what had happened with amita hill they got a female prosecutor to ask to question her to ask their questions now she was not on trial but they but they set it up as so she were with the prosecutor and they got a woman prosecutor to be complicit and that's part of i think the institutional betrayal that so many survivors uh feel you know if they they dare to come forward and then women are part of the system that discredits them it it sort of doubles the humiliation and the the the betrayal um there's a psychologist uh professor at university of oregon named uh jennifer fraud and she calls that she calls this institutional betrayal when the institutions that you turn to for justice for help for acknowledgement um turn their backs or worse but each time a woman has this act of courage to stand up i think it it inspires a whole bunch of other survivors i should say there are male survivors as well certainly of childhood abuse and that's usually by men um in that case as well uh i did want to mention also that since those hearings and since the advent of the metoo movement just very recently we've have become aware of a a new coalition of organizations called the survivors agenda what is that all about well uh it seems as though the leaders of four organizations all women of color got together on the anniversary of metoo and they had collaborated in various projects in the past but it was tarana burke of me too i jinpoo of the domestic workers alliance monica ramirez of migrant justice and fatima gus graves of the national women's law center and they said we need survivors to be the leaders of social change social justice movements public policy the survivors need to have a voice in what happens and how how survivors are treated um and so this is a public problem and we need to have a public presence and so they they did a survey of a thousand anonymous survey thousand survivors saying what are your priorities what do you need what do you want and then they they did town hall meetings they did local organizing um and then they just last month they had a three-day virtual summit of the survivor's agenda and they had anita hill was a keynote speaker and she said i've been waiting my whole life for something like this to come along she said i haven't seen anything like this before because they really they are combining kind of grassroots organizing like i think me too is now working on a lot of local support groups focus groups just getting survivors together to think about to support each other but also to think about what do we need what are our priorities and then they're combining that with very detailed kind of policy thinking for example we need to renew the violence against women act we need that's very important yeah we need to uh expand the victims of crime act which most people don't know about but which is a kind of a wonderful mechanism for offenders as a group to give back to survivors as a group that it sets up a fund that is based on fines on criminal offenders both federal and understands that's the state level and that money goes to victim compensation if they you know if they've lost time from work if they have medical bills if they have mental health bills which lots of people do those are eligible for compensation it funds victim advocates in the court system to try to make the courts a little more humane and a little more victim-friendly and it funds rape crisis centers bad women's shelters all the front-line organizations that are helping survivors so imagine if that were better known and you know if the funding could be expanded like by other survivors i interviewed said rape is a life sentence i think my offenders should they they should just pay a fine once they should have something deducted from their paycheck every month to go into this fund i don't want i don't want to have anything to do with my perpetrator i don't want to get a check from him but if he gave a check into a fund a general fund and then that i could have access to that money what's the name of the organization survivor's agenda survivors agenda and it's uh it is really a coalition they don't have one they decided not to make one organization with one figurehead leader but because they really they have a different style of of leadership they don't want one person to become the the figurehead and i mean these four women are all extraordinarily busy as it is um so they want to be their whole their organizations to just be a network which i think is a wonderful way of doing things so so basically when these situations occur when people are abused whether it's children women whoever is abused it's usually because of this power struggle this unequal bargaining in whether it's the family or in the institution right but i also have found that the legal system usually embraces perpetrators over the victim now have you seen that um in your work no certainly i mean first of all most victims don't report anything they're too ashamed or they're too frightened they've been threatened you know if you ever if you ever go to the cops i'll kill your you or i'll kill your family or i'll you know i'll i'll hunt you down and they in the children if there's children they have to be fearful for the children yeah yeah so um i mean lots of people just you know isolation is key if they have if they can get their social supports together if they can get some source of income that doesn't depend on the perpetrator if they have someone who can house them temporarily um they'll get out much sooner um their silence is their enemy they need to speak up even though they're told if you kill tell anybody we'll kill you you have to speak up well if you're a lot of people sort of try to thread that needle keeping it quiet but just quietly escaping but then the perpetrator there are no consequences for the perpetrator and you probably go on if he really if he really understands that he no longer has power over this person he'll go on to someone else um so the more survivors speak up the more it's possible to begin to demand to hold perpetrators accountable you know the other issue i think that i should point out here is that a lot of people and particularly people of color and other subordinated groups they don't want the perpetrator to go to prison they don't believe that prison is going to make things better and so partly it's the what the criminal justice system offers is often not what survivors want they want safety they want protection they want acknowledgement that you know they have nothing to be ashamed of they didn't do anything wrong it's not you know that she didn't cook the dinner properly or um you know that the house wasn't clean just so but that he had no right to have this level of control over her and the blame goes to him the shame goes to him not to her but what a lot of survivors want is safety protection acknowledgement but they don't necessarily want the perpetrator punished they want the community to deal with him in some way so he won't do it again and we don't generally know what that is i mean there are better treatment programs there are some do they work there are some good outcome data but they do depend on a diversion from the criminal courts you have to have a i mean and sometimes there are domestic special domestic violence courts that are set up to deal with this so that the perpetrator is required to go to better treatment not angered management but better treatment and good better treatment is again understands the violence wheel and understands that this is about power and control and generally the men are in groups with leaders who are gonna challenge all the rationalizations well i did that because she blah blah blah she went well she didn't deserve to get hit no matter you know what and the guys can usually catch each other's rationalizations very well because they're they they've done it themselves you know so if if the court enforces it and and good manner treatment checks in with the women all the time to see you know that that's their metric of success if the woman reports that there haven't been any further incidents that's the good outcome not did they get a conviction um but even setting that up i mean most batterers never see the inside of a courtroom and certainly don't get sent to a good better treatment so in terms of actually coming to grips with the problem at the scale that it exists where one in four one in five women reports having been uh attacked by an inter physically attacked by an intimate partner at some point um we need a system for dealing with domestic violence that we just don't have at this point what would that system be if there could be a system that could really treat the the problem what would you like it to look like i would like it to look like first a safety intervention of course that's number one that's number one getting the woman to safety and a safety plan how is she gonna what's she gonna do for money what she's gonna do for shelter how is she gonna take care of the kids uh how's she gonna get her health and mental health and the kids who've witnessed this and often been have done receiving in themselves howard how's she going to get her immediate crisis needs met so that's one it's a good crisis intervention system and a lot of times that would have to be based for example in pediatricians offices because oftentimes she may not even be allowed to go out to her own medical appointments but she's allowed to take the kids or in primary care offices i mean we do a lot of work trying to get primary care docs to ask about domestic violence and or in the emergency room when somebody comes in you know and says you know she banked into a door to ask about domestic violence dots are supposed to do that now but a lot of times they don't want to do it because they have 15 minute appointment blocks they're already behind i mean 15 minutes per patient and they're on the go day all day long and which is another crazy system but let's not go there for the moment if they do they don't know what to do they need a social worker right there on the spot who can meet with the woman right then and there and you know on a sort of emergency call who could meet with the woman develop a safety plan uh help her get into some sort of support group maybe or so that she isn't isolated anymore and she's got a hotline if there are any more threats or stalking or trying to use the children or however and then a kind of a community swoop onto the perpetrator that would say uh this is not okay uh i mean this is what's envisaged for example in restorative justice um where instead of punishment what you're doing is what one theorist calls re-integrative shaming where you're settling no we don't this is not okay and we're gonna kind of check up on you to make sure that you're not doing this anymore and we're gonna make sure you get the help you need so that you don't repeat this um and then following up so that i mean it's quite controversial to use restorative justice that's when you get the perpetrator to basically try to make amends with the victim right they call it reintegrative shaming where instead of punishment for breaking a law you're saying you're accountable for repairing the harm does this work does this work well that's the big question and particularly for crimes of violence against women it's it's an open question right now there it hasn't been implemented uh in any kind of systematic way where you could get outcome data uh it's you know it's it's it's more aspirational than uh in the real world right now i mean there are there have been model programs here and there but uh nothing that could collect outcome data on a in a way that would be convincing and and clearly it's a big investment of time and energy well why would women not want their perpetrator to go to jail it seems to me if the if the perpetrator goes to jail they would have more time to get their life together to get their finances together to get all these things together so why would they not want them to go to jail well because a lot of times this was somebody they loved they loved once upon a time and might still love um but love shouldn't hurt love should not hurt indeed but it's complicated so oftentimes survivors have very mixed feelings about their perpetrator so i've interviewed women for example who you know went to the police got restraining orders a lot of people think those that's a civil action it's not a criminal matter so a restraining order uh says you have to stay away from her you can't threaten her you can't use do a b and c and um most perpetrators if they have a lot to lose i mean the the restraining orders are helpful for many people they don't work all the time um but for many people they do and that they that gives the survivors a breathing space but i've i've known women for example who their batterer was a pillar of the community when i hear that now i think oh no i know what's going on going on you know behind closed doors but which is unfair but uh and so he had a lot to lose by being outed and so he did stay away from her she they are divorced um they never meet in person but she would still talk with him regularly on the phone because she said things like you know that was 15 years of my life that we were together and i wanna honor the fact that there was you know he was always somebody i could when he wasn't in that controlling mode he was he could be very kind he could be very uh attuned we could always we always had lots to talk about and so she says she if he he knows that she said if if he ever got into another intimate relationship she would feel obliged to warn that woman because it turned out she wasn't the first one he had treated this way but um but she says as long as he keeps his distance i never want to see him in person because that would be too scary but i i like to keep that kind of connection so and the other reason a lot of women are against punishment is that they're afraid it'll just make things worse that he'll do you know he'll have be sentenced to two years he'll be out in a year and he'll be even more vengeful and he'll have picked up more pointers from within the prison system so why do you tell these women that you need a plan you need a social support system and what else you need money um and money that's not dependent on the perpetrator controlling it and oftentimes i've found women who have had a middle and middle class lifestyle will have to have a much leaner lifestyle you know they'll they'll lose they will lose their house they may lose comforts that they were accustomed to or they they won't lose their life their kids will grow up healthier um they won't lose their sanity um and self-respect and their their dignity their self-respect and their friends and their families they'll begin they'll they'll have a social life that's based on give and take on mutuality on equality not on power power and control and when i when i read your book trauma and recovery one of the things i found very striking about it i couldn't put it down it was the fact that um sometimes and often bystanders um can actually be swooned by the perpetrator and even um family members can be duped by the perpetrator yeah why does that happen well oftentimes these guys are pretty slick operators they know how to engage people savvy operators savvy operators exactly um and they're good at manipulating people you know they they and they you know and they'll use their intimate knowledge of the victim against the victim well you know she was always a little you know over emotional she tends to exaggerate uh you know you you can't really take her word and she sometimes she's kind of not all together she doesn't have her back herself together you know and so you and i understand that that she's a little bit confident she's a little bit and people buy into that yeah people do um could it also be they're afraid of the if they do know that they could be fearful themselves sometimes and that fear gives in to the best interest of the victim well um i think the motivations are of bystanders are you know there's a whole range from people who are just willfully blind people who are willingly complicit who you know who will say to the woman you know you made your bed you have to lie in it you should turn the other cheek god said you know i mean think of all the women who go to clergy who said you know that your marriage vows are sacred and uh so uh you know you have to forgive uh and you know religion is about suffering and and bearing your suffering and silence so sometimes there's complicity sometimes there's just ignorance sometimes uh people are duped and then sometimes people as you say are afraid and sometimes people really try to help um but not necessarily in a helpful way so for example if she married him against parental advice saying i told you so is not helpful um uh saying what what people want is how can we help just tell me what you need and i will do it that doesn't happen all that much no it doesn't but when it does it's like a charm so what would you suggest so social the social circle is so important here so so if the family isn't there she needs to develop some kind of friendships but if she can't develop friendships because of the family dynamics and he doesn't let her then she needs to do things clandestinely to develop those social contacts so that she will be able to have a plan when she needs to leave yeah and sometimes that means phone even before the pandemic and of course the pen the domestic violence has gone through the roof during the pandemic because women are more isolated in their homes and children aren't going to school unless reporting is happening yeah sometimes that means you know having that little card that they got with the number for the battered women's program that they hide in their shoe um and calling when they have a you know when they're when he's at work or he's out with his buddies or whatever and she can call and talk to the hotline and develop that plan get her identification of the kids identification together think about where you're going to go is there someone you can alert who will be able to take you in on short notice with the kids um or you know should we plan to have you go to the shelter uh so they can arrange the shelter the hotline can arrange that part yep that's amazing they can do that well you know that is one of the wonderful achievements of of the second wave radical feminist movement we there were no battered women's shelters when i was a resident of people came to the hospital basically to escape we organized them rape crisis centers battered women's shelters were all organized out outside of the health care system by grassroots feminist organizers and then bit by bit they became more professionalized because if you're going to have an organization that's going to run for years and years and years you can't run it on all volunteer labor but that's how they were started what year were they started you recall 1970 right around there 1969 70 71 um and there most communities or many communities have them now so uh certainly cities of any size we'll have them so people call a hotline the hotline will know where is the nearest shelter they can even get a woman to a shelter in a different state if it's neat if necessary if if he's going to pursue her so um so she doesn't have to go to the shelter in her own community no no not necessarily if she's afraid that he could track her down uh that he and the shell and the the staff will help her do sort of a dangerousness assessment they they can even arrange for her to be in a shelter in a different community yeah say the uh the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-7233 that's 1-800-799-723 or safe s-a-f-e well dr herman it's been a pleasure speaking with you uh i look forward to reading your upcoming book thank you i look forward to it it'll be a while yeah well um i enjoyed reading um trauma in recovery again the aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror thank you thank you i want to thank our guest dr judith herman for sharing her research and insights on domestic abuse and trauma i also want to thank you our viewers for tuning in for more information on today's topic and our guest visit us online at thelegaledition.com and remember this information is for general educational purposes it is not legal or professional advice and don't forget subscribe online find us on facebook youtube instagram and twitter [Music] [Music] you