Why do abusers abuse?

Revisiting the age-old question. (This post examines domestic and sexual violence, including the psychology of abusers and a review of what we can learn from interviews with perpetrators).

Hey friends. Quick update: My final manuscript for my book The Ties That Harm: Understanding Sibling Abuse and Finding a Path to Healing is in, I’m getting back into freelancing, and our book cover reveal is coming soon. I can’t wait to share it with you!

Seeing the book now listed on Penguin Random House’s website is making it feel all the more real. 2027 can’t come soon enough.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about the question of why abusers abuse—or, put another way, why people hurt those they claim to love. It’s a question that naturally arises when you’ve been hurt by someone, and one I’ve found myself looping back to for years.

As a child being abused by my brother, I wondered, “Why can’t I make him stop?” As an adult being abused by my boyfriend, I asked: “How can I help him?” The focus was on myself, my behavior, my guilt and shame. But the longer I’ve been in the field of domestic and sexual violence, the more the question of perpetrators’ behavior has come up.

Harm is widespread. Shelters are drastically underfunded. An untold number of victims want to escape—but can’t. Few victims ever experience anything even slightly resembling justice (and those who go through the traditional justice system are typically retraumatized by it).

How much focus and resources, then, should go to those who are abusing and stopping their violence? Can that kind of intervention even help? And what’s the root cause to address, exactly? It makes sense, when you see just how gigantic the problem is, to wonder if you can’t stop it where it starts.

Of all people, it was my hairstylist who brought the same-old question back up for me.

“Why do you think they do it?”

It was my first time since the end of COVID that I’d treated myself to a haircut and highlights, and we had four hours to kill. You get to talking. She gradually revealed her history, and I mine.

We had so much overlap: she’d studied criminology and worked with abused children as well as adult sex offenders. Both of us had considered going into social work but decided against it because our hearts couldn’t take it.

I told her about my book on sibling abuse I’d just finished—and my hope that addressing harm in sibling relationships could be yet another entry point for early intervention and prevention, to help kids and their families before patterns of behavior become a way of being in the world.

I told her, from my point of view, there were the more extreme cases where a young person was causing harm in multiple directions, including harming siblings, peers, parents, and animals, and they continued to escalate into criminal behavior in adulthood. Those were pretty rare (only coming up in a handful of interviews out of about 100).

Then there were many more cases where the abuse trickled down—from parents, other adults, older siblings. And finally, there were cases you just couldn’t make sense of. There was no clear “why.” It just happened. Woven through all of them, there were numerous risk factors (which I examine in-depth in the book).

The cycle of abuse is part of the story.

We both agreed that the cycle of abuse is part of the story, but both of us had also been victims and had made the conscious choice not to hurt others.

A few days later, I stumbled upon the Peabody Award-winning documentary Behind the Rage by filmmaker and activist Deeyah Khan (you can watch it for free in full on Youtube). Khan was asking the same question and went right to the source by interviewing abusers themselves and the people who try to help them stop.

Obviously, it’s a hard watch, but a pretty illuminating one.

Dorothy Halley, who runs the Family Peace Initiative in Kansas with her husband Steve, started providing batters prevention programs after she saw the seventh victim of the same man come in within a five-year timeframe.

Initially, she saw the men “faking” their way through classes and began to shift her focus to helping them access their trauma and humanizing them through connection. Very traumatic childhoods were common, she said.

Kenneth, for example, killed his father when he was 5 in defense of his mother—and was physically and sexually abused in foster care. He went on to be abusive in both of his marriages.

Dorothy had noticed the same patterns I found in my research: a small group were truly “sadistic” and enjoyed causing pain. Others had a significant trauma history, struggled with feeling inferior, and experienced terror and rage related to being left by their partner. Many others believed they had the “privilege and right” to hurt their partner.

Male entitlement and control were a consistent throughline in the men’s stories.

If domestic and sexual violence were simply caused by cycles of abuse, there would be a hell of a lot more girls and women causing harm.

We know that’s not the picture: the vast majority of violence is perpetrated by men and boys. Most victims stop the cycle because they don’t want to hurt others the way they themselves were hurt.

Feminist activists and domestic and sexual violence experts have long pointed to the core of interpersonal violence, especially gender-based violence, as the desire for power and control over another person. To dominate them. To get what you want.

Shawn said he was abusive 85% of the time in his relationships and proceeded to describe a long list of violent acts. He described himself as feeling “superior,” like “I just did some type of drug,” like “I was the man. I’m in my house, so nobody’s gonna tell me anything.”

Daniel, a man who killed his partner and served nearly 30 years for murder, was one of the very few men who dug deeply into his own psychology and background, reflecting on a difficult childhood, drug use, obsession, rage, and self-hatred. He said his partner became a “scapegoat” for feelings he was trying to run from. But he, too, felt entitled to control her.

“I remember her saying that she feel like she was walking on eggshells…I didn’t care. I didn’t care. It made me feel like, Oh, yeah, this is what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to instill fear in her because it’s a controlling mechanism,” he said.

Charles, on his violence in a dozen or so relationships: “It was justified, it was corrective actions, it was just trying to get some compliance.” It was the way he was “programmed,” he said.

Marshel, who’d attacked his wife multiple times, said he was addicted to “dominance.” Why did he do it, even though he knew it was wrong? His answer was simple: “I did it because I could. She was weaker than me.”

Abusers abuse because they can.

What I’ve learned from my own experience is that there are many explanations you can come up with—he was abused himself, he had to learn it from somewhere. We often search for explanations. We want to understand. We want to stop it. We want to solve it.

Women often do the hard work of tolerating, managing, and accommodating the violence of men and boys as well as other women and girls as if it’s the price you must pay for family. All victims do.

Dr. David Adams, co-founder and co-director of EMERGE: Abuser Education Program, whose father was abusive, said that out of the 51 men who had killed their partners he interviewed, only 1 took responsibility for the killing. The rest blamed the victim.

Dr. Sara Brammer, one of the directors of Synergy in Missouri, a shelter for women and children, said the need far outweighed the funding for services. In one year, 1,600 people were turned away.

As she pointed out, there are more animal shelters than there are for domestic violence survivors and their families—and there’s a greater consequence in the United States for killing a bald eagle than there is for assaulting your wife.

As one abuser named Josh shared, “I have always known it’s wrong. I just didn’t care.” Neither did the courts. His first domestic violence case: probation. Second: probation. Third: 90 days in jail. Fourth, an incident that could have killed his partner: just 3 years in prison.

From an Apartment Therapy story called “9 Steps to Repairing a Punch in the Wall.”

Male violence and dominance are woven into our culture, consistently rewarded, and rarely punished. We don’t give women and children the resources and support they need to stay safe, get out, recover, and rebuild.

We see men get away with it, over and over again, often for years if not decades. We’ve seen it with Andrew Tate, Jeffrey Epstein, P. Diddy, R. Kelly, fill in the blank—there are always more.

So why does he do it? Because he can.