Today I read about another young man who beat his girlfriend to death while they were on vacation in Mexico. Her family had gotten bad vibes about him and wanted her to end her relationship with him. She didn't. The night before he killed her, she had contacted her family to let them know that he had assaulted her viciously enough so that she needed stitches. A day later, she was dead, 'beaten to a bloody pulp' as the newspapers reported it.
Every week there are news stories about men who murder their wives/girlfriends/lovers and their children. Or about women who disappear and are never found (and are presumed dead, just that the body cannot be found). If it's not a divorce case where the man stands to lose custody and takes revenge, it's a man wanting out of his marriage because he met someone new and doesn't want to pay alimony/child support to the woman he's discarding. Or you have the cold-blooded psychopaths who enjoy gaslighting and abusing their wives/girlfriends/lovers/children. All of these cases are reported on the news, made into films and crime series, or written about in articles and books. And if these men don't kill the women in their lives, they physically and mentally abuse them and make their lives a living hell. They threaten them with bodily harm and death, they threaten to kill their children if there are any, they threaten to make the lives of these women and their extended families a living hell. Sometimes they do. It's hard to predict which of them will act on their threats.
What is wrong with these men? With regard to the murder cases, why do they go down the path of murder rather than just walking away from the women? Why do they kill them? Is it a moment of rage, or is it years of rage that have built up? Where does that rage come from? Are these men who don't want to be tied down by marriage and children, or by demanding girlfriends and lovers? Men who don't want to pay alimony and child support? Are they all psychopaths? According to my online searches, about 1% of the general population are psychopaths; in the USA that amounts to circa 3,337,548 people. The majority of crime films and television crime series nowadays present many men as predators, opportunists, pricks, and despicable human beings (read psychopaths). They are fooling around with other women while their wives are at home taking care of the kids. They are gaslighting their wives or complaining that she doesn't work/bring in enough money/look the same as before she had children. They are aggressive, brutal, and only interested in demeaning the women in their lives.
The odd thing is that many of the photos of these couples that end up on social media in real life these days present a united and happy front. When you see the violent outcome, you realize how fake it all is, all the lovey-dovey fakery on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. The poses, the fake happiness, the perfect family. Except it's not. You could wonder why women in these relationships go to such lengths to present the image of a happy relationship/family. Psychiatrists and psychologists have probably written a plethora of books on that subject. Abused women retreat into their own twilight world, forced there by the men in their lives. They are forced into secrecy; they cannot tell their families about how bad it all is, because the men in their lives would punish them and/or their families. So they put on the happy face. You could wonder if the men want this image presented to the world in photos, or if the women feel guilted into doing this. It's hard to know. One thing is clear; the use of social media seems to actually help crime scene investigators, because there's usually something of interest, something useful, that they can find to help them with their cases. The Gabby Petito case made that clear with the different video footage that documented escalating tensions between the two young people. Why didn't Gabby just go home? What did she believe would change? That's the tragedy, that when you're young, you have a lot of hope--that people can change, that situations can change, that life can be better. Regardless of what people say to you, you hang onto that belief. In some few cases, things do get better. In the majority of bad relationships, they don't. And that's what you know when you are older. Don't waste your time. Cut your losses. Better to be alone than together with someone who doesn't love you. We need to do a better job with our daughters when it comes to telling them that men who gaslight and abuse them don't love them. It needs to be drummed into women's heads from the time they are young, along with 'don't get into strangers' cars' and 'don't talk to strangers'. A man who truly loves and respects a woman will never be violent with her, will never try to manipulate or control her, will never humiliate her in front of others, will never be a Jekyll/Hyde personality. It's that simple.
People choose to go down the path of evil. It doesn't matter if they're young or old. The more incidences of abuse, violence, lying and other bad behavior, the further along the path of evil they come. Literature is full of references to a person's demons. Are demons real? I believe they are when you look at the depravity of the crimes committed by some of these people. I wonder if the perpetrators, the men, ever thought about the repercussions of their behavior on their consciences. The more frequent the bad behaviors, the more dulled and numb the conscience becomes. The final destination on this path is a completely-numbed conscience, where physical and mental abuse become commonplace. Is that what happened in some of these high-profile domestic violence cases? We may never know.
I'll end this post by including some links to online articles that discuss this topic in more detail:
- Domestic abuse: Killers 'follow eight-stage pattern', study says - BBC News
- Men who murder their families: what the research tells us 230412.pdf (ojp.gov)
