33. Domestic violence and alcohol are linked

By Tom O'Connell

Linking domestic violence and problem drinking, studies by the Quincy (Massachusetts)  District Court under the guidance of Judge Albert Kramer are especially relevant. His court became a national model for a more enlightened way to deal with domestic violence.

When he studied abusers he found that 71 percent of them were problem drinkers, and 60 percent grew up in alcoholic homes. Also, about sixty percent of the women who were victims grew up in alcoholic homes. Clearly, most domestic violence is related to alcohol problems. If you wish to verify this truth, ask any police officer.

Violence is usually a misguided response to anger. It's an overreaction to a perceived threat, and shows an inability to process anger in a civilized way. Violence is irrational, and often starts with a verbal attack, or an omission, that triggers emotional and physical responses based on outrage instead of clear, logical thinking.

Since few people enter intimate relationships with training in dialogue and conflict resolution, is it any wonder that they often resort to primitive behavior? One risk of intimacy is that we can easily press a partner's buttons. So, if you put an angry woman and a defensive man together, add alcohol to the mix, and then add the ingredient of coming from an alcoholic home where violence was common, the outcome tends to be explosive.

Both people are ill, and need education and treatment. Violent couples can learn the Al-Anon message that we don't have to go to every argument we're invited to, no matter how insulted we may feel. And we don't have to take offense. Also, we don't have to live with people who are toxic and violent in their responses. Actually, we owe it to our human dignity to free ourselves from potentially harmful situations. We have choices.

When dealing with this sensitive subject, I think we need to give more careful consideration to Judge Kramer's idea that rehabilitation is preferable to punishment. Wisely, he calls sobriety "violence prevention." But in our society punishment is in vogue, and many alcoholism rehabs have closed in recent years, while prisons have had to expand.

Another perspective on violence was given at a recent Cape Cod Symposium on Addictive Disorders when Dr. James Gilligan, director of the Center for the Study of Violence, said, "If you want to make someone violent, send him to prison."

As for drug laws, Gilligan says, "The drug laws as they are now written and applied have been very successful at achieving the objective of elevating the rates of crime and violence." He notes that we have legalized the drug alcohol, which stimulates violent behavior, and criminalized the use of marijuana which inhibits it. Also, he points out that  30 people are now serving life sentences for growing  marijuana.

Questioning America's irrational approach, he says our moral outrage about drug use and our "War on Drugs" have stimulated violence instead of curbing it. "It's a public health problem, not a criminal problem." Opposing our policy of emphasizing punishment and imprisonment, he says, "There is no utopian solution, and no cost-free solution, but there may be solutions that are not as expensive as the one we've been following."

Well, if alcohol is at the root of the problem, how long are we going to try to solve it by punishing people without treating their addictive disease? Punishing diseased people only worsens their disease, and the medical community agrees that addiction is a disease. As a society, we need a more rational approach to the domestic violence problem which is so closely linked to alcohol problems.

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