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Reviewed by J. Steven Svoboda ... |
The Abuse of Men: Trauma Begets Trauma
edited by Barbara Jo Brothers. Binghamton, New York: Haworth Press.
Generally, in writing reviews I tend to focus on books in which I find significant value. If the work also has substantial shortcomings, this may result in a mixed review, but rarely do I find myself called to pan a work. (I tend simply not to write reviews of such books.) Even those books of which I have been more critical than complimentary typically have their worthwhile aspects to which I always endeavor to call attention.
Barbara Jo Brothers’ edited collection, “The Abuse of Men,” which doubles as an issue of the Journal of Couples Therapy, represents the rarest of cases. I feel called upon to warn everyone I can possibly reach in the strongest possible terms against squandering their time or money on the worst book I have ever read, let alone actually reviewed, in the entire field of gender equity and men’s rights.
Strong words? Maybe but I feel they are fully justified by the facts. First of all, it is galling in the extreme to find a book of such low quality bearing a highly misleading title implying that it will usefully analyze the disgracefully neglected issue of men as abuse victims and even suggesting that it may expand upon Philip Cook’s seminal 1997 masterpiece “Abused Men: The Hidden Side of Domestic Violence.” Instead, discounting references, Brothers offers fewer than a hundred smallishly-sized, large-type pages of text, six articles in total, only ONE (by Tonia L. Nicholls and Donald G. Dutton) concentrating on the effects of abuse on its male victims.
What can the other five articles possibly address, you may wonder. The first piece is a bizarre, disjointed transcript of seminar leader Virginia Satir’s speech to a live audience. Ostensibly addressing “models of perceiving the world” and “relationship as hierarchy,” the piece sheds no light on any issue of any relevance to the book’s ostensible topic.
Immediately following this most curious opening piece is an analysis by Audrey Diane Bloom and Randall Lyle of the “vicarious trauma” which may afflict male partners of female sexual-abuse survivors. Their article never manages to engage its topic effectively.
It gets worse. Aphrodite Matsakis manages to write an article entitled “The Impact of the Abuse of Males on Intimate Relationships” while demonstrating her evidently perfect ignorance of the fact that domestic violence does at times occur to adult male victims. As examples of male abuse she discusses only abuse IN CHILDHOOD or abuse in military and paramilitary experiences. This despite the fact that the immediately succeeding article alludes to men as victims of violence! Matsakis’ standard feminist analysis reveals no attempt at any fresh insight, as she recycles tired lines about how violent men are beating the woman in themselves.
The article by Nicholls and Dutton does centrally address female abuse of male intimates. However, it is hard to be overly grateful for their work when they find it necessary to precede their analysis by discussing male perpetrators, then to minimize the important of male victimization prior to even discussing it. I do not know what their ostensible source is for their first conclusion on page 54 (the majority of domestic violence is between two combative individuals who are both in need of therapeutic intervention), which seems entirely unsupported by both the text of their article and their sources. Since this article does at least discuss the book’s ostensible subject, and is competently if not impressively documented and executed, it qualifies as book’s only article even marginally qualified for publication under this title.
While Nicholls and Dutton are the only ones to cite the work of Cook, not to mention Straus and Gelles, they cannot even manage to get Cook’s title correct! In fact, even to my casual perusal, an inordinate number of other typos crop up throughout the book in citation dates and article titles.
Norman Shub follows with a stunningly self-indulgent tale from his own childhood of his troubles with his parents. The piece leads nowhere. I can imagine the writing of it may have been extremely therapeutic for Shub, but with all due respect, he ought to have sought publication of it in a vastly different forum and editor Brothers should have realized its inappropriateness. Erwin Randolph Parson concludes the book with its longest article (comprising well over one-third of the text), addressing “intertraumatic dissociative attachment” and the treatment of trauma in couples. Parson provides a tiresomely detailed case history of one couple with which he worked. Years previously, the WIFE was raped and the husband suffered a work accident that disabled him. It is hard to see what this article is doing in this book. What abuse did occur again struck the female. Couldn’t Brothers have tracked down some articles better fitting the book’s title?
How did such a travesty come to see the light of day, at the same time that gifted, insightful authors such as Jack Kammer cannot find a publisher? One can only surmise that a highly regrettable confluence of incompetence, ignorance, and inertia joined together to allow this disgraceful volume to see the light of day. We may be reminded not to judge a book by its title and to resist the temptation to purchase a work which sounds compelling from its title but for which we have no recommendation.
©2002 J. Steven Svoboda
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