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Linking Serial Killers, Mass Murderers, and Child Abusers
Think Domestic Violence Can’t Happen to You If You’re Not in a Relationship? Neither Did These Church Worshippers or Night Club Goers.
As a crime writer as well as a forensic psychologist, I do a ton of research. I read about a lot of different kinds of murders. And it struck me last month, as I perused the true crime news, how often domestic violence was a part of a larger savagery. There was often a whole slew of victims besides intimate partners, strangers, coworkers, children, and animals.
Sure, there are often unique game plans that batterers use to keep their victims in line. We need to understand them so we can recognize and avoid them. But violence is violence.
Instead of focusing on the dynamics between the couple, maybe we’re better off viewing the batterer as a dangerous person looking around for a person to control and dominate. After all, intimate partner violence victims may engage in a range of coping strategies-fighting back, placating, hiding out of fear, trying to leave. That doesn’t change the batterer’s agenda.
And by carving out intimate partner violence, by focusing on the differences between battering and other kinds of brutality, I worry that it somehow seems…