Let’s dive a little deeper into the concept of threats. If you’ve never really been threatened, they can be a little hard to grasp in terms of their psychological power. In police work, threats are used toward officers so often that they are routinely laughed off. If a person threatens to kick an officer’s rear end, said officer will likely ask him why he hasn’t tried yet or graciously encourage him to get on with it. If he says he’s going to sue the officer, he’ll probably be invited to get in line behind everyone else who has ever made that threat.
But if threats are something you only know in concept, or experience in a limited fashion, it’s important for you to get a firmer grasp. The most important idea for anyone to understand is that threats are simply a form of psychological warfare. That’s not to say that some people won’t follow through with their threats, but the objective in threatening is to worm a way deep into the psyche of the target in order to achieve a personal, hateful agenda.
For the purposes of illustrating the concept of psychological manipulation, let’s look for a moment at a hypothetical man who has chosen a path of hate and violence to accomplish his political agenda. That man lives and works around other people who have no idea he plans to destroy human lives and valuable property to meet those goals. He goes smiling to his job each day, and even has genuine friends among those whose thoughts and actions don’t necessarily mirror his own.
Occasionally the man must interact with a person or persons he considers enemies, people he fully plans to injure or destroy at another opportunity. If the opportunity isn’t right, though, the man can certainly feign pleasantness and cordiality. In fact, this conveyed sense of respect and friendship, false as it may be, works well in terms of keeping the “enemy” off balance and always guessing where the next attack will come from.
On Friday our hypothetical man has lunch with members of the governing board in his region. They all smile at one another, shake hands, break bread, and generally have a pleasant day talking about sports, weather, a comedian or musician on a television show the night before, etc. On Saturday our fellow sets off a bomb inside the same building, killing eight of the acquaintances from the day before and himself in the process.
The killings are, in and of themselves, tragic, but the aftermath is even more ominous. How can the other people dedicated to peace and equality ever truly believe one another again when they aren’t sure who among the smiling “friends” is planning to blow them into vapor the next day? Distrust and dissension follow, and peace accords fall through because no one trusts the others at the table. And the violence and hatred continue.
The man who ate lunch with the others, and then shattered himself just so he could cause this chaos got exactly what he wanted. It is little matter that he was destroyed; what matters is that he and his ilk now control the situation, at least temporarily, and they can extend that control indefinitely with strategic reminders that it could happen again. The man has more control in death than he had in life, an extraordinary irony if there ever was one.
That pattern of kindness and charm during some exchanges, appearing wholesome and genuine to the rest of the world, but with a willingness and even zeal to utilize threats and violence when it suits their needs is a strategy often utilized as well by people who beat up and terrorize the people with whom they live. With the exception of the fact that in our example we are clearly dealing on a world stage with the potential for far more casualties, there is little difference in the process of terrorism. The political terrorist targets people who are perceived enemies of his nation, clan or ideology. The terrorist who targets his or her “loved ones” living in his own home creates and systematically sustains an environment of limited warfare. Both forms of terrorists do this out of a sense of (real or imagined) threat, an affront to their dignity, and/or a desire to extend their sphere of influence and control.
At its simplest level, both kinds use the threat of future violence to remarkable success. It is the lack of rhythm that is perhaps most unsettling of all. If you step into a boxing ring you know you’re likely to get hit. You can adapt, and your tolerance for that extra stress can rise. If however, you know you’re going to get attacked at some point, but you don’t know when, you live life under constant pressure with little or no hope of feeling peace or contentment. There are times of relative peace in both types of combat zones, but the sense of it is fleeting and artificial.
After a while this psychological warfare can be extraordinarily effective in the domestic setting. We know this from the fact that victims are often cowed by little more than an arched eyebrow or that “certain smile.” They can be held in what amounts to enslavement or servitude for years prior to anyone finding out, all because of a mind control technique.
The threats generally include something specific about the targeted victim. For example, if the victim once said something disparaging about her mother, the person trying to control her might bring up her insults years later and threaten to tell the mother exactly how her daughter feels about her. Never mind that she said those things in a heated moment years earlier. The controller knows how badly it would affect his wife’s relationship with his mother-in-law, and he will be more than happy to use it if and when the time is right.
Most threats fall into one of four general categories: taking the children, financial ruination, ostracization from friends and family, and more violence (including death threats).
In the case of violence, it should be fairly obvious that this is simply a threat of hurting the victim or people the victim cares about. In one case I worked, a woman called from a shelter to report years of systematic physical abuse culminating in a vicious rape and aggravated assault. Actually, she didn’t call. The social workers at the shelter did, because even though she was living in a safe, secure facility, the man was calling her incessantly, threatening to kill her in each and every conversation.
Why she kept answering her cell phone is a little beyond me except for the fact that she had clearly been conditioned to respond when he said or did certain things. One of those things was that she was required to pick up the phone within two rings if she recognized the number as belonging to him. I later learned she was not allowed to answer if it was not her husband, even if it was from their children’s school.
The staff at the shelter were terrified that she was going to walk out at any moment because the woman was so habituated to his demands that she repeatedly told them she thought it might be better if she did as he had told her to do.
You have to understand that the shelter staff could not and would not stop her from leaving. Life is choice, and as bad a choice as it would have been for her to leave the locked facility and run out to his car, it was still her decision to make. Darn that nutty “free will.”
Eventually they got her to agree to speak with me, although when I first walked in I had my doubts as to whether she would even tell me her name, much less make a police report or pursue prosecution.
She was about as badly beaten as anyone I’ve ever seen outside a hospital. For the record, she’d already been to the hospital and released to the shelter. I don’t want you to think we’d delay treatment just to get a police report.
Both of her eyes were black, her nose was swollen and crooked, her hair had been pulled out in huge hunks, her left earlobe had been bitten off and was covered with a softball-sized dressing, her arms had enough bruises running their length that they looked like a leopard pattern, she had trouble breathing because of the cracked ribs on her left side, and she walked slightly hunched over because of the pounding she took to her pelvis and kidneys.
Oh, I forgot to mention…the whole thing started when she “smarted off” to him that she wasn’t going to have the abortion he was insisting she have. He told her he’d just get rid of the baby himself, and he commenced to land a flurry of kicks and blows primarily aimed at her uterus. Then he raped her while she slipped in and out of consciousness. When he left to go to work the next morning she did the bravest thing she’d ever done in her whole life. She left.
Make no mistake—her terror didn’t end simply because she packed the kids and a small suitcase and made it to a sanctuary. Just as I have rarely seen anyone with a worse beating, I had also rarely seen a more genuinely frightened human being. Doors opening made her jump. Cars driving by made her cry. When his favorite television show came on the shelter’s TV, she ran sobbing from the room. His phone calls caused her to hyperventilate, and twice she developed hives and had to take a tranquilizer.
I happened to be present during a moment when he called, which wasn’t the miraculous timing you might think because the bastard was calling every five to ten minutes.
He was one angry fellow, and I overheard phrases that led me to firmly believe he intended to kill her and everyone in the shelter if she didn’t get her butt outside and into his truck when he pulled up in the next few minutes.
Boy was he surprised when I was the one who actually climbed into his truck, but it wasn’t to go home with him. I want to be clear that I really don’t like to fight. I’m a larger than average man with good communication skills who can generally avoid physical confrontations. This man, however, did not go willingly and, I must say, there was something particularly gratifying about that fact that day. I didn’t exact equal justice for what he’d done to that poor woman back at the shelter, but I bet he was damned sore and discolored himself the next day.
Threats work, though, and anyone who is in the process of trying to help a victim recover her freedom needs to understand just how insipid they can be. The intimidation she’s endured again and again over the years is as big a reason for her staying in an abusive situation as anything else. That being the case, I think it’s important to expose some of the more common ones for the shams they are.
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