The Abusers' Claims
While people who work with abusers recognize all sixteen of these factors as contributing to abuse of women, the abusers themselves identifu the motivation for their actions quite differently. Only on number ten do they agree, insisting "It's not my fault." For an article entitled "Why Do Men Batter Ther Wives/" the author James Ptacek conducted interviews with batterers to elicit reasons for their battering firsthand. He found that the explanations for their behavior split into two groups-excuses and justifucatins-and concluded, "The batterer appeals to standard rationalizatios in an attempt to make sense of or to normalize his behavior."
Almost all the women I work with, whether battered physiclly or nonphysically, corroborate th findings of Yilo and Bograd, reporting that their husbands explain their actions not as abuse but as uncontrollable outbursts. "I just lost it" is the common phrase. The authors of the study found that a third of respondents in their study shrugged off responsibility for their loss of control by attributing it to drugs or alchohol, which is a guilt-free cop-out for them and and an obvious evasion, since professionals generally agree that neither causes abuse. The remaining two-thirds blamed buildup of frustration for which they needed an outlet, another cop-out because, as pointed out earlier, the selectively release frustration where it would do them no damage, on their wife. On June 22, 1994, The New York Times reported on a study led by Dr. Neil S. Jacobsen that corroborates the fact that many men not only batter with "cool control" but also actually feel better while doing it. They fall back on the loss-of -control rationale because it enables society to exonerate them and at the same time enables the men to exonerate themselves.