The surprisingly common reason John hits his partner

JOHN openly admits he’s beaten his partner, and even broken teeth. Each time, he’s had an excuse. It actually makes sense.

Ginger Gorman

@gingergorman

7 min read

October 19, 2015 - 8:45AM

John Hill Bashed

“I GET pissed off really quickly. That’s not who I am but it just happens,” says 44-year-old John.

He’s been in a relationship with Tony, who he met in a pub, for 17 months.

“Sometimes I have pushed him over or slapped him and done things like that. Not a lot, but occasionally I have done that,” John says.

At their most severe, John’s outbursts have inflicted broken teeth and stitches to Tony’s head.

It’s rare to hear someone admit to being a perpetrator of domestic violence. And what John has done is shocking. There’s no question about it.

But everyone close to John attests that he was never violent before he sustained a severe brain injury nine years ago. In fact, quite the opposite. Friends and family knew him as a “gentle giant”.

In 2006 John was the victim of a violent assault, punched by a bouncer as he was leaving the Vegas Hotel in Kings Cross. His head hit the pavement.

“I fell on the cement and that was it,” John says, “I was unconscious and had blood coming out of every orifice and I just woke up in St Vincent’s Hospital three months later.”

Even though it happened nearly a decade ago, John’s physical recovery has been slow.

“My walking, my balance was all haywire. My speech is still affected now. I’m very slow sometimes. I had palsy of the face,” John says.

He’s also seen disturbing behavioural changes in himself including “anger, impatience [and] low attention span”.

John is frank about his brain injury causing “a lot of trouble” in his relationship with Tony, especially after a few drinks.

“I’d say it just clicks. It’s not premeditated or anything like that. I just do it. That’s where I have no control over it,” John says, adding: “Since this happened to me, I’ve had three relationships. They’ve all failed.”

John’s story is surprisingly common.

Casey Taft is a clinical research psychologist at the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs National Center for PTSD and a professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine. He has been working in domestic violence prevention for 15 years.

“We know that about half of all of the men who engage of domestic violence have had a head injury in the past. I don’t think that’s a coincidence,” Dr Taft says.

He says brain injury can cause “executive functioning deficits” that in turn can “affect behaviour and aggression and impulsivity”.

However, Dr Taft makes it clear that a physical injury doesn’t diminish the responsibility of domestic violence perpetrators.

“No matter what somebody’s experienced, if they have a brain injury, if they have PTSD from trauma or something else, they’re still ultimately responsible for their behaviour,” he says.

In 2010 Dr Taft worked with a team of researchers to investigate biological factors that could contribute to domestic violence, including brain injury.

An analysis of two decades of research consistently found rates of head injuries among abusers range between 40-61 per cent. Despite small sample sizes, the team noted that these figures are “significantly higher than the general population”.

When I call Tony to ask about his relationship with John, he’s downcast. We speak for nearly 40 minutes on the phone and it’s clear the situation is both complex and confusing.

Tony says that he loves John but at the same time, emphasises that he finds their relationship “very, very, very hard”.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do really,” he says. There’s despair in his voice.

“With his aggressiveness … there’s a lot to put up with,” Tony continues, adding: “I do have forgiveness because I know he doesn’t mean it.”

John and Tony’s relationship is complicated by John’s head injury and violent tendencies. Picture: Andrew Murray

While Tony doesn’t wish to make excuses for John, he is confident that before the brain injury his partner “wouldn’t be abusive” and is hopeful there’s a solution.

“I probably think he’s going to stop this or he’s going to change or he’s going to get help,” Tony says.

With the support of Headway ADP, a specialist support service for adults with an acquired brain injury in Sydney, John hopes to seek further brain-injury specific counselling to assist him with anger management.

Fiona Curtis is the manager at Headway ADP. She says it’s “quite common” for people with brain injuries to exhibit aggression towards their family or significant other.

“Some of the common behaviours we see are physical intimidations, verbal aggression such as yelling and swearing, physical aggression such as pinching, pushing, hitting and emotional abuse and bullying.

“But sometimes also throwing and breaking furniture and objects and punching holes in walls,” Ms Curtis says.

“Because the brain injury can’t be seen, these behaviours are easily attributed to be part of the person’s personality,” she says, but “violent behaviour can be the result of physical damage to the person’s brain”.

Ms Curtis believes that the link between acquired brain injury and domestic violence needs more recognition.

“There are limited services and resources available for people with an acquired brain injury in general and this becomes even more difficult in finding appropriate services where there is violent behaviour involved,” she adds.

Therese*, 67, was married to a man who was physically and emotionally abusive for 15 years. Fred* isolated her from family and friends, was constantly critical and tightly controlled the family’s finances. He was also violent towards their two children.

While Therese says her ex-husband could be “kind” and “charming” and had a “great work ethic,” she was “walking on egg shells right from the start”.

“If he came home from work and he’d had a stressful day, he would be very angry. That would increase the feeling of fear and volatility in the home,” she says.

“Any attempt to express an opinion was put down and over the years the put downs increased and developed into physical violence,” she says.

Therese worried about the physical impact on her children. She explains that “it was the 80s and people did hit their children” but “Fred did it out of anger. He had a very short wick.”

She became deeply concerned about Fred’s biting criticism of their daughter.

“When she started becoming a woman, the put downs increased in viciousness. When I saw the verbal abuse being focused to my daughter and not just me, I thought: ‘I’m not going to have her destroyed’. It was like Eureka moment,” she says, adding: “I decided I had to do something about this.”

Once the couple separated, Therese learned something she wished she’d known much earlier.

Fred’s brother wrote to her explaining that when her former husband was a teenager, he’d been hit by a truck while riding a pushbike without a helmet. The letter stated Fred “was no good after that hit on the head”.

Therese, who has worked as a case manager with brain-injured clients, came to believe her former husband had sustained a brain injury himself all those years ago.

Dr Taft believes we need to start viewing domestic violence as a complex problem caused by multiple factors and not just cultural attitudes towards women.

“If we don’t really try to seek out in an honest way what are the factors that really are related to violence” we run the risk of “doing a disservice … to the victims,” Dr Taft says.

“Yes, it is about sexism. It is about patriarchal views,” he says, but “these different risk factors can operate together.”

“Most of the men that I work with who are violent, they don’t just have one risk factor or one problem. They have multiple risk factors,” he says.

Dr Taft gives the example of military veterans who may “have post-traumatic stress disorder, which is also a risk factor for domestic violence.”

“They may not actually engage in that violence, unless there’s another disinhibiting risk factor on top of that, like a brain injury, or like alcohol use,” he says.

“Head injury is one of those risk factors that we think that may disinhibit risk among those who may already be at higher risk,” Dr Taft continues.

Australian research published last year looked at 507 adults with severe traumatic brain injuries. The study found that 32 per cent of the sample displayed some type of aggression.

Dr Grahame Simpson, director of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Research Group at the Ingham Institute of Applied Medical Research at Liverpool Hospital in Sydney, was part of the research team.

“We certainly found that as the injury was more severe, it [aggression] was more prevalent,” he says.

However, Dr Simpson cautions that we need to view these statistics in context of all brain injuries.

“Eighty per cent of people who have a brain injury have a mild brain injury,” he says, and the great majority of this group resume normal life “within three to six months of having sustained the injury”.

Dr Simpson says the link between with traumatic brain injury and domestic violence needs further investigation.

“We have some data which is suggestive, but we need much more robust research,” he says.

As well as investigating the causes of domestic violence, Dr Taft is determined to find a solution. He’s developed a successful program called Strength At Home, which is designed to treat perpetrators. The program’s repetitive structure takes into account that participants may have pre-existing issues such as PTSD or a head injury.

“A lot of the men that I see really want to work on their violence. They don’t want to be that way,” he says.

For John, his brain injury is something he lives with every day. He confesses to having depression and says, “I used to be a world traveller and now I feel like I’m nothing.”