Violent lessons for young feed cycle of domestic abuse
Tommy Montgomery was 9 years old when he watched his hard-drinking, abusive father stab his mother to death in their Charleston home, plunging a knife into her body 38 times. Her screams and the blood-soaked images from that day haunted him for years, stealing his sleep, filling him with anxiety and fueling hallucinations that churned in his brain.
Montgomery dropped out of school, cycled through low-paying jobs and turned to drugs and drink to chase away his demons. In the end, he unleashed his bottled-up rage on others, just like his father had done. Nine months after he was accused of choking his wife in March 2009, Montgomery killed a church music director in North Charleston, stabbing him 92 times. Then, DNA testing revealed he was responsible for slitting the throat of a woman in a Charleston park three years earlier, police said.
Montgomery's case illustrates the damaging and lasting effects domestic violence can have on children who witness abuse at a young, impressionable age. Though they may not go on to kill, many end up emulating their parents' behavior, growing up to become tomorrow's abusers and victims.
Studies have found that violence is a learned behavior and that exposing a child to abuse in the home significantly increases the chances of that dysfunction being passed on to the next generation. One study found that boys who witness domestic violence are twice as likely to abuse their own partners and children when they become adults, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
This generational cycle of abuse was cited in The Post and Courier's recent series, "Till death do us part," as a key reason why South Carolina remains among the deadliest states in the nation for women. The series found that more than 300 women had been killed in the past decade by men who once loved them, and that South Carolina has ranked that entire time among the top 10 states in the rate of women slain by men.
Detective Mike Lyczany, an investigator with the Charleston police special victims unit, said children who grow up around domestic violence often think it is normal for the husband to hit his wife, and for the wife to accept it. They take this model into their adult lives and seek out mates that fit the profile they grew up with, often with sad, but predictable, results, he said.
"You have to understand, for some of them this is normal behavior," Lyczany said. "Abusers grow up in that type of home."
As a teen, Tina Abbasi routinely woke at night to the sound of her father yelling and hitting her mother in their home near Myrtle Beach. She regularly interceded like a referee pushing a boxer off a downed foe. "I thought that was normal," she said. The abuse didn't stop until 2008 when Tina was 15 and was on the phone with her father trying to find out if her mother was okay. While she called 911 on a second phone, she heard her father choke her mother to death.
Hard lessons
Ashley Varner is a former juvenile justice worker hired by Charleston police this year to work as a victim advocate for children in homes where domestic violence flares up. She checks on the safety of the abused and their children and looks for signs at home and at school that counseling or other intervention might be needed. It's part of a concerted push by Charleston police to tackle the issue of generational violence.
Varner has visited homes where little boys mimic their fathers by deriding or punching their mothers or sisters, turning to violence to solve problems or express displeasure. "Kids emulate what they see," she said. "You want to address that issue now before it gets any worse."
Cautionary tales aren't hard to find.
In 2011, Ronald David Ratliff, a 24-year-old West Ashley man, was convicted of choking and assaulting his girlfriend just six months after his father fatally shot his grandmother and tried to kill his mother, court records show. The following year, Elias James Walker, 23, killed his 45-year-old father with a sword in Mount Pleasant after years of verbal and physical abuse his dad heaped upon him and his mother, according to attorneys.
Vicki Bourus, co-executive director of the Family Justice Center in Georgetown, testified on Walker's behalf, describing him as a man who had suffered almost every form of abuse a person could endure. Bourus said the case was tragic, but hardly a rarity in today's world.
"Children are coming out of these families highly traumatized," she said. "And we as a society are paying the price in many ways for not really addressing it effectively."
An estimated 15.5 million children in the United States live in families in which intimate-partner violence occurred at least once in the past year, according to the San Francisco-based Futures Without Violence. In some households, this domestic warfare has become a family tradition of sorts.
Pamela Krasner is director of the children and youth services program at Sanctuary for Families, a New York nonprofit that helps domestic violence victims. She said she has encountered families who point to patterns of abuse dating back to their great-grandparents.
"We learn how to handle conflict by watching," she said. "If you grow up in a household where this sort of thing is normally happening, how would you even know it's not normal?"
Healing wounds
The key to curbing that behavior is to get to children early, help them process what they've experienced and provide them with different techniques for handling anger and adversity, Krasner said. Sanctuary for Families, which works with more than 2,600 children and young adults each year, has a variety of counseling and therapy programs for youth ranging from infants to 21-year-olds. For the youngest, they work to build a stronger relationship between the child and the non-abusive parent. With older children, they focus on processing trauma and arming them with new coping skills.
Dorchen A. Leidholdt, director of Sanctuary's Center for Battered Women's Legal Services, said in her 20 years with the nonprofit she has seen a number of troubled children benefit from this early invention and go on to become productive members of society as adults. "It's something that society just has to invest in," she said.
Closer to home, the Medical University of South Carolina's STAR children's day treatment programs provide intensive, comprehensive care to children and adolescents with severe behavior disturbances using a "day treatment" model that includes individual, group and family therapy. Most of the kids in the program have experienced some form of violence in their lives. About 75 percent have been exposed to domestic abuse, said program coordinator Lynn Morton-Epps.
Many of these kids have never had their talents praised or appreciated, so counselors work to accentuate the positive, even if its just remarking about the smile the child walked in with that day, Morton-Epps said. Gradually, coping skills are introduced and then repeated to help them deal with anger, anxiety and depression. It takes time and, in many ways, comes down to teaching them the basic principles of knowing right from wrong. Many eventually come around and move past the troubles that brought them there, she said.
"Nobody wants to fight all the time. Nobody wants to be afraid all the time," she said. "It's an uncomfortable way to be."
Danielle Richardson knows this all to well. Her half-brother is Tommy Montgomery, and she too was home the night her mother died at the hands of his father in 1991. "A child should never have to see that, a living nightmare," she said. Richardson said she and her brothers received no real help in dealing with what happened, just one group counseling session before they were split up and sent to live with different families. As a result, she said, she blamed herself for not saving her mother. "There was nobody to turn to."
They both turned instead to drugs and alcohol to dull the pain, and Tommy ended up committing crimes eerily similar to those of his father, who committed suicide in jail.
"It's almost like he became him in a way," Richardson said.
She eventually found solid ground, reconnecting with her faith and finding happiness in motherhood and in God and church. In the book she later wrote, "God Heard My Cries," she had a message for Tommy's father about the damage his violent actions did to the lives of her and her brothers.
"They have been in an out of prison. Tommy is serving prison time because his illness got the worst of him where he committed murder. This is how you left our minds and hearts. We were like caged birds wanting to be free from your abuse and pain."
Glenn Smith, 27 September 2014
Doug Pardue contributed to this article.
