Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Kao Chia-yu (高嘉瑜) late last month said she had been abused by media commentator Raphael Lin (林秉樞). The incident has brought attention to domestic violence.
When a relationship starts to fall apart, no matter how good it once was, someone has to make the call to end it. It is often a woman who first senses that something is amiss, and starts thinking about breaking up. Men tend to be more active in starting a relationship, while women are more likely to want to end it when it has run its course, and this often puts them in jeopardy.
Physical abuse is not a sign of affection, nor is verbal abuse a show of love. If a man is jealous or vindictive, or if he resorts to physical violence, this shows that he has a need to control others. A victim cannot think that after the insults and the blows their partner would again become gentle and affectionate. That is not love.
With love, there might be times of affection and times when a couple argues. With someone who is emotional and unpredictable, it does not matter if they treat their partner like a princess on most days, if that person also hits them, leaving them hospitalized.
Although the chance of having a bad day in a relationship could be as low as 1 percent, it is not the same as calculating “risk probability” in market economics. Is this the kind of relationship that most people want?
Antisocial personality characteristics are often seen in the perpetrators of crimes of passion. While it is important to like oneself, it is only healthy to a certain degree. Problems arise when abusers believe that they are the most important person, and look down upon or deride the feelings of others. They have a sense of entitlement and believe that they are always in the right, feeling that it is acceptable to try to manipulate others and encroach upon their rights.
Studies have shown that abusers say that they committed a crime for the sake of “justice,” because they want to teach their victims a lesson. They tend to build a high wall of self-defense for whenever they make mistakes, to gain self-comfort and public support.
Everyone is afraid of having an abusive lover. What is worse is that when a partner is abusive, the victim is often unaware or denies that it is happening. Love is not a business and cannot be weighed by a “return on investment.” Still, healthy love is not a charity. Do not sacrifice yourself to maintain a relationship, and never believe that you are the only one who can save the abuser. Otherwise, the relationship becomes a “balance of terror,” as the two parties merely use their leverage to maintain the balance.
Some people take pleasure in others’ misfortune, or believe that it takes a wild person to tame a wild horse. Others believe that bad things only happen to bad people, in what is known as the “just-world fallacy.”
Do not forget the economic principle of the “spillover effect,” in which a seemingly unrelated event can affect something or someone in another aspect of life. Nobody is completely shielded from what happens in society.
Chen Chien-an is an assistant professor at Hsuan Chuang University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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