Newsletter Summer 2008 A Case of Domestic Violence | A Case of Domestic Violence |
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A Case of Domestic Violence*Donald T. Saposnek, Ph.D.*First published as part of an editorial in the Association for Conflict Resolution’s Family Mediation News, Spring 2008. Reprinted here with permission. I recently presented a training to divorce professionals in Canada. The topics that I covered in the workshop included dealing with difficult divorce relationships, their multifaceted problems and the involvement of other non-disputants (e.g., friends, families, lovers) in the couples’ disputes that make mediation more challenging. Theory and research are clean and fun to present; reality is messy and often not so fun. The evening following the workshop was ironic and eventful, as theory and reality unexpectedly converged. As I was trying to fall asleep in my beautiful hotel room about 10:30 p.m., I heard a man screaming and crying directly outside my hotel room door. He and a woman (his wife? lover?) were staying in the room directly across the hall and they were apparently having an argument (although only his voice could be heard). He was cursing foul words at this woman as he repeated his refrain: “How could you leave me, after what you did?!” He kept referring to “that man you f----d.” He continued screaming, crying and cursing at her for about an hour. I called the front desk to alert them and they sent a young man who just listened for a while in the hallway and then left. After another hour of this man cursing this woman, she left the room, and he remained in the hallway crying and screaming. The woman eventually returned and they re-entered the hotel room. His anger and distress escalated and he began screaming even more loudly at her. (I learned later that the reason others on that floor of the hotel had not intervened and called the front desk was that this couple and I were the only hotel guests staying on that floor. Unable to sleep, and being quite concerned, I once again called the front desk and told them to call the police, since the situation was now sounding dangerous. Before the hotel kid came up again, the man bolted out of the room carrying a limp woman. He laid her down in the hallway, directly in front of my door. His face was covered in blood, and she was unconscious—I thought dead! He was yelling at her to keep breathing and then he picked up her body and started to carry it to the elevator. In my thinking that he could more seriously injure her, if she was still alive, or dispose of her, if she wasn’t, I went out in the hallway and told him, “Leave her right here,” and that help was coming. He complied, but, with an absolute crazed looked on his face, he raged at me, so I closed my door and waited for help to arrive (I learned from my response that my instinct to survive was strong and that my inner mediator pretty much got paralyzed in the middle of the night!). The hotel clerk finally called an ambulance, and after about 10 minutes of the man alternately shaking the unconscious woman, kissing her, slapping her and yelling at her to wake up, with blood all over, the paramedics arrived. When they arrived, the man told the paramedic that “she just fell and hit her head while we were dancing.” Upon hearing this, I told the hotel clerk to call the police also…that it was more than just a fall. The paramedics couldn’t revive her, so they tried to prepare to take her to the hospital, but the man insisted aggressively on coming with them. They had to restrain him. The police finally arrived, and when they asked him his identity the man explained to one officer that he was not her husband, he was just trying to help her, but that her husband was down the hallway. He told the other officer that he was her husband and they had just gotten married. He was hysterical.< Several hours after this incident began, at about 2:30 a.m., just as the paramedics had finally taken the unconscious woman into the ambulance and to the hospital, the police came into my room to interview me. I told them the story, and they quickly dispatched another officer to find and interview the man (and look for the possible “other” man). I later heard that the woman had at least temporarily gained consciousness at the hospital, but I heard nothing more than that. I headed off to the airport—I don’t know if she survived or not. The whole experience, while commonplace for the police (about 80% of police calls are for situations of domestic violence), was quite surreal to me. Talking about domestic violence and seeing it play out in front of you are really different experiences, yet the elements in theory and reality are the same: the inability to communicate effectively and resolve domestic conflicts, the involvement of other players in the relationship with the attendant friendship and sexual betrayals (both misperceived and real), and the dearth of preventative, educational and emotional resources that might forestall this intense scene from being played out nightly, locally, nationally, and internationally, as in this case. I was reminded of a quote by computer scientist Jan van de Snepscheut, "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."
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