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In Reply to: Re: Paradox is a good word for this topic posted by chain breaker on July 28, 2005 at 20:36:46:
What are you trying to do, get a group consensus on what responsibility is for everybody in a
"collective sense" and designate who fits what criteria for which level?
I am astonished by this question. Clearly, you assume that I have a manipulative agenda going on. This may be hard to believe, but I wanted to explore other people's thinking on the questions. I don't pretend that I completely understand mind control and what is meant by that concept.
I would also agree that the battered spouse is probably closest to the mind control experience as I understand it personally. I do understand what it is like to lose the courage to change and make the healthy choices in an abusive relationship.
However, even for battered women there is still something called social responsibility. Many times when I was working with a battered woman who refused/declined to help herself, she paid attention when I explained a state law mandating child welfare/police intervention in homes where children watch their mom get beaten up. As a mandated reporter, I would have to inform child welfare authorities & police of the situation if she refused to remove herself and the children from the home.
Yeah, that's coersion. And that's the best leverage some of us have to work an intervention, because as far as society is concerned, the woman can continue to keep being beaten up as long as that's what she "chooses" for herself. She's just not allowed to make that choice if she has children in the home.
The comparison to someone in poverty and an abuse victim is this: Both individuals have the perception that their choices are limited. Both individuals have limited resources at hand to make different choices. Both are dis-empowered--they believe they are helpless and that there is nothing they can do to change things.
A battered women and a poor women are usually the same woman, btw.
