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I wrote to "Dear Abby" concerning this column, and advised "her" that she should've advised the husband to get out of the relationship and seek shelter for himself and his children. Why? Because this woman's tendency toward violence is obviously escalating, and she's already tried and failed at getting help. If he stays too long, he could end up dead.
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I thought the same thing this morning when reading this column. I'm particularly sensitive to things like this, since both I and my (male) partner are DV survivors.
This woman sounds like a nut. It's bad enough that she decked him, but doing it in a moving car made it even worse. Did Abby ever consider that, by striking her husband while he was driving, the wife could easily have caused him to lose control of the car, killing him, herself and the kids? The wife is so out of control that she didn't *care* about this possibility.
Abby's advice to this man wasn't anywhere near strong enough. Telling him to buy an anger management booklet for his wife is like telling him to put Neosporin on cutaneous anthrax. I agree with Nightmist. He needs to get out NOW, and take the kids with him if at all possible.
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By "we" I mean society in general. When men are violent we simply vilify them, punish them, or lock them up. Not so when women are violent. For some reason we try to "explain away" violent women's outbursts.
Notice how Abby—or her writers—try to offer reasons why "people" are violent in response to this woman's behaviour. If a man had pounded his wife while whe was driving would Abby have launched into a vague explanation of the origins of anger? I doubt it. She would have roundly condemned the "brute" and told the woman to leave him immediately or have him arrested. However, when it's a woman doing the hitting, all of a sudden Abby gets all philosophical on us.
I have always believed that Abby knows who her audience is. For the most part, men don't read Dear Abby. I maintain that she is not so much writing good advice to help people through their lives as she is writing advice that she knows women will enjoy reading, and very few women would like to read that some other woman should be arrested and given a restraining order, even if it would be the right thing to do.
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