It can get even WORSE than that. I once had a West Indian lover. Now he had some serious problems and a history of violence (that nobody told me about until it erupted) well better yet, let me introduce you to him, from an article I wrote when he was still fresher in my memory in 2001, then scroll down for the punchline:
sometimes, male children as young as 5 are not allowed in shelters for abused women.
This is feminism gone insane.
Battered women don’t need protecting from men, they need protecting from abusers.
Male children need protecting from abusers just as much as anyone else.
Patrick was an eldest child.
He once had ambitions to be a photographer. He saved money every way he could and built himself a darkroom in a shed in the garden. When his father found out he burnt the shed to the ground. I don’t know if Patrick would have been a good photographer. He never took a photograph since that day.
I can never find it in my heart to condemn his father completely. He was a hardworking man with ambitions, ambitions for his 5 sons too, he was also totally illiterate. To him, the only way to succeed was to work hard with your hands. Everything else was a foolish fantasy and a road to heartbreak.
That he loved his 5, exceptionally intelligent, sons, I have no doubt. I’m fairly certain he was as intelligent as they were. Somewhere along the way his own frustration and despair became the basis of his philosophy of life. A philosophy of life he tried to impose upon his family, by force if necessary.
Where another father would have encouraged these bright and talented boys towards university, it was England, at the time University education was state funded, including a subsistence grant, he tried to force them, one after the other, into trade apprenticeship that would initially cost him money.
Patrick, the eldest, took the brunt.
When his father beat his mother he was constantly intervening. He felt he had to.
At the age of 12 his father kicked him out of the house for this intervention. Patrick slept in abandoned cars for a while, coming back to the house to eat when his father had gone to work. He kept trying, with his mother’s help, to go to school as often as he could.
His father took in a 15 year old cousin who was having troubles at home, while his own eldest son slept in cars as the price of protecting his mother.
Friends families took him in as often as they could. His educational learning pretty much stopped at that point. He could never read or write easily, though he was intelligent and extremely articulate.
I lay in bed with him, when we were both 26, and taught him to read, beyond the basics. He a beautiful speaking voice, it was a pleasure, as soon as he stopped insisting on learning from the driest and toughest of technical manuals. That strange mix of driven ambition and despair that was his father’s manifesting again in him. He learned very fast too.
When Patrick was 17 his mother finally escaped to a shelter.
They accepted all her sons, even the 16 year old, but not Patrick, who had lost his childhood and education for protecting her when no one else would.
Even so, he was very handsome, very charming, the women in the shelter sneaked him in as often as they could. Patrick became a very aware young man, one of the first of the “new men”. In spite of being left homeless and traumatised, first by his father, then by the shelter.
To his horror, when he got into a permanent relationship, Patrick also became violently, uncontrollably abusive in his own right.
He despised himself for it. He kept trying to find some way to control it.
He was a hard worker, like his father. He always had at least two jobs. Somewhere along the way he started to gamble, mostly on slot machines. So he would work harder to pay for it.
Patrick’s life was completely out of control by the time he was 26.
He was dead by the time he was 27.
He hardly ever went to night-clubs. (With all those jobs when did he have time?) But he did that night. I never heard all the details. There was some kind of fight. Patrick, and his temper, was dead at the end of it.
I had left England, and Patrick almost a year before.
I could still remember another time he went to the same club, he had to that night to see someone about a business matter. He came back in shock. A man had been stabbed. He was all right, just injured, but it was hours before Patrick stopped shaking, days before he got it out of his mind.
Strange, that was the way he died a few months later.
The ultimate scapegoat who was never given a chance to be anything else.
When the violence erupted, we were finished (after my father, and one diagnosed psychopath, in 1980, I do not do violence)…but he used to come back…now sorry but I couldn’t handle that alone, I HAD to call the cops…
Even so, I can’t help wondering if they would have sent a special patrol group van out EVERY time, within 10 minutes, if I had been black, or he had been white…
The only response they were prepared to give was “mob handed”.
Think on’t.
GD
