Publisher's Synopsis
What makes a man like John, in every respect a cultured an charming man, successful in his career and liked by his friends and acquaintances, behave violently towards a woman he says he loves? Is he sick? Is he different from other men? Is it, as he says, Jane's fault? Does she like being beaten? Otherwise why should she go on doing what she knows upsets him? Adam Jukes hope that by the end of his demanding but gripping book, the reader will be able to answer these questions. Adam Jukes works with men who are abusive and violent to women. In the last eight years he has been involved in the London Men's Centre, which offers dedicated programs to men who are violent. He began working with abusive men as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, but as his work continued, he found that the work of feminists in the refuge movement and in the 'speaking bitterness' literature could not be ignored. He integrates these two perspectives in his work. The way in which he presents men in this book will generate distress for those men who experience their masculinity as a burden - for he argues that misogyny, the hatred of women, is an inescapable element in the development of masculinity. But he also shows how the model of misogyny which informs the book is applied to an intervention program to stop male abusiveness.
