Conning the System
Even a complete battery of tests, administered by experienced professionals sometimes fails to identify abusers and their personality disorders. Offenders are uncanny in their ability to deceive their evaluators. They often succeed in transforming therapists and diagnosticians into four types of collaborators: the adulators, the blissfully ignorant, the self-deceiving and those deceived by the batterer's conduct or statements.
Abusers co-opt mental health and social welfare workers and compromise them - even when the diagnosis is unequivocal - by flattering them, by emphasizing common traits or a common background, by forming a joint front against the victim of abuse ("shared psychosis"), or by emotionally bribing them. Abusers are master manipulators and exploit the vulnerabilities, traumas, prejudices, and fears of the practitioners to "convert" them to the offender's cause.
I. The Adulators
The adulators are fully aware of the nefarious and damaging aspects of the abuser's behavior but believe that they are more than balanced by his positive traits. In a curious inversion of judgment, they cast the perpetrator as the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the abused or attribute the offender's predicament to bigotry.
They mobilize to help the abuser, promote his agenda, shield him from harm, connect him with like-minded people, do his chores for him and, in general, create the conditions and the environment for his ultimate success.
II. The Ignorant
As I wrote in "The Guilt of the Abused", it is telling that precious few psychology and psychopathology textbooks dedicate an entire chapter to abuse and violence. Even the most egregious manifestations - such as child sexual abuse - merit a fleeting mention, usually as a sub-chapter in a larger section dedicated to paraphilias or personality disorders.
Abusive behavior did not make it into the diagnostic criteria of mental health disorders, nor were its psychodynamic, cultural and social roots explored in depth. As a result of this deficient education and lacking awareness, most law enforcement officers, judges, counselors, guardians, and mediators are worryingly ignorant about the phenomenon.
Only 4% of hospital emergency room admissions of women in the United States are attributed by staff to domestic violence. The true figure, according to the FBI, is more like 50%. One in three murdered women was done in by her spouse, current or former.
The blissfully ignorant mental health professionals are simply unaware of the "bad sides" of the abuser- and make sure they remain oblivious to them. They look the other way, or pretend that the abuser's behavior is normative, or turn a blind eye to his egregious conduct.
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