Trait Examination OR Character Assassination?

By Sandra L. Brown, M.A.

Part of the problem we face in trying to get to the nitty-gritty of pathological love relationships is that

"how we do it" or "what we call it" is judged so severely that it impairs sharing the valuable outcomes that are learned.

There are groups of professionals, women's orgs, and service agencies that tip toe around what we "call" patterns of selection in relationships. There are unspoken rules and heavily weighted opinions about "what" we can discuss and "how" we discuss the outcomes.

What am I talking about? Since the 1970's which largely kick started the women's movement, the way society discusses specifics about women's choices in relationships’ their patterns of selection; her personality traits, mental health,  and sexual addiction/deviancy has been largely discouraged and semantisized as "labeling the victim" or "victim blaming." It has put the victim off limits for any in depth understanding other than a victimology theory that was developed in the 1970's.

It is hard to get around the billboard image of "victim" to talk about any kind of relationship dynamics or other psychological aspects of the pathological love relationship including biology, temperament, or engrained/learned, or conditioned traits. We may study him but we already have a "theory" for her which is not to be disturbed.

Compare this to any other field of mental health and it's absurd that we would say "We already understand depression, no more theories, no more studying! Don't call it depression or you are blaming the patient for their own depression."

To study her is to blame her. To measure her traits to see if there are vulnerabilities or pattern typing is to suggest she is flawed.

* The victim assuredly has been through trauma.

* Studying the victim in no way says they have not been through trauma.

* The victim is not to blame for what happened to them.

* Studying the victim in no way says they are responsible for what happened to them.

* The victim did not "choose" the victimization, but in relational dysfunction, she did pick the victimizer.

Could we learn something about that?

How will Cancer be won or a cure for AIDS found if we don't study the problem from all angles? If we conclude that studying the victim blames them, then we have cut off one entire segment of research that can help us in prevention, intervention and treatment, whether it's a medical disorder or a pathological relationship.

• Studying victimology, including aspects of the victim, is not victim character assassination.
• It might be trait examination or pattern of selection analysis.
• It might be a lot of things that have nothing to do with blame and shame and everything to do with understanding or creating new paradigms in which to see these relationships.
• It might piggyback off of other theories developed in the 1970's.
• Surely we have learned SOMETHING new about relationship dynamics, pathology in relationships, personality disorders as intimate partners, violence and addiction and their part in these relationships!
• Surely we can UPDATE a theory without our own assassination or that of the victim?

In some ways, I envy the Scientific and Research communities that look at the data and pass all the darn political correctness and emotional politics of "labeling" it something that certain groups find offensive. They test and crunch numbers and put it in a journal without all the rig-a-ma-roy. But in our case, where we are a notch below the researchers, what we study, how we describe what we found, is subject to so much scrutiny that many clinicians and writers hesitate to publish what they found.

So it has been with many of the things that The Institute has studied, found, reported, and written. In many organizations the first book "How to Spot a Dangerous Man" was rejected for looking at family role modeling, patterns of selection, and other aspects that women themselves said contributed to their pathological relationship. (On the other hand, it has been hailed by many domestic violence agencies and used widely in shelters, treatment centers and women's prisons.)

We stepped it up a huge notch in the "Women Who Love Psychopaths" in which we used testing instruments to test women's traits to see if there were temperament patterns in women who ended up in the most dangerous and disordered of relationships. This caught huge attention from some groups as the ground-breaking trait identification that it was and yet still; the victim groups saw it as labeling.

How can we help women if we don't understand their own biology?

Ironically, what we found was significant; super-traits so perfectly and symmetrically seen in 80 cases. Did we hurt a victim by studying that? Or have we helped now thousands of women who have read the books, been counseled by our trained therapists, come to our treatment programs?

How would we have gotten here today without daring to look deeper-to even risk looking at her! Not to blame her, but to understand her.  Some of the biggest breakthroughs that have been happening are in understanding the biology of our own brains and the consequences of our biology on our behavior, choices, and futures. We know that MRI's are being done on psychopath's brains revealing areas of brains that work differently. Some day, I think that may cross over and other personality disorders and chronic mental illnesses will be MRI'd as well so we understand how those disorder effect biology and brain function.

But what about victims?

* If we put the word "damaged" away and instead looked at how "different" brain regions in victims function, over function, under function, are influenced by stress, PTSD, adrenaline, cortisol, and early childhood abuse--could we come to understand how their brain might function in their patterns of selection in dangerous relationships?

* Could we come to understand that even temperament traits might give proclivity to how the brain "chooses" or how the brain categorizes (or ignores) red flags, danger, or is highly reactive to traumatized attraction?

* Could we understand brains that have higher tolerance levels because of certain brain areas that operate differently than other people?

* Could we understand traumatic memory storage and why good memories of him (even as awful as he might be) are so much stronger than the abuse memories?

* If we know what part of the brain distorts memory storage, can we work with that?

* Could we come to understand trait temperaments as risk factors or certain brain functions as possible victim vulnerabilities?

* Then would we know who is at risk?

* Would we understand better, how to TREAT the victim in counseling?

* How to develop prevention and intervention?

* Or how intensity of attachment could be either a temperament trait or a brain function instead of merely "victim labeling."

I am not only interested in the psycho-biology of the victim but how the psycho-biology affects patterns of selection and reactions in the most pathological of relationships. When we start really dealing with an open dialogue about these survivors, looking past ridiculous theories that asking questions is victim blaming, then maybe we can really offer some new theories into victimology that by passes band aid approaches to complex psycho-bio-social understandings. This is what The Institute intends to do. 

Sandra L. Brown, M.A. is the CEO and Founder of The Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and Public Pathology Education.

"On your mark... get set...." the race to a UN Treaty on Victim Rights

By Randy McCall


In an exciting development in the area of global crime victim rights, the World Society of Victimology has recently announced that the Society has "decided to support the move to elevate the UN Declaration of 1985 to a more timely and detailed convention."


While these very dry words don't sound the least exciting in themselves, they are actually the firing of a starting gun, signaling the beginning of a lobbing effort to have the United Nations create an official international treaty -- known in UN diplo-speak as a "Convention" -- on Justice and Support for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power.


As I mentioned in a previous post, the World Society helped formulate the Declaration on Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, which the United Nations voted to accept in 1985, followed shortly by supporting documents written by WSV members: A Guide for Policy Makers and the Handbook on Justice for Victims. Since then, a large number of countries and international organizations have used the Declaration and accompanying documents as the measuring sticks for creating and administering victim rights laws and policies within their own borders, including:

• Australia
• Canada
• Council of Europe
• Japan
• New Zealand
• Taiwan
• and many others

The Declaration, however, was only an agreement in principle between UN member nations, essentially a "suggestion" of what UN affiliated countries should provide to their citizens. It had no force in law, and no UN member state had to offer their citizen's any of the rights or forms of treatment it recommended.


A Convention, as a full treaty, would hold the power of law, requiring UN member nations to provide victims of crime and the abuse of power the rights and privileges set out in the Convention. Obviously, there may be stiff opposition to passage of such a Convention from UN member states, whether due to cost concerns, or because certain countries don't want to give such rights to their citizens.


Along with the WSV's announcement of their support to move the Declaration to full Convention status, they announced the Society will be fielding a team of experts to attend the Twelfth United Nations Congress on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (Salvador, Brazil, 12-19 April 2010) http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime-congress/crime-congresses.html to represent the Society and to advocate to UN members for the passage of the Convention.


This team will be comprised of internationally respected experts in the fields of victim rights, criminal, justice, and academic victimology. They include (but aren't limited to):

• WSV President Prof. Dr. Groenhuijsen (Director, INTERVICT, Netherlands)
• Vice Presidents, Annette Pearson de Gonzalez (Brazil) and Michael O'Connell (Commissioner for Victim Rights, South Australia)
• Prof. Dr. John Dussich, Chair of the UN Liaison Committee (Director, TIVI, Japan)
• Prof. Dr. Sam Garkawe (Associtate Professor, Australia)
• Professor Hidemichi Morosawa (Chairman, TIVI, Japan), and others

In preparation for this trip, the WSV -- in consultation with victimology centers such as INTERVICT (Netherlands), TIVI (Japan), and with individual experts in victim rights and criminal justice from around the world -- have provided an updated Draft proposal for the Convention. For those who would like to have some insights on how this proposal was developed, you can obtain a copy of a discussion held at the WSV's last Symposium in Japan, August 2009:

Dussich, John J.P. and Mundy, K.G. (eds.): Raising the Global Standards for Victims: The Proposed Convention on Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power. Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the Tokiwa International Institute February 15 and 16, 2008. Tokiwa International Victimology Institute. Tokyo (Seibundo) 2009 ISBN 978 - 4 - 7923 - 9191 - 1

Unfortunately, this document is presently only available for purchase; the WSV is working to make it publicly available, and I hope to be able to let our readers know when this happens.


The United Nations normally records all proceedings and press conferences, and makes these video recordings available to the public for free. Once the Brazil conference is over, I'll post the links for any relevant text or audio-visual files the UN provides.


If you'd like to help support this measure, you can do so by asking the victim rights organization of your choice to provide support the WSV in lobbying the UN, or by joining the WSV or any of the affiliated organizations with which they work.