No One Believed Me
When men are victims of domestic violence.
By Glenn Sacks, M.A. and Ned Holstein, M.D.
Four Sacramento County Sheriff’s cars pulled up in front of David Woods’s house. He tried to explain to them what happened. But the lead deputy cut him off: “Yeah, that’s fine. Put your hands behind your back.”
David said, “No, wait, she stabbed me … there’s the knife. See the knife? See my neck wound? See?”
“Put your hands behind your back. Turn around,” the deputy replied.
“No,” David protested. “She stabbed…”
The deputies drew their weapons. David’s little daughters came running out of the back bedroom pleading, “Leave Daddy alone! Mamma tried to hurt him with a knife!”
One deputy, a woman, took the children in the bedroom and shut the door. David stood there, cuffed.
How the fight began
David’s wife Ruth had taken the kids out for a walk in 39 degree weather — for seven hours.
“By the time she got back their fingers were blue, their lips were blue, their ears were blue,” David says. The children were soaked; she was soaked. We argued for an hour. “We had to put them in a warm bath to warm them up; they were hypothermic.
Then she started cutting up vegetables for dinner. She had a serrated vegetable knife with a blade about seven inches long. She turned around and she stabbed at me.
“I tried to block it, but I was surprised. I was off balance…the knife went right through my collar and gave me a little nick on my neck.
“She reared back to stab me again. I tried to block it again…I hit her in the mouth. She dropped the knife, ran to the telephone, called 911, and told them, ‘My husband is hitting me! I think he’s gonna kill me.’
“When she dropped the knife, I stood over it. I wouldn’t let her hide the knife. I was going to say to the police, ‘See? She tried to stab me.’”
The truth came from the kids
After 15 minutes, the female deputy returned from the bedroom after talking to David’s children. She told the other deputies, “It’s true. Both of the daughters saw it. She tried to stab him with the knife.”
They took the cuffs off David. “Your wife obviously needs help,” the lead deputy said. “She works for Kaiser, you’ve got health insurance that covers mental health, you need to call the emergency number and get her an appointment.”
David says there’s a double standard when it comes to charging men. “Now, isn’t that strange? When she had a fat lip, it was a felony and I was going to jail. But when they finally realized that she tried to stab me in the neck, it stopped being a crime, and instead it was a mental health issue.”
The history of their case
David Woods is a partially disabled former Marine who endured years of abuse at the hands of his wife Ruth and the law enforcement and domestic violence system which unwittingly enabled her.
Woods, a former construction worker, suffered disabling work-related injuries early in his marriage. He says:
“The violence really began in our family about 10 days after Ruth realized that she had all the power [financially]. I knew I had to get my kids out. I called the largest domestic violence shelter agency in Sacramento County several times. They told me, ‘Men are perpetrators of domestic violence; women are victims of domestic violence,’ and hung up.
“I had no way out. I had no money. Whenever we bought a car, Ruth insisted that the car be in her name only, so that if I took it and went to the movies without her approval she would call the police, and report, ‘I’m estranged from my husband, and he stole my car.’ She did that several times.”
Worst of all is what David’s children endured. One daughter says, “No one would help. Teachers, parents of friends, anyone I tried to talk to about what was going on at home told me I didn’t understand, that my mother couldn’t possibly be the violent party. When the police came to our home, they would always be ready to arrest my father, sometimes putting handcuffs on him. It was up to me to scream as loud as possible that it was my mom and not my dad, so they wouldn’t take him away and leave me alone with her.”
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