With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions.
Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcasts.
And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision that's banking reimagined?
What's in your wallet?
Terms apply, see capital1.com slash bank, Capital One NA member FDIC.
Hey there everybody, Chuck and Josh here to tell you about the new podcast,
Car and Drivers into Cars, a production of Car and Driver, and I Heart Media's Ruby Studio.
Hosted by Eddie Altraman and Tony Quiroga,
Indicars is the ultimate podcast for car lovers.
Car and Drivers into Cars is brought to you by eBay Motors,
all the parts you need at the prices you want.
Guaranteed to fit your ride every time, visit eBay Motors.com for more eligible items only.
Exclusions apply.
Listen to Car and Drivers into Cars, available wherever you get podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too,
and this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.
That's right, big trigger warning, just straight from the jump here,
because this is about a form of domestic violence, more specifically intimate partner violence.
And it's a tough one, so trigger warning.
Yeah, the reason that we're specifying the difference between domestic violence and
intimate partner violence is that domestic violence, like you could have a kid who beats up a
parent that's still domestic violence. Intimate partner violence is specifically between two people,
same sex, different sex, non-binary, in a relationship where one abuses the other.
That's intimate partner violence and it almost always includes actual physical violence.
Yeah, or as we'll see where they both abuse each other, which is not as typical obviously.
Maybe a myth as well. We'll get to that later, okay?
So what we're talking about is not just intimate partner violence or domestic violence,
but a specific kind of domestic abuse that for a while just kind of seemed like its own thing,
but it seems like as more and more research gets built upon it, this thing that we're going to
talk about, coercive control, is actually the basis for a lot of the domestic violence or
wife-battering that it was long called, that it's actually what's actually going on beneath the
surface and that the actual beatings and the actual rapes inside the home are symptoms or just the
most obvious parts or factors in this larger thing, which is called coercive control, where one
partner essentially controls the other partner's life. That's generally what we're talking about today.
Yeah, and the word coercion means persuasion through threat. So in this case, coercive control
is controlling that partner, generally through threat, and then we'll see there's a host of components
to all this, but actual violence is almost always a part of it, not necessarily 100% always, but
a lot of times that violence is part of a larger plan to use the threat of that violence for control.
Right, or the violence itself for sure. Yeah. So our understanding of coercion in general dates back
to just after the Korean War, and I remember us discussing this in the brainwashing episode,
but there was a whole thing where some POWs appeared to be to turn collaborators with the Chinese
and Korean captors, and it was chalked up to brainwashing that they had been brainwashed, which
must mean that they probably were pretty weak-minded to begin with. So give them a break.
And there was a social scientist named Albert Bitterman, who was not satisfied by that answer,
and he started studying what tactics the Korean and Chinese captors had used on the POWs to get them
to seem to collaborate. And what he found was that they used tactics that he came to kind of
break out into what constitutes coercion. How somebody could make someone act against their will,
seemingly under their own will, without just using physical violence. And he came up with
the whole list of stuff, actually. Yeah, and again, just to point out, like his whole jam was,
this is not brainwashing. This is something entirely different. And I think,
and I agree with him, I think he thought he was making it more almost easier to believe,
because brainwashing sounds so kind of out there. It kind of just conjures to mind like people
that literally don't have control of their mind anymore, where he's like, hey, coercion can kind
of happen to anyone, because your brain's not being taken over. And like you said, he came out with
this chart of coercion. And was like, you know, the Chinese and Korean captors are doing this. It's
not like in World War II with Germany and Japan, when actual physical torture was, you know,
sort of the main component. In this case, and again, there is some violence, but it's more of these
tactics and the threat of violence that get someone under your sort of spell in a way.
Yeah, because threatening violence, when you're violent with somebody, there's a there's a end to
it. There's a point that the person knows is going to, it's going to come to an end. So now this
thing that they've been worried about is actually happening. And that means that the end is coming
soon too. The threat of violence, there is no end to it. It's always around the corner. So it can
generate like real anxiety in ways that actual violence can't. Yeah. That's just part of it.
Another part of it is isolation, monopolization of perception, like keeping people in a room with
the lights on 24 hours a day. It just has all sorts of weird effects on people. It also helps to
restrict information. So they are completely isolated and have no contact or way to get information
from outside of their captivity. Those are just a couple of them. Yeah. The list goes on with
humiliation, any kind of degrading punishment, stripping people naked, no privacy, not allowed to
take care of their bodies and go to the bathroom in a normal hygienic way or bathe themselves,
to basically kind of turn people into animals and break them down. So they don't resist.
Exhaustion, of course, is one of them. These long interrogations, limiting food, limiting
sleep, obviously. So all of this stuff is sort of working them hard. All of this stuff is going to
weaken their ability to resist the coercion. Yeah. And the one that gets me the most is the
most despicable of all our occasional indulgences. I knew you were going to say that. Because not only does
it almost like creates like an affinity for the chapter in the in the mind of the POW who's being
mistreated. Suddenly, there's like this generosity that they can latch onto me like, yes, people,
there is goodness still in the world. But the reason that they're doing that is because it keeps
you from getting used to being mistreated. Man. Isn't that just the most despicable thing you can
imagine? Yeah. Because what that says is that a human being could potentially get so used to
that abuse, coercive abuse and physical abuse that they're not going to talk. So throw them a
bone every now and then and it just shakes that they're their mental sort of processes. So they
don't get used to it. Yeah. And it makes all abuse after that that much more effective continuously.
There's also demonstrating omnipotence, which I guess just revealing information that they
wouldn't guess that you had would be pretty shocking. And would also make you feel like well,
there's no no way to hide anything from these people they know everything. And then another one
was trivial rules. Did you see that one? Yeah. So I mean, that's I mean, that can be just any
mundane thing like you, you know, you answer after we knock this many times or you approach the door
in a certain way, just any kind of little trivial rule. And again, it's just about control.
Right. And it creates a habit of complying in the subject too, right? So if you put all this
together, bitermin is widely considered to have essentially identified the techniques of coercion
that anybody could use on anyone else. And in fact, the US government apparently used bitermin's
tactics as a playbook in Guantanamo Bay. I'm sure elsewhere as well that we just don't know about
at the moment. And there was also this kind of weird thread that also came about a couple decades
after bitermin's research in the 50s, starting in the 70s that like the women's movement like we've
talked about really started to gain steam, right? And one of the things that a huge focus was
the plight of women who were physically abused by their husbands, battered women. That's what they
called them at the time back in the 70s. And one of the things that that scholars feminist scholars
in particular at the time noticed was that there were real parallels between the tactics that
bitermin had identified of coercion used against POWs in the Korean War. And reports of how women were
treated in the home when they were victims of domestic abuse. And it became clear that these
coercion tactics had kind of been adopted unconsciously by men who abused their wives. And that
in a very roundabout way for decades later laid the groundwork for our idea of coercive control.
Yeah, I mean, you grew up, you were a little younger than me. But in the 70s and 80s, the
the notion of, like you said, what they call it at the time, the battered woman, the battered wife
was a real, it was really on the radar. I remember when I was a kid, there were movies,
there was this, it just scared the crap out of me and not to get too personal with my family.
But you know, I've talked a little bit before about having enough so great childhood. And that
just that the awareness of that and fighting in the house all combined to just terrify me when
I was a kid. I remember there was, and I looked it up today because I was like, man, I remember there
was a TV movie with the guy from Mash that just terrified me and I looked at it from Mash.
Honeycutt. So I looked it up. It was an NBC TV movie called battered. And it was three sort of
stories. Mike Farrell was one of them, like the nicest guy ever on Mash played an abuse of husband.
And it just told each of these stories. And it was, I remember this coming on and it just like,
it was, it was awful for a young kid to watch that while also sort of living in a household of
yelling and fighting and stuff like that. So it was just, it was a big part of the,
the national landscape. If like a kid is hearing about the stuff all the time via TV movies,
another one that came out was obviously the burning bed, which was, it's a big case that we're
going to talk about now because it was, I mean, the movie, it was a landmark TV movie, but the case
it was based on also a landmark case in a lot of ways. Yeah. One, I'm really sorry that you
experienced that as a kid that's awful. And two, yes, the burning bed was a huge, huge deal. It
changed everything. Like this was 1984 that the TV movie came out. I think the book came out in
1980. And the whole thing was based on the experience of a woman who throughout the 70s
suffered tremendously at the hands of her husband and then ex-husband who continued to abuse her even
after they were divorced. The woman's name was Francine Hughes, her husband and then ex-husband's
name was Mickey Hughes. And he did everything like he beat her, he raped her, he controlled her.
The story itself is, is actually you could do an entire episode on it easily. It was just so
horrible that this happened. And it's so captured the attention of America thanks to the book and then
to the TV movie. It really kind of helped move forward this awareness of just how bad the lives
of battered women were because it was not a secret that there were women who were beaten by their
husbands in America. I think it was outlawed in the United States first by Alabama in 1871. By 1920,
every state has had outlawed wife abuse in the home. But in the courts, that wasn't enforced.
There was very frequently not enforced. In general, American culture viewed wife battering,
spousal abuse as a private family matter. As long as it happened by enclosed doors and your
you know, your wife didn't show up to work if you let her have a job with black eyes.
People were probably going to look the other way, even if you ended up in court over it, criminal
court over it, you were still probably going to get off because it was a family matter. And I saw
just real quick, I saw a quote that writer named Aaron Blakemore for I think history.com found
there was a New York City Councilman in 1976 named Leon Katz who said, are we to break up a
marriage simply because a man beats his wife? Like that was the attitude at the time. So this is
what the feminist movement was up against and circling back to the burning bed. It helped a lot.
Yeah, big time. You know, you mentioned in case people are confused about how or why he
continued to abuse her after their divorce. This is over a 13 year period, but they divorced in 1971.
He got in a bad car accident and she let him move back into the house and suffered six more years
of abuse. He and this guy was a despicable human being. If all of this abuse wasn't enough,
and we're talking, and this is stuff that will come out, you know, as clear examples of
courts of control, like not just the physical violence, but threatening her life.
He made her drop out of secretaryal school, burned her books the night of the final incident.
And this seems to be a common thing as far as tying in historical cultural at the time, domestic
roles of like, you know, the wife cooks for the husband and takes care of the kids in this and
that. He like destroyed the dinner through it on the floor, made her clean it up, made her cook it
again. That kind of thing. And then in another incident strangled his daughter's kitten in front of
him. Oh, so he actually did. He didn't just threaten to. No, no, no, he did. So a despicable human
to the point where after that final night, where she was raped one final time, he passed out drunk
and she set his bed on fire, which is why it's called the burning bed. And Farrah Fawcett got a
lot of a claim for taking on like a really serious role in portraying Francine Hughes to the great
Paul Amats despicable Mickey Hughes. I did not hurt him. I didn't bother to look him up. Who is he?
What did he do? Oh, he was he was a great actor in the 70s. He was in a lot of stuff. Okay.
I didn't recognize him. Yeah, you remember Melvin and Howard, the John the Dimmie movie about the
true story of the when the guy picked up Howard Hughes as a hitchhiker. No, he was Melvin.
And he was in a lot of stuff. Paul Beak guy in the 70s and 80s. Okay. I got to see that movie.
I've never heard of that. Well, it's not what you think. It's not a fun road trip in the
tradition of road trip. No, no, no, it's a very good movie, but that's a very small part of it.
Anyway, just a couple of more quick points. Just of how reprehensible this case was,
when the
