No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

David Adams was running a monthly gathering at the Boston Men’s Center when women who ran a program for abused women approached him asking what Adam could do to stop domestic abuse before it even began. This occurred before Sinclair founded ManAlive, when there were very few resources on the topic.

For his PhD dissertation, Adams looked at abusive households like the one he had grown up in to see how they differed from non-abusive households. He was surprised to find that in both types of households, men did about 21 percent of the housework and childcare. The difference was that the non-abusers appreciated their wives’ efforts, whereas the abusers felt unappreciated and were critical of their wives: “What Adams realized, then, was that the clinical narcissism of these men kept them from being able to really see how their behavior impacted their victims” (149).

Adams later founded Emerge, the first intervention program that aimed to stop abusive behavior and teach life skills. Emerge consists of 40 weeks of classes and receives far more voluntary participants than other programs—30 percent compared to the national average of 5.

For both Hamish Sinclair and David Adams, women were instrumental in prompting them to join the fight to help abused women.