The first time a woman is struck by a lover, Gavin de Becker sympathizes with her, freely calling her a "victim."
But each time it happens after that, this leading specialist in violence prevention all but writes her off as a "volunteer" in her own victimization (except in the extreme, and extremely rare, case when a woman simply cannot leave her batterer). After all, de Becker writes, she will have seen a host of danger signs, likely even before the first blow hit home.This will strike many people as "blaming the victim." But no matter how provocative the presentation, Gavin de Becker's intention in "The Gift of Fear" is to change the attitude of potential victims of violence - in a way that might save their lives. All too often, he writes, women and (more rarely) men become victims of violence - anything from random knife attacks to the punches of intimates - because we dismiss a sixth sense that should tell us when we are in danger even before we are conscious of the source.
That sense, de Becker says, is fear. It is a gift that, if honored, will serve you better than a fist, stick, knife or gun. Many forms of violence we consider random and senseless are neither, he insists.
"We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore - even to ignore - survival signs," he says in his book, subtitled "Survival Signs that Protect Us from Violence." He's talking about the edgy feeling many people disregard just before they fall victim to rape or burglary or robbery.
In his view, we edit out all that sensory stuff and allow reason - that left-brain voice saying, "This is a fair city and, besides, the FBI says crime is plummeting" - to guide us.
Instead, we should listen to the internal guardian that some call intuition or "gut feeling," says de Becker, whose credentials in the field include designing the way the government weighs threats against officials.
A how-to book that reads like a thriller, "The Gift of Fear" systematizes self-defense with a childlike simplicity, saying that many forms of violence are preventable as long as you follow de Becker's easy steps to identify the signs.
While praising the instinctual mechanisms that he says can steer us away from danger, he has also designed a step-by-step forecaster of tragedy. A list of 30 telltale signs, de Becker says, is a sure-fire way to tell whether you will become one of the thousands of women who yearly fall prey to violence at the hands of lovers. First on the list, of course, is the woman's own fear.
De Becker aims to enable readers to predict whether a spouse, spurned lover or disgruntled co-worker will snap one day. (More often than not - about 80 percent of the time - it is in the context of such close relationships that violence erupts.) The gist of the book is that "snapping" never really occurs, in the sense that we usually use the word. The assailants usually reveal their intentions, their means and their reasons before they strike. The letters that stalkers send their victims, the words they speak when consumed by rage, their histories in other situations, all generally reveal whether a person will explode.
"The Gift of Fear" outlines case after case of people with overflowing rage, saying they tend to follow a pattern with near-formulaic exactitude. "In each prediction about violence, we must ask what the context, stimuli and developments might mean to the person involved, not just what they mean to us," de Becker writes. We best understand motivations for committing violent acts when we choose not to write their perpetrators off as monsters but can appreciate the fundamental humanness of violence, no matter how perverse it may seem.
A page-turner, "The Gift of Fear" is an empowering antidote in its reasoned response to an all-too-preventable epidemic.