"Peace of mind comes from not wanting to change others." Gerald Jampolsky Batterers Retaliate Batterers do not only manipulate mental health professionals. When batterers feel that their authority is being threatened, they escalate their violent and terroristic tactics, often threatening to kill or seriously injure their victims,31 their families, children or loved ones,32 and even themselves.33 After separation they often carry out these threats, hurting their partners 14 times as often after separation as when they were together.34 Most of these men also rape their female partners, and these rapes are more brutal than stranger rapes, and 10% of the rapes occur in from of the children.35 Batterers retaliate in many other ways as well, often being extremely imaginative and unpredictable.  They are notorious in fighting for custody,36 even though most of them never paid much attention to the children while then they were together with the children's mother.37 Most batterers seek the children knowing that depriving the mother of custody is the best way to punish and hurt her.38 Batterers, who are notoriously poor at paying child support,39 also know that winning custody not only absolves them from having to pay child support, it may obligate the mothers to pay them child support, which they see as another way to hurt the women. Batterer Manipulation and Retaliation Denial and Complicity In the Family Courts by Joan Zorza, Esq http://www.stopfamilyviolence.org/ ocean/host.php?folder=62&page=377 The bottom line on personality traits and behavior In Chapter 2, we looked at the spectrum that covers lower levels of psychopathy, through psychopathic traits, all the way up to extreme psychopaths capable of rape and murder. We hope that the checklist we developed will help women realize there is no reason to wait for a man to be formally “diagnosed” to make decisions about whether or not they are in a dangerous relationship. If a woman is checking off behaviors on our checklist then she is with someone “psychopathic enough” to be gravely concerned about. The question of differentiating between a man who has psychopathic traits and a man who is “a psychopath” is a distraction, and in reality is only important to psychopathy research. The problem is that women often wait for him to be diagnosed “something” before leaving. So much of psychopathy flies under the radar of formal diagnosing and therapists who don’t specifically work with this pathology usually miss his signs and symptoms as reported by her. These men are very good at conning therapists and making the therapists believe that it’s the women who have issues. The reason the psychopaths are able to do this is that a positive and “happy” presentation is often part of psychopathy. Therapists are used to treating depressed people and when they see the happy talkative psychopath and the distressed unhappy woman, they believe the woman is the “sick one.” From the types of behaviors our women have reported, it is clear that even “just” psychopathic traits (without the full blown diagnosis of psychopath) put women at considerable risk. That is because it doesn’t take much deviant, permanent, pathological behavior to greatly affect an intimate relationship. Men with psychopathic traits are toxic to all those who are close to them. Women Who Love Psychopaths – Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm, Sandra L. Brown, N.A. & Liane J. Leedom , M.D. www.SafeRelationships.com  or   www.WomenWhoLovePsychopaths.com Women Who Love Psychopaths http://www.msnusers.com/psychopath/women wholovepsychopaths.msnw