For years, domestic abuse has been treated like a private relationship problem.
A bad marriage. A volatile breakup. A couple in crisis. A family matter. Something painful, maybe even dangerous, but still somehow contained inside the home.
That framing has always been wrong.
The U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, known as NTAC, has been studying targeted violence and mass attacks for years. Their work looks at what attackers did before the violence became public: what warning signs were present, what behaviors people noticed, and what opportunities existed for intervention.
And one of the clearest findings should make every family court professional, attorney, therapist, mediator, police officer, and judge sit up straighter: domestic violence and misogyny show up again and again in the histories of people who commit mass attacks.
In NTAC’s report on mass attacks in public spaces from 2016 to 2020, nearly half of the attackers had a history of domestic violence, misogynistic behavior, or both.
That is not a side note.
That is a warning.
Domestic abuse does not live in a separate category from public violence. The control, entitlement, threats, stalking, intimidation, and rage that happen inside a relationship are part of the same larger system of domination that shows up in other forms of violence. Sometimes the targets are a wife, girlfriend, ex-wife, children, or family members. Sometimes the violence expands into a workplace, school, public space, or community. The setting changes. The belief system often does not.
This is where the language of misogynistic extremism matters.
The Secret Service’s NTAC also published Hot Yoga Tallahassee: A Case Study of Misogynistic Extremism, examining the 2018 attack in which a gunman targeted women in a yoga studio, killing two women and injuring others.
Misogynistic extremism helps us name the ideology underneath so much gender-based violence: contempt for women, entitlement to women’s attention and obedience, rage at rejection, punishment for autonomy, and grievance when a woman says no, leaves, files for divorce, gets custody, starts over, or stops making her life revolve around managing him.
That language may sound intense to people who are used to minimizing abuse as conflict.
It should sound intense.
The behavior is intense.
A man who monitors his partner, isolates her, threatens her, controls money, tracks her movements, punishes her independence, stalks her after separation, uses the children as leverage, or weaponizes the legal system is not simply “having a hard time.” He is engaging in a pattern of domination.
When systems misread that pattern, they respond badly.
They send couples into therapy when one person is afraid of the other. They push mediation when one person is using negotiation as another arena for control. They call it “high conflict” when the dynamic is actually coercive. They reward the calm presentation of the person causing harm and pathologize the fear of the person trying to survive it.
This is how danger gets laundered into respectability.
The abuser looks composed. The survivor looks dysregulated. The system decides both people need to communicate better.
NTAC’s research matters because it pushes us to look earlier. Before the mass attack. Before the public violence. Before the final act that makes everyone say, “How did no one see this coming?”
Often, people did see something.
They saw rage. They saw threats. They saw stalking. They saw obsession. They saw escalating grievance. They saw violence at home. They saw hatred toward women. They saw a man who could not tolerate humiliation, rejection, or loss of control.
They may not have had the language to understand what they were seeing.
That has to change.
Domestic abuse is not only a personal tragedy. It is a legal issue. A community issue. A political issue. A family court issue. A workplace issue. A children’s safety issue.
It’s rooted in a culture that has trained men to believe women owe them care, sex, silence, loyalty, forgiveness, emotional labor, access, and second chances. It’s rooted in a culture that still asks women to manage men’s feelings and then acts shocked when some men become dangerous after women stop managing them.
This is where our questions have to get more honest.
A woman leaving an abusive relationship is often treated like the obvious solution, as if walking out the door ends the danger. But separation can be the moment when control escalates. The question is not simply why she does not leave. The question is what happens when she tries to reclaim her life, and whether the systems around her understand the risk she may be facing.
We also have to stop using physical violence as the only marker of seriousness. By the time someone asks, “Has he hit you?” the more important pattern may already be well established. Is he monitoring her? Isolating her? Threatening her? Controlling money? Punishing her independence? Stalking her after separation? Using the children, court, or public reputation to keep her afraid and engaged?
Those behaviors matter because they reveal the structure underneath the abuse.
And in family court, that structure is too often flattened into “conflict.” A mother trying to protect herself and her children may be pressured to co-parent with someone who is using parenting time, communication, and legal process as ongoing access points. Her fear may be treated as emotionality. His composure may be mistaken for stability. The system may reward the very performance that allows coercive control to continue.
That is how misogynistic violence hides in plain sight.
Patterns matter because they tell us what isolated incidents cannot. And when the pattern is coercive control, misogynistic entitlement, stalking, threats, and escalating grievance, we need to stop waiting for the kind of violence that makes everyone comfortable calling it abuse.
The NTAC research gives institutional weight to what survivors and advocates have been saying for a long time: domestic abuse is not a private failure between two people. It is part of a larger system that normalizes male entitlement, minimizes women’s fear, and repeatedly misreads control as conflict.
The danger is not only that abuse can expand beyond the home.
The danger is that the same system beneath it is already harming women inside the home, inside divorce, inside custody disputes, inside workplaces, inside law enforcement responses, and inside courtrooms every day.
Domestic abuse is not private.
It never was.