We live in a world that has largely abandoned the language of evil, preferring clinical diagnoses to moral judgments. Seeking psychological explanations rather than ethical clarity. We talk about “toxic behaviors” and “unhealthy patterns” and “maladaptive coping mechanisms.” But what do we call someone who deliberately, systematically destroys another human being’s sense of reality, safety, and self—knowing full well what they’re doing? Can we finally begin to explore whether evil exists, especially in the context of abuse?
This isn’t a theoretical question. It’s the lived reality for millions of abuse survivors who are told their suffering is the result of their partner’s “anger issues,” “communication problems,” or “unresolved trauma.” These therapeutic frameworks obscure a simpler, more terrible truth: that some people intentionally choose to harm the people who love them.
Because if we can’t name that deliberate choice for what it is, then we cannot hold perpetrators accountable—or help survivors recognize what’s being done to them. And our unwillingness to face and name this – is exactly what abusers count on.
The Perfect Target for Abuse
Don Hennessy, who interviewed over 1,000 perpetrators during his decades in domestic violence intervention, observed something chilling: skilled abusers specifically seek out good women who will never suspect.
Not weak women. Not damaged. Nor women with “low self-esteem.”
Good women. Trusting women. The kind of women who believe in the fundamental goodness of people. Women who, when faced with cruelty, will search for explanations that preserve their worldview rather than accepting the simple, terrible truth: someone is choosing to harm them.
These women make ideal targets precisely because they will exhaust themselves trying to understand, to help, to fix, to believe the best. They will turn their scrutiny inward—What did I do wrong? How can I be better?—rather than outward toward the person systematically dismantling their reality.
If you cannot conceive of intentional malice, you can’t defend yourself or your children against it.
Defining Evil: The Intention to Harm
In his groundbreaking work People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck offers a deceptively simple definition of evil: the intention to do harm to another person. Not the capacity for harm—we all have that. Not accidental harm, or harm done in ignorance, or even harm done in the heat of genuine emotion.
“You may be one of many women who find this behavior unbelievable and even the survivors of these behaviors find it hard to explain them. I think that the best word I have to describe his behavior is ‘evil.'”
Steps to Freedom: Escaping Intimate Control – Don Hennessy
Intention. The deliberate choice to damage another human being. This definition cuts through all the sophisticated excuses, all the therapeutic language, all the “explanations” that remove moral culpability:
- “He had a difficult childhood”
- “He struggles with anger management”
- “He just doesn’t know how to communicate”
- “He’s under so much stress”
These frameworks treat abuse as a deficit—something the abuser lacks. Skills he never learned. Trauma he never processed. Why he can’t stay in control of himself. But Don Hennessy’s perpetrator interviews tell a radically different story.
What Perpetrator Interviews Revealed
When Don interviewed perpetrators, he didn’t find men who had “lost control.” He found men who described, in great detail, the strategic choices they made:
How they selected their victims. Looking for women with specific qualities—kindness, empathy, a desire to see the best in people. Women who would make excuses for them. Women who would blame themselves.
How they tested boundaries. Small transgressions first, watching to see if they’d be forgiven. Gradually escalating. Carefully calculating what they could get away with.
How they isolated their targets. Systematically cutting off support systems. Making themselves the sole source of reality. Creating dependence—emotional, financial, social.
How they performed. Presenting one face to the outside world, another behind closed doors. Controlling their behavior perfectly at work, with friends, in public. Losing control only when it served their purposes.
These weren’t confessions of weakness or illness. They were matter-of-fact descriptions of technique. They told Don (and each other): “I knew exactly what I was doing.” Another described how he would time his “raging” for times when no one else could see them. How “angry” he was depended on who was around.
This isn’t losing control. It’s performance.
“He may appear decent to the rest of the world, and you may feel unable to pinpoint or explain to others what you can deeply sense as true malevolence, or even evil.”
Steps to Freedom – Don Hennessy
Why We Resist the Word “Evil”
Our culture has largely abandoned moral language in favor of clinical terminology. We prefer to say someone has “narcissistic personality disorder” rather than that they are cruel. We talk about “maladaptive coping mechanisms” rather than deliberate harm.
And there are good reasons for this shift. Medical models reduce stigma for genuine mental illness. Therapeutic frameworks offer hope for change. Understanding root causes can inform prevention.
But when we apply these frameworks to perpetrators of systematic abuse, we are making a catastrophic error. Because then we treat intentional harm as if it were a symptom requiring treatment rather than a choice requiring accountability.
We ask: What happened to him that made him this way?
Instead of: What is he choosing to do to her?
The perpetrators that Don interviewed weren’t confused about this distinction. They knew they were making choices. They knew they were causing harm. And they certainly knew that their partners didn’t deserve it.
But they did it anyway. And if that’s not evil, then what is?
The Stakes of Not Naming Evil
When that deeply religious woman cannot conceive of evil, she cannot recognize it when it’s destroying her life. She will search for explanations that fit her worldview:
- He must be hurting too
- God wants me to forgive
- Marriage is sacred; I must try harder
- Everyone has flaws; no one is perfect
All true. But also completely irrelevant when facing someone who is intentionally hurting her and purposely harming her. Because her inability to name evil doesn’t protect her from it. It just makes her more vulnerable to it. And her abuser knows this. Because that’s why he chose her.
“You should acknowledge the great strength you have shown to have remained sane while living with such a man.”
Steps to Freedom – Don Hennessy
Evil Doesn’t Look Like What We Expect It To
Hannah Arendt wrote about “the banality of evil” in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil after witnessing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial. She expected a monster. But what she found was a bureaucrat. Ordinary. So boring as to be banal. An ordinary man who committed extraordinary atrocities through methodical, mundane choices. As she observed, “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic—that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
And that is the whole issue with what we believe about almost every evil…we think that it will announce itself with a black hat and Snidely-Whiplash mustache. But the real truth is that it hides behind the ordinary. So banal, and thus so dangerous.
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic—that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil – Hannah Arendt
In his landmark work The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Jay Lifton documented the psychological process of “doubling“—how ordinary physicians could perform deadly experiments during the day and then go home and be loving fathers at night. Not because they were psychotic, but because they had learned to compartmentalize, to create separate parts of themselves for separate contexts.
The CIA MKUltra researchers who developed systematic techniques for breaking and shattering human consciousness weren’t madmen. They were educated professionals who carefully documented their nefarious methods. They published papers. And worst of all, they believed they were serving their country.
So, the intention to harm someone doesn’t require horns and a pitchfork. It merely requires the choice to treat another human being as an object to be used, controlled, or destroyed.
And domestic abusers make that choice every single day. To the person who loves them the most.
“When my colleagues and I worked with groups of male intimate abusers, we experienced a sense of malevolence that exceeded that among groups of child abusers.”
Steps to Freedom – Don Hennessy
Recognizing That Evil Exists in Abuse Equals Accountability
If abuse is a mental illness, treatment is the answer. Therapy. Medication. Anger management classes. And if abuse is a skills deficit, education is the answer. Teaching communication. Conflict resolution. Emotional regulation.
But if abuse is a choice—an intention to harm—then accountability is the answer.
Not because punishment will change the abuser. Don’s research suggests it rarely does. Most perpetrators simply become more sophisticated in their tactics. But because victims need us to accurately name what was done to them. And when we refuse to use moral language, when we medicalize and excuse and explain away the intentional harm, we abandon survivors to a world where their reality is constantly questioned (which we have).
Was it really that bad? Isn’t everyone flawed? Shouldn’t you be more forgiving? Have you considered his perspective?
Yes, it was that bad. No, not everyone systematically destroys the people who love them. No, forgiveness doesn’t require continued exposure to harm. And yes, his perspective is that you are an object to be controlled, and he chose that perspective deliberately.
Survivors don’t need more empathy for their abusers. They need validation that what was done to them was wrong. Intentionally. Inexcusably. Wrong. And they need us to have the courage to call evil by its name.
But science isn’t there yet.
Steps to Freedom – Don Hennessy
“This is an ongoing debate between my colleagues and me, one that we have settled by saying that science has not yet explained the origins of the degrading, persistent and extremely harmful behaviors of the intimate abuser.
Until that happens, I want to recognize and respect your experience of being put through evil; if society tells you that you overreact or are too sensitive, they should count themselves lucky that they haven’t experienced anything similar to what you’ve been put through.”
Women of Faith Who Cannot Conceive of the Existence of Evil
If you believe in good, you must also believe in its opposite.
If you believe people are created in God’s image, you must grapple with the terrible mystery of free will—that we can choose to honor that image or desecrate it.
Your inability to imagine someone deliberately harming you doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It just means you’ve never chosen to harm anyone yourself.
Your goodness is not a shield. It’s a target.
And the person who chose you—who saw your kindness, your faith, your generosity of spirit—saw exactly what he was looking for: someone who would exhaust herself trying to love him better rather than recognizing what he was choosing to do to her.
The Real Questions We Have to Ask Ourselves
Maybe the questions aren’t just whether evil exists in the context of abuse. But whether we have the courage to acknowledge it when we see it. Can we start to be willing to stop making excuses for deliberate harm? Because we need to finally prioritize perpetrator accountability over comfortable explanations. And can we, will we, validate survivors’ reality instead of asking them to extend infinite understanding to people who are choosing to destroy them.
Don Hennessy’s perpetrators told him the truth: they knew what they were doing. They chose their targets. They escalated systematically. But most of all, they controlled their behavior when it mattered to them.
M. Scott Peck gave us the language: evil is the intention to harm.
The woman of faith who is discovering that she’s been abused needs both: the research and the moral clarity. The evidence and the permission to name what was done to her. She needs for us to say: Yes. Evil exists. Not as an abstract theological concept, but as a concrete choice made by real people who decide that what they want matters more than another person’s humanity.
And yes, it happened to you. It may still be happening to you.
But the bottom line is that it’s not your fault. It never was. You are off the hook, because you never there to begin with. It was always, only, his choice.
You may feel defeated, but I remind you again that there is a part of you that is not damaged but hidden: it is not gone.”Steps to Freedom – Don Hennessy
This is part of Street Smart Safety for Women’s ongoing series exploring the research and reality of systematic abuse. To learn more about Don Hennessy’s groundbreaking work with perpetrators, his books are invaluable. If you or someone you know is experiencing abuse, please reach out to The Hot Line.