Something is rotten in the state of our domestic abuse narratives

by bezukhova

Trigger warning: extensive discussion of domestic abuse and domestic violence, intimate partner murder, violence against women, rape, rape apologism. Many links also discuss these issues.

As I have mentioned on this blog before, I have been in an abusive relationship. I am by no means alone – One in four women in the UK will be a victim of domestic or partner abuse in her lifetime, though that statistic doesn’t take into account sexual assault by partners or emotional abuse (which are the types of abuse I suffered) and many women do not report and may not even recognise their abuse, so the actual figure is probably much higher. On average, two women a week are killed by their male partners or former partners in the UK. Two a week. Tragically, the situation is even worse in a lot of other countries; for example, the horrific statistics for South Africa have been in the news a lot recently.

Domestic violence and abuse is a truly horrible phenomena. In order to understand it and try to reduce its prevalence and impact, it needs to be seen in the wider context of violence against women in general, which is endemic both in the UK and across the world. Most rape survivors know their attacker, and while men of course also suffer the devastating effects of rape, violence, and domestic abuse, women are more likely to be affected, more likely to suffer long-term sustained violence and abuse, and more likely to be killed by a partner or former partner. It is also worth noting that the majority of both men and women who suffer violence (domestic or otherwise) do it at the hands of a man. Violence against women is a serious problem and the scope of it is frankly terrifying, but somehow thousands of brutal tragedies are ignored by our mainstream media, and every case that does make the newspapers is treated as an anomoly, as an exception.

The responsibility for ending VAW in general and DV and DA in particular does not only lie with those who perpetrate it. Rape culture and its role in normalising and legitimising rape is becoming increasingly recognised and discussed. It is also important to tackle the culture of abuse. The popular Fifty Shades of Grey series of novels has been heavily criticised for the way it portrays an extremely emotional relationship as romantic and desirable (full disclosure: I have only read the first few chapters of the first novel. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but found it far too triggering to continue). When confronted with some of these criticisms, author E. L. James responded  in an extremely aggressive and silencing manner. She denied the lived experience of abuse survivors. In fact, she treated abuse survivors in much the same way that abusers typically do – aggressive, threatening, silencing, mocking, belittling.

More recently, a high-profile real life story of domestic abuse and intimate partner murder broke. I am of course talking about the killing of Reeva Steenkamp at the hands of her partner Oscar Pistorius. Steenkamp’s death was of course utterly tragic, but what shocked, appalled, and disgusted me most about the story was the horrible way that both mainstream and social media reacted and discussed the story. The wonderful Hannah Curtis, Stavvers, and Stewie Griffin’s Mom have all blogged on this in more detail and you should absolutely read their posts in full. Helen Lewis also wrote well about it in the New Statesman and Marina Hyde did the same in the Guardian, demonstrating that mainstream media can cover these issues if it so chooses. You can also sign Hannah Curtis’s petition about the Sun’s disgusting cover the day after the murder here. The widespread sympathy for Pistorius absolutely sickened me, with one commentator going so far as to suggest he had been “punished enough” for the killing by losing his girlfriend.

Let’s take a moment to let that sink in. Punished enough for killing her by her death. Nope, doesn’t make any sense to me either. Once again though, as with Ched Evans and Julian Assange, we are reminded that many people will completely close their ears to any suggestion that a powerful, famous, white man they admire may also be capable of morally reprehensible acts and horrible, violent, inexcusable misogyny and abuse of women. Apologists spring up, explanations and excuses so thin and implausible they’d be laughable if they weren’t so widespread and so unchallenged are put forward and then endlessly regurgitated and retweeted. The women who have been abused, raped, or murdered are erased, ignored, and silenced because for vast swathes of the population this is more palatable than facing up to the truth of violence against women.

Another less dramatic news story which has caught my ear recently is that of the Vicky Pryce trial. Vicky Pryce is using a defence of marital coercion in her trial for perverting the course of justice by pretending she had been driving her then-husband’s car when it was caught by speed cameras. Marital coercion meaning that her ex-husband, Chris Huhne, bullied and pressured her into pretending she was driving and accepting the points on her licence. Pryce herself referred to Huhne’s ongoing “threatening behaviour“.  The fact that this defence is actually an accusation that Huhne domestically abused Pryce has not been covered much in the mainstream media – though I did find this piece on the Herald Scotland website about it. The fact that the public image of Pryce seems to be of a bitter, vengeful, and lying bitch, the fact that the jury in her first trial were so confused by her defense they couldn’t agree on a verdict, and the deafening silence about the domestic abuse aspect of the case are further indications of the way domestic abuse is trivialised and ignored in our society.

There is also, of course, the deluge of recent stories about various kinds of abuse (overwhelmingly abuse of women and children) going on over a long period of time in various institutions and being covered up, denied, or ignored by those responsible for preventing such abuse. These cases may not be domestic abuse, but they are abuse nonetheless and it all feeds into the same culture of abuse – abusers are not challenged, are not condemned, they are instead allowed to carry on as everyone would rather look the other way than expose and challenge abuse. It becomes impossible or incredibly difficult for those affected by abuse to make complaints, and many stay quiet because the possible consequences of speaking out seem worse than those of keeping quiet. Again, this has been covered well by Helen Lewis and also by Suzanne Moore.

While I was drafting this post, I became aware of some horrible t-shirts encouraging rape and domestic violence on sale on Amazon.co.uk and other websites. Laura has written an excellent piece about it here. This is just one more example of a culture which tells men to treat women however they like, and women to shut up and take it.

The way my abusive ex treated me was really just an intensified version of the way that society treats women in general. I was sexually assaulted by a man in a bar during our relationship, and my ex told me I was probably at least in part to blame for it. This is also what the media, the police, respected celebrities,  and even self-identifying feminists tell me. He slut-shamed me for my previous sexual relationships and encounters, returning to discuss them again and again, and I see the same hurtful attitudes and words he used to grind me down all over the place. He berated me for photos of me with male friends which appeared on facebook (and once even for a photo of me with my brother) – assuming that I couldn’t possibly just have a platonic friendship with a man, as backed-up by popular culture and the media paparazzi circus which swarms like vultures waiting to snap pictures of famous women in the company of men so that the gossip rags can hypothesize about the nature of their relationship. He tried to control my weight and appearance, because we all know that the number on your scales and the way you look are the only measures of your worth as a woman. He used many of the same tactics as the fashion and beauty industries, mainstream media, the music industry, popular chick lit and chick flicks, and countless arsehole men on the internet to make me feel bad about myself. He made me feel obliged to engage in certain sexual behaviour with him, when he wanted, on his terms in exactly the same way as women’s magazines, men’s magazines, mainstream films, pornos, and popular literature define women’s sexuality for them and convince them that their primary goal in any sexual encounter should be to “please their man“. In short, my abusive ex-boyfriend sought to control me and belittle me in the way our patriarchal society has sought to control and belittle women for thousands of years. Yes, he is a detestable, pathetic cockwomble arsehole shit stain fuckwad for what he did to me, but he was also an unhappy young man incapable of forming healthy, happy relationships and caught up in the system which encouraged his behaviour and which will never state openly and unreservedly that the way he treated me and the way that countless other toe rags treat countless other women is wrong. A man I spoke to about my abuser recently suggested that he was “just trying to be protective and went a bit far”. Others have implied or told me outright that it was my fault it happened in the first place, or blamed me for not getting out sooner. Others have asked me what I did to provoke his behaviour. This has to stop. I was abused. It was horrible. It took me a long time to recognise that what happened to me was abuse, because it didn’t fit the dominant cultural narrative of domestic abuse, because he never hit me, because sometimes he was lovely to me, because it is fucking hard to face up to the fact that someone you love, who claims to love you, is abusing you. I finally freed myself and walked away, only to find there was nowhere I could go to truly escape because I see echoes of the abuse I endured everywhere I turned. Because my lived experience is denied and rejected by those who refuse to challenge their narrative of what domestic abuse means. Because popular culture glamourises and romanticises the most horrible experiences of my life.

Our society and our culture actively encourage and excuse violence in general and violence against women in particular – including intimate partner abuse and domestic violence. I for one am sick of seeing the sort of hell I and many others have been through romanticised, excused, encouraged, ignored, and accepted as inevitable. We need to challenge the horrific culture of abuse which we have allowed to infest our society, our public spaces, and our private thoughts.