See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Establish love and trust

  The first stage of domestic abuse is the development of love, trust and intimacy. It is love that first binds the victim to her abuser, and love that makes her forgive and make excuses for him.

  Trust is an essential component of coercive control. In the North Korean camps, the ‘most insidious’ and effective technique the communists used was false friendship. ‘When an American soldier was captured by the Chinese, he was given a vigorous handshake and a pat on the back.’ The enemy ‘introduced himself as a friend of the “workers” of America … This display of friendship caught most Americans totally off-guard.’ The captors in North Korea were only being friendly for show, knowing full well the psychological horrors that awaited the soldiers in the prison camps. But domestic perpetrators – aside from those who set out to abuse and exploit – don’t usually seduce a woman with the explicit aim of controlling her. When an abusive man says he loves his new partner, he probably means it. But it’s not the kind of love non-abusive people feel – it is defined and distorted by his deeply held sense of entitlement. As long-time men’s counsellor Lundy Bancroft explains, ‘When an abusive man feels the powerful stirring inside that other people call love, he is probably largely feeling the desire to have you devote your life to keeping him happy with no outside interference, and to impress others by having you be his partner … The confusion of love with abuse is what allows abusers who kill their partners to make the absurd claim that they were driven by the depths of their loving feelings.’11

  Either way, whether the love is real or fabricated, the victim is lulled into a sense of security. Once their guard is down and trust is established, the abusive process can begin.

  Isolate

  The first technique in Biderman’s Chart of Coercion is to isolate. As long as the victim maintains meaningful social and emotional connections, the abuser’s influence is diluted. To become the most powerful person in her life, he must eliminate her external sources of support and silence voices that would question his behaviour.

  Take the story of ‘Jasmine’ and ‘Nelson’. Jasmine was fresh out of school when she met Nelson, who became her first boyfriend. She had been educated by Catholics and spent most of her teenage years hanging out with her mother and sister. She was, by her own admission, incredibly naïve, and at seventeen, believed the only men she needed to be wary of were strangers. Early in their relationship, Nelson told her she shouldn’t wear white pants because her undies showed through and made her look like a tart. She was grateful for his advice – she certainly didn’t want to look like a tart. When he said that wearing a dress would make her an easy target for bad people who wanted to touch her, she thought that was a bit over the top, but agreed not to wear those either. He was older and he’d travelled overseas. He knew how the world worked.

  In a matter of months, Nelson’s ‘helpful’ advice had calcified into hard and fast rules about what Jasmine was allowed to do and who she could see. She shouldn’t spend so much time with her sister, he said, and her male friends were a problem – he was worried she would be tempted to have sex with them. At first, Jasmine was flattered. He really wants me all to himself, she thought. She was right. Soon enough, he was threatening to harm her male acquaintances, and forcing her to ring male colleagues to tell them she hated them. This was just the beginning. Unbeknown to Jasmine, Nelson was systematically isolating her.

  Unlike prisoners of war, victims of domestic abuse are isolated gradually, in ways that can seem relatively harmless. A perpetrator may isolate his partner geographically, moving her far away from friends and family, to somewhere he can monitor and restrict her movements. Or he may isolate her in more subtle ways, by driving supportive friends and family away: he might make it difficult for her to see them, convince her they’re no good for her, or behave so badly around them that they simply stop visiting. Weary and distressed by her reluctance to leave what they see as a toxic relationship, they may gradually stop trying to contact her. In this way, they do the perpetrator’s job for him.

  Alternatively, if the victim has a troubled relationship with her parents, the perpetrator may seek to collude with them – something that can isolate the victim to an even greater degree, as her family sides with and supports him. One survivor, Terri, says, ‘When he tried to re-establish regular contact with my family I convinced myself that he was a nice guy who was trying to repair and strengthen my relationship with my family. I now believe that he recognised a kindred spirit in my mother. She essentially became his partner in crime.’

  Sometimes the victim remains in public, and to the rest of the world her relationship looks perfect. Here, she isolates herself by refusing – out of shame, fear or the desire to protect her partner – to tell anyone about the abuse. She doesn’t need to be isolated entirely for coercive control to be effective. All the abuser needs is for her supportive connections to be damaged or removed.

  If an abuser decides to isolate his victim against her will, the campaign can become extreme: hiding car keys, intercepting messages and phone calls, threatening or assaulting friends and family. He may explain his possessive behaviour as a sign of his passionate love, or accuse her of cheating. Severing connections with others is the only way she can prove she loves him, and allay his jealousy.

  Monopolise perception

  After the victim is isolated from friends and family, the perpetrator is able to monopolise her perception. In the North Korean POW camps, this was achieved by physical isolation and other sensory tricks: keeping the prisoner in complete darkness or bright light, restricting movement and so on. The point of this was to fix the prisoner’s attention on his immediate predicament, foster introspection and frustrate all actions not consistent with compliance. Domestic perpetrators are rarely so explicit. Instead, like a magician working sleight of hand, the perpetrator redirects his partner’s attention away from his abuse to her faults: if she wasn’t so this, he wouldn’t be so that. This can make a lot of sense to her, especially if, like many perpetrators, he seems to love and care for friends and family. If she’s the only one he’s attacking, it must be she who is provoking him.

  While she’s trying to figure out what she’s doing wrong, he has the perfect cover. The walls creep up. He’s better able to tell her whom she should see and how she should behave; after all, he’s only trying to help her to overcome her faults and become a better person.

  If she resists, the abuser changes tack. Maybe he tries to persuade her that she shouldn’t see certain people and do certain things because he needs her devoted attention. Maybe he needs her to help him be a better man. He is wounded and lost, and she is the only woman who can help him. She’s actually the strong one. But to help him, she will need to address her faults too – which seem to multiply by the day.

  Over time, her guilt begins to morph into shame. When shame takes hold, she doesn’t just feel bad about certain things she’s done – she starts to feel that she is bad. This cuts her off from her instinct – which she can no longer trust – and makes the perpetrator’s opinion even more important. From there, the shame becomes a spiral. Every time the perpetrator gets her to act against her instincts – by cutting off beloved family or friends, for example – the feelings of shame multiply. The more ashamed she feels, the more dependent she becomes on her perpetrator, and the less likely she is to seek help. After all, who would want to help a person like her?

  Gradually the abuser draws his victim further away from the real world and into his version of reality. As she becomes more isolated, alternative viewpoints from friends and family that may alert her to the danger she’s in slowly disappear – indeed, she may drive them away herself, lashing out at anyone who tries to question her relationship.

  As the abuse escalates, she starts searching for clues to explain his behaviour. It can’t all be her fault – so why is he being like this? This leads her to the exact same questions we ask when we try to understand why men abuse their partners: Is he ment
ally ill? Is it his drinking? Is it drugs? Is he just stressed? There must be some reason for it.

  The clues she finds turn into excuses. He’s jealous because that bitch of an ex-girlfriend betrayed him. He doesn’t like her going out because he’s overprotective. He’s got a temper, but everyone’s got their demons – he just needs a good woman to help him overcome them. She makes these excuses because the idea that the man she loves would choose to inflict such cruelty on her is almost impossible for her to comprehend – just as it is for us. So she searches for ways to fix him, because that’s what a woman is supposed to do for a man. Care for him. Show him how to be soft. Show him how to love. The longer she takes responsibility for his abuse, and the longer she tries to fix him, the further she becomes trapped.

  ‘Right from the get-go, you don’t know it for what it is,’ explains Frances, who was a successful performer in Melbourne before her seventeen-year relationship with an abusive partner. ‘It seems like aberrant behaviour, and then there is some more aberrant behaviour. But it doesn’t form a pattern until it has been there for a long time … you wonder if you’re going mad a lot … [It’s like] you are Alice in Wonderland [and] you don’t know what’s really real.’12

  The abuser’s most skilful trick is to make his abuse invisible.

  Induce debility and exhaustion

  The captors in the North Korean POW camps specialised in inducing debility and exhaustion. ‘The Communists place great reliance on the poor understanding of the victim of what is happening to him,’ explained Biderman. ‘Deceiving, tricking and confusing the victim are important.’13 The bewildered prisoner had to devote enormous mental energy to distinguishing fact from fiction. The further he fell down the rabbit hole, the more exhausted he became. Eventually, it was easier just to let the captor define his reality.

  This process is replicated by domestic perpetrators, only we have a different term for it: gaslighting. Gaslighting is when an abuser knowingly denies, fabricates and manipulates situations to make his partner doubt her own memory and perception. As she becomes more confused and anxious, she starts to believe that his interpretation of events may be more reliable than her own. The term comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman as a woman driven by her abusive partner to believe she is insane. He does this by making small changes to her environment, like dimming the gas lights; when she notices, he denies it is happening, and insists she is mistaken and, eventually, crazy. With her sanity in doubt, he convinces her that it’s not safe to go out or have visitors, because she is imagining things that aren’t real.

  Survivor Terri describes an incident of gaslighting that occurred when she and her abuser first started dating:

  We had been walking. He had his hand in the small of my back, and I ended up on the ground. I was sure he had pushed me over and I accused him of it, but he denied it, and was so nice. And even though I was really, really sure I had been pushed, I couldn’t reconcile that knowledge with this charming, supportive man. Though confused, I chose to believe him. I remember asking myself why he would have pushed me over. Why would anyone do that? And because I couldn’t work out why someone would do that, I convinced myself that what I knew to be true – that I was pushed – was wrong. The grooming started very early.

  Gaslighting is remarkably common in situations of domestic abuse. Kay Schubach, then an art dealer working in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs, was with an extremely dangerous – and charming – serial abuser for two months, who gaslit her relentlessly. ‘My keys were there one second and then they weren’t. Fifty dollars was in my wallet and then it wasn’t. “You must have lost it,” he said. “Are you losing your mind? You just can’t think straight. What’s wrong with you?” He was always putting me on the back foot. In the end I thought I was going mad.’ Kay’s abuser, Simon Lowe (who, in 2009, was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for the rape and assault of another woman), told her that, given how anxious and confused she was, she should go to his doctor and have something prescribed. Later, when it was clear she was planning to leave him, Simon said that he had kept the prescription for antidepressants and would use it to undermine Kay’s credibility if she ever tried to take him to court.

  Other techniques can range from prolonged interrogations over suspected betrayals through to sleep deprivation, or they can be much more subtle. ‘Everything he did was geared towards making things as difficult as possible for me,’ says Terri. ‘My daughters have Asperger’s, and when my second daughter was little she had issues with routine and order; she needed dinner, bath, bed in that order. So right after dinner he would shower until the hot water tank was empty. I would ask if he could wait until I ran a little water in the bath, but that would have ruined his game. I was too exhausted to see it for what it was.’ Mind games are common: an abuser may, for example, send his partner a loving text message, then chastise her for replying with the exact same sentiments. Alternatively, he may go completely silent for days at a time (even months or years), leaving her feeling intimidated and wondering what on earth she’s done to deserve such treatment. His unpredictable responses lead her to ‘walk on eggshells’, endlessly hypervigilant, alert to the need to adapt her behaviour to prevent further abuse. Needless to say, the victim is left exhausted by constantly having to monitor her abuser’s emotional state.

  Each abusive strand is now being woven so tightly and imperceptibly that it can feel impossible to describe what’s happening to outsiders – be they friends or police. Unless the abuser is brutish and clumsy and leaves evidence on her skin, she has no way to prove his violence. Without proof, it’s her word against his – and her story is so crazy, it sounds implausible.

  Enforce trivial demands

  To develop the habit of compliance, the abuser starts to enforce trivial demands. Demands may adhere to a theme – like forbidding sexy clothing or speaking to other men – or be arbitrary and spontaneous, and enforced without warning. The victim’s actions and behaviours are measured against these rules, which are ever-changing and often contradictory; to avoid punishment, she must know them by heart. This puts the victim in a hyper-alert state, her attention trained on how to anticipate and comply with the demands her abuser is likely to make. To do this, she must align her perception with his, so she can see through his eyes, and predict his next demand before he makes it. Only her compliance can prevent him from hurting her or her friends, family or pets. The incredible mental effort this requires draws her further away from her own needs and wants, and deeper into his web of abuse.

  Jasmine’s life was governed by Nelson so completely that she could barely go a few minutes without reporting her whereabouts. Even when she was at home, she had to take photos to prove to Nelson which room she was in. If she bought the wrong shampoo, looked at him the wrong way or used the wrong tone of voice, she would be criticised and denigrated. Repeatedly, Nelson would tell her, ‘You are a slut and will be treated accordingly.’

  Sociologist Evan Stark describes how such rule-setting can approach the level of fetish. ‘Rules given to women have extended to how the carpet was to be vacuumed (“till you can see the lines”) and the height of the bedspread off the floor, to the heat of the water in the bath drawn each night for a husband. Since the only purpose of the rules is to exact obedience, they are continually being revised.’14

  In an environment where the rules are constantly in flux, a victim comes to feel as though she’s living in a parallel universe. Her energy is directed towards avoiding punishment, and adapting her behaviour to suit his expectations. She may be so focused on compliance – and so exhausted by it – that it may not even occur to her that she is being abused. As Terri explains: ‘Between dealing with my two daughters and trying to avoid retaliation for all matter of perceived and manufactured things, I was too tired to realise that I was walking on eggshells. Every moment was a moment to get through.’

  Demonstrate omnipotence

  In the North Korean camps, the captors would demons
trate omnipotence by exhibiting complete control over the prisoner’s fate. In domestic abuse, omnipotence is demonstrated in a few ways, and it makes the victim feel that no matter what she does, escape is impossible.

  In many controlling relationships, the victim is subjected to relentless surveillance. As her sense of self deteriorates, her abuser occupies and defines more of her reality. If she has places she feels safe – work, church, even the supermarket – he colonises them, calling and texting her constantly, for example, and punishing her if she doesn’t answer. ‘If abusive relationships were filmed in slow motion,’ explains Stark, ‘they would resemble a grotesque dance whereby victims create moments of autonomy and perpetrators “search and destroy” them.’ Over time, she may start to believe her partner is somehow omnipotent, and that no external authority – not the police, not the courts – can keep her safe. As in the POW camps in North Korea, the abuser creates this impression for a distinct purpose: to convince his victim that resistance is futile.

  Some abusers do an impressive job of being all-knowing. They know which websites she’s visiting, who she’s calling, the exact route she takes to work each day. Assuming godlike powers these days is easy – they can be purchased online. One popular phone app costs less than $300 per year and, once installed, doesn’t show up on the home screen, so the user can’t see it. With this single app, an abuser gains remote access to that phone’s text messages, call log, photos, emails, contacts and browsing history. They can even block numbers for inbound and outbound calls, and delete everything on the phone remotely. The victim’s phone becomes a tracking device thanks to its in-built GPS – a stalker can sit at the computer and watch her move from one place to another on a street map.

  Aside from physical surveillance, an abuser may choose to demonstrate his omnipotence by showing that he can control whether she lives or dies. Nothing proves this kind of total power like strangulation. From the moment he has his hands around her throat, the abuser controls his victim entirely. She can’t talk back and she can’t scream. He can prolong the assault by loosening his grip and allowing her to catch her breath before tightening it again, or he can choke her until she blacks out altogether. As he does this, he is free to chastise her for some perceived wrongdoing, or simply show her how easy it would be to kill her. Strangulation is an extreme form of violence that seldom leaves a mark. There’s no black eye, no bloody nose. In fact, by the time police arrive, it’s more likely the abuser will look like he’s the one who’s been violently assaulted, because victims will commonly bite and scratch their abuser as they fight for air.