by Jess Hill
Research shows that more than 65 per cent of domestic abuse victims will experience near-fatal choking.15 As one survivor from Queensland recalls:
The first time he was violent it came out of the blue. It was an intense, terrifying experience. He flew into a rage over something I’ve long since forgotten. What I do remember is his hands closing around my throat. I remember gasping, I remember the fear, and I remember the way he watched my eyes as I slipped towards unconsciousness. He would release the pressure just as I felt myself sinking into blackness, allowing me just enough oxygen so that he could begin the process again. I don’t know how long he did this for, like a cat playing with a mouse, making sure just enough life remained to sustain the game for longer. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. I just remember feeling petrified and trapped. I wanted him to leave then, I asked him to. He refused. What could I do?16
Traditionally, strangulation has been classified as a minor assault,§ but it is far more cruel – and dangerous – than a punch or a kick: researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have likened it to waterboarding. The physical harm can be extremely serious – a victim can die from internal injuries days or even weeks later. Strangulation is a big red flag for future homicide: abusers who strangle are almost eight times more likely to end up killing their partner.17
Alternate punishments with rewards
The key to coercive control is to alternate punishments with rewards. In the North Korean camps, the captors were master shape-shifters. ‘At various times and places, [the captor] may seek to achieve its purposes by representing itself as a kindly, solicitous, smiling creature – at others, it may wantonly display its brutality in all its nakedness … Many have been impressed by its abilities as a quick-change artist.’18 Domestic abuse was certainly not in Biderman’s mind when he wrote those words, but he could not have better described the mercurial temperament of the domestic abuser. Aside from extreme situations, in which the abuse is unrelenting, the perpetrator will at times profess their love, offer gifts, show kindness and express remorse. This is what’s known as the Cycle of Violence, where an explosion is followed by a period of remorse, then promises and pursuit, a false honeymoon stage, then a build-up in tension, a standover phase, and another explosion. The kindness expressed during the false honeymoon may feel genuine to the abuser, but this reward phase – like every other part of the cycle – is still all about maintaining control.
Periods of kindness, no matter how short, bond the victim to her abuser. Reminded even momentarily of the man she fell in love with, she is duped into letting her guard down, and into sharing things – secrets, desires, perhaps even erotic photographs – that the abuser may later use against her. The victim is persuaded that if she changes her behaviour and creates the perfect environment, his abuse will cease. She resumes her search for what it is that sets him off, and doubles down on trying to comply with his demands – to prolong the period of grace and win the approval of her harshest critic.
Even a small act of mercy delivered directly after an attack can elicit a deep sense of gratitude. Kay Schubach survived a particularly terrifying assault, during which her abuser drove wildly along a main road and punched her twice in the head. As she begged him to take her to the hospital, he screeched the car to a halt outside their apartment and ordered her to ‘stop making a spectacle’. Upstairs, he continued to berate her until, all of a sudden, he changed. ‘He would just calm down,’ says Kay, ‘and you could see it was safe again. Then he’s like, “Oh, you gotta calm down, I’ll make you a peppermint tea, everything is alright.” You’re a nervous wreck by this stage, so that’s when you break down and start crying, and then he comforts you, and puts you into bed and makes you a cup of tea, and says he’s sorry, and he doesn’t know what happened, and then changes the subject. You actually feel grateful that he is a warm, nice person again and he’s going to deliver you from evil.’
As Herman explains, this ‘kind’ treatment does the job of undermining psychic resistance far better than simply feeding the victim an unchanging diet of degradation and fear. ‘The goal of the perpetrator is to instill in his victim not only the fear of death, but also gratitude for being allowed to live … After several cycles of reprieve from certain death, the victim may come to view the perpetrator, paradoxically, as her savior.’19
In the light of his mercy, the victim shifts from fear to relief – or even admiration. ‘You get so attuned to what they’re doing, for your own safety and survival,’ explains Schubach. ‘When they’re good, you’re incredibly grateful, you’re incredibly in love with them, for bestowing their kindness upon you.’
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This, in the end, is what the controlling abuser is looking for: a willing and devoted submissive who loves him even more for setting boundaries so clearly, and expects to be punished if she disobeys. For centuries, this was just a basic expectation held by men in patriarchal societies. In 1869, the English philosopher and feminist John Stuart Mill described the despotic mindset. ‘Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments,’ he wrote in The Subjection of Women. ‘All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.’ Orwell gave this same animating desire to Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us … We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.’ In the North Korean camps, communist interrogators also looked for this form of total submission, telling prisoners: ‘You do not have the correct attitude. I am trying to help you adopt the correct attitude. You must change your attitude.’20 As Herman observes, ‘the desire for total control over another person is the common denominator of all forms of tyranny. Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims. Slaveholders demand gratitude of their slaves … Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships.’ It’s this fantasy of ‘total control’ that forms the power dynamic at the core of most pornography. ‘The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.’21
But subjugation is not a condition that is natural to women, and it runs entirely counter to the phenomenal liberation we have fought so hard for. That’s why abusers – especially coercive controllers – don’t just beat their victims anymore. If they want to replicate the old conditions of submission and devotion, they need to create an environment of coercive control.
It’s worth pausing here to remember that many perpetrators are not necessarily aware that they are orchestrating campaigns of control and degradation. Cold and calculating coercive controllers have an acute sense of dominance and a correspondingly acute propensity for violence, physical and psychological; with them, the system of control is conscious and ever-present. But coercive controllers who are consumed by morbid jealousy and paranoia are more likely to recreate these techniques spontaneously and insecure reactors are even less intent on acting strategically: they move in and out of the control regime, as if switching channels. Once they have regained control, they can let the system go and feel genuinely restored to the relationship. Whether perpetrators abuse strategically or on impulse, however, they usually have one thing in common: a supercharged sense of entitlement.
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There are two further techniques on Biderman’s Chart of Coercion: threats and degradation.
Threats
As the abuse becomes more degrading and intrusive, the abuser uses threats to cultivate anxiet
y and despair and to prevent his victim from leaving or seeking help.
In the North Korean camps, captors would threaten their prisoners with death, endless isolation and interrogation, and harm to their families. In domestic abuse, the threats are just as terrifying. They are what render a woman captive and communicate to her that even if she wants to leave, she may never be safe.
In the case of Jasmine and Nelson, Nelson’s coercive control reached toxic levels of intensity. Soon after Jasmine gave birth to their baby daughter, he forced her to spend most nights sleeping in the car with the baby, allowing her to come inside only for housework or sex. All through the night, Nelson would call her to make sure that she hadn’t gone to her mother’s house, which was forbidden. If Jasmine disobeyed, the consequences were clear: not only would she and her baby be killed, several of her family members would die, and her cats would be killed too. By this point Jasmine had been coercively controlled for eight years, since she was seventeen.
Abusers may make grand threats, but many are also finely attuned to the limits of their power and averse to being caught. Harming friends or family would risk police involvement; it’s less risky to hurt or kill the family pet. In an Australian study of 102 women with a history of family violence, more than half said their animals had also been abused.22 These included a pet cockatiel beheaded for ‘singing too much’, a cat hung by a leash, another cat put in a microwave, and other pets that were shot, stabbed, kicked and thrown. Survivor Kim Gentle, who now works as a horse trainer with Indigenous youth in Port Hedland, returned home one day to hear that her abuser – the same man who had abused Kay Schubach – had thrown the dog he gave her off a cliff. Why? Because she loved the dog more than she loved him.
Abusers aren’t always so coarse. Some are more covert – tampering with the brakes on their victim’s car, for example, or cutting the telephone lines. Others will exploit their victims’ loyalty and empathy by threatening to harm or kill themselves. No matter the abuser’s method, the victim is left feeling that there is no safe place in or out of the relationship. As Schubach explains, ‘It’s like being in a house with an assassin. You know there is someone there who’s out to get you. You don’t know how, when or where, but you’re sure it’s going to happen.’
Degradation
In the North Korean camps, degradation of the prisoners was achieved through preventing personal hygiene, keeping them in filthy surroundings, administering demeaning punishments, insults and taunts, and denying any privacy. The point of this was to reduce the prisoner to ‘animal level’ and ‘make the cost of resistance more damaging to self-esteem than capitulation’.23
In domestic abuse, degradation is obscenely targeted: unlike other captors, a domestic abuser has intimate knowledge of his victim’s fears, secrets and insecurities, and uses this to hone his taunts and insults.
The psychological impact of degrading comments can be extreme. Abusers commonly tell their partners they’re worthless, stupid and unlovable and, after a while, the woman may start to believe it. ‘If I had a quid for every woman who said to me over the years, “Give me a black eye any day. The bruise is gone in a fortnight. It’s the words that hurt, the words that stay,”’ says Karen Willis, the head of Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia. ‘In fact, all of our counselling and trauma work – 99 per cent of it – is about reversing the impacts of those words.’
Returning to Nelson and Jasmine: after a separation of several months, Nelson lured Jasmine back, claiming he was miserable without her. Thinking they could ‘turn a corner’, she accepted. When, soon after, Jasmine revealed a brief sexual relationship she’d had during their time apart, Nelson seized this opportunity. He stopped addressing her by her name, referring to her instead as ‘Slut’. After their daughter was born, Nelson was determined to make ‘slut’ the child’s first word.
Degradation is not always so overt. Willis describes a typical scenario: ‘[You’re] at a party with some friends, laughing and joking and having a good time. There will be a whisper in the ear: “They’re not laughing with you. They’re laughing at you because you’re an idiot.”’
Sometimes degradation goes so far, it reaches a level of dehumanisation. Evan Stark explains that women in his practice ‘have been forced to eat off the floor, wear a leash, bark when they wanted supper, or beg for favours on their knees’.24 In many of these sickening scenarios, both the perpetrator and their victim were known to friends and families as friendly, regular people. As the American philosopher David Livingstone Smith stresses, ‘You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being.’25
One of the most powerful ways a perpetrator can degrade his victim is through sex. Commonly, survivors report being coerced into sexual acts they find humiliating, degrading or painful. Others are simply raped. ‘Eleanor’, a survivor from Melbourne with three children, was raped throughout her marriage. The first time, she remembers, her husband came into the bedroom and announced they were going to have sex. When Eleanor told him she didn’t want to, he forced himself on top of her, ripped off her underwear and shoved his hand over her mouth to stop her screaming. ‘I could hardly breathe,’ Eleanor says. ‘It was a matter of minutes before he ejaculated inside me and finished. I was sobbing, and I said to him, “How could you do this to me?” He got off me, and I remember him looking at me like he was disgusted with me.’ Afterwards, Eleanor confronted her husband and asked if he was going to apologise. ‘He said, “Why? It was the best sex I’ve had in six years. The more you struggled the more it turned me on, and what you got was fucking great.” I remember vomiting in my mouth,’ says Eleanor.
Some abusers aren’t satisfied until they have degraded their victim to the point of utter despair. In these extreme cases, the work of degradation is complete when, as Herman explains, the victim is ‘forced to violate her own moral principles and to betray her basic human attachments. Psychologically, this is the most destructive of all coercive techniques, for the victim who has succumbed loathes herself. It is at this point, when the victim under duress participates in the sacrifice of others, that she is truly “broken”.’
Such a sacrifice may involve her children. She may feel forced to neglect them, as Terri did: ‘If I was caught spending time with my eldest, he would take it out on her. I felt forced to ignore her to protect her.’ Or she may start to dole out severe punishments, in the hope that this may protect her child from a worse fate at the hands of their father.
In this rare and candid account, an abuser explains how children can be used to degrade a mother:
I raped her daughters – my stepdaughters – right in front of her. I made her watch – every time I saw her look away, I threatened to shoot her and the girls. I had my .38 loaded and in my hand – that’s how I made them all do what I said. I didn’t do it for the sex. I didn’t desire her daughters, really. I just wanted to make her feel terrible that she had watched me do that to the girls without her trying to protect them. I wanted her miserable. I wanted her to doubt herself as a mother, to think she was a bad mother. So I gave her the biggest failure a mother could have.26
Mothers who are being abused will frequently risk their lives to defend their children. But others may be so thoroughly dominated that they allow or enable the abuse of their children, and even punish them for trying to defend themselves. ‘At this point,’ says Herman, ‘the demoralisation of the battered woman is complete.’27
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In suburban houses, on remote farms and in inner-city apartments, women of all backgrounds encounter the abusive man. It may be weeks or months – even years – before his abuse emerges. When it does, each woman will have her own reasons for staying. The strong, independent woman believes she is the only one who can help him defeat his demons. The woman who grew up with violence may think she doesn’t deserve any better. The woman recovering from an abusive relationship seeks the protection of another man. A religious woman believes marriage is sac
red. A woman from overseas is threatened with deportation if she leaves. A new mother is determined not to fail like her parents did. A young woman caught in the rush of her first love is eager to please and willing to change. By the time a woman realises the threat she’s facing, she may have no choice but to stay, because leaving either feels impossible, or has become too dangerous.
*In a scenario familiar to domestic violence victims, the American prisoners of war were belittled and shamed for their behaviour in the camps. The media slandered them relentlessly, saying they had ‘giveup-itis’ or a ‘contagious tendency to quit and die under fire’. According to some harebrained commentators, the soldiers had been rendered weak by the ‘soft living’ of young people after World War II, and emasculated by their overbearing mothers.
#Coercive control wasn’t just a communist fantasy. In 2002, US military trainers used Biderman’s ‘Chart of Coercion’ to train interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on the ‘coercive management techniques’ for which the prison became notorious: sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, and ‘exposure’. Remarkably, what was seemingly lost on the American military was that these techniques had come to fame for eliciting false confessions. Coercive techniques were used on a small group of prisoners at Guantanamo until 2005, when Congress banned them. (Scott Shane, ‘U.S. interrogators were taught Chinese coercion techniques’, The New York Times, 2 July 2008.)