by Jess Hill
Maybe this does make sense to you. Maybe you scoff at those who ask why women don’t just leave, and remind them: ‘Don’t you know that leaving is the most dangerous time for a woman?’ But if we’re being honest, even the most empathic among us (myself included) can sometimes find the behaviour of victims bewildering (and deeply frustrating, if they are dear to us). Even women who’ve lived underground can find themselves making snap judgements about other victims. Survivor Kay Schubach was at her abuser’s trial when one of his victims was testifying. ‘I was sitting there and I was thinking, this stupid girl, how did she let this happen? You know, like, oh God and then she got pregnant to him twice, and she went back to the house and kept going back, and this went on for months … How could she have been so stupid? And then this penny drops. It was exactly my story, word for word.’ Kay had fallen pregnant to the same man, and she too had forgiven him after savage assaults. ‘[He told her] she was ugly, old, stupid, past her use-by date, that he was building a case against her, trying to discredit her mental health … [trying to line up] witnesses to testify to any scratches or marks on him … It was exactly the same.’
Despite having made the same choices, Kay’s impulse was to revert to the position we’ve all been culturally trained to take. For decades, victims of domestic abuse have been blamed by the public, maligned by the justice system and pathologised by psychiatrists. Now, when most of us look at a violent relationship, we see just one logical binary: if your partner abuses you, you should leave. If you don’t leave, there’s obviously something wrong with you. That’s just ‘common sense’, right?
But what is common sense? It’s not some set of inviolable rules handed to us on stone tablets. Common sense is constructed for us, brick by brick, by academics, filmmakers, storytellers, experts – by culture. Every cliché we have about victims – from women’s masochism to learned helplessness – was invented by somebody first, before it was woven into the fabric of what is considered ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’. If we trace these ‘common sense’ positions back to their origins, we can see exactly how the dangerous logic of victim-blaming took hold – and how illogical it actually is.
But before we do that, let’s start with a story that will test even the most compassionate among us.
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Jasmine, whose story began in Chapter 1, met her partner Nelson when she was seventeen, and stayed with him for over a decade. Nelson’s coercive control escalated to shocking levels of emotional sadism: aside from forcing Jasmine to sleep in the car with their newborn, he regularly travelled interstate to have affairs, and on his return would force Jasmine to watch videos of him having sex. One day, after Nelson left on another trip, Jasmine sent a message to his best friend, ‘David’, asking him to come over. Predictably, David forwarded the message to Nelson. When Jasmine picked Nelson up from the airport a few days later, he launched into a terrifying assault.
Nelson would later plead guilty to punching Jasmine repeatedly in the head on the drive home, then duct-taping her to an office chair in their bedroom, where he continued to beat her savagely in front of their eighteen-month-old daughter, Ruby, who Nelson sat on the bed so she could watch. As Jasmine cried and begged for mercy, Nelson picked up Ruby, held a samurai sword to her chest, and told Jasmine that her punishment for being a slut was to watch her daughter die. Unable to move and in a state of abject terror, Jasmine fainted. When she regained consciousness, Nelson forced her to eat her SIM card and then smashed her phone on the floor. Then, removing the tape from her wrists, he told Jasmine to get into his room and take off her pants. There on the bed, he anally raped her. When he finished, he said: “You want to act like a dirty slut, you will be treated like one too.” Then he took her to Ruby’s room and told her to look after her daughter, threw in a loaf of bread, locked the door and said they better be there when he got back. Using a pair of scissors to jimmy open the door, Jasmine was able to escape, and drove to where her parents were staying with friends. There, a family friend photographed her extensive injuries.
Jasmine did report the attack to police, but refused to take it any further. Within two months, she had moved back in with Nelson. They even exchanged sexually explicit texts, and Jasmine sent erotic videos of herself telling him how much she loved him. They remained living together for five months, until January 2008, when Nelson sent Jasmine several threatening texts, trashed their daughter’s room and kicked them both out of the house. A few weeks later, after Jasmine had moved into a new place, Nelson was evicted, and Jasmine let him stay with her temporarily until he could find a new place. But when Jasmine asked him to leave, Nelson refused. Even when she stopped letting him sleep in the house, he would sleep in a ute outside and plead to come inside. Eventually, Jasmine relented.
When Jasmine moved to another place, Nelson moved back in. They didn’t sleep in the same room, but Jasmine continued to do all the housework and domestic chores. By this time, Jasmine really wanted to leave, but the more she said so, the more controlling he became, until he was locking her in the house during the day and taking her car keys to work with him.
In December 2008, almost eighteen months after the assault, Nelson finally agreed to move out. But just days later, when Jasmine was getting a security camera installed, Nelson arrived at the house unannounced, picked up Ruby and walked off, telling Jasmine she would never see her again. Jasmine, distraught and panicked, went straight to the police and begged them to get her daughter back, but they told her that with no family court order in place they couldn’t intervene. When federal police did retrieve Ruby a week later, on the orders of a family court judge, she was still wearing the same clothes she’d been taken in, and her hair was matted to her head. When Jasmine set her down in the lounge room, three-year-old Ruby – usually a ‘chatty, happy girl’ – refused to speak, and instead made ‘little wild animal sounds’ and dragged herself across the lounge-room floor with her legs behind her. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ says Jasmine. That was the end of Jasmine’s relationship with Nelson. She would spend another eight years in Family Court battling for sole custody of her daughter, even after Nelson was jailed for assaulting them both. Jasmine now has sole custody of Ruby.
*
What did Jasmine’s story evoke in you? Sympathy, sadness, frustration, anger, disgust? Can you understand why she went back to Nelson, even after he viciously assaulted her and threatened to kill their baby girl? Why do you think she stayed?
For much of the twentieth century, until the late 1970s, responses to Jasmine’s story would have been pretty uniform: most people would have dismissed her as a masochist. That was the expert consensus: victims of domestic abuse were frigid, controlling masochists who were secretly gratified by their abuse.
We didn’t always think of survivors like this. In the late nineteenth century, victims of domestic abuse weren’t masochistic – they were pitiful creatures living under the yoke of brutal, alcoholic husbands.# But that somewhat sympathetic view lasted only as long as women were willing to shut up and accept their fate. When, in the 1930s, wives started complaining about their violent husbands – and, shock-horror, even applied for divorce – they were no longer objects of pity: they were a threat to the sacred family unit.
Cue a new theory: women stayed with their abusers because they liked it. For the grand theory of women’s masochism, we can telegram our appreciation to Sigmund Freud, who claimed – and was for a long time believed – to have discovered the essential forces driving human behaviour. According to Freud, all women – who were lesser for lacking a penis, and envied men for theirs – were innately masochistic, and unconsciously sought to be punished. This wasn’t just one theory jostling for primacy – for a time, Freud’s was the dominant model. In her 1944 magnum opus, The Psychology of Women, psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch expanded on Freud, listing masochism as one of three essential traits for femininity, together with passivity and narcissism.
In the 1940s and ’50s, when Freudian theories were at their p
eak, social workers came to believe that battered women actually looked for men who would abuse them. This idea found particularly enthusiastic backing from abusive husbands. In the influential 1964 study The Wifebeater’s Wife, three psychiatrists sought to understand the internal lives of victims by interviewing thirty-seven abusers. The responses of these violent men led the authors to conclude that, though their wives might protest their abuse, they secretly wanted it. In fact, their husbands’ violence ‘probably’ helped them deal with how guilty they felt about the ‘intense hostility expressed in [their own] controlling, castrating behaviour’.5
This shameless victim-blaming dominated popular thinking until the second wave of feminism crashed into the 1970s. In her bestseller The Myth of Women’s Masochism, psychologist Paula Caplan delivered a broadside against Freud and his ilk: women were not innately masochistic, she argued – they were simply acculturated to behaviour that appeared masochistic, because the ‘ideal woman’ was one who denied her own needs in the service of others. ‘Once females have been trained [to be nurturant, selfless and endlessly patient], this behavior is then labeled masochistic,’ wrote Caplan.6 As she told The New York Times, women stayed with abusive husbands not because they liked the abuse, but for myriad reasons, including the fear they would be punished for leaving. Among these reasons: they hoped love would prevail. ‘Some of these women are so vulnerable that they are bonded not to the abuse,’ said Caplan, ‘but to the occasional affection these men express.’7 Her ‘revolutionary proposition’ was that women were just as eager to be happy as men.
By the 1980s, when the opinions of abusive men were no longer counted as supporting data, the notion of the ‘masochistic’ victim was thoroughly discredited. When researchers began to ask victims about their own experiences, study after study returned the same result: ‘women rarely provoked assaults and could do little to prevent them’.8
Only fools and charlatans would solemnly invoke the m-word today. But its ghost still lurks. Fifty-one per cent of Australians believe, for example, that most women could leave a violent relationship if they really wanted to.9 Some who contribute to this statistic believe that if a woman hasn’t left, she must want to stay – because maybe she secretly likes the drama, she has a victim complex, she gets off on being abused, and so on. These assumptions are categorically wrong. The reality for women in violent relationships is far more complex, as we’ll see.
Alongside the ghost of women’s masochism thrives another wraith: the helpless victim rendered powerless by her partner’s violence. She is the poster girl for domestic abuse – a typically white, middle-class woman cowering in a corner as her husband looms above, fist clenched. This figure emerged from the work of psychologist Lenore Walker, who with her landmark book The Battered Woman Syndrome, shifted the model victim from masochistic harpie to helpless child virtually overnight. Walker’s book declared that ‘battered women’ had a unique syndrome characterised largely by ‘learned helplessness’.10 Walker drew this from the work of psychologist Martin Seligman, who found that dogs confined to a cage and subjected to electrical shocks at unpredictable intervals would, over time, stop trying to escape and instead become ‘compliant, passive and submissive’.11 Victims of domestic abuse also became defeated by a ‘cycle of abuse’: first a building of tension, then a phase of acute violence, followed by a ‘honeymoon period’ of remorse, affection and promises that it will never happen again, then another build-up phase, an explosion, and on and on it went. With each repetition of the cycle, the woman’s motivation to resist diminished; she became passive, believed herself ‘too stupid to learn how to change things’, and was prone to depression and anxiety. The reason she stayed with her abuser, said Walker, was because she was blind to the opportunities she had to leave.12
Walker’s ‘helpless victim’ rewound public sympathies back to the nineteenth century, when victims were pitied instead of scorned. But in doing so, she created yet another stereotype – and one that still laid blame on the victim for her abuse. It was the victim’s passivity, Walker wrote, that drove the perpetrator to abuse her: ‘The batterer, spurred on by her apparent passive acceptance of his abusive behaviour, does not try to control himself.’13 It is true that in controlling relationships, victims can become so degraded, and have their self-esteem so reduced, that they can lose the ability to do even simple tasks. They may even start to believe what their abuser tells them: that they won’t be able to survive without them. But they are not trapped simply because they can’t see how to escape. As we will see, most victims are constantly strategising and resisting the abuser, in their own way.
Despite clashing with the lived reality of victims, Walker’s theory of learned helplessness dominated for more than twenty years, and is still widely referenced. Explains one critic, the Canadian family therapist Allan Wade: ‘[Walker’s] theory of violence became so popular because it failed to question the status quo in any meaningful way.’14
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Nothing exposes the mythical thinking behind learned helplessness better than Stockholm syndrome: a diagnosis assigned to women who show affection for their captors, and a distrust of authority. It’s a classic throw-away line we use to describe the mental condition of domestic abuse victims, but it’s also a term that’s still taken seriously by some psychologists. ‘A classic example [of Stockholm syndrome] is domestic violence,’ says Oxford psychologist Jennifer Wild, ‘when someone – typically a woman – has a sense of dependency on her partner and stays with him.’15
But Stockholm syndrome – a dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria – is riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie.16 The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on; never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted.
Enmark was twenty-three when, one morning in 1973, Jan Olsson walked into a bank in Norrmalmstorg and took her and three other clerks hostage. Over the next six days, the audacious heist became a blockbuster media event. Swedes had never seen anything like it, and neither had the police.
With no training in hostage negotiation, the police response was ham-fisted from the start. Early in the siege, they misidentified Olsson and, thinking they had found his younger brother, sent a teenage boy into the bank to negotiate, accompanied by Nils Bejerot, only to have Olsson shoot at him. As Olsson became more and more agitated, his accomplice, Clark Olofsson, whose release from jail was one of Olsson’s first demands, reassured the hostages. ‘[Clark] comforted me, he held my hand,’ Enmark recalled in 2016. ‘He said, “I want to see that Jan doesn’t hurt you.” I can’t say that I felt safe, because that’s not the word, but I chose to believe him. He meant very much to me, because I thought that somebody cared about me. But there was no affection in that way. In some way, he gave me hope that, this is going to end okay.’17
There was no such reassurance from the police. Enmark asked to speak to Bejerot, but he refused. In a live radio interview from the bank, she blew up at the authorities. ‘[The police] are playing with … our lives. And then they don’t even want to talk to me, who is the one who will die if anything happens.’ Sensing that their likelihood of survival was getting slimmer by the hour, Enmark took matters into her own hands. She called the Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, and begged him to let her and another hostage leave the bank with their captors. ‘I fully trust Clark and the robber,’ she told Palme. ‘I am not desperate. They haven’t done a thing to us. On the contrary, they have been very nice. But you know, Olof, what I’m scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.’ Palme refused to let her leave, saying they could not give in to the demands of criminals. At the end of the conversation, Enmark says Palme said, ‘Well, Kristin, you can’t get out of the bank. You will have to
content yourself that you will have died at your post.’ Enmark was appalled, telling Palme, ‘I don’t want to be a dead hero.’18
Finally police teargassed the bank vault and paraded the captors up and down the street to cheers and jeers from the crowd. Enmark watched on, furious at this macho display. When she was told to lie on a stretcher, she refused: ‘I walked in here six and a half days ago, I’m walking out.’19
On the radio, Enmark criticised the police, and singled out Bejerot. In response, and without once speaking to her, Bejerot dismissed her comments as the product of a syndrome he made up: ‘Norrmalmstorg syndrome’ (later renamed Stockholm syndrome). The fear Enmark felt towards the police was irrational, Bejerot explained, caused by the emotional or sexual attachment she had with her captors.† Bejerot’s snap diagnosis suited the Swedish media; they were suspicious of Enmark, who ‘did not appear as traumatised as she ought to be.’ ‘It is hard to admit,’ wrote one journalist, ‘but the words that come to mind to describe her condition are: fresh and alert.’ Her clarity was, apparently, proof that she was sick.
Four years later, when Enmark was asked to explain her actions, she was indignant. ‘Yes, I was afraid of the police; what is so strange about that? Is it strange that one is afraid of those who are all around, in parks, on roofs, behind corners, in armoured vests, helmets and weapons, ready to shoot?’
In 2008, a review of the literature on Stockholm syndrome found that most diagnoses were made by the media, not psychologists or psychiatrists; that it was poorly researched, and that the scant academic research on it could not even agree on what the syndrome was, let alone how to diagnose it.20 Allan Wade, who has consulted closely with Enmark, says Stockholm syndrome is ‘a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence’ by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.21