See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

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  In the 1980s and ’90s Stockholm syndrome, battered woman syndrome and learned helplessness became the dominant models for domestic abuse experts and lawyers. Victims were typecast as pure, timid and submissive: the proverbial woman cowering in the corner. This ‘true victim’ stereotype persists to this day in courts across the Western world. She is ‘a middle-aged, working-class white woman, a good mother and a devoted wife who has done everything in her power to appease her abuser and obtain protection from the criminal justice system’.22 When a victim fails to live up to this standard – if she is ‘difficult’, addicted, uses violence to defend herself or her children, or exhibits the chaotic effects of trauma – she may be judged to be as or even more guilty than the man abusing her. Conversely, judicial officers may also discriminate against a woman who presents as strong and independent, because they can’t reconcile competence and strength with their belief that true victims are vulnerable and helpless. Unless a victim’s story matches ‘the standard melodrama of a virtuous female protagonist and a one-dimensional male villain’,23 the legal system often doesn’t know what to do with her.

  But the reality for women living underground is that they are, just like Kristin Enmark was in Stockholm, constantly strategising and seeking ways to be safe. The research on this is conclusive. ‘Survivor theory’ arises from a study of 6000 women who sought refuge at fifty women’s shelters in Texas.24 The study found that these women were precisely the opposite of ‘helpless’: most had been extremely assertive in their efforts to stop the abuse. Other studies that followed25 showed that not only were victims commonly assertive, they also had sophisticated coping strategies and frequently sought help. The obstacles these women had to overcome in order to leave weren’t psychological – they were social. In case after case, it was the state authorities – in particular, police and welfare services – that had failed these women and made it harder for them to leave.

  Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the patriarchal world of psychiatry was portraying victims as mad, bad and pathetic, women living underground were doing what they’d always done: defending themselves, in whatever way they could. In Linda Gordon’s study of social agency case records from 1880 to 1960, the same story appears again and again: a resourceful woman who, with little or no help from the state, is able to resist, and even at times overpower, her abuser.26 Women underground have never been gratified by their abuse, and they’ve never been passive in the face of it.

  We don’t hear much about women’s resistance, but every day women push and fight back, even in the face of terrifying consequences. ‘I argued back,’ says survivor Nicole Lee. ‘You get to a point where you’re so exhausted, you’ve walked on eggshells so much – then he leaves a plate on the table, and you’re just like, “Can you just put that in the fucking sink?” And then you think why did I do that?, as the plate comes hurtling at you. You’re fighting back tooth and nail, get away from me, stop. But the physical power imbalance – there’s no chance of me protecting myself against this man, none whatsoever. I tried.’ Even when women feel that they’ve surrendered their agency, they are still making the minute-to-minute calculations required to survive. As one survivor described it: ‘Before I met my husband, I was never a strategic person. He has taught me strategy. It was about survival.’

  Resistance is a human instinct. In the North Korean prisoner-of-war camps, even when the ‘physical and moral strength’ of the prisoners was at its lowest, the will to resist remained, even if it had to be exercised subtly – like the American officer who made communist propaganda films but indicated that he had ‘his tongue in his cheek’.27 Even acts that looked like capitulation were often carefully calculated. Some American soldiers who defected to communist China after the war did so strategically: they were afraid their coerced confessions and cooperation would see them jailed back in America. Defecting – an act Americans put down to brainwashing – was the only way they thought they could maintain their freedom.

  Similarly, women may resist their abusers in imperceptible ways, and also often stay for strategic reasons. One I’ve heard time and again is that they are afraid of what might happen if their abusive partner fought for custody. Survivor Terri said, ‘I felt that the only way I could protect my children, as best I could, was to stay until they were old enough to be heard by the court. My oldest daughter had been pleading with me to “get rid of him” from quite a young age. I explained to her that the best-case scenario would probably be that they would have to spend every second weekend with him, without anyone to witness or check his behaviour. I don’t think I will ever forget the look on her face when she realised what that meant.’

  As long as we portray women going through domestic abuse as passive and helpless, they will find it even harder to see themselves as victims. As Nicole Lee says, ‘We keep showing victims as this cowering person in the corner. I used to look at that and think, Those poor women didn’t do anything to deserve it. But me? I should have shut my fucking mouth. I shouldn’t have provoked him. We need to show it like it is. We keep painting the monster and the powerless victim, but they’re not monsters – they’re just a man that you work with, the dude next door, someone walking past you in the street. They’re average people. I’m just a woman trying to protect myself, and he’s just a man trying to exert his power and control.’

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  Once we’re cleared of all these discredited theories, it’s actually not so hard to see why some women stay. Even Jasmine’s reasons for returning to Nelson are, though complex, not impossible to understand. The reason she initially didn’t want to press charges after the assault was because she was terrified that Nelson would either hurt her, or punish her by hurting Ruby. After the assault, she was apart from him for two months, and started to establish some semblance of independence. But just as she was reclaiming her life, she started getting incessant calls and texts from Nelson’s friends, who said he was becoming suicidal without her. Jasmine felt sorry for him, and thought maybe he’d finally learned his lesson; that he might now become the man ‘he’d always promised he could be’. Nelson also knew all the right buttons to push: he kept telling her it wouldn’t be right for Ruby to grow up without a father, knowing that Jasmine was pained by the fact that her own father had left when she was little.

  On top of all this, Jasmine was also suffering from complex trauma after a decade of living under extreme coercive control. She had no experience of adult life without Nelson – they had got together as soon as she finished high school. ‘I had no self-esteem – I didn’t know how to live separate from him,’ she says. ‘I have this image in my head – it’s like a cobweb. You’re just dangling on the outside of the cobweb, but your safety is in the cobweb. I was just swinging around on the outside of that cobweb, and I had nothing to hang on to.’

  The ‘cobweb’ Jasmine describes is a metaphor used time and again by women underground. It’s what Catherine Kirkwood calls the ‘web of abuse’. In her book based on interviews of thirty abused women, Kirkwood writes, ‘The insidiousness and power of emotional abuse paralleled the invisibility, strength and purpose of a spider’s web … As in a web, the components were interwoven; no strand could be considered in isolation from the support and reinforcement of the other, and within this web … the struggle for change was complex.’28

  When a woman is subjected to extreme coercive control and sexual abuse, her reality becomes severely distorted. Apart from their daughter, Nelson was virtually the only person Jasmine had regular contact with. His abuse became her world. When Jasmine left Nelson the first time, she regained some of her lost clarity. ‘I started to go, hang on – I’m actually a person! I can make my own decisions, and I have a life! The longer I was apart from him, the more I started to resent him for what he had done to me,’ she says. ‘But I was still in love with him, and I was angry with him. I wanted him to be what he’d promised me all the years … I think I loved the idea of what he said he
represented, if that makes sense. I just wanted him to be the husband, the provider – the man who looked after me. Well, forget that idea,’ she says, laughing. ‘I’m happy looking after myself now.’

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  If the idea of loving someone who abuses you makes your head spin, think for a moment about what intimacy does to us. When we fall in love, we thrill at the potential for ‘oneness’ – the chance to have a true partner in life, someone who knows us better than we know ourselves, who can accept and love us for our flaws and vulnerabilities. To develop this kind of intimacy, we immerse ourselves in their life, and share our most secret thoughts and fears with them. Violent relationships are no exception. In fact, unless the woman is there by force or arrangement, domestic abuse needs intimacy in order to thrive. Once intimacy is established, the perpetrator has everything he needs to hold his partner captive: trust, unique insights into her flaws and vulnerabilities, and her belief that the true him is the one she fell in love with, while the abusive him is just something to be fixed.

  Abusers are notorious for rushing the first stage of intimacy, something that’s often described by survivors as a kind of ‘love-bombing’. This phase is electric and full of promise. Survivors commonly recall being swept off their feet by a man more passionately interested in them than anyone had ever been before. When survivor-advocate Leslie Morgan Steiner first met her partner, he idolised her. ‘Conor believed in me as a writer and a woman in a way that no-one else ever had. And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us, by confessing his secret: starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather,’ says Steiner. ‘If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not I wore make-up, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were and how I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you. Because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in Conor at the beginning. I didn’t know that the first stage of any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim.’29

  Sharing secrets and confiding intimate details is the kind of self-revealing behaviour that bonds us to a partner. The sharing of confidences makes us allies and gets us invested in the journey our partners are on to overcome their ‘difficulties’ and grow into the best parts of themselves. This alliance is exactly the protection an abuser needs; it persuades the victim that their abusiveness is just a ‘difficulty’ they will overcome.

  In any situation of coercive control or abuse, developing trust is the first component. Recall the Chinese captors lulling American soldiers into a sense of camaraderie with offers of cigarettes and kind words. When their captors later alternated between kindness and punishment, the prisoners were left disoriented and confused. Imagine, then, what it’s like for a victim of domestic abuse: they believe they know this person inside and out, they’ve made life plans with them, they may have had children with them. Often, by the time the abuse starts, their captor is not just part of their family, but part of them. The process of realising that the person they share a bed with – the person they have taken into their heart – is actually a mortal threat to them, and possibly to their children, is not only painful and frightening – it can be virtually inconceivable.§

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  Before a woman starts to weigh up whether to leave or stay, she must first recognise that she is a victim of domestic abuse. This may sound strange to some readers: how could someone not know they are being abused? But it can take victims months or years to realise that their partner’s ‘difficult’ behaviour is actually domestic abuse. Deb Sanasi had to google ‘emotional abuse’ when her husband, Rob – on the stern advice of his counsellor – told her that his controlling and degrading behaviour was defined as domestic abuse. ‘Then up came this list of behaviours,’ says Deb, ‘and I actually saw my whole life in a list on a computer.’ She was astonished. ‘I thought, you know, I’m a high-functioning, intelligent person … How could I have been in an abusive relationship, and not even known?’

  It’s not that they don’t know they’re being badly treated – they just don’t see it as ‘abuse’. In her TED talk, Leslie Morgan Steiner explains why she stayed for years in an abusive relationship with Conor. ‘Even though he held those loaded guns to my head, pushed me down stairs, threatened to kill our dog, pulled the key out of the car ignition as I drove down the highway, poured coffee grinds on my head as I dressed for a job interview, I never once thought of myself as a battered wife. Instead, I was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man, and I was the only person on earth who could help Conor face his demons.’30

  This disconnect is vital to understand. Before women realise they’re a victim of domestic abuse, they see themselves as just another woman in a difficult relationship – albeit one that’s more difficult than most. Often, it’s a relationship they’ve invested a lot of time in, with someone they think they know better than anyone else. Most don’t want to give that up until they are sure there is no way to save it.

  This is what makes domestic abuse the most insidious and dangerous version of coercive control. People taken hostage against their will generally can’t wait to be released, so they can go back to their old life. In domestic abuse, the relationship in which they are captive is their life, and they will go to great lengths – and ignore severe pain and distress – to preserve it.

  This was borne out in a study of more than a hundred female victims in the United States. Kathleen Ferraro and John Johnson found that women who stayed in violent relationships rationalised their abuse in six ways:31

  1‘I can fix him’: Their abuser is deeply troubled and needs a strong woman to get better. As the American writer Ali Owens writes: ‘Occasionally – generally after a particularly cruel incident … he would promise me that he’d get counseling, that he’d do whatever it took to get better … in those moments, he seemed to me like a lost, broken boy – and I would ache for him. I loved him so much that seeing his pain felt far worse than the pain he inflicted on me.’32

  2‘It’s not really him’: If he weren’t [insert problem here], he wouldn’t abuse me. The ‘problem’ might be drugs, drink, mental illness, unemployment – the list goes on. Once the problem is fixed, the abuse will stop – or so the thinking goes. Sometimes they may be right – but more often than not, the ‘problem’ goes, but the abuse persists.

  3‘It’s easier to try to forget’: The knowledge that their partner has intentionally hurt them can be so inconceivable, some women refuse to acknowledge it. Their attention goes towards ‘getting back to normal’; even while the evidence – cuts, bruises – are still visible, the routines of daily life soon ‘override the strange, confusing memory of the attack’.

  4‘It’s partly my fault’: Some women believe the abuse will stop if they work out how to change their own behaviour – how to be more passive, more agreeable, more sensitive to their partner’s needs.

  5‘There’s nowhere to go’: For many women, it’s just not possible to leave: there’s nowhere to stay, no money and so on. Some may believe that nobody else will ever love them, and find the prospect of being alone too awful. For others, especially those from poor or violent backgrounds, the world is an unsafe place, and they feel relatively protected by their abusive partner.

  6‘Until death do us part’: Some women are determined to endure the relationship, no matter what, because they see it as their duty: to God, or to the notions of family and tradition. As an investigation by the ABC found, religious leaders from many faith groups still encourage women to stay in violent relationships, deny them access to religious divorce and prevent them from leaving the marriage. Women who want to leave their abuser are threatened with exile from the community and punishment in the afterlife.33

  Women can spend months, years – their entire lives – rationalising the abuse they’re suffering. To distract themselves from their unbearable reality, they may turn to drugs or alcohol, develop eat
ing disorders, self-harm, become addicted to gambling – anything that provides a psychological escape from their abuse. Cruelly, this will likely render them untrustworthy to friends, family and the courts if they do try to leave.

  As long as victims are rationalising their abuse, they will commonly refuse help, withdraw testimony when their partner is charged, and otherwise resist efforts from friends or family to get them to see what’s really happening to them. This can be incredibly difficult and painful for the people who love them. But there’s something important to know about this process: what may look like stubbornness or naivety is, according to the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, actually a sophisticated coping mechanism. ‘People in captivity become adept practitioners of the art of altered consciousness,’ she writes. ‘Through the practice of dissociation, voluntary thought suppression, minimisation and sometimes outright denial, they learn to alter an unbearable reality.’34 Herman calls these complex mental manoeuvres ‘doublethink’, borrowing George Orwell’s term to describe ‘the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’. Doublethink is not just something victims use to cope – it also helps them to survive. To evade punishment, a victim needs to get inside her abuser’s head, so she can be meticulously attuned to what makes him angry and what will calm him down. Over time, as the abuse worsens, his perspective becomes more important, to the point where she may start to see the world through his eyes more than her own. She does this not because she is helpless, but because she needs to be constantly one step ahead of him if she’s to protect herself (and possibly her children).

  But doublethink – and the rationalisations that underpin it – is fragile. If something about the violence changes – if it escalates or is witnessed by an outsider – a victim may be startled into seeing her situation with fresh eyes. The best thing friends and family can do is give judgement-free, unqualified support, even when the victim is trying to push them away. Connections with family and friends are the best protection a victim has.