See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  There were red flags early on – excessive jealousy towards Joanna’s ex-boyfriend, an incident in which he shoved her up against a wall, and another where he raged and swore at her. Around three weeks before the murder, Joanna’s roommate heard her yell at Kevin, ‘Don’t you ever grab my face like that again.’ When she asked if Joanna was alright, Joanna complained that Kevin was being ‘childish’.

  Then there was Kevin’s excessive drinking; Joanna advised him to get help, but later bought alcohol for the under-age military police officer so they could get drunk together on raunchy weekends off-base. That’s not to say that Joanna was somehow under Kevin’s spell: as Websdale notes, Joanna ‘was clear about what she wanted from the relationship and equally emphatic about what she would not tolerate’.

  This assertiveness and emotional strength, witnesses later testified, may have contributed to Kevin’s decision to strangle her to death. The day before he killed her, Joanna and Kevin checked into a motel to drink and have sex. Joanna was alert to the serious increase in Kevin’s drinking, his claustrophobic attentiveness and his volatility. That night, Kevin ruined their evening by getting so drunk on Southern Comfort he passed out. The following morning they fought. Joanna told Kevin she didn’t want to marry an alcoholic and threw her engagement ring at him. Kevin later reported to the prison psychiatrist that as they argued, ‘rage shot through my entire body. My fists balled up. My legs went numb.’ Still drunk from the night before, Kevin threw up on the carpet. Joanna, who didn’t want to pay a cleaning charge, called her friend Mary to bring carpet cleaner to the motel. After the women cleaned up, Joanna asked Kevin – who was half-asleep in bed – if it would be okay if she and Mary went to lunch. Kevin sarcastically agreed, and the two left.

  While they were gone, Joanna told Mary she was planning to break up with Kevin. When Mary dropped her back at the motel, Kevin asked Joanna if she was planning to stay. Her answer sounded ‘evasive’, and Kevin was overwhelmed with the sickening thought of her being with somebody else. At this point, Kevin says, Joanna lay down on the bed. As he put his hands around her neck, she replied, ‘Oh Kevin, don’t,’ and bit his finger. As he applied more force, she screamed, struggled and fought against him, until they fell off the bed, where Kevin killed her. Speaking to investigators, Kevin said, ‘She indicated she wanted nothing to do with me anymore. I was scared, angry, and nervous. As a snap action I choked her until she died.’

  But Kevin was not out of control. His own testimony reveals that in the minutes he spent choking Joanna, he went from reactive rage to a moment of conscious choice. To the detective who drew out his confession, Kevin admitted he did ‘at first’ get a rush from strangling Joanna. ‘But at the end, I really wanted to let go, but I knew I couldn’t ’cos she’d have jumped up and went straight to you.’ In the six to eight minutes it took Kevin to kill Joanna, Neil Websdale says that the shame and ‘humiliated fury’ Kevin felt at the sense he was about to be abandoned was replaced ‘with a rage that quickly and temporarily restored a sense of pride and a sense of control. His act of killing temporarily dissipated his anxiety and fear.’

  Any pride or feeling of control Kevin might have had when he was killing Joanna was short-lived. With Joanna dead on the floor, Kevin became ‘scared’, and tried ‘to make it look like an accident’. After lifting Joanna’s body back onto the bed, Kevin violated her corpse to make it look like she’d died after a session of rough sex, removing her clothes, biting her nipple and breast, and digitally penetrating her. This desecration, Kevin later said, was something he felt more shame about than anything he had ever done. Over the next day, Kevin says he tried several times to kill himself, finally by attempting to drive Joanna’s car into an oncoming tractor-trailer on a rural highway. When he was caught fleeing the scene by police, he confessed to murdering Joanna and told them where to find her body.

  If we were to look at this murder through the lens of the feminist model, we might dismiss Kevin’s testimony about his difficult childhood and subsequent fear of abandonment as just lousy excuses from a man seeking to minimise his crime and get a more sympathetic hearing. In this view, Kevin is just another man whose murderous rage was driven by a desire for the ultimate power and control.

  That’s certainly what it looks like from the perspective of the victim. But as we’ve read, there is often a big difference between how powerful abusers look and how powerful they feel. This, I believe, is one of the major elements missing from the mainstream understanding of domestic abuse: the fact that in the moments before a man takes control, he can feel at his most vulnerable and powerless, just milliseconds before feeling the flush of power and pride that comes from reinstating dominance.

  Consider the results of a 2004 study of twenty-four abusive men conducted by the psychologist Jac Brown in New South Wales.31 The men in Brown’s study said their violence generally followed an emotional sequence: first they felt vulnerable, then scared, and then angry. This cascade of emotions – from the initial feeling of shame, humiliation and vulnerability through to the abusive reaction – can happen in a split-second. Think of what occurs when you turn on a light. You flick the switch, which triggers a surge of electricity that gets conducted through the wires and down into the bulb itself, where the electric charge ignites the filament that creates the light. We don’t see electricity’s journey from the switch to the filament – we just see the light coming on. Similarly, the cascading emotion in an abusive man can happen so quickly that the only thing visible is the rage that erupts: the cold fury, the degrading remark. But, as Websdale, Gilligan and others have argued, the actual exertion of power and control over an intimate partner is often motivated by a feeling of underlying powerlessness, and a fear of vulnerability – essentially, of shame.

  The notion that deeply shamed people ‘feel’ shame, however, is not quite right, writes Gilligan. ‘While shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling … When it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante’s Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice – absolute coldness.’†

  If we carefully consider Kevin’s testimony, a picture emerges that we don’t often recognise in domestic abuse. Kevin didn’t feel powerful or privileged. This was a young man who fantasised about guarding nuclear weapons; a man raised to protect women as a point of honour. But his machismo covered a ‘tenuous sense of self, a precarious masculine identity … soaked in a level of alcohol consumption subconsciously or consciously directed at soothing his fear, rage, and anxiety’. Alongside Kevin’s desperate attempts to control Joanna, and his intimidating behaviour, ‘we also witness searing levels of personal vulnerability, powerlessness, dependency, and fear of abandonment’. This fear of abandonment – common to obsessive, controlling abusers of the Pit Bull type – is not simply a fear of being alone; it is a shame-based fear of being exposed as defective and unworthy of love. As Websdale concludes, it was Kevin’s ‘humiliated fury’ at the likelihood that his fiancée was about to abandon him that triggered his murderous act.

  *

  Men who attack others when they feel shamed are not doomed to do this forever. But in order to change this pattern, they need to be able to see it.

  Nowhere have I heard of this happening more powerfully than in the men’s behaviour change groups led by Kylie Dowse. A qualified therapist and domestic abuse advocate, Dowse describes herself as an Aboriginal feminist and has worked for twenty years with women and child survivors. A decade ago, Dowse made the atypical move to work with abusive men, too. She did this because survivors were telling her, time and again, that they wanted the violence to end, not the relationship. What these women needed, more than anything, was for their men to stop abusing them. So Dowse set about trying to find a way for that to happen. This marked the beginning of ‘Insight’ – group programs for abusive men that consisted of twice-weekly meetings for twelve weeks.

  W
hen Dowse started running the groups, she noticed one particularly strong theme: the men’s sense of shame was stopping them from being honest about their abusive behaviour. They insisted on blaming their partners: ‘If she hadn’t said this’, ‘If she hadn’t done that’, ‘She knows what I’m like’. That’s what got her thinking about the role of shame in men’s violence.

  So she changed tack. In one group, Kylie asked the men to try an experiment: If shame were in the room, what would it look like? To her surprise, the men all said that shame was male. ‘I thought it might have been a belligerent mother or something, but the men identified that shame was very male, hyper-critical, and that this male shame got into their thinking – they’re no good, they can’t change, so they’re better off just pretending it didn’t happen or blaming someone else.’ Shame told these men that if they spoke about what they had done, they would be ostracised, says Dowse, because what they had done was so despicable, nobody would ever look at them the same way again.

  Once shame had a face and a voice, the group started playing around with how to make shame visible. ‘These ideas came from the men in the group. We said, “How about we put shame on this seat?” So we had a chair, and we stuck a piece of paper on it that said “shame sits here”.’ One night, they had shame seated in the circle, and one of the men said, ‘I just can’t even stand shame sitting there looking at me like this.’ So the men agreed: shame was to be put outside the room. ‘What I noticed,’ says Dowse, ‘was that once the shame seat was outside the room, men were saying things like “thank god that idiot’s gone”, and “get out of here, we don’t want you here”.’

  Something about this didn’t feel right. Dowse went home that night and thought about what had happened. Suddenly it dawned on her. ‘What had we recreated here? We don’t like something, so we physically remove it from the room and abuse it.’ The following week, she went back to the group with a suggestion. ‘I was thinking about how we treated shame once he was asked to leave the group,’ she said. ‘What if we were to send shame to a support group? Because it sounds like he’s got a whole bunch of things going on.’ With the backing of the group, she went over to the broom cupboard, and tacked up a sign that said ‘Shame Support Group’. That started a whole new dynamic: when men would arrive at group, they would drop shame off at his support group, so they could meet as a group ‘without shame’.

  This might sound silly, but what Kylie and the group were doing was groundbreaking: not only were they making shame – an unbearable and usually hidden emotion – visible, they were making it something to be playful with. When someone in the group would make a comment driven by shame – minimising his abuse, blaming his partner, and so on – other men in the group would intervene, saying things like, ‘Uh-oh, I think we’ve got a problem – I think your shame got out of the room.’ Suddenly, instead of these men hiding behind their shame, they were talking openly about it – and holding each other accountable.

  What Kylie started to notice was a direct relationship between shame and responsibility: in releasing men from their shame, they were able to finally take responsibility for their abuse. But that wasn’t the only major change in the group. ‘We’d start out with blokes telling war stories of how cool they are, how tough they are, how nobody could get anything over them, particularly if they’d been to prison. Without shame in the group, tears became possible. We lost the bravado.’ When men spoke without shame or bravado, something else happened: they began to talk about the abuse in ways that more closely matched the women’s accounts, positioning themselves as the ones at fault. When they gave up the need to blame their partners, it became easier for them to think about how their abuse had harmed their partners and children, and themselves.

  One of the most remarkable turnarounds was seen in a man called ‘Paul’. He and his partner, ‘Crystal’, had a long history of violence, which had landed him in jail several times. One night in the group, Paul started talking about something that had happened with his partner. He started saying, almost mechanically, ‘Yeah, well she …’ and then interrupted himself. ‘I almost did that – my shame must be back. Let me just get rid of shame and start again.’ Paul took a moment, and said, ‘I was going to say that she pushes and pushes and pushes until I snap. But what I really want to say is that I snapped, and I feel terrible. I shouldn’t have done it; it’s not her fault, it’s never been her fault.’

  In a video where Paul talks about this moment, he’s able to talk about his abuse in a way ‘that didn’t relieve him of responsibility, but relieved him of shame,’ says Dowse. ‘He was able to talk about being responsible without having his shoulders slump, or talk of being hopeless, helpless, a terrible man.’

  The next day, Dowse got a phone call from Crystal. ‘Whatever happened in group,’ she said, ‘keep it coming.’ The night before, she said, Paul had come home from group and asked if she wanted a cup of tea. Then, as he brought her tea, he told her he was thinking of moving out for a while. But he wasn’t just telling her – he was asking her, checking to see if this was okay, and asking her if she wanted space. As Crystal recalled, Paul said, ‘I never really gave you a chance to say what you want. Maybe you don’t want me to be here for a while.’ Paul was still up on charges from his last assault on Crystal, and they were both soon to return to court. But instead of planning to contest the charges, as he usually did, Paul called the police that night to ask what he would need to do to protect Crystal from going to court. On their advice, he turned himself in and was sentenced. ‘He wrote to the group from prison,’ says Dowse, ‘and explained what had happened. He said he just couldn’t make her turn up to court anymore, and have everyone look at her like she’s no good, and have her worried about having the kids removed. So he just turned up to court and said, “Yeah, I did it.” So she didn’t have to go.’

  The response from the group was equally surprising. The men weren’t angry that Paul had been sent back to jail, and they didn’t blame his partner for it. Instead, they were deeply moved. ‘We had a few men getting a bit teary, and talking with real emotion in their voices about what had happened. What they wanted to know most of all was “Is his partner okay?” Paul’s act of taking responsibility had a flow-on effect for the other men in group, who started workshopping how they could do the same. ‘So for one of the men in that group, that meant paying his child support debt and not whingeing about how she spends it. Other men agreed to just put their weapons down, in a way, and agree to stop doing something: badgering their former partners about access to their kids, humiliating her on Facebook, and so on.’

  There’s been no formal study of Kylie Dowse’s program, though she’s had feedback from others in the field that its retention rate – the percentage of men who stay with the program – is unusually high. Whereas many men’s behaviour change groups focus on highlighting men’s privilege and teaching skills for anger management, the Insight program did something highly unusual: it took its participants’ top-secret fears – of their shame, dependency and vulnerability – and brought them into the light.

  *

  The explosive cocktail of shame and entitlement in violent men like Kevin is a vital clue to solving one of the most confounding riddles of domestic abuse: Why do so many men sabotage not only the people they claim to love, but also themselves? Over and again, we hear of ‘nice guys’ committing unthinkable violence against women and children. When another ‘nice guy’ drowns his children or kills his wife, neighbours and newspaper headlines insist this man was a good father, a successful worker, a pillar of the community, a tower of strength, a quiet neighbour.

  We’re not the only ones left in horrified bewilderment. Remember, Kevin tried several times to kill himself before ultimately confessing to Joanna’s murder. In 2015, a South Australian man, Robin Michael, viciously beat his wife, Kerry, to death while they were hiking Mount Roland in Tasmania. Michael wrongly believed his wife was having an affair with his close friend. In a Facebook post written a few hours
later, Michael wrote: ‘I have committed an act which should attract no pity, no sympathy, not even any understanding. I can’t understand it.’ He said he had killed her in a jealous rage and was ‘so far gone it was surely insanity at its greatest’. Michael killed himself in Tasmania’s Risdon Prison four months later.

  Both Kevin and Michael were twisted by morbid paranoia, jealousy and desperate need. Michael had a history of controlling and abusing his female partners; notes written by Kerry described how ‘trapped’ she felt by his jealousy and possessiveness. Both men seemed, to the outside world, ‘normal’: Kevin an ‘easygoing, nice guy’ working his way up the ranks of the military; Michael, a national figure in healthcare and general manager of Northern Territory’s largest hospital. We like to think only a certain type of man is capable of committing murder. But Kevin and Michael and the countless other men who’ve committed unthinkable violence towards women and children are the same kind of men we work with, are friends with, trust; men who seem normal. We almost never see this violence coming. As the renowned sociologist Allan Johnson writes, this is a profoundly disturbing realisation calling into question a worldview we depend on for predictability and order in our lives.32 If this man, this colleague, son, husband or father, can commit such acts, then why believe another man will not?

  Shame is felt by both genders. In fact, women have it drummed into them that their very femaleness is a shameful thing. Shame is something many women spend their lives trying to overcome. But women do not commit most of the world’s violent crime. Men do.

  The feeling of shame is biological and psychological, and the way we react to it is gendered. We may be born with the same physiological apparatus for feeling shame, but the way we experience shame is distinctly gendered. As Brené Brown explains, ‘Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we’re supposed to be. And it’s a straitjacket. For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one: do not be perceived as … weak.’33 Numerous studies have shown that as soon as we identify a baby’s sex, we bring our culturally biased expectations around gender to bear. The demand that boys be strong feeds into the expectation that one day, the baby boy will need to become a man who can stay in control. From the very moment a young boy experiences shame, his response to it – and our response to him - is already being influenced by gender.