How do we raise girls to believe the evidence of their senses?
Last Friday, I was doing some gardening, whilst listening to the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. (Very middle-aged, I know.) The show started with a feature on domestic abuse, and it included a number of interviews with women who had managed to leave abusive relationships - and one harrowing voice recording of a 999 call made by 22-year-old Raneem Oudeh, who called police four times on the day she was murdered by her ex-partner, and thirteen times in the weeks leading up to her murder. I was struck by how the call handler (horribly, tragically, wrongly) urged Oudeh to believe that she was not in immediate danger - and how quickly Oudeh acquiesced.
The women who subsequently phoned into the show all responded to this, defending Oudeh against the unspoken, but all-too-common, criticisms levelled at women in abusive relationships, that ‘it takes two to tango’, that she had given in too easily, that she hadn't sufficiently fought her corner with the call handler. These objections are in the same vein as outsiders who wonder about abused women, ‘why didn't she just leave him?’
The callers described how one of the most pernicious effects of intimate partner abuse is the way that it makes you doubt your own reality, to the extent that it becomes impossible to fight your own corner with much conviction. One woman recounted how she had gently started a conversation with her partner about something distressing that he had done to her, and he denied it had ever occurred. She did not know how to retort to his completely unexpected mode of defence, and, stunned into silence, she wondered if he was right.