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.
Sometimes men deny women’s perceptions in order to get away with secretive self-serving, illicit behaviour, denying that an overheard phone call with another woman had ever taken place, or that the mileage on the car’s odometer has changed significantly and inexplicably, or claiming that he was ‘just browsing’ prostitution websites.
But often abusive men’s casual contradictions of women’s observations fall into a routine pattern, like a cat toying with a mouse, with no immediate, obvious personal gain other than, bit and bit, eroding their partner’s faith in the evidence of their senses - partly for cruel fun, partly to lay the groundwork to get away with more self-serving abuse. ‘No, you’re misremembering, we didn’t talk about that yesterday’; ‘our child definitely doesn’t have a temperature, and it’s bizarre that you think he does’; ‘no, we’ve never watched that box set’, ‘we’ve never visited that place together’ and so on. Sometimes such men move items around the house, or hide objects, to similarly mess with women’s minds. This is ‘gaslighting’ (after the 1944 Hitchcock film Gaslight, in which a man manipulates his young wife into believing she’s going insane, partly by causing the gas lighting in the house to dim and denying it’s happening), but the word has become so ubiquitous (and often wrongly applied) that I think it can sometimes mask the minutiae of what’s going on and how it feels.
Callers to that Jeremy Vine show also described how, when their partners did acknowledge the reality of women’s perceptions, they generally disrupted any attributions of blame, deftly reversing the roles of victim and offender. These men argued that, if distressing behaviour had occurred, then it was simply because women had left them with no choice: ‘I had to lie to you, because you made it impossible to tell you the truth’, ‘I had to slap you, because you were hysterical and needed calming down’. There’s an acronym for this. DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
I’ve been thinking about how it happens that women’s faith in the evidence of our senses is eroded to such an extent that, in such circumstances, we don’t just perform acquiescence but whole-heartedly come to believe that we were wrong, and to believe that we mishear, misremember, misinterpret information on a regular basis. I’m partly thinking of Dominique Pélicot’s abuse of Gisèle, in which, when she started to wonder if he was drugging her, he convinced her that she was suffering from dementia.
Much of this erosion of women’s self-belief takes place within relationships, in which men often don’t behave abusively at the start. Women aren’t idiots: we don’t generally throw ourselves into relationships with men who are clearly appalling from the off. Instead, abusive men often wait until we’re practically and emotionally invested, co-habiting, or with children or pregnant, often financially dependent, and signed up to a good, loving image that the man had performed until then. When the first instances of abuse occur, and something starts to feel ‘off’, it’s a complicated and heart-rending process of analysis for a woman, with very high stakes. On the one hand, we contemplate losing the life and man we’re dependent on, fearing what will happen to our children, and realising that we’ll have to overturn our beliefs in who our partner actually is. This are really big things, and can feel disproportionate against the often small manifestations of abuse that men begin with. We weigh this up against the possibility that we might have interpreted the situation incorrectly; that it’s actually us who are at fault, in our perceptions, or in our behaviour. It takes someone with an unusual level of self-belief and unusual knowledge about how abuse begins small but ramps up - and, often, an unusual degree of financial independence - to opt for the former. And then, once we’ve engaged in this analysis once and decided to overlook the first instances of abuse, it sets a pattern. At each stage of abuse intensifying, we question, ‘can I put up with this?’ and, when we’ve put up with something similar before, and when the stakes of leaving are so high and scary, and when our ability to trust the evidence of our own senses is being increasingly razed to the ground, it can feel like the only option is to say ‘yes’.
I think that women are particularly vulnerable to this type of abuse, because it’s perpetrated on us, not just by individual men, but by the whole of our society, from the day we were born. When I was in a relationship with a man who was behaving like this, it coincided with a number of other events in my life, which redoubled my increasing suspicion that my perceptions were untrustworthy. I was seeing a therapist who, when I told her that I had been anorexic in the past, clearly decided that I was a control freak and perfectionist, and that my unhappiness in my relationship was due to me having an unrealistically high bar for my partner’s behaviour. I came away from each session convinced that it was me who needed to change - not him - and not by me exiting the relationship. My perceptions, standards and beliefs were clearly all wrong. When he did something that hurt me, the problem did not lie with him, but with my control-freakish expectations that he should have behaved better. It’s a commonplace that women’s emotions are written off as ‘hysterical’, ‘mad’, ‘inappropriate for the situation’. But (as I wrote in my book A Revolution of Feeling) our emotions are key guides to what is best for us, and can be more honest and straightforward than our conscious mind. Instead of berating ourselves for being ‘overly emotional’, we’d often do better by paying more attention to our emotions, and listening to our distress, fear and anger as appropriate reactions to situations that threaten our best interests.
The therapy coincided with a horrible experience with a hospital consultant. In the past, I had had a minor but rare medical condition, which was successfully treated by a specialist prescribing medication off-label. When I subsequently had to move hospitals, the specialist advised me that the new consultant wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with the condition or its treatment, and that I should ask him to consult my past notes and follow their advice. When I came to see the new consultant, I was first seen by a nurse, who clearly identified my symptoms, and reported them to the consultant: but he point blank denied that I had any condition at all. He said he couldn’t see any symptoms, and that there were no notes relating to this on the NHS computer system, and, when I provided him with the previous specialist’s contact details, he refused to call and said he’d never heard of that person. The consultant said that the only thing he was willing to prescribe was anti-depressants, with the implication that I was fabricating it all.
This was all at a time when my self-belief was in tatters, and I started to become convinced that I was going mad. I started misplacing things, and was left unsure of whether they’d ever existed in the first place. I confused dreams and memories: which ones had actually happened? I was trying to write a book, and when I fumbled around for words, I started to doubt that the concept or word had ever been a real thing. I found myself gripping the kitchen counter and making myself concentrate on its solidity, as an attempt to literally ground myself in some sort of material reality. I’ve written recently about the secret lives that men lead, and, when women are driven to live in such a state of terrifying unreality, it’s easy for men to get away with it. When I couldn’t even trust my perception that it was raining outside, I wasn’t about to blow my relationship apart on the basis of a vague suspicion that things were starting to feel ‘off’.
Mumsnet has a chat topic called ‘AIBU?’ (Am I Being Unreasonable), and it’s struck me recently that this could only really exist for women, because so many of us have lost all confidence that our perceptions and objections in relationships are justified. (The male equivalent on a different site, AITA (Am I The Arsehole), is not the same: it’s men hoping to be reassured that their bad behaviour is OK). For many of the posts on AIBU, the answer is so obviously a resounding ‘NO! Of course you’re not being unreasonable!!’, that - to an outsider - it’s hard to see how the poster could ever have been in doubt. Just a few from this week (it’s a public site in which posters write anonymously, so I’m not outing anyone): a woman who was worrying that she was ‘being unreasonable and controlling’ by objecting to her boyfriend of 2 years using dating apps behind her back to meet other woman. A woman worrying that it was an ‘overreaction’ for her to feel like cancelling an exotic holiday for herself and her boyfriend, after he announced his intention to book a massage with a ‘happy ending’ whilst on holiday. A woman feeling that she was being unreasonable for ‘struggling’ with a four-month-old baby, whom she was caring for alone because her husband had become depressed, sat in his car on the driveway for hours, and refused to come into the house or help with the baby at all. (Note: she wasn’t contemplating ending the relationship; she just felt that she may be being unreasonable by finding her situation hard). It breaks my heart that women have been ground down to such an extent that so many find it hard to even express righteous anger and frustration at men’s behaviour, let alone to act in their best interests and leave.
I’ve been thinking about this this week, because it’s become clear to me how this grinding down of women’s self-belief begins in the first years of childhood. One of my daughters has had a minor clash with a male friend at school. From her description, it doesn’t sound as if she’s done anything morally wrong. She’s simply, gently, and reasonably put herself first for a short time, and said to him that, for one break time, she’d like to play with a different friend. But the male friend has felt hurt, and has given her the silent treatment (among other things), and lots of other children (and a teacher) have rallied to his defence, calling on my daughter to be nicer. Her reaction has been to agree, berating herself for not being nice enough, and saying that her (perfectly reasonable) desire to have a variety of friends was unreasonable. I hate that word ‘nice’. We raise our girls, telling them that being ‘nice and kind’ are the most important qualities for women, but niceness isn’t a moral compass. It’s the absence of one. In order to be ‘nice’ (as it is popularly defined for women), you have to put aside all of your own best interests and beliefs and perceptions, in order to acquiesce to someone else’s. As Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan wrote in their study of how teenage girls lose themselves by trying to be ‘nice and kind’, this is part of a godawful process in which girls and women are schooled into being prey for abusive men. I wrote about Brown and Gilligan’s work in my last post:
I want to give my girls something different, something better: a strong sense of self-belief, both in the moral justifications for their actions and desires, and in the firm reality of their perceptions of the world. I’ve bought a book called Raising Girls Who Like Themselves (in a world that tells them they’re flawed), by Kasey Edwards and Christopher Scanlon, and I’ll report back. And I’d be interested to hear your experiences. If you’re someone who has never experienced the type of abuse I’ve described in this post, do you think there was something about your upbringing and socialisation that made you less vulnerable to being preyed on by such men? If you have a daughter who has a strong moral compass and self-belief, and doesn’t stand for being mistreated by peers, what do you think aided this?
In all of this, I’m not suggesting that it’s women’s fault for being abused; that we bring it on ourselves in some way. Instead, I think that women are subject to abuse both by individual men and by the society in which we live, which, between them, erode our self-worth, our judgement of what is good for us, and our faith in our own perceptions of reality. I don’t often use the word ‘evil’, but I think that one definition is intentionally decimating a person’s ability to discern what is real and what is not.
Excellent piece. Of course the ubiquity of abusive and perverted pornography does not help and neither does the same kind of mentality infesting the video game, music and movie industries. And these 'men' protect each other, which is why the police and their ilk dismiss you and don't take you seriously. They don't see a problem - because it is normal for them as well. The sense of entitlement to do what they like to women has also led to the most horrendous situations for young girls who, these days, are routinely expected to perform oral sex on boys - or be ostracised from their friend groups. And then there is the industrial scale of abuse, and worse, of babies and children. And that is not just endemic, it is institutionalised. And they also protect each other. But the current situation in the USA, with the arrest of that rapper and his video collection, might well help to blow the lid off it.
“ realising that we’ll have to overturn our beliefs in _who our partner actually is_.
[…]
At each stage of abuse intensifying, we question, ‘can I put up with this?’ and, when we’ve put up with something similar before, and when the stakes of leaving are so high and scary, and when our ability to trust the evidence of our own senses is being increasingly razed to the ground, it can feel like the only option is to say ‘yes’. “
These two parts explain for me somewhat that strange phenomen of ‘the wife who stands by the husband who has been accused (or sometimes even convicted) of multiple acts of violence (bullying, sexual assault, murder) of other women’. It always seemed inexplicable but _of course_ a man who sees ‘other women’ as less than human will treat his wife with the same lack of respect. There will be a degree of coercive control, denial of realities, whatever you want to call it, until such time that ‘Wife’ either utterly believes her man has been wronged or that perhaps all those women deserved what was coming to them.