See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

by Jess Hill

‘You must get so frustrated when you think a woman’s ready to leave and then she decides to go back,’ I say. ‘No,’ replies one phone counsellor pointedly. ‘I’m frustrated that even though he promised to stop, he chose to abuse her again.’

I felt content, peaceful; safe. As I walked towards our back steps, washing basket in hand, a cascade of thoughts swept through me with such force it made my eyes sting. To feel safe in the dark – even in my own backyard – was a privilege. How many women would never feel safe in their backyard? How many would be approaching their back steps with a sense of dread? How many would be steeling themselves for what might happen to them in bed that night? How many would feel their breath quicken at every rustle of leaves, terrified that somewhere in the dark, the man they once loved was waiting for them?

These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.

This is a book about love, abuse and power. It’s about a phenomenon that flourishes in private and in public, perpetrated mostly by men who evade scrutiny. It’s about all the questions we don’t ask, like: ‘Why does he do it?’ It’s about turning our stubborn beliefs and assumptions inside out and confronting one of the most complex – and urgent – issues of our time.

‘The girls don’t flock to the gentlemen. They flock to the alpha male,’ Rodger wrote. ‘Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?’ Rodger’s worldview wasn’t that of a lone madman; it was echoed and encouraged in the online forums he frequented and the men’s rights groups he joined. It was forced on women online by trolls who threatened them with rape and violence.

We may be able to grasp intellectually that domestic abuse can happen to anyone, but many of us still can’t imagine it affecting anyone we know – even when the evidence is right in front of us.

There’s a big barrier [to seeing domestic violence], because there is all that focus on some people, rather than an understanding of it being entrenched throughout the society.’ That focus on some people leads us to believe domestic abuse only happens to certain types of women: the poor, the vulnerable, the mentally ill or those with ‘victim mentalities’.

not one

researcher has been able to find a victim ‘type’. As one review concludes, ‘there is no evidence that the status a woman occupies, the role she performs, the behaviour she engages in, her demographic profile or her personality characteristics consistently influence her chance of intimate victimisation.’13 In the hands of a sophisticated abuser, even the most secure and strong-minded woman can be reduced to someone utterly unrecognisable, even to herself.

Domestic abuse is not just violence. It’s worse. It is a unique phenomenon, in which the perpetrator takes advantage of their partner’s love and trust and uses that person’s most intimate details – their deepest desires, shames and secrets – as a blueprint for their abuse. We also say domestic abuse is a crime, but that’s not quite right either. Crimes are incidents – if you get bashed, you can call the police and report an assault. There are criminal offences committed within domestic abuse, but the worst of it cannot be

captured on a charge sheet. A victim’s most frightening experiences may never be recorded by police or understood by a judge. That’s because domestic abuse is a terrifying language that develops slowly and is spoken only by the people involved. Victims may feel breathless from a sideways look, a sarcastic tone or a stony silence, because these are the signals to which they have become hyper-attuned, the same way animals can sense an oncoming storm. These are the signals that tell them danger is close, or that it has already surrounded them.

After all, it’s not a crime to demand that your girlfriend no longer see her family. It’s not a crime to tell her what to wear, how to clean the house and what she’s allowed to buy at the supermarket. It’s not a crime to convince your wife she’s worthless, or to make her feel that she shouldn’t leave the children alone with you. It’s not a crime to say something happened when it didn’t – to say it so many times that you break her sense of what’s real.

It doesn’t make sense that women who are smart and independent will stay with a man who treats them like dirt. It doesn’t make sense that even after fleeing, a woman will often return to her abuser – even plead for him to take her back. It doesn’t make sense that someone known as a good bloke could be going home to hold a knife to his

wife’s throat. If we were to think about his actions as much as we think about hers, it would make even less sense that a man who inflicts abuse on his partner would want to stay – and even kill her after she leaves. Why does he stay? None of it makes sense. What’s even more confusing is that perpetrators commonly believe with all their heart that they are the victim, and will plead their case to police even as their partner stands bloody and bruised behind them. Their victimhood is what makes them feel their abuse is justified. They’re not like those other men, because they’re just defending themselves.

‘The day you raise your hand to a woman. That day you’re officially not a man!’

However, in a cruel twist, the increased attention on men’s violence – amplified by the #MeToo movement – may actually be making perpetrators more dangerous. In homes across Australia, abusive men – furious that women are getting all the attention while their suffering is ignored – are taking out their humiliated fury on their girlfriends, wives and children. The backlash is real, and it’s violent. When I visited the Safe Steps helpline in Melbourne, then CEO Annette Gillespie told me they had recorded an increase in the frequency and severity of assaults being reported, and had victims calling in to say that awareness campaigns were making their abusers more volatile. ‘Women will call and say, can you get them to stop the ad on TV, can you ask them to stop talking about family violence? Because every time he sees that ad he goes nuts.’

The recent awakening to domestic abuse threatens to initiate us into a dark reality: that hundreds of thousands of Australians have inflicted pain, suffering and even sadistic torture on people they professed to love.

‘It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that we do nothing … The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.’18 If we flinch and decide that’s too hard, domestic abuse may once again disappear from sight.

Deb shakes her head. ‘Can I interject? The reason that Rob went into counselling was I went into the workforce. The control had been very strong in our relationship, but actually neither of us really realised to what degree Rob was controlling me, until I did something that he couldn’t control. Within three weeks of me starting that job, Rob had a nervous breakdown. He lost 15 kilos, he was having anxiety and panic attacks, he became addicted

to Xanax, he was suicidal. That’s what drove him into counselling. He was a mess.’ Rob nods quietly. During their first session, Rob says his counsellor asked him a series of questions. ‘Do you raise your voice, do you yell, do you throw things, do you call your wife names, do you swear, do you bash things – not her, but things – and it was kind of tick, tick, tick,’ Rob remembers. ‘And then he went to a filing cabinet in his office, and pulled out an A4 piece of paper with a preprinted “Cycle of Violence” on it, and he whacked that on the table and he said, “That’s what you do. This is what we call domestic violence.”’

At first, Rob kept the piece of paper to himself. ‘And then eventually I thought, oh, I’ll just bring it out casually, you know. But when I brought it out, things got a lot worse. Because then Deb realised what was going on. It’s kind of like the scales fell off our eyes – both of us.’ I ask Deb what it was like for her to see that piece of paper. ‘I remember actually what Rob said to me. He said, “What’s going on in our relationship is domestic violence, and the type of violence that I’m using on you is called emotional abuse, which means I don’t bash you with my fists, I bash you with my emotions, to keep you under control.”’

Now, after almost ten years and much intense counselling, Rob and Deb are happily married, and both counsel domestic abuse victims and perpetrators: Deb in private practice, and Rob more informally, with abusive men who seek him out for advice.

Biderman established that three primary elements were at the heart of coercive control: dependency, debility and dread. To achieve this effect,

the captors used eight techniques: isolation, monopolisation of perception, induced debility or exhaustion, cultivation of anxiety and despair, alternation of punishment and reward, demonstrations of omnipotence, degradation, and the enforcement of trivial demands.

they spoke about being isolated from friends and family, instructed on how to behave, degraded, manipulated, sexually violated and threatened with death. Physical violence was common, and could be sadistic in its extremes, but survivors insisted it was not the worst part of the abuse – and some were not physically abused at all.

Domestic perpetrators don’t need physical violence to maintain their power – they only have to make their victims believe they are capable of it. This threat is particularly effective, wrote Herman, when it is directed towards loved ones: ‘Battered women, for example, frequently report that their abuser has threatened to kill their children, their parents, or any friends who harbor them, should they attempt to escape.’ This atmosphere of threat is enough to ‘convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance’.5

In fact, for victims of domestic abuse, resistance is even harder than for other captives. A hostage, for example, often knows nothing of their captor, and generally regards them as an enemy. As Herman explains, a victim of domestic abuse doesn’t have this advantage. She is ‘taken prisoner gradually, by courtship’. Before she feels trapped by fear and control, it is love that first binds her to her abuser, and it’s love that makes her forgive him when he says he won’t abuse her again. Abusers are rarely simple thugs or sadists – if they were, they’d be far easier to avoid or apprehend. Instead, like all men, they can be loving, kind, charming and warm, and they struggle with personal pain and uncertainty. This is who the woman falls in love with.

What should surprise us about domestic abuse is not that a woman can take a long time to leave, but that she has the mental fortitude to survive.

Over the next thirteen years, they had two children together. Each time Melissa fell pregnant, Tom would stop the physical violence and assume the role of ‘protector’. ‘If I wasn’t eating right, he’d force me to eat,’ she says. ‘I’d be about to vomit and he’d be forcing me to eat, saying, “I don’t want anything to be wrong with my child.”’

The next time Melissa decided to venture out, Tom came at her more ferociously than ever. He accused her of having an affair, and punched her so hard she was thrown across the room. This time, Melissa fought back. ‘I just felt this power,’ she says, with a faint smile. ‘I jumped up and knocked him flying over the bloody computer table. He was just so shocked that I’d done it. I said, “Don’t you ever do that to me again. You ever touch me, or push me, or shove me again, I’m gonna divorce you and I will leave.”’ Tom didn’t hit Melissa again for three years. The next time he did, she left.

‘It’s the self-righteousness that kicks in, where if I don’t get my way or you don’t agree with me, or if this isn’t happening the way I want it, I have every right to show my displeasure and punish you.’

When an abusive man says he loves his new partner, he probably means it. But it’s not the kind of love non-abusive people feel – it is defined and distorted by his deeply held sense of entitlement.

and at seventeen, believed the only men she needed to be wary of were strangers. Early in their relationship, Nelson told her she shouldn’t wear white pants because her undies showed through and made her look like a tart. She was grateful for his advice – she certainly didn’t want to look like a tart. When he said that wearing a dress would make her an easy target for bad people who wanted to touch her, she thought that was a bit over the top, but agreed not to wear those either. He was older and he’d travelled overseas. He knew how the world worked. In a matter of months, Nelson’s ‘helpful’ advice had calcified into hard and fast rules about what Jasmine was allowed to do and who she could see. She shouldn’t spend so much time with her sister, he said, and her male friends were a problem – he was worried she would be tempted to have sex with them. At first, Jasmine was flattered. He really

wants me all to himself, she thought. She was right. Soon enough, he was threatening to harm her male acquaintances, and forcing her to ring male colleagues to tell them she hated them. This was just the beginning. Unbeknown to Jasmine, Nelson was systematically isolating her.