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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jess Hill
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July 4 - September 1, 2020
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.
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.
For many victims, the physical violence is actually what hurts the least. Almost uniformly, victims who haven’t been physically assaulted say they wish their abuser would just hit them; anything to make the abuse ‘real’.
Men abuse women because society tells them they are entitled to be in control. In fact, society says that if they are not in control, they won’t succeed – they won’t get the girl, they won’t get the money, and they will be vulnerable to the violence and control of other men.
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.
Not only will she have to avoid developing empathy for her abuser, but she will also have to suppress the affection she already feels. She will have to do this in spite of the batterer’s persuasive arguments that just one more sacrifice, one more proof of her love, will end the violence and save the relationship. Since most women derive pride and self-esteem from their capacity to sustain relationships, the batterer is often able to entrap his victim by appealing to her most cherished values. It is not surprising, therefore, that battered women are often persuaded to return after trying to
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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.
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.
‘When an abusive man feels the powerful stirring inside that other people call love, he is probably largely feeling the desire to have you devote your life to keeping him happy with no outside interference, and to impress others by having you be his partner … The confusion of love with abuse is what allows abusers who kill their partners to make the absurd claim that they were driven by the depths of their loving feelings.’
The first technique in Biderman’s Chart of Coercion is to isolate. As long as the victim maintains meaningful social and emotional connections, the abuser’s influence is diluted. To become the most powerful person in her life, he must eliminate her external sources of support and silence voices that would question his behaviour.
Instead, like a magician working sleight of hand, the perpetrator redirects his partner’s attention away from his abuse to her faults: if she wasn’t so this, he wouldn’t be so that. This can make a lot of sense to her, especially if, like many perpetrators, he seems to love and care for friends and family. If she’s the only one he’s attacking, it must be she who is provoking him.
Over time, her guilt begins to morph into shame. When shame takes hold, she doesn’t just feel bad about certain things she’s done – she starts to feel that she is bad. This cuts her off from her instinct – which she can no longer trust – and makes the perpetrator’s opinion even more important. From there, the shame becomes a spiral. Every time the perpetrator gets her to act against her instincts – by cutting off beloved family or friends, for example – the feelings of shame multiply. The more ashamed she feels, the more dependent she becomes on her perpetrator, and the less likely she is to
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She makes these excuses because the idea that the man she loves would choose to inflict such cruelty on her is almost impossible for her to comprehend
Gaslighting is when an abuser knowingly denies, fabricates and manipulates situations to make his partner doubt her own memory and perception.
His unpredictable responses lead her to ‘walk on eggshells’, endlessly hypervigilant, alert to the need to adapt her behaviour to prevent further abuse. Needless to say, the victim is left exhausted by constantly having to monitor her abuser’s emotional state.
Each abusive strand is now being woven so tightly and imperceptibly that it can feel impossible to describe what’s happening to outsiders – be they friends or police. Unless the abuser is brutish and clumsy and leaves evidence on her skin, she has no way to prove his violence. Without proof, it’s her word against his – and her story is so crazy, it sounds implausible.
Aside from extreme situations, in which the abuse is unrelenting, the perpetrator will at times profess their love, offer gifts, show kindness and express remorse. This is what’s known as the Cycle of Violence, where an explosion is followed by a period of remorse, then promises and pursuit, a false honeymoon stage, then a build-up in tension, a standover phase, and another explosion. The kindness expressed during the false honeymoon may feel genuine to the abuser, but this reward phase – like every other part of the cycle – is still all about maintaining control. Periods of kindness, no
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Whether perpetrators abuse strategically or on impulse, however, they usually have one thing in common: a supercharged sense of entitlement.
Abusers may make grand threats, but many are also finely attuned to the limits of their power and averse to being caught. Harming friends or family would risk police involvement; it’s less risky to hurt or kill the family pet.
‘It’s like being in a house with an assassin. You know there is someone there who’s out to get you. You don’t know how, when or where, but you’re sure it’s going to happen.’
In domestic abuse, degradation is obscenely targeted: unlike other captors, a domestic abuser has intimate knowledge of his victim’s fears, secrets and insecurities, and uses this to hone his taunts and insults.
Abusers commonly tell their partners they’re worthless, stupid and unlovable and, after a while, the woman may start to believe it. ‘If I had a quid for every woman who said to me over the years, “Give me a black eye any day. The bruise is gone in a fortnight. It’s the words that hurt, the words that stay,”’
‘You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being.’
each woman will have her own reasons for staying. The strong, independent woman believes she is the only one who can help him defeat his demons. The woman who grew up with violence may think she doesn’t deserve any better. The woman recovering from an abusive relationship seeks the protection of another man. A religious woman believes marriage is sacred. A woman from overseas is threatened with deportation if she leaves. A new mother is determined not to fail like her parents did. A young woman caught in the rush of her first love is eager to please and willing to change. By the time a woman
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What is wrong with all these women? Why don’t they just leave? If anyone ever did that to me, I’d be out of there in a heartbeat. When most people hear stories of domestic abuse, this is their kneejerk response. We like to believe we would act immediately, that we would see what was coming. We think we’re better than the women who end up in abusive relationships. We think we’d be smarter, stronger, quicker to act. We would never get trapped. Not like them. But think back to the times you forgave a lover for wronging you, or trusted them against your better judgement. To do that, you had to
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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.
No matter how clearly we depict what domestic abuse is like for women living underground, most people will resist understanding it. This resistance is deep and instinctive: we don’t want to know that the same forces that so blissfully draw us together can also become our single greatest threat. We need to believe in love, and we need to believe that any threat to our wellbeing would come from someone unknown to us.
In the years I’ve spent writing this book, I’ve found that it’s the questions we don’t ask that are the most confounding: Why does he stay? Why do these men, who seem to have so much hatred for their partners, not only stay, but do everything they can to stop their partner from leaving? Why do they even do it in the first place? It’s not enough to say that perpetrators abuse because they want power and control. Why do they want that?
The real devil of domestic abuse is in the details.
Between 2009 and 2016, more than half of American mass shootings started with the murder of an intimate partner or family member.
Lundy Bancroft says it’s no surprise that people believe abusers’ thinking must be disordered. ‘When a man’s face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane,’ writes Bancroft. ‘When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around … [it] is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill.’
According to the feminist model, domestic abuse is a natural byproduct of patriarchy: a system in which men feel entitled to dominate, discredit and disregard women. This model says that an abuser’s personal history is not the decisive factor in his abuse: pathology, upbringing, substance abuse and even class may influence an abusive man’s behaviour, but they don’t cause it.
‘Disrespecting women does not always result in violence against women. But all violence against women begins with disrespecting women.’
After more than thirty-five years working with violent perpetrators, he has arrived at a compelling idea: all violence begins with shame. In fact, he argues, the very purpose of violence is to banish shame and replace it with pride.
‘In a big corporate entity, you’ve got men who are exerting power, exerting control, are narcissistic, are audacious, they’re not willing to compromise on their ideals, they’re used to having their way, they bark orders, they expect to be listened to, they show no remorse. You know, that’s what makes a successful man in a corporate world,’ says domestic abuse survivor-turned-advocate Kay Schubach. ‘Those behaviours are completely inappropriate in the family, and yet you see it time and time again; you’ve got these kids who are walking on eggshells when Dad gets home, Mum is completely
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The essence of patriarchal masculinity, says Kimmel, is not that individual men feel powerful – it’s that they feel entitled to power.
That ‘entitlement to power’ is the key to understanding why men and women generally respond so differently to shame and humiliation. ‘Women are humiliated and shamed as well, and they don’t go off on shooting sprees,’ says Kimmel. ‘Why not? Because they don’t feel entitled to be in power. [For men], it’s humiliation plus entitlement. It’s the idea that “I don’t feel empowered, but I should.”’
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. MAYA ANGELOU, I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
The legal system is designed to protect men from the superior power of the state but not to protect women or children from the superior power of men. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN, TRAUMA AND RECOVERY
Until governments are willing to invest in affordable housing and crisis accommodation, they may as well throw their strategies to end domestic violence in the bin.
Women don’t just leave domestic abuse – they journey away from it, step by step. There is no straight path out – it’s a game of snakes and ladders, and women can slip back underground just when they’re about to escape. This means that any potential escape route needs attention and support.
Argentina introduced its first police station for women in 1985, and today in Buenos Aires alone there are 128 comisaría de la mujer y la familia (police stations for women and children), staffed by around 2300 police. They have all the powers of regular police – they conduct investigations, make arrests – but that’s where the comparison ends. Their structure is completely different – they report to the police minister via their own Commissioner for Women’s Police, not the head of the common police – and their mission is different too. Their primary purpose is not to enforce the law; it’s to
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Governments funnel millions into awareness campaigns, emphasising that domestic violence is not just physical. Report domestic violence, women are told: it’s a crime. But if we don’t treat coercive control as a criminal offence, is domestic violence really a crime?
For too long, women have been left to protect themselves and their families from men intent on destroying everything they love and cherish. Why should coercive control – the most dangerous kind of domestic abuse – be invisible to the criminal justice system? It’s not good enough to wait for the bruises to appear: we know controlling behaviours are red flags for future homicide. Scotland has set an example for the world to follow. It’s time that Australia got serious about protecting victims and made coercive control a crime.
Women will be told by child protection, it’s absolutely critical that your child have no contact with the [abusive] father, otherwise we’ll remove the child from you. Then the next week, they’re told in the Family Court it’s absolutely critical that this child has contact with the father
Survivors say that entering the family law system is like walking ‘through the looking glass’ and entering an alternate reality where everything is upside down.
Domestic abuse is core business for the family law courts – 54 per cent of cases involve allegations of physical violence, and 85 per cent allege emotional abuse.4 And yet, there’s little to no mandated training on domestic abuse for family law judges, lawyers or judicial staff.
We’ve got so much awareness. We’re sick of talking about it. This is not a ribbon, it’s not a colour, it’s not a hashtag. Just think: how many women and children this year have had to face the last moment of their life? That terror. That moment of going, fucking hell, make it quick. Yeah, you’re gonna kill me right now, I get it. But please don’t make me suffer. How can I not do something? NICOLE LEE, SURVIVOR-TURNED-CAMPAIGNER
Most perpetrators of domestic abuse will never be held accountable. There is little reason for them to believe the law will come between them and their victim. By treating domestic abuse like a lesser kind of violent crime, we are not working to change our society at the level that counts.
Let me be clear: to eradicate domestic abuse we do need to change community attitudes, as well as behaviour. This means confronting and overturning the prejudices that underpin gender inequality, from unequal pay rates to our gendered responses to shame and anxiety. Teaching kids what respectful relationships look like, and confronting bullying at school, is an essential part of this.
