See What You Made Me Do: The Dangers of Domestic Abuse That We Ignore, Explain Away, or Refuse to See

by Jess Hill

In the hands of a sophisticated abuser, even the most secure and strong-minded woman can be reduced to someone utterly unrecognizable, even to herself.

Almost uniformly, victims who haven’t been physically assaulted say they wish their abuser would just hit them…anything to make the abuse “real.”

“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.”

“DDD,” or dependency, debility, and dread. To achieve this effect, the captors used eight techniques: isolation, monopolization 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.

techniques common to domestic abuse match those used by practically anyone who trades in captivity: kidnappers, hostage-takers, pimps, cult leaders. This shows us that there is nothing uniquely weak, helpless, or masochistic about victims of domestic abuse.

They don’t use violence just to seize power in the moment or gain the advantage in a fight. Instead, they use particular techniques—isolation, gaslighting, surveillance—to strip the victim of their liberty and take away their sense of self.

it can take victims months or years to realize that their partner’s “difficult” behavior is actually domestic abuse.

Before women realize they’re a victim of domestic abuse, they see themselves as just another woman in a difficult relationship, albeit one that may be more difficult than most.

“He was chasing me with an ax this day, and then I just had enough. I said to him, ‘Just do it cunt, ya dead dog. If ya gonna be a big man, just do it and put me outta my misery.’”

The connection between domestic abuse and mass shootings is now explicit, especially in the United States, where mass shootings (defined as killing four or more people in a single incident) have become so commonplace, they occur on nine out of every ten days on average.

“What perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn out to often have in common, more than any particular religion or ideology, are histories of domestic violence.”19

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them.”

The fear that they will be devalued in the eyes of their community is so great that they feel a need to bury what was done to them.

Although men are powerful as a group, they do not necessarily feel powerful as individuals. In fact, many individual men feel powerless (whether they actually are or not). The essence of patriarchal masculinity, says Kimmel, is not that individual men feel powerful. It’s that they feel entitled to power.

bell hooks, “anti-male.”23 Often, these are women who have been seriously harmed and traumatized by men’s violence. They are victims and survivors of child abuse, rape, and domestic abuse, and they have channeled their fear of and revulsion to men into a vengeful fury.

Men’s pain—especially in relationships—sounds to us “like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.”

They were often chronic oversharers, divulging the most intimate details to virtual strangers,

Common symptoms of complex PTSD are:

What we can measure—more or less—is domestic homicide. This data tells us that 16 percent of America’s homicides are due to intimate partner violence,2 and that four men kill their current or former partner every day.3 Police data, too, shows that domestic abuse is one of America’s most serious law-and-order problems: every forty seconds, police are called out to a domestic incident. In fact, domestic abuse is the number-one reason people call police for help.4 Now, as you digest those statistics, consider that only 25 percent of domestic assaults are reported to police.5 Imagine if they were all reported.

What is truly scandalous, though, is the number of Native American women that disappear and are barely looked for. In Montana, where they make up just 3 percent of the population, Native American women account for 30 percent of all missing persons.

more than 90 percent of Native women who’ve suffered violence from a partner have been victimized by a non-Native offender. Why this anomaly? As Assistant Professor Andrea Smith explains, “non-Native perpetrators often seek out a reservation place because they know they can inflict violence without much happening to them.”

The Lakota culture, for example, held that “the woman owned her body and all the rights that went with it.”32

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute… Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.56

Wife Torture in England,

The Fatal Shore,

many tribally-initiated conflicts and ‘uprisings’ (like the Great Sioux Uprising in 1862) were responses to kidnapping and sexual mistreatment of women.”