Reading: Tough Love
May. 25th, 2010 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thousandmilesblogThe following is an extract from Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion, from the fourth chapter, entitled 'Tough Love'. For context, a young woman has just been describing the emotional, physical and sexual abuse she comes home to each night from her boyfriend. I've tried to select an extract that conveys some good points but won't be too difficult to read for people who have been through similar experiences, so there's nothing especially graphic here. I'm not always going to stay away from graphic description, because it has its place, and I will give warnings when it appears. This piece discusses domestic violence and rape.
Her boyfriend's violent behaviour has left Amy feeling utterly isolated. Yet, as a statistic, she is in tragically great company. One in four women living in the UK will, like Amy, experience violence at the hands of a current or former partner. Amy had never told anyone about the abuse before she got in touch with me during my research for this chapter. 'I physically cannot vocalise it.' The abuse has consumed Amy's life. She has been eating very little, describing it as an attempt to 'move towards invisibility ... at that point where I wouldn't cause offence in Andrew because I would simply disappear.' She has also been drinking a lot. 'Alcohol is blissfully forward-looking; it's hard to remember things when one's drunk.' From an observer's perspective the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse Amy is experiencing is a classic and clear-cut case of domestic violence. It has formed a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour. It is abuse Andrew could and should be criminally prosecuted for and for which Amy should receive extensive treatment and support. But from Amy's point of view it all seems much more confusing. She recently went on a research trip to Italy without Andrew. 'While I was struggling to maintain social norms part of my head contemplated suicide. All I could think about was maybe I'd be better off dead. All this, and I was a thousand miles away from him. Actually that was part of the problem. I thought, "Why am I having these feelings when I'm so far away?" - which is part of the reason I sometimes think the problem is 100 per cent me.' Violence against women is a phenomenon that knows no boundaries: race, wealth, culture, nationality, economic and political systems - it cuts across them all. And it comes in many forms - domestic violence and rape beng amongst the most prevalent. In total, one in three women throughout the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused at some point in her life.
So how is it possible that Amy can think 'it's me' when there is such a clear pattern? Because sexist violence is the Houdini of modern-day social crises - inexplicably escaping all attempts to pin it down, name it, and contain it. It is everywhere and nowhere, natural but unnatural, predictable yet without cause. Local newspapers frequently feature individual articles about women being murdered by their current or former partner - as might be expected given that domestic violence causes more death and disability among women aged between sixteen and forty-four than cancer or traffic accidents. Yet front-page headlines of an epidemic are nowhere to be seen. Girls and women are taught that it is their daily responsibility to mitigate the threat of rape by being careful what they drink and not walking home alone at night - as if shielding their body from the natural elements. Yet when the threat materialises and the perpetrator comes into frame, he is portrayed as an unnatural being, a beast or a stranger; else the victim herself is implicated in the blame and the rape denied. And while the UK government is able to predict that 100,000 women will be raped each year in Britain - equivalent to 2,000 women a week - only 6.5 per cent of those that are reported to the police end in the conviction of a perpetrator, and there is little public discussion about the aspects of our culture that encourage so many men to choose to rape women. Rape, as with most violence against women, is widely seen as a causeless problem. Our approach to violence against women is filled with contradictions, falsehoods, and illusions.
Incidents of violence against women do, of course, take place against a backdrop unique to the specific time, place, and context of personal histories and individual relationship dynamics. But the daily crimes committed against Amy and millions of women and girls like her are not random. Look beneath the surface and you find the roots of all these individual acts connected in a tangle of gender inequality that is planted firmly in the heart of normal, everyday society - in behaviours deemed 'manly', in cultures deemed 'traditional'. Rape, domestic violence, harassment, stalking: uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge, while these are all deeply personal acts, they are also profoundly political acts drawing on a common ideology. They express and bolster the power assumed by one social group over another. The only way we will ever be able to uproot violence against women - what Amnesty International have declared as 'the greatest human rights scandal of our times' - is by changing the cultural landscape that nurtures it and dispelling the illusions which act as shelter.
Evil Giraffe
Her boyfriend's violent behaviour has left Amy feeling utterly isolated. Yet, as a statistic, she is in tragically great company. One in four women living in the UK will, like Amy, experience violence at the hands of a current or former partner. Amy had never told anyone about the abuse before she got in touch with me during my research for this chapter. 'I physically cannot vocalise it.' The abuse has consumed Amy's life. She has been eating very little, describing it as an attempt to 'move towards invisibility ... at that point where I wouldn't cause offence in Andrew because I would simply disappear.' She has also been drinking a lot. 'Alcohol is blissfully forward-looking; it's hard to remember things when one's drunk.' From an observer's perspective the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse Amy is experiencing is a classic and clear-cut case of domestic violence. It has formed a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour. It is abuse Andrew could and should be criminally prosecuted for and for which Amy should receive extensive treatment and support. But from Amy's point of view it all seems much more confusing. She recently went on a research trip to Italy without Andrew. 'While I was struggling to maintain social norms part of my head contemplated suicide. All I could think about was maybe I'd be better off dead. All this, and I was a thousand miles away from him. Actually that was part of the problem. I thought, "Why am I having these feelings when I'm so far away?" - which is part of the reason I sometimes think the problem is 100 per cent me.' Violence against women is a phenomenon that knows no boundaries: race, wealth, culture, nationality, economic and political systems - it cuts across them all. And it comes in many forms - domestic violence and rape beng amongst the most prevalent. In total, one in three women throughout the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused at some point in her life.
So how is it possible that Amy can think 'it's me' when there is such a clear pattern? Because sexist violence is the Houdini of modern-day social crises - inexplicably escaping all attempts to pin it down, name it, and contain it. It is everywhere and nowhere, natural but unnatural, predictable yet without cause. Local newspapers frequently feature individual articles about women being murdered by their current or former partner - as might be expected given that domestic violence causes more death and disability among women aged between sixteen and forty-four than cancer or traffic accidents. Yet front-page headlines of an epidemic are nowhere to be seen. Girls and women are taught that it is their daily responsibility to mitigate the threat of rape by being careful what they drink and not walking home alone at night - as if shielding their body from the natural elements. Yet when the threat materialises and the perpetrator comes into frame, he is portrayed as an unnatural being, a beast or a stranger; else the victim herself is implicated in the blame and the rape denied. And while the UK government is able to predict that 100,000 women will be raped each year in Britain - equivalent to 2,000 women a week - only 6.5 per cent of those that are reported to the police end in the conviction of a perpetrator, and there is little public discussion about the aspects of our culture that encourage so many men to choose to rape women. Rape, as with most violence against women, is widely seen as a causeless problem. Our approach to violence against women is filled with contradictions, falsehoods, and illusions.
Incidents of violence against women do, of course, take place against a backdrop unique to the specific time, place, and context of personal histories and individual relationship dynamics. But the daily crimes committed against Amy and millions of women and girls like her are not random. Look beneath the surface and you find the roots of all these individual acts connected in a tangle of gender inequality that is planted firmly in the heart of normal, everyday society - in behaviours deemed 'manly', in cultures deemed 'traditional'. Rape, domestic violence, harassment, stalking: uncomfortable as it may be to acknowledge, while these are all deeply personal acts, they are also profoundly political acts drawing on a common ideology. They express and bolster the power assumed by one social group over another. The only way we will ever be able to uproot violence against women - what Amnesty International have declared as 'the greatest human rights scandal of our times' - is by changing the cultural landscape that nurtures it and dispelling the illusions which act as shelter.
Evil Giraffe
