Someone said to me once: ‘I can’t believe a woman like you would have stayed in domestic violence. I would have left. I wouldn’t stand for it.’
Just a heads-up, never say that to a survivor. It’s the worst kind of shaming. It suggests that there are two types of women. Strong women who don’t get into relationships where they experience violence. And those who do. By the simple binary, it ‘others’ survivors as weak, and blames them for not leaving. For not being a woman ‘like you’. Someone who doesn’t accept violence.
Something I know from being on the inside. It doesn’t happen like that. Violence generally isn’t an explosion, it’s a slow, slow implosion, a poisonous erosion.
This statement also suggests that staying in violence is a choice. And that whether or not you are a victim of violence is the choice of the victim. It affords agency to a woman who has had her agency smashed on the floor. Yes you have choice, but you’ve lost your capacity to make one. It’s a kind of madness.
The statement also forgets about perpetrator responsibility. It negates the context of coercion. It disappears the bigger story of violence, which weirdly has very little to do with the outbursts of actual violence and more to do with the invisible hand that sits at your throat. It does not acknowledge the unspoken destruction. The erosion of your own self love. The fear and adrenaline that pulses under your skin. The sense of dread. The mistrust of your intuition. The missing future. The lack of options. And the hope. Fuck the terrible, abysmal, festering abscess of hope.
The hope that the person you love will change. That the nightmare will finish, and you will wake up and things will be different. Violence isn’t a straight line. It’s tricky. That’s why it’s so dangerous. Often we love our perpetrators. That makes it even more confusing. I loved my father. He was an alcoholic. His violence was part of his disease. It was the trauma of his father living in my father. Sometimes the hands that hurt you are generations old. The person can be kind, and loving, and sorry. So very, very sorry. For a person living in violence, this is confusing. As a victim of violence you often become a counsellor to your perpetrator. Their sorry feels like love.
And in the long weeks of them being sorry, you forgive, and you let them back. The door of your heart swings open and they’re in. They’re back on the comfy chair with their shadow on the wall. A giant, lingering darkness. And when that man becomes a monster, reunited with his shadow self, as you should have known he would, as your friends said he would, as he promised he wouldn’t, you live with the shame that it’s not just him who can’t be trusted. It’s you.
And you didn’t leave. You stayed. And the people who love you are getting impatient and annoyed you can’t see what they see. So when it happens, the violence, the circle of people you can reach to for help gets smaller, because the stain of shame gets bigger.
It takes so much courage to leave. Because we all know that’s the most dangerous time. When we are most likely to die. So living through this, it’s extraordinary. It’s a fucking miracle.
There aren’t two types of women. There’s just us. It has been me. It could be you.
This Wednesday is the Reclaim the Night march in Lismore, at the QUAD, at 6pm. Be part of a new narrative to end violence.
All welcome.
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