Domestic Abuse and Austerity - Part 1

Furies: Poetry about sexual and domestic violence, published by For Books' Sake, with profits going to Rape Crisis and Women's Aid

One of the most dangerous situations to be in as a women in the UK today is to be trapped in your own home with an abusive partner or ex-partner. In 2017, 46% of all women killed were murdered by a partner or ex-partner. Austerity and the introduction of Universal Credit have made this situation more dangerous and more difficult to escape from. Domestic abuse, usually at the hands of hetrosexual men, kills 2 women per week in the UK. 104 women per year.  Domestic abuse happens within all sections of society, spanning multiple age ranges, ethnicities, socio-economic status, and education levels, but the women who are most vulnerable are the ones who are already poor and rely on the benefits system to survive both during their relationship with an abusive partner, and if the are able to leave. Those who are especially vulnerable are women who are asylum seekers, followed by those who are refugees and migrants who speak little English.  

One of the many questions people ask about abusive relationships is why don’t you just leave? This question shows how little cultural understanding we have of the complexity of domestic abuse. One of the most useful ways of explaining the insidious nature of domestic abuse is to understand the constellation of abuse - the multiple ways abuse is carried out and how it progresses. Abusers use emotional, social, financial, physical and sexual abuse to control and manipulate their partner, and they do it in increments. Usually the first and main form of abuse is emotional, most often with a cycle of intense declarations of love and grand gestures of proving that love, putting the partner on a pedestal and therefore setting them up to fail. Once a perceived failure has happened, once the partner does something that doesn’t fit in with the ‘perfect’ idea of them that the abuser has created, the abuser will become angry, cold, cruel, say hurtful things and then blame their partner for their behaviour. They will often say that their partner made them say the hurtful things or that they just lost control because they were feeling hurt. If both people get angry and say or do hurtful things, the abuser will deflect responsibility for their behaviour onto their partner and make them feel guilty for both their response and the abusers behaviour. This places the responsibility directly onto the partner and creates the narrative that if only the partner behaves exactly as the abuser wants them too, then the abuser will be kind. The abuser then goes through a phase of remorse, while still putting responsibility for their actions onto their partner and often other people such as parents, but the key thing is, it will be put onto anyone but themselves. Then they return to the intense demonstrations of love, and the cycle begins again. 

At first, this may be easily brushed off as an ordinary argument between a couple, where hurtful things are said, sometimes by both people. Once the abuser is back in the ‘intense love’ phase of the cycle, the partner can easily believe that things are ok, and it was an anomaly. This is why domestic abuse is so insidious and difficult to extract yourself from; it starts with a feeling of discomfort, a minor hurt, but we often don’t have the knowledge or language to explain exactly why this is different from other relationships. This is especially difficult for anyone who has been in an abusive relationship before with family members or friends, as this will feel normal. Even if you know you don’t like it, the intensity of the initial demonstrations of love and the resurgence of the loving behaviour makes people reluctant to leave - what if they throw away a potentially good relationship? In general, people want to be loved, they want to be wanted, and they may be scared of being lonely. This also aids gaslighting - if someone wants to talk about behaviour they feel is a problem to their abuser, the abuser will minimise thier bad behaviour and will dismiss thier partners feelngs. So much abuse happens because women in particular have been lead to believe that we are ‘biologically’ over-emotional, we are over-sensitive, that we over-react. This is cultural conditioning that enables abusers to more easily manipulate women and make us dismiss our feelings and makes it harder for us to assert healthy boundaries. It erodes the self-worth that we need to be able to say that only we get to decide whether someone’s behaviour towards us is acceptable or not, and implies that men are entitled to over-rule us because they are more ‘rational’, despite obvious displays of intense emotion such as anger. It also implies that ending a relationship is an agreement that two people come to together, rather than each person having the right to end a relationship they don’t want to be in. 

Survivors of domestic abuse will say that at first, most of the time their relationship was in the  intense love phase of the cycle with only a few incidents of cruelty or hurt from which they quickly moved on, but didn’t ever actually resolve. But every time this cycle occurs, the breaking down of self-worth and self-belief and the gaslighting becomes more and more effective. While the cruelty and aggression increases and lowers the person’s self esteem, the person then feels that they need more reassurance from their abuser during the intense love stage of the cycle. Because they are being repeatedly told that it is their fault their abuser becomes abusive, that they did something wrong to proke the abuse, they concentrate on behaving the way their abuser wants them to in order to avoid the abuse. They will also often feel empathy and compassion towards their abuser if they say that they have been abused themselves. This is a way of using the victim-perpetrator-rescuer relationship triangle for the abuser to always position themselves as the victim, and therefore not be responsible for their own behaviour. When challenged about their behaviour, they will move themselves from the perpetrator position to the victim position, by telling their partner that they did something to make the abuser behave the way they did. This makes the partner the perpetrator and the abuser the victim. The abuser will then often be remorseful and blame their behaviour on abuse they suffered themselves, say they can’t help it, and then say that they are worthless and awful and be relentlessly self-critical. This reaction moves the partner into the rescuer position - it is their role to then comfort and reassure their abuser, while the abuser claims total remorse and that they will be different in the future, at the same time as blaming both their partner and other people for their behaviour. The exhaustion of going through this cycle, the relief that the cruel abusive phase is over and the empathy the partner feels for their abusers pain then leads them back to the beginning of the cycle.   

Over time, the incidents get gradually worse, and the abuse phase of the cycle lasts longer. Abusers then also introduce the other forms of abuse to increase and maintain control over the relationship, at the points where the emotional abuse and manipulation have made their partner vulnerable to accepting other forms of abuse as part of their relationship, and continuing to blame themselves for it. The abuser will create justifications for behaviour like having increasing control of all of the finances, often framed as saving their partner from themselves, gaslighting them into believing that they are incapable and that the abuser is helping them by taking control of their money, for their own good. A similar form of manipulation is used to socially control and isolate their partner, using a combination of claiming that their partners’ friends and family are bad influences on them, and that the abuser is suffering because of their partners participation in their own social life in some way. This can come in the form of jealousy, mistrust and ownership over their partner, often claiming that they love their partner so much they can’t bear to be away from them, that they get jealous and possessive as proof of their love, and that if their partner was a good person, they would appreciate this and not cause their abuser to feel bad. 

One of the reasons people find it so difficult to leave an abusive relationship is that when these behaviours begin, they may appear to be superficially similar to ordinary relationship problems. This means if they do confide in friends or family, the narrative that it is normal and nothing to worry about will be reinforced by people they trust. Abusers are almost always outwardly charming and can maintain a likeable persona when they are meeting family and friends, so that when the abuse does get worse, it is difficult for loved ones to match this behaviour to the person they think they know. As women internalise misogyny like the assumption that all women are over-sensitive, other women may reinforce this narrative instead of refuting it. By the time abuse becomes more extreme, the overwhelming feeling partners usually feel is shame. They have internalised the blame put upon them by their abuser so much, it has transformed from believing that it is their own fault because they did something to provoke their abuser, to it being their own fault for suffering the abuse because they didn’t leave.

The biggest source of shame women carry is often a combination of the most easily demonstrable form of domestic abuse - physical violence, and the one that is least likely to be believed by others - sexual abuse. Sexual abuse is more damaging and insidious in a different way, especially for women. We are still culturally conditioned to think women’s sexuality is shameful in itself, that women who enjoy sex are dirty and immoral, and the ‘sexual script’ of our culture demands that women be sexually attractive and responsible for holding off men’s advances. Men are expected to always want sex and we still claim that they are unable to control themselves. We still expect women to be able to control the sexual relationship despite most women being physically weaker than most men. We are still given the most inconsistent of messages about our sexuality; we are supposed to walk the tightrope of sexy enough but not too sexy, not too boring but not to adventurous, and to satisfy male sexuality while only enjoying what he enjoys because he enjoys it (and yes it is fundementally cis and heteronormative)  When we cannot get consent and communication consistently right within relationships that don’t display other signs abuse, sexual abuse in abusive relationships seems almost inevitable,  at the same time as being one of the things that women are most ashamed of and least believed about. As a culture, we still don’t hold men accountable for their sexual behaviour in general, never mind specifically in abusive relationships. 

Some of the most extreme and damaging cases of domestic abuse don’t involve physical violence. The ones that do present the biggest risk to a woman’s life both during a relationship, and if they are able to escape. Physical violence happens incrementally just as the other forms of abuse do, with it getting increasingly worse as time goes on. It tends to happen later on in relationships because it is the only form of domestic abuse that we are culturally conditioned to find unacceptable. Abusers will often restrain themselves for longer because they are aware that this is the most likely deal breaker in a relationship. But that means it also carries a lot of shame - if someone stays after even one incident of physical violence, they are not just blamed by their abuser, but as a culture we often blame them too. We often want to believe that we could never end up in an abusive relationship, so we search for a fundamental difference between ourselves and survivors - one of which is the insistence that in their place, we would have just left. One of the most horrifying things about this is that the most dangerous time for a person who has been abused is when they are planning to leave and when they have left. At that point, the abuser feels that they have nothing to lose, they have already lost control of their partner, and the only way to regain that control is to kill them. 

In order to prevent the literal murder of survivors who have managed to leave an abusive relationship, they need to be supported and protected by various social services. Some are able to go to family or friends for support, but rebuilding your life takes a huge amount of time, effort and resources. Survivors often have to leave absolutely everything behind in order to escape, and not just material things. Survivors have had to leave workplaces and any known addresses of family and friends in order to stay safe. They often need somewhere to live, money, basic necessities such as clothing and toiletries, and long term therapy. Some survivors have had to move house multiple times because their abuser keeps finding out where they live and terrifying them with verbal and physical violence. In order to gain any kind of police protection, proof of harm needs to be given, and this often means that survivors have to wait until after their abuser has found and attacked them before they can be protected. Places that take survivors in without question were already over-subscribed and underfunded. Austerity has made things significantly more dangerous for survivors by cutting all the services they need to stay safe and re-build thier lives. Refuges for those fleeing domestic abuse have been closed due to funding cuts and services reduced, with long waiting lists for places. Cut to the police force mean that the police are even less able to protect survivors and prevent them from being attacked and killed by ex-partners. In order to receive any kind of protection, survivors have to prove that their abuser has previously harmed them and will do so again. They must go through multiple interviews, repeating and re-living the abuse they have suffered, and constantly having their memory, judgement, and morals questioned. It is both triggering previous trauma from abuse already suffered, and repeating the gaslighting they experienced during the abusive relationship. It can take months or years for the process to be completed, during which the survivor may be restricted from accessing trauma therapy. Many survivors find this process to be as traumatising as the abuse they suffered in the first place, and there are very few survivors who chose to use the justice system for this reason, and even fewer convictions.   

The changes to Universal Credit have made it easier for abusers to control the finances of the poorest and most vulnerable, made it harder for survivors to leave, and harder for them to receive the support they need after they leave, and the difficult conditions that survivors face may even lead them to return to their abuser. It takes an enormous amount of emotional strength to leave an abusive relationship. Survivors suffer from anxiety, depression and complex PTSD as a result of the abuse they have suffered, and these problems don’t go away just because they have left. Sometimes in the aftermath of such a huge change, mental health issues become worse as survivors attempt to figure out what they are going to do next. If survivors are faced with the additional problems of awful housing, no money, no possessions, cut off from their family or friends, unable to work and no immediate access to therapy to help them cope, it may seem better to go back to their old life. The same toxic thought patterns will be in their minds, and they may slip back into the old cycle of believing that maybe this time their abuser has changed. They might even have accepted they probably haven’t but decide they would rather go back to a situation they know than face a difficult and miserable immediate situation alone.  

Things are particularly harrowing for survivors who have children with their abusers, as the way parental custody is enforced re-traumatises survivors. In cases with domestic abuse and children, the rights and safety of the child is supposed to come first, as the most vulnerable person in the situation. However, because of the disparity between the evidence needed to convict someone of domestic abuse and the evidence needed to involve social services in children’s lives, survivors often end up having their rights being considered last. There is a fundamental lack of understanding about how domestic abuse harms children even if there is no evidence that the abuse has happened directly to them. This means that they parental rights of abusers are still in place as they would be if no abuse had occurred. It also ignores the wealth of evidence in studies on the way abusers control their victims which highlights that abusers use children as a way to continue to abuse and control their victim, during their relationship and after they have left. This includes threatening to sue for full custody of the children, telling the child lies about the victim, including that the victim doesn’t really love them, and directly harming the children.

It is well documented by victim support groups that the process regarding custody of children is incredibly harmful to survivors, most of whom are women. If a child is identified as at risk, both the parents are required to attend meetings with other adults who care for the child, such as someone from their nursery or school, a doctor, a health visitor, a social worker etc depending on each situation. Women who have been told that they have to end a relationship with an abuser or risk having their child taken into care, are then forced to attend meetings with their abuser to talk about the child’s wellbeing, and if they don’t attend, they risk having their child taken into care. They are then expected to listen to their abuser talk about what they want in terms of access and custody, and are expected to be able to explain why they do or don’t agree with their abuser right in front of them. If the survivor wants to try to get full custody of the child, legal aid has been decimated the point where abuser and survivor will often have to represent themselves in court because they can’t afford to pay for solicitors. In order to provide proof of abuse, this means survivors will have to cross-examine their abuser and be cross-examined by their abuser. This process is so harmful and ineffective, that survivors are often advised to just agree to whatever recommended access their abuser has to the child without going to court, because the abuser may be awarded more custody if they do. The survivor is then forced to have contact with the abuser, with no supervision or protection, during the time the abuser picks up and drops off the child; if they refuse, it is they who risk having custody taken away.

This entire process shows how survivors are systematically re-traumatised, disbelieved and punished for being victims. Any further disadvantage like people who are LGBTQ, BAME, refugee or asylum seekers, migrants with English as an additional language, physical or learning disabilities, poverty, being a sex worker - any and all combinations of these make the situation so much more difficult. We blame the victim in cases of domestic abuse in a way that is only otherwise seen in case of rape and sexual assault, which are again perpetrated mostly by straight men against women. Due to the way the benefits system and legal systems are institutionally loaded against victims and survivors, domestic abuse is known to be a low risk, high reward crime for perpetrators, and austerity has made this so much worse by destroying the already flawed services that are supposed to support victims and survivors. The victims and survivors of this trauma are left to try to survive, escape, and rebuild their lives if they can. Most perpetrators never change, and spend a lifetime abusing the same woman or multiple women, starting the cycle over again with every new relationship. However, things do not have to be this way. There are ways the system can change to better protect victims, survivors and not compromise our commitment to human rights and innocent until proven guilty. (More in Part 2)

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