What We Talk About When We Talk About Domestic Violence

Every now and again, a book comes out that causes me to reevaluate what I thought I knew about women’s history. I felt that way when I read Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 history of rape, Against Our Will, praised for its “absolute lack of precedent” and its examination of rape as military strategy, from Troy to Vietnam.  (Today, Brownmiller could add an appendix about recent conflicts in Serbia, the Middle East and Africa.) Brownmiller doesn’t shy from calling rape “nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear."

Now this year comes See What You Made Me Do, a book with a perfect title about domestic abuse -- of which rape can be a part -- by Australian investigative reporter Jess Hill. She points out that domestic abusers consider themselves the victims -- hence her title.

In late June 2020, I was on a Webinar with Hill, hosted by the International Center for Journalists. Hill talked about the questions perennially asked about abused women: Why doesn’t she just leave him? What did she do to piss him off? What we should ask, Hill said, is Why does he do it? Why does he stay? Why does he want power and control over his partner?    

Hill writes mainly about Australia, where she lives and works, and where domestic homicide is an enormous and frequently horrifying problem. For example, in February 2020, a man doused his wife and three children with gasoline and burned them to death inside a car before killing himself.

But much of Hill’s reporting in her book covers the U.S., where one in four women will experience domestic abuse in her lifetime, or applies to American situations. She prefers to talk about “domestic abuse,” because she has found that most of it does not involve broken noses or bruises. She carefully teases out the roots of violence in the man first isolating his partner from her friends and family and then assuming complete power over her, minutely controlling every aspect of her life, from whether and where she can drive, to the length of curtains, to how she runs a bath, to the household goods she buys - or doesn’t.

If she disobeys him, he may enforce that control with threats of violence against her, their children, or their pets. But he may never, ever touch her or injure her -- until he kills her.

Hill elaborates on the perpetrator’s use of control: “There are criminal offences committed within domestic abuse, but the worst of it cannot be captured on a charge sheet. A victim’s most frightening experiences may never be recorded by police or understood by a judge.”         

It’s not a crime to tell your wife what to wear, writes Hill, or how to clean the house, or to constantly monitor how she spends money. “It’s not a crime to convince her that she’s worthless, or to make her feel that she shouldn’t leave her children alone with you.” These, says Hill, are the “red flags” for domestic homicide. But “by the time that crime occurs, it’s too late.”

There is some research that supports instances of overweening control leading to the victim’s murder. A handful of American psychology researchers and a sociologist have found that “when the women leave, the [men] try to get even.” But these researchers told Hill that federal funding agencies are no longer interested in exploring domestic violence or violence in general.

 Ann Marie Cunningham is a Columbia University Lipman Fellow for 2020 who will be working with the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting. She is a veteran journalist/producer and author of a best-seller. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Technology Review, The Nation and The New Republic. Contact her at amclissf@gmail.com.