I recently joked on both Facebook and twitter that my cat
tried to kill me. He dipped his paw into
his water bowl and dripped microscopic drops of water onto the kitchen
linoleum, which I stepped into, causing me to slip and fly across the floor, ramming
into the cupboards and countertop before slamming into the ground. A few bruises and aches later I’m none the
worse for wear. But it wasn’t always
this way.
There was a time when I sported bruises and felt aches for a
far less benign reason. I, like seven out of ten women, am a survivor of domestic violence. It’s been 30 years since my former husband
and I parted ways and I haven’t seen him in all that time, but I still have
nightmares. Maybe only once or twice a
year, but I still have them. Of course, that’s
better than the night terrors that plagued me for the first few years.
When people tell me that they cannot imagine me as a victim
of DV, they often ask me why I stayed.
The reasons were too numerous to name, but among them was the fact that
he told me often that he would kill me if I ever left. This was not an idle threat, as almost 1/3 of female homicide victims in the US are at the hands of an intimate partner. My early dreams were usually about him coming
after me to do so, even though I had moved almost 2000 miles away. I would shoot up in bed, shaking and
sweating, terrified that he was right outside the window or door.
He abuses me still in my sleep, most often sexually. I wake feeling dirty and defiled and
powerless. That is perhaps the most
lasting injury of all. That sense of
powerlessness. The thought that there is
nothing I can do to change it. In some
sense, it is still true, even though my current suffering is “virtual” and has
been for years.
Yet, like Janay Palmer, I married my husband after he first
abused me. I stood by him for several
years. I both believed that he could
change and that he never would. That it
would get better and that I would die at his hand. That it was my fault and if I would only change,
the abuse would stop. That no one else
would ever love me and so I had to make this relationship work. Some of these thoughts were a result of what
he told me. Some of them were very old,
ingrained in my childhood and upbringing.
All of it made me feel simultaneously culpable and vulnerable.
This is why last week while I was in Prayer Circle at my
church, I tried to explain that I felt for Janay Palmer Rice. It was wrong for the media to keep showing
the video of her abuse at the hands of her then-fiancé Ray Rice, and for
youtube to make it accessible to anyone and everyone all the time. One parishioner, a wonderful older woman, couldn’t
understand my point of view at all.
“But if it brings this type of behavior to light and helps
to make a change, isn’t it a good thing?
If it had been you in the video, wouldn’t you have wanted to have it
shown because of the possible end results?” she argued.
No. No, I wouldn’t
have. I wouldn’t have wanted the world
to see me exposed that way. I looked it
up on youtube just to make sure that I had my facts straight, but you’ll notice
I didn’t include a link in this blog.
You can go find it yourself if you need to view it for whatever reason. I find my parishioner’s argument to be as
fallacious as Ravens’ owner Steve Bisciotti’s that “if this becomes a seminal moment for domestic violence
and the way we handle it as a society, it's not a burden for us to become the
poster boy.”
Domestic violence is unacceptable. Individuals being beaten up verbally,
physically, emotionally, and sexually at the hands of those who supposedly love
them is unconscionable. That should be
clear without any need to see it.
Period.
