by Jess Hill
In Biderman’s chart, there was no category for physical abuse. Though it was frequently used, actual violence wasn’t ‘a necessary nor particularly effective method’ to gain compliance, and the more skilled and experienced interrogators avoided it. They only needed to instill the fear of violence, which they did with ‘vague threats, and the implication that they were prepared to do drastic things’. The Chinese communists were not like the Germans or the Japanese – they didn’t want to just brutalise their prisoners or work them to death. They wanted to control their hearts and minds.
When Biderman released his findings, people were incredulous. Could people really be manipulated so easily? Was he sure there was not something he had failed to detect? But Biderman was adamant: ‘Probably no other aspect of Communism reveals more thoroughly its disrespect for truth and the individuals,’ he wrote, ‘than its resort to these techniques.’3#
In the 1970s, when women began fleeing to newly opened shelters, they spoke about being isolated from friends and family, instructed on how to behave, degraded, manipulated, sexually violated and threatened with death. Physical violence was common, and could be sadistic in its extremes, but survivors insisted it was not the worst part of the abuse – and some were not physically abused at all. In her groundbreaking book Rape in Marriage, Diana Russell presented two lists side by side: Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, and the common techniques of domestic perpetrators. The lists were virtually identical. The only difference was that whereas captors in North Korea deployed the techniques tactically, husbands appeared to be replicating the system of coercive control unconsciously.
In 1973, Amnesty International included Biderman’s Chart of Coercion in its Report on Torture, declaring these techniques the universal tools of torture and coercion.4 As Harvard psychiatrist and trauma specialist Judith Herman would later write, ‘The [coercive] methods that enable one human being to enslave another are remarkably consistent.’ In situations of domestic abuse, the effect of coercive control is the same: the perpetrator becomes ‘the most powerful person’ in the victim’s life, and their psychology is ‘shaped by the [perpetrator’s] actions and beliefs’. Domestic perpetrators don’t need physical violence to maintain their power – they only have to make their victims believe they are capable of it. This threat is particularly effective, wrote Herman, when it is directed towards loved ones: ‘Battered women, for example, frequently report that their abuser has threatened to kill their children, their parents, or any friends who harbor them, should they attempt to escape.’ This atmosphere of threat is enough to ‘convince the victim that the perpetrator is omnipotent, that resistance is futile, and that her life depends upon winning his indulgence through absolute compliance’.5
Today, thanks to the pioneering work of experts like Herman, Lewis Okun and Evan Stark, we know that that the techniques common to domestic abuse match those used by practically anyone who trades in captivity: kidnappers, hostage-takers, pimps, cult leaders. What this reveals is that there is nothing uniquely weak, helpless or masochistic about victims of domestic abuse. Faced with the universal methods of coercive control, their responses are no different from those of trained soldiers.
In fact, for victims of domestic abuse, resistance is even harder than for other captives. A hostage, for example, often knows nothing of their captor, and generally regards them as an enemy. As Herman explains, a victim of domestic abuse doesn’t have this advantage. She is ‘taken prisoner gradually, by courtship’. Before she feels trapped by fear and control, it is love that first binds her to her abuser, and it’s love that makes her forgive him when he says he won’t abuse her again. Abusers are rarely simple thugs or sadists – if they were, they’d be far easier to avoid or apprehend. Instead, like all men, they can be loving, kind, charming and warm, and they struggle with personal pain and uncertainty. This is who the woman falls in love with.
Fairytales and Hollywood movies have led us to interpret the warning signs of domestic abuse – obsession, jealousy, possessiveness – as signs of passion, not danger. By the time this ‘passion’ begins to morph into abusive and domineering behaviour, the victim already cares deeply for the perpetrator, and will minimise and excuse his behaviour to protect him, and their love. If she’s to resist becoming captive to his abuse, she will have to do the very opposite of what we do when we’re in love, as Herman describes:
Not only will she have to avoid developing empathy for her abuser, but she will also have to suppress the affection she already feels. She will have to do this in spite of the batterer’s persuasive arguments that just one more sacrifice, one more proof of her love, will end the violence and save the relationship. Since most women derive pride and self-esteem from their capacity to sustain relationships, the batterer is often able to entrap his victim by appealing to her most cherished values. It is not surprising, therefore, that battered women are often persuaded to return after trying to flee from their abusers.6
What should surprise us about domestic abuse is not that a woman can take a long time to leave, but that she has the mental fortitude to survive.
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Perpetrators exist on a spectrum: from family men who don’t even realise they’re being abusive, to master manipulators who terrorise their partners. Whether domination is the aim or simply the result of their abuse, all use similar methods, but to varying degrees.
Some perpetrators know exactly what they’re doing; their abuse is premeditated and tactical. Rarely do you see this as blatantly as in this exchange between two Facebook users in the group ‘Aussie Banter’. Says one: ‘Covertly reduce her self-belief and self-esteem to a point where she has to rely on you to survive, then threaten to dump her for being needy.’ Says another:
The place should be devoid of any cell phones or land lines, cars should be manual, neighbor should be fought on regular bases [sic] and cops should also be paid routinely! … Behave for the first 6–8 months, she’ll think he is the perfect one and when she’s emotionally invested and reliant then start off as she’s an easy picking now and has dropped her guard. An honest word of caution: Never introduce her to your friends as those Rambos might jeopardize the fucking plan. The power of suggestion over and over again will wear her down and no matter how empowered she is she will kneel! It’s the way they’re hardwired and oh they’ll make the same mistake again and again. Luring them in is the best sport one can play.7
Most abusive men, however, would be hard-pressed to articulate such ‘tactics’: they reinvent the techniques of coercive control accidentally and spontaneously. This is perhaps one of the most confounding aspects of domestic abuse: whether an abuser is a cunning sociopath or a ‘normal’ man afflicted by morbid jealousy, he will almost always end up using the same basic methods to dominate his partner.
This doesn’t mean that all domestic abuse is the same. We will explore this in more detail in Chapter 3, but for now, think of it this way. Domestic abuse occurs on a spectrum of power and control. At the highest end, perpetrators micromanage the lives of their victims, prevent them from seeing friends and family, track their movements and force them to obey a unique set of rules. This abuse is called ‘coercive control’ (and sometimes ‘intimate terrorism’) – the type of oppression Biderman first identified. Here, two types of intimate abuser are commonly identified: the calculating abuser who knowingly manipulates and degrades his partner so he can dominate her; and the paranoid, emotionally dependent abuser who becomes more controlling over time because he’s afraid his partner will leave. They both fit under the title of coercive controllers. At the lower end of the power and control spectrum, we have abusers who are not so intent on dominating their partners, who better suit the term ‘insecure reactors’. But let’s look at the coercive controllers first.
COERCIVE CONTROLLERS
According to Evan Stark, the American sociologist who popularised the term, perpetrators of coercive control make each household ‘a patriarchy in miniature, complete with its own web of rules or c
odes, rituals of deference, modes of enforcement, sanctions and forbidden places’. Victims are commonly isolated from friends, family and other supports, and ‘frequently deprived of money, food, access to communication or transportation, and other survival resources’. This kind of controlling violence is deeply rooted in a historical imbalance of power, which is why, in heterosexual couples, it is almost exclusively perpetrated by men. ‘To make contemporary women their personal property, the modern man must effectively stand against the tide of history,’ writes Stark, ‘degrading women into a position of subservience that the progress of civilisation has made obsolete … As batterers themselves have pointed out to me over the years, there would be no need for so many men to deploy elaborate means to control female partners if women still accepted subordination as a fate bestowed by nature.’8 Based on the available research, Stark estimates that 60 to 80 per cent of female victims who seek help have been subjected to a type of coercive control.9
Coercive control is a very particular kind of violence. Coercive controllers don’t just abuse their partners to hurt, humiliate or punish them. They don’t just use violence to seize power in the moment or gain the advantage in a fight. Instead, they use particular techniques – isolation, gaslighting, surveillance – to strip the victim of their liberty, and take away their sense of self. As Stark explains, the aim of coercive control is ‘total domination, rather than simply to win compliance on a particular issue’.10 In other situations of domestic abuse, the victim may feel degraded, angry or helpless, but may not actually be afraid of their abuser. Coercive control is different. It is a strategic campaign of abuse held together by fear.
‘Tom’ is a typical coercive controller. He met ‘Melissa’ when she was seventeen, and within six months, insisted they get married and move to his farm, far away from Melissa’s family. After promising a countryside idyll, Tom became controlling, jealous and violent. When he wanted to punish Melissa – for disobedience, or whatever he’d just come up with – he’d drag her around the house by her hair. Any mention of Melissa going out was a provocation. ‘I was stuck there,’ she told me. ‘I had no friends, no family. I was in a prison, basically.’ Tom undermined Melissa’s self-esteem so severely that she felt she had no options outside the relationship, and was fearful of what he might do if she tried to leave. Then there were the apologies and promises from the Tom who really loved her, who needed her help to become a better man, who only hit her when she ‘provoked’ him.
Over the next thirteen years, they had two children together. Each time Melissa fell pregnant, Tom would stop the physical violence and assume the role of ‘protector’. ‘If I wasn’t eating right, he’d force me to eat,’ she says. ‘I’d be about to vomit and he’d be forcing me to eat, saying, “I don’t want anything to be wrong with my child.”’
One day, Melissa told Tom she planned to go to the movies with a woman she’d managed to befriend on a rare trip into town. In thirteen years, Melissa said, she had never once been on a girls’ night out. Tom turned on her, teeth clenched, and snarled, ‘You’re not fucking going anywhere.’ For the first time, Melissa stood up to him. ‘I said, “Well, I’m letting you know that I’m going on Friday, whether you clench your teeth or not. I’m not your daughter, I’m your wife.”’ When Melissa returned home that night, Tom had locked her out of the house.
The next time Melissa decided to venture out, Tom came at her more ferociously than ever. He accused her of having an affair, and punched her so hard she was thrown across the room. This time, Melissa fought back. ‘I just felt this power,’ she says, with a faint smile. ‘I jumped up and knocked him flying over the bloody computer table. He was just so shocked that I’d done it. I said, “Don’t you ever do that to me again. You ever touch me, or push me, or shove me again, I’m gonna divorce you and I will leave.”’
Tom didn’t hit Melissa again for three years. The next time he did, she left.
INSECURE REACTORS
All domestic abuse is about power, in one way or another, but not all perpetrators enforce tight regimes of control. At the lower end of the power and control spectrum are men who don’t completely subordinate their partners, but use emotional or physical violence to gain power in the relationship. They may do this to gain the advantage in an argument, to get the treatment and privileges to which they believe they’re entitled, or to exorcise their shame and frustration. (This is a kind of domestic abuse women also perpetrate, as we’ll read in Chapter 7.) Evan Stark calls this ‘simple domestic violence’. That doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous – men who are insecure reactors can end up killing their partners, too.
Susan Geraghty, who has been running men’s behaviour change programs since the 1980s, says that no matter what culture they grew up in, the attitude of these men is the same. ‘It’s the self-righteousness that kicks in, where if I don’t get my way or you don’t agree with me, or if this isn’t happening the way I want it, I have every right to show my displeasure and punish you.’ However, these are also the men most likely to confront their own behaviour. Those Geraghty works with are there by choice – not mandated by court order – and they are usually not coercive controllers. ‘To a large degree,’ she explains, ‘these are men who have lived with violence, have incredible issues around intimacy and have never learned to communicate. Their sense of frustration with that [is] profound.’
‘Nick’, a burly man in his mid-thirties, is a typical insecure reactor. When I met him at the home he shares with his wife, ‘Ani’, and their two sons, he was still serving the last weeks of a domestic violence order. A year earlier, during an argument late one night, Nick picked Ani up and threw her out of bed. Her screams woke up their eldest son, who came running into the room to find his mother sobbing on the floor.
That night, Ani called the police. As they were loading Nick into the divisional van, he turned to one of the police officers and said, ‘I’m not a criminal.’ It was the first time Nick had been physically violent towards Ani, and he certainly didn’t consider himself an abusive husband. But Nick was about to discover that not only had he committed a crime that night, he’d been inflicting domestic abuse on his wife for years.
At a local men’s behaviour change program, Nick and the other men in the group were astonished to learn that verbal, emotional, psychological and even financial abuse counted as domestic abuse. ‘I actually didn’t know what family violence constituted, and a lot of people don’t. Probably the biggest one was language – the derogatory language. That’s the bit that probably really woke up most of the men in the program,’ he says. ‘I could assure you that the true meaning of family violence is misunderstood by 95 per cent of men.’
Nick may fit the profile of an insecure reactor, but he’s not typical: he’s one of the rare men who has committed to at least try to change. When I met him, he was trying to reconcile with Ani, who he said was willing to give him another chance. But regaining her trust was harder than he had anticipated. ‘Even recently she said, “I’m scared of you.” It really hit me for six; I got really upset. I suppose it gave me a reminder to say, hang on a minute, it could take you ten years to … it could be never. She could be always scared of you. And that really eats me up.’
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It would be much easier to police domestic abuse if perpetrators fit neatly into a particular category. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way: the line between these two groups is very hazy, and can be easily crossed. Insecure reactors, for example, may turn into coercive controllers, and coercive controllers may pretend – especially in court – to have merely overreacted, like an insecure reactor. Some perpetrators won’t fit into either category, especially those whose violence is driven by psychosis. Despite this uncertainty, it’s still vital to understand that not all domestic abuse is the same.
WE FIGHT A LOT: IS IT ABUSE?
It can be hard to pinpoint where garden-variety fighting ends and domestic abuse begins. Most people have arguments with the person they love. It�
�s normal to feel jealous, say things you regret, even scream the house down. In a healthy relationship, both partners negotiate power: over money, housework, socialising, childcare, sex and so on. Though one partner may have more power in a particular domain, overall, power is reasonably evenly distributed between them. In relationships where one partner is abusive, these same power struggles occur. But if one were to animate these couples, the abuser would be depicted as twice the size of their partner. Outsiders, like police, may see that couple fighting and judge the violence as mutual. But this is a dangerous mistake. Where there is a severe power imbalance, the ‘smaller’ partner – the victim – is always at a severe disadvantage, no matter how fiercely they fight. Indeed, the perpetrator will often make it look like they are the ones being abused.
So how can you tell? There is a simple test: relationship conflict becomes domestic abuse when one partner uses violent, threatening, or coercive behaviour to gain power over the other person. Another test is that the victimised person will generally feel afraid of their partner. But that fear may not come straightaway. Some victims will start off feeling confused, even angry. Fear can build over time, sometimes imperceptibly – just as the heat builds slowly for the proverbial frog in the boiling pot.
THE BLUEPRINT FOR ESTABLISHING POWER
Using Biderman’s chart as a guide, I will now outline the basic techniques used to varying extents by all abusers, regardless of culture or creed.† Under each technique, I have included some common tactics and behaviours, but it is by no means an exhaustive list. With each new technique that is deployed, the bonds of coercive control are fortified, and become tighter over time. It’s the cumulative effect of these techniques that is devastating for victims, not just the isolated incidents. The longer a woman stays, the harder – and more dangerous – it becomes to leave.
