by Kerry Daynes
She had called the police on three occasions, but no action was taken nor had charges been brought. She said that after the third time Paul gave her such a beating in punishment she didn’t dare report him again. Join any discussion on domestic abuse, and you’ll hear someone ask why women don’t just leave or call the police. It sounds so simple. But the dynamic between two people in an abusive relationship is incredibly intense, a spinning wheel of violence and shock, deep remorse, emotionally powerful reconciliations, hope and elation. And then the terror. After a period of calm the victim knows something is coming, they just don’t know when, and they attempt to see it off by changing their behaviour – going ‘into’ themselves, disappearing, doing whatever it takes to keep the peace. But they never can. And inevitably there is more violence, and the cycle begins again.
For both parties in this potent loop, each repetition of the cycle propels them to the next. The victim adapts quickly, as the threat of violence creates a strong incentive to learn. She begins to believe that her circumstances are a result of her personal failure, and views herself as worthless, weak. When she is a good girl, it will stop. Until then, she doesn’t deserve anyone else’s love. The abuser also becomes attached to the power they hold, and the skilful use of violence and manipulation to achieve the deference that they expect from their partner. This wretched dynamic is like a scar tissue that meshes them together. So leaving, while it may appear like an obvious course of action to many, often feels impossible for the victim.
Alison had found a much sought-after place at a women’s refuge, but Paul had followed her and forced her to come home, threatening to tell social services just how mad she was and that they’d take away her children. Alison had a habit of cleaning, meticulously and repeatedly cleaning. He said that she’d get locked up if people knew about it.
She explained that she’d worked in a restaurant as a teenager, and the place had been temporarily closed down because it had breached food hygiene regulations. Her mother – an exacting woman who she could never please – had suggested that she couldn’t have possibly been doing her job properly, and the compulsion to clean crept in. Rituals that had later grown into something she did when she was feeling anxious, a way of trying to impose order on the chaotic stream of worry in her mind, which by this stage in her life occupied every waking moment. She described how Paul would torment her by crushing packets of biscuits and crisps and scattering the contents around the house.
Her medical records showed she had been admitted to hospital more than a few times over the past couple of years with unexplained injuries – once for burns to her throat after drinking bleach. At the time she’d told doctors it was an accident. When I asked her about it she told me that Paul had forced her to drink it one day when he’d become irritated by her cleaning. He’d forced his hand over her mouth and held her nose to make her swallow it. The doctors knew that this was no accident – I’ve certainly never met an adult who drinks bleach by mistake – and they asked her if she needed to tell them anything. But she had stayed quiet, too scared of her children being taken away if she said anything. A nurse came to talk to her but, getting nowhere, ended the conversation by implying that if Alison kept ‘going back to that, she must enjoy it’.
Alison told me he raped her. She said that on Saturday afternoons he would get obliterated with the vodka from the garage and then would usually expect to have sex. If Alison didn’t seem enthusiastic he would force himself on her anyway. If she didn’t look like she was enjoying herself, he would sometimes strangle her until her vision blurred and she felt light-headed.
*
On the night she killed him, Alison said she hadn’t slept properly for days – things had been calm for a while but the tension was building – she couldn’t stop memories of previous assaults from rushing to the front of her mind and sucking the breath from her throat. She said she felt jumpy that afternoon, on eggshells, but also worn out with the effort of trying not to antagonize him and of trying to stop herself cleaning. She had cried a little bit and he told her to stop ruining his mood. She went into the kitchen so he couldn’t see her, and he shouted to her from where he was lying on the sofa, ‘Bring me a bottle from the garage.’
This was when she had lost control of her bowels – I had noted the evidence of this in the pictures from the kitchen. In her soiled trousers, shaking with fear, she walked to the garage and, standing in front of the bottles of vodka, she had reached down and picked up a pipe wrench instead. She described how at that moment her terror turned her ‘numb, like I was floating’. She turned around and walked straight into the lounge, and standing just behind Paul, who was prone on the sofa with his eyes closed, brought the wrench down onto his head with all the strength she could muster. She couldn’t remember precisely how many times she had done it.
She drew in breath as she told me this, visibly horrified by what she had just said. Then she said: ‘Poor Paul, poor Paul.’
He was motionless. She could hardly explain it, but said it still seemed to her like he was jumping up at her in a rage, yet he wasn’t actually moving. She could only recall jumbled thoughts and panic; she had run back into the kitchen and grabbed a small serrated knife from the knife block and stood there, holding it in front of her for what seemed like a long time, expecting him to burst through at any moment. When she went tentatively back into the lounge she shook him to see if he was alive. Even though it was only because she had shaken him, the movement of his body had terrified her and she punched down on his chest, stabbing him. But he was dead already by then.
Looking down at her hands, she began to say ‘Poor Paul’ again, but before the words could come she threw up.
*
Sitting in the traffic on the long drive home, nudging slowly along the familiar grey vistas of the motorway, I thought about how I recognized the classic cycle of abuse she described to me. I recognized it not only from the many hours I’d spent studying the dynamics of domestically abusive relationships, but from my own experience.
After I’d left HMP Wakefield I’d continued to see the prison officer. But it had quite quickly turned sour. His behaviour became increasingly domineering and frightening, when I didn’t dress as he wanted, fill the kettle from the right tap, put a smile on my face like he wanted or go along enthusiastically with sex as and when he wanted. It was what we now refer to as coercive control, I can spot it at 30 paces these days. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and back then we didn’t have a word for it. The onset was so insidious that I may not have identified it, even if we had.
It became intolerable when I started my new job as a trainee forensic psychologist in a hospital secure unit. This kind of opportunity didn’t come up very often in those days and I was proud of myself for landing it; I’d made the transition from student volunteer to fully paid, fledgling psychologist. Our relationship had started to feel like the fly in the ointment of my life. I desperately wanted out, but also knew that the moment when an abusive relationship ends is when the risk of harm increases.
I eventually managed to leave, but he didn’t want to make it easy for me to go. He began to turn up at my work. Colleagues would tell me he was lingering in the car park or had marched into the reception area demanding to know if I had left the building for the day. He’d bang on the front door or his face would appear at the window of my home at the same time as the phone would start ringing off its hook. I closed the curtains, and sat immobilized until he eventually went away.
On a typically dismal 31 October – Halloween – I’d arrived home from work in the evening and run in to the house just as it was starting to rain. I saw trick or treaters down the road and in a mean-spirited moment thought to myself that they’d be getting soaked in a minute. I rushed in through the door, threw my coat down in the hall and went straight into the kitchen to see if my housemate was home – she wasn’t. When the doorbell rang, I practically skipped to the door, expecting to see the painted faces and plastic masks of children.
It wasn’t them.
*
A few days later it was my housemate who made me call the police, with the ultimatum that if I didn’t, she would. It is bloody difficult to make that phone call. I was filled with foreboding about setting in motion the chain of events I knew would follow.
Because when a victim of domestic abuse makes that decision, and calls the police, they are starting a story with only two possible endings, neither of them happy: either the authorities decide not to take action, and hell waits for its dues at home; or action will be taken, and they will have to face a new reality – their life and everything they know, upended and dispersed. All I really wanted was for him – everything – to go away. Reporting a crime felt like inviting a whole new wave of problems into my life. Still, I called them, and many months later found myself in court.
Dr Albert von Schrenck-Notzing was the first psychologist known to have testified in court when he gave evidence about the credibility of witness testimony in a Munich murder trial in 1896. I’d been imagining my first moment in court since what seemed like 1896. In my vision I was the erudite expert, holding the court in thrall as I educated judge and jury with my accomplished testimony, Queen’s Counsel sighing ‘no further questions Your Honour’, conceding defeat in the face of my professionalism under cross-examination. What I hadn’t ever aspired to was giving evidence as the victim, cheeks burning, struggling to phrase my justifications for not complaining sooner.
In the court proceedings that eventually followed, I testified that I felt like a performing seal, constantly trying to keep the mood upbeat and see off a potential rage that could be triggered by something minuscule and, once ignited, could blaze for days. So I understood the state of perpetual fear that Alison talked about – always expectant, waiting for something to blow up and doing everything you can to avoid it – but finding over and over again that you can’t, because of course it isn’t your behaviour that is the problem, it is theirs.
It was only a local magistrates’ court – small, so no jury, just three magistrates, me, my ex-boyfriend and his legal advocate, a prosecutor, but also what appeared to be an assembly of the entire nation’s press. His solicitor – doing his job – asked me a series of personal and embarrassing questions about the relationship we’d had. This was a man I had had an on-and-off relationship with, had been intimate with, after all. Wasn’t I making a big fuss about nothing? Surely this was a lovers’ tiff? The over-reaction of an attention-seeking, hysterical young woman. I was a timewaster, a liar – at least that was what I was being told.
He was convicted of harassment two weeks later, and sentenced to 18 weeks in prison, of which he could expect to serve nine. In actual fact, he only spent a weekend in prison; after the trial his solicitor sprang into action, arguing that as a prison officer he was in too much danger from other inmates – and his sentence was later dropped on appeal.
Media reporting of crime and actual events so often seem to exist in different dimensions, entirely unconnected by truth or facts. Newspapers sell stories and stories get spun to suit their agenda. This episode had all the salacious elements of the perfect tabloid story – the prison officer and the redhead. Of course that was how this tale was going to play out in the tabloids.
When I caught that surreal first glimpse of myself on a news-stand as I went to work that morning I felt suddenly unsteady, like I was in a lift that was going down too fast. When I walked into the communal ward area, where all the papers were laid out on the table every day, there I was on the front page of most of the tabloids. One had gone with a classic prison pun about the warden who got his lag over with the firecracker shrink. Another had dedicated two full pages to the story. Referring to a very difficult piece of evidence I’d given, they’d opted for a lurid description of his scrawling across my naked breasts in lipstick – he’d actually written ‘feminist bitch’ on me. I was stunned at the time that a man would turn me into a human graffiti wall (and that he knew how to spell feminist) and I remain stunned to this day that this most personal detail of my testimony was repurposed by a journalist as cheap titillation.
It is very difficult to describe shame. I’d been gradually getting a measure of how deep it cuts via my clients – both the victims and the ones who had done terrible things to others. But perhaps it is something you have to feel in order to fully appreciate it. I went to the toilets and stood looking at myself in the mirror, sick at my own image.
My supervisor could see I was in no state to work and told me to go home. Almost as an afterthought he said: ‘But before you do, you need to go and apologize to Dr Wilcox.’ Dr Wilcox was the consultant psychiatrist whose team I was attached to. I should go and show my remorse to my superiors, like a kid who had stolen a biscuit. They weren’t angry, just disappointed. Unquestioning, I barrelled into his office and babbled a nonsensical apology. The man clearly didn’t know what on earth was going on and got me out of there as quickly as he could. I’ll never forgive my supervisor for further humiliating me that day. He was a generally decent and supportive man who I otherwise enjoyed working with, but on that particular occasion sensitivity deserted him.
When I came back to work a day or two later, no one in the staff room mentioned it. Not one colleague. Everyone knew about it by that stage but no one said a word, it was eyes down in every office I walked into. My colleagues – highly skilled nurses and psychologists – didn’t see past the headlines. Or if they did they never told me, or asked how I was feeling. Their discomfort was palpable. The subtext was that this wasn’t how we did things, we were mental health professionals and this was something that happened to our patients, not us. All I could do was try to keep my head up, but it was hard.
On my first day back I sat down for five minutes alone in the patients’ communal area – where the newspapers had been – and three of the female patients approached me. They were holding a small bunch of white daisies, obviously picked from the lawn outside. These women – people with learning difficulties, who heard things, had visions and held unusual beliefs, who were supposedly far out of touch with reality – stood there and handed me these daisies. They didn’t say a word but I knew what they were for. They nodded silently at me, and I nodded back. This little trio had more compassion in that moment than any of the staff – the experts who couldn’t even speak to me or look at me.
I was on a yearly renewable contract and, a couple of months later, when my contract wasn’t renewed, I knew immediately why. I had been with the hospital for almost two years and there had never been any issue with my work. My ward manager even wrote to the directorial board to express his dismay at my leaving. But the contract wasn’t renewed and no explanation was given – none was needed, I wasn’t being sacked, after all. There was simply no further requirement for my post. My supervisor told me, off the record, that I had embarrassed the hospital and there was concern about how I had apparently let this happen. They felt I was an inappropriate person to work with some of the male patients who had sexual offence histories (although it was OK for them to share a ward with female patients).
And so I went. I thought that was it; I had messed it all up. I had ended my own career before it had begun. He had returned to his job (a spotless criminal record is on the desirable list on the person specification for prison warden, but isn’t actually necessary for the job) but I had somehow lost mine. Not only that, I had humiliated myself in the most public way.
A well-meaning friend gave me her kitten, Serendipity, aka Dippy, to look after for the weekend while she was away. Everyone knows that when you are sad, you need a kitten. Dippy was cute, but as it turned out also part Tasmanian devil, and she spent the weekend ripping every piece of furniture I owned to shreds. Every pot plant got turned upside down and the soil sprinkled liberally across my living-room carpet. When I tried to vacuum up the mess, I realized my Hoover was broken. It was just a bit of soil, but in that moment it was also the last straw. I sat on the floor and sobbed quietly into Dippy’s sof
t fur. My life was a shambles and I couldn’t tidy it up.
Oh yes, I appreciated Alison’s position. But I wasn’t there to empathize. Emotional empathy – not just understanding but feeling what another feels – is a beautiful, but also capricious and short-sighted sentiment, not helpful in the professional analysis of the forensic psychologist. It can muddle your thinking and has no place in the context of a forensic evaluation for a court. It is not my job to identify with anyone, no matter how much I might recognize my own story in theirs. None of my experiences and subsequent prejudices are relevant when I am assessing a client.
*
Alison’s solicitor sent me copies of the statements taken by police from the couple’s neighbours and people who knew them. She was regularly seen with bruises and injuries; in fact, it was common knowledge that Paul hit her. Almost every statement I read said the same thing: I told her to get away, I said she should leave him. No one mentioned telling him to go away, to stop beating her up.
How naturally we seek out and find culpability in the victim. Alison had been told that she was the one at fault long before she had picked up a weapon and become the aggressor.
There was no doubt that Alison was what most people might call a battered wife; hers was a classic case of ‘battered wife syndrome’. This depressing term acknowledges the deep and lasting psychological effects of the kind of ongoing, cumulative abuse Alison had endured at Paul’s hands. But it’s not my preferred terminology; something about it makes it sound almost like a lifestyle choice, like ‘stay-at-home mum’ with violence. More relevant, it is neither a category of legal defence, nor a recognized diagnostic label in psychiatry.
In the UK we skip between two diagnostic systems: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is produced by the American Psychiatric Association, and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), produced by the World Health Organization and used throughout Europe. (Even in psychiatry we can’t decide who our most special relationship is with.) Battered wife syndrome doesn’t appear in either.
