My Best Friend Was an Abuse Victim and I Didn’t Even Know It
The number of women murdered in the US by their partners or exes between 2001 and 2012 was just under 12,000, according to an October 2014 article in Huffington Post. This is double the number of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during this period!
It is common to think of domestic violence as something that happens only in movies, or in crime reports. This also tends to stereotype the problem as a collection of situations and cases that imply that domestic abuse is always physical. Since very long ago, the impression that I formed of such abuse was from crime shows and newspaper reports.
Getting to Know Domestic Violence from Up-Close
A few years ago, I was at my friend, Judy’s place for a get-together of sorts. We hadn’t seen each other in two years, and I wanted badly to see Judy’s little, happy home, and her kids, Samantha and Matt. We were looking at old photographs on her laptop, when Rick, her high-school sweetheart and now husband, returned from work. Judy followed Rick upstairs and came back with news, I had to leave. The family was to leave immediately for a dinner hosted by Rick’s boss.
What shocked me was not the way it came out of the blue, but the way my friend had said it. The otherwise-composed Judy had looked hassled, even desperate. When she phoned me in the evening to tell me they hadn’t gone to any such dinner after all, I wasn’t surprised. When I met her the next day, I knew my friend had been taking emotional, psychological and sexual abuse without even realizing it.
The Flawed Projection of Abuse
According to a report on domestic violence by The Guardian, the media chooses to distort domestic violence, presenting it salaciously. The same article goes on to say that the focus of the media is on how physical violence is carried out, and not on the motivations behind it. This excludes cases where abuse is inflicted in indirect forms, without necessarily harming individually, and alienates the victims of such abuse.
On the day of our second meeting, Judy told me she had come on the pretext of seeing her gynecologist. After a lot of cajoling, she finally admitted to unwillingly carrying a third child. In a little while, everything began to fall in place. This included why she hadn’t seen me all this while and why her sister hadn’t visited her in four years. She added that Rick’s apparent ‘possessiveness’ meant she wasn’t allowed to mingle with or talk to men.
The Need to Realize Domestic Violence in Time
What was still more surprising was Judy’s refusal to believe she was being traumatized and abused. It was only when we both talked to another friend of mine, a counselor, that she realized things were not normal. She revealed further that Rick apparently had trust issues and that she had to snap a lot of her relationships owing to his controlling behavior. He had also indulged in sexual coercion and nonconsensual sex.
Several meetings and rounds of counseling sessions later, Judy was convinced to file for a restraining order. We got in touch with Kelsey Mulholland from Ruvolo Law Group, LLC, who was then hired as Judy’s divorce attorney, helping her not only win the case but also arranging for child support. A restraining order provided complete protection from her abuser.
The need to realize domestic violence in one’s household is so urgent because it transcends class, ethnicity and education. The number of African-American women suffering intimate partner violence was 35% higher than that suffered by white women, according to a University of Minnesota statistic. From celebrities openly abusing their girlfriends and athletes murdering their partners to spouses of the physically challenged abusing their disability, domestic abuse is pervasive in our society. It is time we recognized it and did something about it.
