#intimate partner violence

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#MeToo is over if we don’t listen to ‘imperfect victims’ like Amber Heard | Martha Gill

It is only the rare misogynist who outright admits they don’t believe women. Their objection has always been just to this one bitch, who is lying.

#MeToo (the clue’s in the name) attempted to combat this by linking experiences – all those bitches who weren’t believed – so we could see the pattern. In fact, you could say the whole project of feminism is about taking bad things that happened to women, which they thought only happened to them, or were their fault, and calling them by one name. Divide us back into unlinked individuals who might be lying, and the movement is lost.

#MeToo is often framed as having uncovered truths about the world – its success was because women “explained really clearly” what was going on. No. People already knew what was going on. #MeToo worked for the reason any feminist movement works: strength in numbers. 

Consciousness raising. Collective action.

I just got a PM about this very issue this week. The person accused me of “cynically using feminism to justify supporting toxic abusive femininity.” When it’s just one woman, no matter who she is, it’s very easy to dig holes, to use half truths to spin the worst possible conclusions, and to attack the person rather than the case itself.

Even the worst, the serial rapists, the serial abusers, who have a dozen, twenty, five dozen accusers … all started out saying the same thing. That one woman accusing them is crazy and a liar. Those two women accusing him are both crazy and liars. It got to the point that Bill Cosby had dozens of accusers before people started to think he did it, and even then it took a man’s stand up act for the public to actually listen. And even Hannibal Buress was called a jealous no-talent comedian at first. Harvey Weinstein could easily dismiss his victims by claiming there was only one accuser and she was just Rose McGowan. Or it’s just Courtney Love. Weinstein still, to this day, denies assaulting McGowan even as he was convicted of an almost identical crime against another actor and TV production assistant.

Amber Heard was forced to publicly testify about her own rape and abuse with zero protections from the court. The sentence “Lance Bass acts out Amber Heard’s testimony on tiktok” shouldn’t make sense but it’s something that happened. Of the people who heard the testimony, some refuse to believe it. Of the people who believe it, some refuse to believe it’s a problem (“but if a famous man sexually abused me I’d be into it because I’m a kinky kool girl not like that frigid bitch”). Of the people who believe it’s a problem, some refuse to acknowledge that Heard didn’t deserve to be raped because they feel a personal level of hatred for her (“we just don’t like you, Amber”). That’s leaves the rest of us, saying that no matter who a woman is, she doesn’t deserve to be raped and abused. And we’re accused of ‘cynically using feminism’ when we say this basic fact.

I have been abused by a few men in my life. I don’t have that level of evidence that Heard has. I don’t have a successful court case on record, let alone two cases in two different countries. And I see what’s really happening here. And my abusers, who walk around to this day thinking they did what they were entitled to do, also probably see what’s happening. And I’ll bet they approve of it.

All strangulation of women is serious – and it’s time for the law to step up

Jamie Read, 31, attacked his girlfriend so ferociously, she thought she was going to die. He had followed her home after drinking in a pub. In court last year, Ramsay Quaife, prosecuting, said: “All of a sudden, he grabbed her throat and squeezed her hard. The victim was barely able to breathe… She saw him take six steps back before lunging at her and kicking her in the face with the sole of his trainer. He repeated this twice more.”

Read admitted assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The judge, Recorder John Trevaskis, said Read wouldn’t receive rehabilitative help in prison and gave him a 16-month jail term suspended for two years. Read walked free from court.

Next month, on 7 June, as part of the Domestic Abuse Act (2021), non-fatal strangulation (NFS) and suffocation becomes a free-standing offence, punishable by up to five years in prison in England and Wales. Campaigners including the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) and We Can’t Consent To This – who challenged the defence where the perpetrator claims it happened as part of “rough sex gone wrong” – have long argued that NFS, if prosecuted at all, was frequently charged as common assault, receiving a sentence of a few months.

An estimated 20,000 strangulations a year are reported to women’s charities. “The vast majority are a way of exerting power, fear and control – but not fatal,” says CWJ’s Nogah Ofer. Prosecution is also impeded because it is often treated as a private matter, normalised by the increasing use of pornography. Yet NFS increases the odds of a woman being killed by a staggering seven times.

According to the Femicide Census, established by Karen Ingala Smith and Clarrie O’Callaghan, with whom the Observer has collaborated in a year-long campaign to better tackle femicide and violence against women and girls (VAWG), a woman is killed by strangulation every two weeks.

“The Femicide Census has consistently found that strangulation is the second most common method after stabbing that men use to kill women,” says O’Callaghan. “It’s long overdue that the criminal justice system catches up.”

In 2021, Anthony Williams, 70, “choked the living daylights” out of his wife, Ruth, 67. He received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. The new NFS offence is a vital opportunity to put a brake on coercion, control, intimidation, violence and killing – all of which statistically impact on women far more than men.

However, while senior judges and the judicial colleges are in discussions with the Ministry of Justice, nationwide training for police, health workers and all those engaged in bringing a perpetrator to trial, so far, appears non-existent. “Women’s lives are at stake. The government should be seizing the initiative and ensuring that everyone involved is trained,” says Julia Drown, patron of the charity Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse (AAFDA), and a member of small group of experts who have been lobbying for accelerated action.

Last year, Sam Pybus, 32, pleaded guilty to manslaughter after strangling Sophie Moss, 33, during what he alleged was consensual sex. He was jailed for four years and eight months – a sentence that triggered a public outcry but was upheld by the appeal court. A pathologist’s report found Moss’s injuries “do not suggest a very prolonged or very forceful strangulation”. Strangulation does not need to be prolonged or forceful to cause serious long-term damage.

Dr Catherine White is the foremost expert and researcher in strangulation in the UK. She is scathing about the lack of progress. The voluntary expert group of which she and Drown are a part has struggled for months to raise £7,000 to pay for two excellent half days of free training in NFS. Finally, NHS England provided the funds.

“Hopefully, we can ignite a fire in the belly for more training. But why are we volunteers doing this?” White says. “The Ministry of Justice should be knocking on my door, asking for training. The government says it is spending millions on VAWG but, when you look at the scale of the challenge, it’s peanuts.

“No one seems to be in overall control, driving forward a co-ordinated response. It feels like re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The impact of strangulation, control and sexual violence is huge, yet the societal and government response is so lacking.”

Last year, White and colleagues published I Thought He Was Going to Kill Me, a three-year study of 204 adult cases of NFS as part of a sexual assault. Some 96.6% of the victims were female. In 27% of the cases, the woman had been strangled before by the same perpetrator. Over one in six had been strangled to the point where they lost consciousness.

It takes skill and training, often not found in GPs’ surgeries to detect the signs. One American study reported that “NFS might well be the equivalent of waterboarding – both leave few marks; both can be used repeatedly with impunity”.

White’s study reported that a male handshake has 80-100lbs per square inch (psi) of pressure. It takes 20psi to open a fizzy drink can. It takes only 4psi to occlude a jugular vein.

Strangulation is external pressure to the neck that cuts off air, or the flow of blood to the brain (choking is different, caused by an internal obstruction to the airwaves). For those who survive, symptoms include strokes, depression, memory loss, seizures, motor and speech disorders and paralysis. The connection of these symptoms to NFS is often not recognised.

White’s commitment to properly tackling NFS was triggered by taking a course at the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention, Texas, co-founded in 2011 by lawyers Gael Strack and Casey Gwinn. The institute now trains thousands of frontline workers every year across the US.

A medical assessment, vitally, has to include imaging (MRI and CT scan) and forensic documentation of internal and external injuries. This approach has helped the San Diego domestic violence homicide rate to drop by 90% since the 1980s.“Strangulation is much more common than we realised – but also so much more serious then we ever gave it credit for,” says trainer Cat Otway.

Forensic physician Dr Helena Thornton has worked at St Mary’s Sexual Assault and Referral Centre, Manchester, with White for 27 years and is registrar of the faculty of Forensic and Legal Medicine. The General Medical Council refuses to allow forensic and legal medicine to become a specialisation so, incredibly, there are no national guidelines on training, qualifications and exams. In addition, senior forensic clinicians are retiring and not being replaced – so who will give evidence in court?

“St Mary’s is commissioned by police and the NHS but, in a lot of areas, the service has been outsourced for the lowest price, as cheap as possible,” Thornton says. “In some parts of the country, you might see someone who has received only three days’ forensic training. The faculty sets out what to expect from good treatment.

“When I see a patient, questions have to be asked, such as did you black out? When you came round, had you wet or pooed yourself? If you lose control of your bowel, that isn’t fear. It means you are seconds away from death.

“It’s embarrassing so a woman is unlikely to volunteer that information. If you haven’t been properly trained, you’re not capturing the evidence.”

Alarmingly, if you have been strangled but not sexually assaulted, it will be extremely difficult to find the level of examination required. White would like to see a branch of Strack’s institute in the UK, but that, too, has proved a struggle. “Everyone thinks it’s a good idea but, like training, no one seems to have a budget. I’ve seen statements where it’s just said, ‘red mark on neck’. What the heck is that – a felt-tip pen? A bruise?

“That lack of information influences whether the police and the Crown Prosecution Service decide to continue with the case. When you see the unfairness of the system for patients, that’s what gives me the energy to keep on fighting.”

Over the past two years, a national conversation about VAWG has been prompted by lockdowns, rising rates of domestic abuse, the exposed criminality of some police, and the shocking deaths of Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman and Sabina Nessa, among many others. Still, as O’Callaghan and Ingala Smith have argued for years, little attention is paid to the misogyny that is VAWG’s root cause – and to prevention.

The three aims of the Observer’s End Femicide campaign, now concluding, are: name it (government is reluctant to use the gendered word “femicide”, a killing of a woman by a man). Secondly, know it, for example, by improving data on racially minoritised women; and thirdly, stop it.

The government has a number of initiatives, including a domestic abuse plan and a VAWG strategy, while investing small pots of money, for instance, in police training (£3.3m). However, weighed against the estimated cost of domestic abuse alone, £66bn a year, and the plummeting rates of conviction – 90% of cases of domestic abuse brought to the police in 2020 did not end in a charge or summons – so much more is required.

“It feels as if government is only scratching the surface of the transformation we need,” says Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) Coalition, representing over 120 women’s specialist services, activists and survivors. “Who is holding all these strains of work together? Who is accountable when policies fail?

“The hypocrisy of the government is that in the Queen’s speech there was a raft of alarming legislation that directly attacks women’s and survivors’ rights, such as scrapping the Human Rights Act, an essential tool in challenging failures by the state to protect women and girls.”

On 8 June, it’s the 10th anniversary of the government’s signing of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention (IC). The IC’s articles cover issues such as high-quality holistic services and appropriate funding and support for victims, overseen by a monitoring group. Once ratified, a government is legally bound to comply with the review process. The government has announced it will ratify in July but not yet include women with insecure immigrant status who have no recourse to public funds. (A pilot study is examining the experiences of migrant women.)

Hannana Siddiqui of Southall Black Sisters says she is “extremely concerned” about this two-tier system. “All women have a human right to protection from abuse.”

“While this reservation stands,” says Lisa Gormley who helped to draw up the IC, “women’s rights’ advocates will continue to call for justice and safety for all women and girls without discrimination, without limitations.”

“The convention is the gold standard in how you prevent and tackle VAWG,” Simon says. “It’s vital that there aren’t gaps in support. It’s a fundamental human right for all women to feel safe and free.”

New York is betraying rape victims

“For far too long, this city’s answer to every societal problem was to throw people in jail.” In an impassioned speech in 2019, the Mayor of New York City announced comprehensive reforms to the criminal justice system (CJS). “We lost generations to mass incarceration”, continued Bill de Blasio, “mostly young men of colour”.

An investment of $391 million would address root causes of incarceration by funding mental health services, housing and rehabilitation, along with a programme named “Community Based Violence Reduction”. So far, so good. But the reforms would also redefine how victims and offenders should be dealt with, with increased funding to “restorative justice” in “serious felony level cases that would otherwise result in detention and incarceration”.

Restorative justice (RJ) is described as an alternative to prison; it is a non-punitive response to criminal behaviour. The idea is to bring together the person who inflicted the harm (the “responsible person”, in RJ terminology) and the victim, often in the presence of community representatives. The perpetrator is supposed to accept responsibility for the harm inflicted and reach an agreement with the victim about how to make amends.

De Blasio’s reforms were welcomed by prison reform campaigners, as well as pretty much every liberal in the State. Alissa Ackerman, a sex crimes policy researcher at California State University and one of the few facilitators of restorative justice sessions for rape victims, has said that RJ, “allows survivors to have their pain heard and stories acknowledged, and is an opportunity for the person who caused the harm to be accountable for their actions”.

I spoke to one proponent of RJ, who asked not to be named “in case I am seen as colluding with carceral white women”. White himself, he is a newly trained lawyer in Washington DC, specialising in “replacing the racist system with a true healing process for both parties”. “Anti-rape feminists are probably responsible for more black men being incarcerated than anyone else in modern-day America”, he says. “Locking up African Americans is a product of slavery.” Ben went on to suggest “community resolution” and “non-violent strategies” to address sexual assault.

But for feminist activists campaigning against male violence, who have seen the consequences of the reforms up-close over the last three years, RJ constitutes the very opposite of justice.

Sarah, whose name I’ve changed, runs a support service for victims of male violence in NYC and is “appalled” that RJ is becoming a substitute for criminal justice sanctions. “What we are seeing is what we have seen forever”, she tells me, “which is the under-policing and under-protection for women, including women of colour. But some BLM activists are claiming that feminists calling for CJS sanctions for rape and domestic abuse is flat-out racist, because black men are overrepresented in the prison population.” As a result, she told me that “black and brown women, indigenous women … are the ones who are bearing the consequences of us not holding men accountable for their violence. They are the ones who are being murdered and raped and their abusers are walking free.”

According to the ideals of RJ, after a crime is committed the offender and the victim should meet face-to-face. The victim is not to blame or judge the perpetrator, but rather describe the impact of the offence, in order to “heal” and become “empowered”. RJ sees victim and perpetrator as equal, both in need of support and understanding. Supposedly modelled on the conflict resolution practices of certain indigenous cultures, there is much talk of circles. Healing circles are held for the perpetrator, before a sentencing circle takes place; later, there are follow up circles. The outcomes may include an apology or financial compensation. Some participants, including the victim, sign a confidentiality agreement.

RJ is considered a suitable remedy for domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse and sex trafficking, among other violent crimes predominantly committed by men. Most of these crimes are committed against women by men known to them: male family members, partners and colleagues. “The perpetrators have worked very hard, often for years, to condition the person they are abusing to not disclose, to minimise, to protect his emotions: to protect his character publicly”, says Sarah. “They’ve been using manipulative tactics to inspire self-doubt, blame and fear, in the person they are abusing.”

And victims of this kind of abuse may feel coerced by RJ practices, which are conducted, as Sarah said, “without any understanding of the dynamics of power and control, the impact of a trauma-coerced bond, and also the amount of time and commitment that it actually takes to elicit genuine behaviour change in abusers”.

I meet with Diane, whose name I’ve changed, at a café in Harlem, NYC. She was introduced to me by her rape counsellor. Diane was seriously sexually assaulted by a senior member of her church, having been targeted and sexually harassed by him for months. “I decided to report him to the police, despite the fact that my community is rarely well served by the cops.” Diane and the perpetrator are African American. “There are too many vulnerable young people in the church, and I didn’t see why he should poison the congregation.”

The perpetrator, considered to be a man of “good character”, with no criminal convictions, admitted to the lesser charge of inappropriate sexual touching, denied committing serious sexual assault, and agreed to partake in RJ.

“I was contacted by the local service that runs these things,” says Diane. “They told me it was important that we reach an agreement and rebuild trust. I was told nothing could be gained from taking him on a route where he could end up in jail. It felt like I had no choice.”

But having read up on RJ, Diane decided not to participate in it. “I was judged and blamed by the service”, says Diane, “as though I should have accepted the scraps from the table and have him say ‘sorry’ or whatever. He got away with what he did to me, and a man like that pretending to regret what he did would just be lies.”

Onereport, published in 2016, is often used to justify replacing criminal sanctions with RJ. It is entitled “Restorative Practices in cases of Intimate Partner Violence, Sexual Assault and Dating Violence: A Roundtable Discussion”. While it claims that RJ focuses on victims of violence and their needs, the report also ironically reveals who is actually centred in the process. One attendee is quoted as saying about perpetrators of male violence: “Do we actually blame them as a perpetrator when they were violated at a young age?”

To be taken out of the criminal justice system and put in a situation where everybody is required to empathise with him — including his victim, who is forbidden from blaming or shaming him — is a violent man’s dream come true.

Like most on the Left, I believe that only the most dangerous criminals should be locked up. I have criticised the fact that the most vulnerable and disenfranchised are most likely to be in jail. But the campaign to end male violence is my life’s work. Victims have to come first. One service provider working with sexual assault victims describes reports from young survivors in California that they are “sick of going to rape circles”. She has also heard from women and girls of colour being pressured to engage in RJ instead of making police reports.

While RJ is not yet widely practiced throughout the US, it is growing in popularity in several states — and threatens to become federal policy. In its 2022 budget, the Office on Violence against Women requested $25 million, “to support restorative justice responses to domestic/dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking, and research, evaluation, and technical assistance related to such responses”.

The media consistently reports that research shows RJ is very successful. One paper, by Mary P Koss, is often cited. Koss asked victims to complete a survey about their PTSD symptoms before and after they engaged in RJ, and concluded that victims who complete an RJ process exhibit a marked decrease in those symptoms. But PTSD symptoms almost inevitably decrease as time passes after the traumatic event. Asking the victims and perpetrators of serious crimes to “hug it out and move on”, as Sarah describes it, was simply not shown by the research to be effective.

I asked several experts on violence towards women if there is any reliable data about the efficacy of RJ and was met with a resounding “no”. When I spoke to Marcia, a veteran advocate for victims of male violence, she pointed out that in cases of domestic violence, putting the perpetrator and the victim in a room together is “outright dangerous”. Perpetrators of domestic abuse, and of sexual assault, are more likely than any other offenders to repeat their crimes — often against the same victim. But the well-publicised evaluations of RJ don’t include follow-ups that measure the recurrence of violence within domestic abuse scenarios.

Marcia asked for anonymity because “right now there is so much intolerance on the Left that even those of us who are part of the Left fear retaliation if we don’t conform.” She emphasised that rape victims want their rapists prosecuted, but with the Left advocating for RJ, victims “feel that there is no movement standing behind them. They feel utterly alone.”

The idea that serious, sexual and violent crimes should be dealt with by “community leaders”, outside the criminal justice system, is shockingly naïve at best. At worst, it is re-victimising women, and giving perpetrators a free pass. Liberal cities like New York are conducting an experiment with women’s safety and lives — and ignoring whatever they have to say about it.

Fact: Your partner should never hold your orientation against you, expect you to stay closeted for them or claim to be gay or lesbian instead of bisexual, isolate you from LGBTQIAP+ friends or community, treat you as less trustworthy because of your orientation, or threaten to out you. These are all examples of biphobia and can be signs of an abusive relationship.