The Avon cosmetic company has a campaign to raise funds and awareness about domestic violence in the United States. My mother bought a bracelet in support of this campaign for both my daughter and me. She said it was because of my sister. I kind of shook my head, thinking, what kind of violence did she exactly suffer? I realized I was not entirely aware of my own sister’s experience of domestic violence. As humans, I believe we often compartmentalize our experiences of and reactions to domestic violence.
I began to think about my own experiences and awareness of domestic violence. It is a topic we think of as “happening to other people” and don’t realize the impact that it can have on us, especially when we wake up one day like I did today to realize that I believe I’ve actually become desensitized to it. What I mean is that while I believe in speaking up and supporting both victims and perpetrators (see my article on Stiffed), I also feel like my reaction is rather ho-hum. Because a partner has not physically or emotionally abused me, I sort of consider myself unaffected. And yet, when I think of my experience, through others, of domestic violence situations, I am alarmed at my lack of realization before this point.
Let me shed some light on some examples. When I lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, my next-door neighbor’s sister had been killed when she finally split from her abusive husband, and he stalked her and killed her in her driveway. As a child, my mother was in a life-threatening car accident as she rushed to the aid of a friend who suffered physical abuse at the hands of her husband. On a very personal note, before we married, my husband shared with me that he had been in a volatile relationship where there was mutual emotional and physical abuse between partners. While he knew that was not the relationship he had with me, nor what he wanted with me, he still felt it was important that we discuss the matter. Fortunately, he dealt with the emotions and healed from that kind of reaction. It takes a lot for me to write that here, and yet this “speak out” campaign makes me want to share real experiences so that people truly recognize the secretive and shameful feelings that are part and parcel of domestic abuse.
Where my own sister is concerned, her relationship in her first marriage was where she experienced abuse. Her husband’s father, in fact, was in jail for killing his second wife. As a teenager, my sister’s husband was home and witnessed his father returning to the house covered in blood after committing the murder. He had witnessed the violence between his mother and father, which was the reason they were no longer together.
My husband worked for a lawn care company early in his working life in his twenties. One of the company’s customers was a man who murdered his wife and tore out her lungs and placed them on a stake in the yard. This was in a “nice” neighborhood where people expect things like skinned knees from bike riding or twisted ankles from basketball in the driveway. Such a gruesome event was more alien than a visit from outer space.
If you think about it, how much domestic violence has been in your own life? How much has been tangential? Do you only know of friends of friends who have suffered this kind of thing, or from newspaper stories? (Even if that is the case, does it amaze you to think you read it, are horrified, and then go on to read the next page?) Or, have you, too, actually experienced, witnessed or supported someone who has dealt with this kind of issue? I like the Avon campaign idea about talking it over. I think the more aware we become of the presence of this kind of violence in our lives and in the lives of friends, co-workers and family, we can become better equipped to handle it, to treat both victim and perpetrator and to learn how to avoid these situations. As the Avon campaign thankfully recognizes, perpetrators are often victims themselves of child abuse or of living with violence in their childhood homes. It needs to become much less shameful to admit things and to be able to talk about them sensibly so that we work toward solutions.
We need for people like me to tell the story of my husband coming from a scary situation and growing into a man who figured out the basis for his behavior and addressed the problem before he perpetuated violence into our life and that of our children. For friends who know my husband as the peaceable, generous, loving, kind, devoted, supportive man and father that he is, I worry about the new image that might form in their minds of him when they read this article. I wonder about my colleagues at HerCircle and how they will come to picture my husband. I consider my children reading this and, because these articles post on Facebook, I worry, too, about my children’s friends having a totally different image of their friend’s father. However, rather than have that as “our little secret,” I think telling the story might do some good. I do not mean as a “morality tale,” or “story of reformation,” either. I hope that open, honest communication and dealing head-on with emotional issues serves to reduce and ultimately eliminate domestic violence of all kinds.
What do you think? Have you experienced domestic violence or witnessed it? Have you helped someone who suffers from domestic violence?
KATE ROBINSON IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH OR SPONSORED BY AVON. THE MENTION OF THE AVON CAMPAIGN IS THAT IT WAS THE CATALYST FOR THE THOUGHTS THAT BECAME THIS POST.
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