‘Not every home is a haven’. This is the theme chosen for this year’s international annual 16 Days of Activism for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.  While we are digesting how the pandemic is affecting our lives,    little may we think of  how the mandatory safety measures affect people living with an abusive family member. While practicing social distancing  to stay safe from  Covid-19, they are exposed to another danger – domestic violence. The more togetherness, the more opportunity for a perpetrator to wreak havoc on the victim.

We tend to automatically associate home with comfort,   unwinding, love, play, leisure, safety and warmth; it is our castle,  our nest. But as with everything else, it is always unwise to generalize or take anything for granted.

Patriarchal ideology keeps many women in abusive relationships, having ensnared their mind via stereotypical upbringing and an education that ensured adherence to social mores.  You’d have to further your education, and a critical one at that,  or receive a more progressive  kind of schooling to become a critical and reflective thinker, a person who is emancipated and resourceful enough to recognize and get out of harmful relationships. And even then, dealing with what is happening to you and your family   is mind-blowing.  There are no words to do justice to what it means to face the dark truth, watch your life cave in,  feel your heart break.  Persons experiencing domestic violence  have to fight off feelings of shame, inadequacy, failure, desperation… They grieve the loss of a lover or a best friend, or at least someone whom they thought was a lover or a best friend, who groomed them into looking at him that way. They have to deal with the conflicting emotions, including the voices clamouring in their head – the  words of their  mothers, grandmothers, teachers and myriad authority figures who had taught them so finely how to be good and respectable, and how to feel guilty if they deviated. For it would always be the woman’s fault. ‘You know how men are. Boys will be boys. It is the woman who has to be the backbone of her family’. So it goes.

Universally,    girls and boys are socialized into set roles that they are expected to perform during their lifetime. They are told what love is, what to expect, what is considered ‘respectable’, ‘shameful’,  ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Boys should be strong and they should not demonstrate weakness or emotion.  No, that is for girls, who receive their own share of brainwashing:  ‘You must look pretty and smile, show just enough  flesh to entice, but not too much because that would be slutty. If he’s jealous it’s because he loves you. A dose of jealousy is good for the relationship. He must adore you if he stalks you. Sometimes his eye wanders, but that’s normal – men are like that. Make sure you are there for him, please him. The right man is a gift to woman. Motherhood is the climax of a woman’s life. You would be the luckiest woman on earth if you have all this. It’s what every woman wants, my dear! ‘. 

It’s what the voice behind the curtain keeps whispering my dear.

Historically, society has made all kinds of excuses for men’s behavior, and things have not changed as much as some would have us believe. Patriarchal ideology is still at work.  He needs to go out with his friends, have a drink…  because he works so hard, brings food to the table, shoulders responsibility for the family, and so on. ‘A good woman should understand her man’,   they tell us, ‘be patient, take care of the kids and have warm meals ready for him, make sacrifices.’

 But there is no teacher like reality. It hits you like no sermon, advert, textbook  or class ever could.

Persons who have experienced domestic violence speak about coercive control, which is  not a way of coping with  stress, or caused by alcohol or drugs. It’s an ongoing control, in which the abusive partner seeks to destroy the  sense of self of the other. The goal is to make their partner a “willing slave”, consciously or not. To achieve this, they isolate, micro-manage, humiliate, degrade, surveil and gaslight, creating an environment of confusion, contradiction and danger. Coercive control  has been classified by  Amnesty International  as torture.  

Call 179 if you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence. 

Audrey Friggieri is Commissioner on Gender-based and Domestic Violence.