Controlling
Women are a kind of accident that happens to men. Sometimes they can really spoil men’s whole lives!
Her name was Reeva Steenkamp. She was a 29-year-old model who was the face of an anti-bullying campaign and was about to return to her old school to talk to girls about gender-based violence. She was adored by her family. But on Valentine’s Day 2013 she was murdered by her violent, controlling boyfriend. He shot her four times through the locked door of a bathroom in his home, where she was cowering, petrified.
Poor guy. He must have been so upset!
Her future was stolen by a dangerous predator with a history of controlling and abusing women; a former girlfriend has said he used to lock her in his house with no food for hours at a time, call her parents many times a day to track her movements and physically abuse and threaten her to the extent that she feared for her life.
That is the story of Steenkamp’s horrific murder by the Paralympian Oscar Pistorius. But it seems our national broadcaster disagrees. Last week, the BBC began promoting a new four-part documentary series, The Trials of Oscar Pistorius. It launched a trailer that did not mention Steenkamp’s name, but instead featured Pistorius’s “remarkable” sporting achievements, praise from Nelson Mandela and his lie that “he didn’t do it”.
Well, you see, she doesn’t matter, and he does. Women are something that happens to men; they don’t count in any other way.
Accompanying this was a sickening BBC press release that boasted of a series telling the “extraordinary story” of “an international hero who inspired millions” until “he suddenly found himself at the centre of a murder investigation”. “According to Pistorius, the event was a tragic accident, but his troubled past and questionable testimony cast doubt on his innocence,” the BBC tells us. Amid the gushing, his murder conviction is not mentioned once. You could read it and think he got off.
Now if Steenkamp had had the good sense to be a trans woman the BBC would have been falling all over itself to Center her.
This is a dangerous mistake by the BBC that compounds the dominant narrative about men who murder their partners. So often, the stories that get told are of upstanding citizens, loving fathers and respected colleagues who, having been provoked, lose control and lash out in a moment of madness. The tragedy is theirs, not of the women they kill, who are so often cast as the spurned lover or unfaithful temptress.
The truth could not be more different. Professor Jane Monckton Smith, an expert on intimate partner homicide, reviewed 372 cases where men killed their partners. She found almost all these killings shared an eight-stage pattern that began with a pre-relationship history of stalking or abuse, which evolved into a relationship dominated by coercive control and an escalation in control tactics such as stalking or threatening suicide.
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Two women a week are killed by their partners in England and Wales. Their lives could be saved if they, their loved ones and the police were more aware that coercive control does not just constitute psychological abuse at that time, but could be a red flag for what might happen. Yet the popular narrative perpetuates the idea that these murders are surprising and unpredictable, so there is little we can do to proactively keep women safe from dangerous predators.
Oh well, it’s only women.
I was reading a playwriting book last night, and the writer described a play that would make the protagonist, an ordinary man, as “interesting as Hamlet” in a complex story. The man, a teacher, would be the victim of a seduction attempt by a high school sophomore in his class; when he turned her down, she would get her revenge by accusing him of sexual assault. The thing that they thought would make it more interesting would depend on how “Bob” handled this. None of the scenarios involved the possibility that “Bob” was actually guilty; they all involved the girl being a vamp, a temptress, who had gotten another poor schmuck fired at a different school the year before. It included the (unlikely) idea that the school would believe every word she said, and not a single word “Bob” – or the teacher at the other school – said. Yeah, right.
I am so sick of the bullshit. The reality is, most girls who are assaulted fear to report it, because they know they will not be believed. They have all heard the stories of women like me, who reported it and was punished, though not overtly enough to file any sort of official complaint. They have seen their friends report, and be abused by the authorities. They may have heard stories from their mothers, grandmothers, big sisters…so many stories. And the school rarely does much even when guilt is determined; a slap on the wrist, send all the employees to extra Title IX training sessions, and forget about it. Bob’s a good man. He wouldn’t do something like that, but we have to settle so this nasty little girl doesn’t ruin him or bring the school into disrepute.
You’d think the BBC would know better. But then, why would they? It’s what people want to hear. It’s the preferred narrative. She made him mad. She deserved it. She…she…she. She did…something. Never he…he…he. Never he did something he shouldn’t do.
And it’s funny how many actual plays and novels there already are with exactly that plot.
Yeah, he talked like it was something new. Guess he never heard of Oleanna.
And Coetzee’s Disgrace and Francine Prose’s Blue Angel and there are others…
Wow : “he suddenly found himself at the centre of a murder investigation”
That’s one way of saying “Until he shot a woman to death”
This bugs me, because it is a clear lie.
I remember the case. His defense was that he thought there was an intruder in the toilet, and that he shot through the door in a misguided attempt at protecting his property.
Even if one accepted his version of events, which I don’t, he absolutely meant to kill whoever was on the other side of that door.
Saying he didn’t mean to do it, is utter nonsense. He absolutely meant to do it, his defense could at best be described as he didn’t mean to do it to her.
Oh, I don’t know. I mean, whenever I’ve woken up in the night to find that my wife wasn’t in bed next to me and I could hear sounds from the bathroom, my first thought has always been ‘must be a burglar, better grab a gun and start shooting blind’.
GuyRT@5,
Yeah, sort of like how I suddenly “found myself” surrounded by empty Halloween candy wrappers the other night. Spooky!
Screechy, you too? That must have been going around…