I worked in the domestic violence sector for a little under a year. My job title was ‘Junior Bid Writer’. Naively, I thought that having the word ‘writer’ in my title would make me feel like I was fulfilling the calling I’d always felt. To write, to offer up an interpretation of the world in the hope of changing it.
Instead, I found myself using the same industrial-strength language, day after day. Describingthe reality of domestic abusein wordsthat bleached away reality:words likeservice-user, perpetrator, data-driven, positive outcomes. Cost-effective.Endless hours putting togetherfundingapplications that stretched to dozens orevenhundreds of pagesjustto provethat we could run the refuges we were already running. Knowing, all the while,that funding was being slashed, and thatlocalgovernment was bound to award the contract to whoever promised to do the most with the least money.Therewereplenty of housing services,most of them withno expertise in domestic violence,waiting to step in and replace us.
Thatwriting had to be emotion-free. A women’s organization couldn’t risk being accused of hysteria; not when those competingorganisationsprofessed to see intimate partner abuse as a gender-neutral problem.SoI continued to bleach my words. Butthatfeltincreasinglyat odds with the world I was working in.A world where there’sa checklistto judge how dangerous a perpetrator is.This checklistasks about violent incidents, yes, but it also asks – are you pregnant? Has he ever choked you? Has he ever harmed any pets?
Most of all –are you very frightened?
Unbelievably, much of my writing involved proving there was aproblem. I did a lot of research, read a lot of domestic homicide reviews. There’s a website called Murder Map where you can read up on all the homicides in London.Twice in the same week, over the course of work research, I read news stories about men beheading their wives. One inCambridgeshire, one in Hoxton. Haven’t heard about it? No. You probably wouldn’t have. It wasn’t big news.
Occasionally the phone on my desk would ring.On the other end a woman would speak in low, urgent tones. Needing help. I’d give her the number of the National Domestic Violence Helpline and put the receiver down, shaking, knowing that I’d likely just spoken to someone who’d snatched a moment of safety from adaily reality ofnegotiating with aterrorist.A terrorist who claimed to love them.
Are you very frightened?Box ticked.
In our applications we had to make the argument that fighting domestic abuse is economical. And, by the way, it is.Every domestic homicide costs the state in the region of2.2million pounds.AHome Office reportpublished in 2019estimated the cost ofdomestic violence in the year 2017 as £66 billion.Court costs, incarceration costs, childcare costs.Lost productivity.But what I really wanted to do was talk about the human cost of failing to disentangle love and violence.
I’d go home at night and watchMaking a Murderer,the series that everyone was talking about. A man hadn’t had a fair trial for murdering a woman – a terrible miscarriage of justice. The fact that the woman was dead, that her name was barely mentioned even as the story of her death wastold?Barely a footnote. Same forSerial.
What I saw in culture fit exactly with what Iwas discoveringat work –that misogynyisbaked into the institutions of our country. Thepolicewho see domestic violence ‘incidents’ and fail to understand the pattern of power and control, theCPSwhoweren’t given the time or resources to properly prepare for court cases,local council ads telling women they risked violent assault if they drankalcohol.The local authorities who saw the necessity of refuge funding as an inconvenience.The women who stayed in refuges were, by definition, not from the local area, because the whole point of a refuge is toflee. What’s more, they were legally homeless, which meant they couldn’t vote.What’s the point in helping people who can’t even vote for you?Can’t we just put the perpetrator into an anger-managementprogramme? He might go from hitting her five times a week to hitting her three times. Positive outcomes.
I felt hopeless.Theproblem was patriarchy, and patriarchy is simply too big, too inexpressible, too unwieldy.I saw itin my friends’ Tinder dates, in the books I read and the advertising I saw.Isaw it inthefriend whose boyfriend threatened to kill himself if she left him.The friend whose ex took nude photos of her while she was asleep, then treated her angry reaction as unreasonable and disproportionate.In the friend whose ex signed her up to appointments fororganisingher own funeral from a variety of different companies, to ensure that every few minutes forawholethree days she was constantly asked to anticipate her death. Her house wasvandalisedand friends quietly admitted he has repeatedly expressed that he wanted to ‘ruin her life’, ‘not make this easy for her’, tomake her ‘feel the pain’ than he feels.’
I saw in all these things that power wasa man’sbirthright. That it was okay – expected, even – for a woman to obliterate parts of herselftomake a man feel powerful.
I knew it because I’d done it. Not been abused, not been terrorized, but–quietly, unthinkingly, culpably–mademyselfsmaller so that men could feel big.
EventuallyI stopped doing that job.I started writing fiction, because,for me,fiction was a way of cutting through the roar of fact.Because, between the tight lines of judgement criteria, in the cramped box of a checklist, there was no space for a story.
And I needed the story.Because without the story we can’t make sense of the statistic,we can’tunderstand, inourcore – that two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner in the UK. That an estimated further three per week take their own lives to escape abuse. That only eight per centof casesreported to the police end in conviction (why doesn’t she just report him?)That when a woman left a violent partner,the risk to her life goes up, not down(why doesn’t she justleave?).Still, she usually does try to leave. It will take an average ofbetween five andseven attempts to finally get away.
People have asked me if I found writingKeeperupsetting. I didn’t. After all those months of anger, it was a relief.There was a well of anger inside me that came pouring out almost from the moment that I startedthe book.There’s a line from Adrienne Rich that I always come back to – ‘my visionary anger cleanses my sight’.Anger – female anger–can help us to seeclearly, rather than clouding our judgement.We’re not insane, we’re not unstable, we’re just looking at the world with clear eyes.
How did my experience inform my writing, people ask me?Some of thelittle detailsof life in refuges:the kids’ pictures on the walls; the way the heating was always turned way up.Thefeeling of enteringa kind ofunderground railroad – a network of secret spaces that exist to keep women safe.Bigger things too.The understanding thatwomengo into hidingbecause there are men who want to hurt or kill them. Thatthe police and the courts aren’t stopping them.
Almost every time I talk aboutKeeper, people– mostly women–offer me stories. Stories of friends that they’re worried about, friends whoescaped, friends who they fear neverwill. And every time they tell me about these situations as though they were unique. They say,wide-eyed, ‘but the weirdest thing is that he seems so charming. So nice.’ They don’t know that charm is a control tactic. Theysay‘the thing is, I don’t think he’s actually ever hit her.’
They don’t know that violence is a tool of control, that it isn’t the root cause.That abusemight include physicalviolence,butmight not.That the official definition for coercive control is ‘a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support’– that might mean fists, but it also might meanaccess to family or finances.That ‘threats with a weapon’ might include a gun or a knife, but it also might be a pair of scissorsheldup close to the facewith thewhisperedthreat:I’m going to cut off all your hair. It might include a niqab, but it also might also mean a woman forced to wear revealing clothing so that the world can see what a wonderful object she is, that her beauty is a reflection of her owner’s power. It might mean the perpetrator screaming in the street, or it might mean the victim screaming while the perpetrator smiles calmly and makes eye contact with passers-by.Look at her. Look at how crazy she is.
That abuse is a pattern of behavior. A story.Keepertells thatstory, ortries to. It’s my offering. Because I couldn’t write the funding applications any more. Because whatever money I donate or however much I tweet about the Domestic Violence Bill (at the time of writing, still not through Parliament) or however much I write to my MP about ratifying the Istanbul Convention, it doesn’t feel like enough. Becausethe best I can offer is a story, and perhaps that story might help a woman to understand her own.
