Woman’s Hour and the invisible perpetrator
How the media talks about domestic violence matters.
I listened with a howling sense of pain-wracked frustration to the otherwise fabulous Jane Garvey interviewing domestic abuse survivor Tina Nash on BBC Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour yesterday morning (interview begins 1 minute in).
I’m used to victim-blaming and its ugly companion, the invisible perpetrator, in mainstream media coverage of domestic abuse.
But I’ve noticed it more and more since I became a Writer in Residence for Aurora New Dawn, an organisation working with victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence.
Mainstream news media often just replicate dominant social attitudes and reflect them back to us with authority. It’s not right, or actually ok, but it’s the reason WVoN exists so I’ve made a sort of angry, activist peace with it. For now.
Listening this morning, though, I felt like Jane Garvey’s feminist teacher, standing on the sidelines and calling, “Come on Garvey, pull your socks up! You can do better than this!”
Here’s why.
I recommend that you listen to the interview before or after reading this. For me the questions are actually worse in context not better, but make up your own mind.
JG: It would be easy to think of you I suppose as a victim, but you’re more than that, aren’t you?
TN: I’m a survivor now.
This would have been a great opportunity to talk about the issue of victimhood, the journey to feeling like a survivor and the difference between the two. Nash herself brings this up several times in the interview after she raises it here.
She talks about how she did not perceive herself as a victim during the abuse even though it was so severe, and about how on many occasions Jenkin, her abuser, would convince her that he was actually the victim in the relationship.
Garvey follows up on none of these.
If you’re learning about domestic abuse for the first time, understanding the dynamic of victimhood is central. But if you’re a broadcaster doing an interview about an abusive relationship, I would hope – with a little preparation and research – it would be Interviewing 101.
After asking how they met, Garvey begins to sound a little like a barrister building a case that the victim should have ‘known better’:
JG: …he was a man with a bit of a reputation.
Nash obligingly clarifies that she had heard of his reputation, yes, but 10 years before they began dating, at which point Jenkin portrayed himself very much as a changed man.
Four months into the relationship, Jenkin pushed Nash over after his violence to strangers in a nightclub caused him to be thrown out. She banged her head on the pavement. Nash packed her things and left.
JG: See, at this point Tina, people will be thinking, ‘Well, that would be enough’. He may not actually have hit you on that occasion but there were indications that this was a man you wouldn’t be close to for any length of time. Why did you keep in touch with him?
Later, Nash talks about Jenkin laughing at the panic room installed for her by the police.
JG: He was laughing at the authorities and…but…in a way Tina I’ve got to put it to you, you allowed him to do that because you kept buying his lost little boy routine, didn’t you?
Finally, Garvey asks a question that is made more offensive to me as a listener by the calm, dignified and eloquent answer given by Tina Nash following it.
JG: For the people listening who think ‘Why did she allow this to happen to her?’ how would you try to explain that?
TN: It was a steady progress, it didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t like I met him on the first night and he hit me and I stayed with him. It didn’t happen like that. I fell in love with him. He made me see a side of him that I didn’t think other people got to see so I thought he must love me. I thought it was completely different with me than he was with everybody else. Silly me, I fell for it.
At this point, I genuinely don’t know how, as one human to another, Garvey felt no inclination to challenge Tina Nash on that last statement. Possibly because almost every question that led up to it has implicitly pointed to how Nash failed to identify, challenge and escape a man who is now serving an indeterminate sentence in a mental hospital. I assume a jury put him there because they had fewer problems than Jane Garvey in identifying that he was the one to blame for his own behaviour.
Instead, Garvey asks:
JG: How many chances did you give him, in fact?
At which point I face-palmed myself so hard I swept my own feet out from under me and fell on my ass.
Given everything we know about domestic abuse, about patterns of coercion and control and about the reality of living – and surviving – an abusive relationship, it’s disappointing that broadcasters still feel comfortable asking variations of: Why doesn’t she just leave?
Chats overheard in the pub? Yes.
Woman’s Hour? No.
Interviews like this not only remove the focus from Jenkin’s actions but also – and if I were a man, this would be far more offensive to me – position the extreme violence of men like Jenkin as inevitable, or somehow to be expected, from all men.
What would I like to have heard? More about what it’s like to make the journey from victim to survivor, for a start, and an acknowledgement of the difficulty of the transition between the two.
Shame, isolation and self-blame are reasons that the Aurora team hear every day from victims and survivors to describe why they feel powerless to leave their perpetrator.
Of course, they also work with victims and survivors who have left and are now in more danger than they have ever been in before as a result – another reason why so many victims stay.
Media coverage of domestic abuse must start to reveal the reality (linked video carries Trigger warning) – and complexity – of abusive relationships, including painting a picture of how commonly it happens. As writers and journalists, we must shift the focus away from victims and move toward asking questions about perpetrators, who might find themselves with fewer places to hide as a result.
Taking this approach in the media would help to build a society where victims feel less isolated and less ashamed of behaviour that, ultimately, isn’t theirs. That alone would go an incredible length of the way to making the journey out of an abusive relationship easier and quicker.
aaagh – the lack of context is soooo frustrating. Women in abusive relationships are performing femininity – a femininity that they have been trained for since they were born. We are so indoctrinated into the ‘flawed man’ syndrome – which is backed up by the media that surrounds us – that to leave takes great courage. Giving up the fight to ‘cure’ is hard, and made worse when the media colludes in refusing to recognise the cultural habitus that keeps women in the ring. Literally so when some women stay so long that they lose their lives.
I have complained about this interview. Having survived sexist violence myself, what I noticed, even amongst fellow counsellors (I trained as a counsellor), friends, family etc was that I was constantly being exhorted to empathise with his feelings or to take responsibility for provoking his behaviour, even when he had lied to me or stolen money from me. It took me some while to realise that if I continued listening to the people round me, that I was likely to end up dead. There is a major lie going on in society at the moment, that we abhore domestic or sexist violence, but men’s mass media is ok to train and groom men into having a psychopathic understanding of us as people – that we are bitches and whores, that we enjoy pain and humiliation, even to the point of being sodomised and then licking our own shit off the end of their dicks. If all of the above is a cool way of seeing women and children, then how on earth is any women or child meant to withstand that level of misinformation and grooming by the men’s media?
I’d be interested to hear what response you get from that, Vicky.
There’s also the issue that victims are often at the greatest risk when they leave, so if there aren’t support services in place, taking everyone’s advice and getting the hell out of dodge isn’t going to help either. It was very heartening to hear Tina Nash describe how she felt the police were so supportive of her when she was unable to see herself as a victim. I think she said they ‘never gave up on her’.
For me there’s also a broader point here about the invisibility of perpetrators. I’m not being facetious when I ask why there’s rarely any examination of what motivates perpetrators in the media, as well as the general failure to ‘join the dots’. This not only means individual perpetrators are not looked at closely by the media, but as I say in the article, I think it also combines to implicitly suggest that ALL men are ‘naturally’ violent and that gender violence is inevitable.
This is also an assumption underpinning rape culture, of course, which is why it’s so easy to ‘blame the victim’ for not being careful.
I’ve met a lot of men now who identify with the feminist movement who have found their ‘way in’ to feminism by understanding the implications of patriarchy for men. I think it’s very important that we make a shift in how we cover domestic violence and rape to include perpetrators for this reason.
Thanks for comments
I agree that some police are helpful, but some aren’t and are actually prejudiced against the victim to the point, as I found, that they are unwilling to see them as victims. The fact that when the police raid brothels to crack down on trafficking, they frequently have to be briefed to treat the women inside as victims is a perfect indicator of a level of misinformation within the police force itself as to how they understand gendered violence. The thing that worries me is that assuring victims that they will be believed and treated with respect by the various authorities, friends and family, can actually place them in more danger if that in reality isn’t the case. Looking at the recent cases around JSavile and Rochdale there is a huge way to go. Cutting off the source of misinformation/lies within society about women’s and children’s responsibility for the violence done to them plus ensuring that the actual enforcers of the law are held to account for the way they protect the perpetrators of gendered violence has to be tackled if the safe arm of the law is going to be a reality for victims rather than just an illusion of safety.