Who are my abusers?

I found myself recently – during one of my daily walks – in the old stomping ground of my abuser (as I write the word abuser I have to resist the ingrained urge to put inverted commas around it – because is he an abuser if he never really hit me, and he never really raped me). This isn’t the first time that I have revisited the area he and I frequented during our time together, but somehow today it felt different. Perhaps it’s in light of the countless discussions taking place about gendered violence within our society, or the articles I continue to read about Eurydice Dixon, it could be the (apparently) cliched journey of self-growth I am undertaking… or maybe it’s the simple fact that sometimes, it still hurts to remember.

The abuse that I endured for over a year, is minute compared to that of innumerable women the world over. But it is not insignificant. I am not stripped of my right to hurt, my right to join the ranks of countless women rebuilding the pieces of themselves after a man has shattered them. The abuse I endured was mostly psychological. Gaslighting. He manipulated me, he humiliated me, he demeaned and disrespected me, he ignored me, blamed and berated me, he bullied me and pushed me until he made me so weak that I truly believed it was my fault. He was smart about it, he knew just when to stop and just what to say. I was wrapped around his finger, to the point that I ignored the rational voice in my head, and the voices of my friends and family – more than that, I outwardly defended him. He was simply misunderstood!

Now more than ever, when I hear of women beaten, raped or even murdered in their own homes, by their own partners, my heart breaks for them. And it breaks all over again when I hear the discourse that surrounds these horrific acts of violence. “Why didn’t she just leave him?” These six words leave me with such rage that I would almost accept my often-prescribed title of ‘angry feminist’. There are infinite reasons a woman stays with her abuser. Money, family, resources, fear of retribution. For me, I stayed as long as I did, because he emotionally manipulated me, to the point that I lost all sense of who I was. I was worthless, I was stupid, I was a bitch, I was weak, I was lucky to have him. But this is beside the point. What baffles me to no end is that the questions we ask are centred around the victim, not the perpetrator. Why aren’t we asking, “What made him believe he had a right to hurt her?” We live in a society that teaches women that it is the choices we make, that lead to the crimes we endure. “Why was she walking through the park at night?” “Why was she wearing such a short skirt?” “Why didn’t she leave him?”

After I finally gained the strength to leave him, it was many years before I was able to accept that what had happened to me was partner abuse, gendered violence (before you tell me that it doesn’t exist and I’m just an angry misandrist, preserve your energy and use it to look up the stats for yourself, you may learn something). I am still living with the shockwaves and ramifications of my time with my abuser. I’m proud to say that I am putting in the work, that I am growing and learning to be proud of the person that I am. But it’s not quick, and it’s not easy. I still have to remind myself some days, that I have worth, that I am strong, that I did nothing to deserve it. The strange thing about this journey, is that it was not only my abuser who convinced me it was my fault. It was a team effort. It was the culture that I grew up in, the culture in which grown men would hassle me on the street, where if I responded to them I was a “slut” and if I didn’t I was a “bitch who needs to learn to take a joke”. The same culture encouraged me to dress pretty, but not too pretty so as to encourage unwanted attention because you know, “boys will be boys”. We wonder why it is that so many men and women fit so neatly into their respective roles of perpetrator and victim, yet we continue to blame the individuals rather than step back and admit we’ve fostered this behaviour. We’ve created these roles and now we don’t know how to break out of them, or maybe in the case of some, we don’t want to.

What frequently pains me the most, is that my abuser doesn’t even know that he is part of the problem. He – among countless other ignorant men – would fervently argue that he is a ‘good man’, because he never laid a hand on me (except that one time – but he was drunk, and I was “riling him up”), because he would never rape a woman (except that he was under the assumption that since I had consented to him once, he had unlimited rights – regardless of my complaints). And the type of abuse that he inflicted on me daily, in full view of his friends and family, is one that he and many men like him, would argue exists only in the mind of a girl who “doesn’t know how to take a joke.”

This begs the question, who is my abuser? Who are my abusers?