An opener: This piece will be addressing partner violence seriously and openly, and as such some of the material may be difficult for readers. Read at your own comfort level, if you need or want that space.
Trauma is difficult. It leaves you scared and anxious. Broken pieces of yourself are scattered across those memories and those fears. Violence is trauma. It is the fear of what’s to come, and the need to lock yourself away inside to survive. Living in silence, however, leaves those pieces in the past and in your trauma. We must find spaces to trust others with our hurt. Audre Lorde, writing in The Cancer Journals, writes, “the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak” (Page 20). There is reason to be afraid and cautious with our truths, yet there is also nothing to gain by living in silence around those we can trust. We must teach and bond and build new community around our truths.
Partner violence, particularly sexual violence, are frequently kept silent. We expect people to be interested in having sex with their partners. It’s something you owe them to demonstrate your love and it’s something they need from you. The National Domestic Violence Hotline writes, “Domestic violence doesn’t look the same in every relationship because every relationship is different. But one thing most abusive relationships have in common is that the abusive partner does many different kinds of things to have more power and control over their partners.” While relationships are different, power and fear remain constants even while victims experience them differently. The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) writes, “Sexual assault in a relationship rarely exists in a vacuum. It often occurs alongside other forms of abusive behavior. The majority of women who were physically assaulted by an intimate partner had been sexually assaulted by that same partner.” Both of these resources point to the fact that domestic violence is a means of controlling partners, exercising power over them, and using them to satisfy the abuser’s interests. Sexual violence goes hand in hand with this, as it’s another means of subsuming a partner’s safety and needs for the sake of control and power. Those who do not comply with an abuser’s sexual needs are threatened, manipulated, and forced into sex. The violence does not end with the sexual encounter. Lauren Taylor and Nicole Gaskin-Laniyan, writing for the National Institute of Justice, write “Sexually abused women in the study were also more likely to have had their abusers harass them at work and threaten them with murder.” This means that women who face sexual partner violence are at an even higher risk of ongoing violent threats, including those in public.
These facts about partner violence are intense, vivid and frightening. As such, we need to consider ways to move forward towards healing, trust, and community for those who have been abused. There are numerous online resources, including those with tools that allow victims to hide their identity and browsing history from their abusers. By accessing these, victims can speak their pain and seek camaraderie from other survivors and victims of abuse. Another resource available to survivor-victims is hotlines. As I mentioned earlier, there are national hotlines to address domestic violence. Additionally, the National Domestic Violence Hotline lists state-based offices and phone lines for people to call for help, comfort, and advice. For example, there is one hotline listed in Pennsylvania that victims can access. On top of these two outside resources, some survivor-victims may be able to reach out to those they know and trust in their own lives. However, all of these resources require survivor-victims to put themselves at varying levels of risk and open up about their fears to strangers. But Audre Lorde provides us an alternate way of considering this. She writes, “I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of affecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving, and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle” (Page 15). While this may be another burden upon survivor-victims in the form of being brave enough to think and act in such a way, I believe that Lorde, in confronting her own pain is asking us all to be brave. To understand that in finding ways to break our silence we can confront the things we might need changed. It may not hold up against the threat of violence, but I can’t say that it isn’t a compelling way to think on the issue. We cannot be silent about our hurt, our loss, our trauma. As Audre Lorde writes, “it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death” (Page 21).
Anybody who is looking for help or a person to talk to about these issues, please click through to either of the resource pages at the top of my post, as each offer advice and further resources.
An aside: I wanted to honor the prose, poetry, and artistry of Audre Lorde’s cancer journals. As such I felt like I needed to use a creative outlet to speak my own truth, no matter how difficult it may be or what form it might take. I don't even know if I should be writing this right now but I am here doing it and I don't know what comes next. I've written it out and now I don't feel right taking it back. So thank you for bearing with me if you feel comfortable doing so.
When I think about him I think about the feel of his dark orange shaggy carpet. Crisp tendrils that my feed dig into as much as they push me back. The heat and the blurry glass of the bathroom mirror. I miss my cat, and I wonder if he’s really safe and being cared for. I think about the feeling every time I hear a car door or walk back to my house. I know that any day he could come back again and any day his car could pass me on the street. The summer kind of blurs together into noise. Into pauses between the fear. The Big Bang left a background radiation; microwaves that indicate to us all who listen for it that some time long ago there was an explosion. An annihilation of particles coming together in ways they should not creating energy that needed to be. We cooled over minutes into millennia into billions of years until life could form from that annihilation. I am scared, and I have been hurt, and I am tired. Sometimes it’s not possible for me to pick up all of the pieces. I don’t know if I ever can or if I even need to.
Works Cited:
"Abuse Defined." The National Domestic Violence Hotline. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2016.
"Intimate Partner Sexual Violence." Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2016.
Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1997. Print.
Taylor, Lauren R., and Nicole Gaskin-Laniyan. "Sexual Assault in Abusive Relationships." National Institute of Justice (n.d.): n. pag. Web.
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