When Sexual Violence Isn’t Sexual Violence
When Sexual Violence Isn’t Sexual Violence
Abuse works in a very strange way. Only recently are the more complicated elements of coercion and control being explored and understood fully and there is still so far to go. as we sat down to discuss this with Emma (Not her real name.) she said "but when you live it, you just know".
Here is her story about the role of sex in her controlling and coercive relationship and it isn't what you first think when we say the words sexual violence within a relationships. As we so often hear in cases of domestic abuse there are acts of extreme physical and sexual violence resulting in unfathomable harms and of course death. Alongside and before the brutality which may be seen by the outside world, there are so often, nay always, elements of control that are so hard for anyone to describe.
Emma tries to do this here and I am so glad she has.
Sex is such a powerful tool and sometimes you
don’t know it is being used to cause harm, I most certainly didn’t realise it
was being weaponised in my relationship. Like many many others I had been the victim of sexual harms growing up. I had been molested, bullied, forced and manipulated into sexual encounters I had no desire for but I had been relatively lucky in this way compared to so many others. In my late 20's I met and fell desperately in love. Quite early on in my relationship tiny
things happened in the bedroom that I later realised were designed to
destabilise me, I now think of this as sexual violence but many others won’t.
Right at the start there were the odd occasions where he would stop and just lose
interest or say something to hold me accountable for the fact he wasn’t able or
didn’t want to continue, like “you heard the phone ring”. These micro
punishments made me want to please. Over time these became more frequent and
confusion crept in, was I doing something wrong? Where others had taken sexual encounters from me where they were not invited, this man was finding reasons he did not want me. Maybe he just didn't. Maybe all the efforts I had made to not be a victim of abuses of others had failed me and I was 'damaged goods' as they say.
When I became pregnant he told me about all the other women
he had been with who hadn’t got pregnant, he seemed angry, which made no sense to me. I
understand now he was, in his own way trying to do lots of things with this
weird statement: Make me know somehow, he was not responsible in any way and
let me know about all the women he had been with despite the fact he was not
wanting sex with me because of supposed failures to attend to his needs that
were yet to be made clear. There were no needs, the need was to feel like he
could control my feelings. It is so humiliating to reflect upon because, to
anyone that doesn’t understand how these things are set up from the start to
get you in a position of subservience must look and say the dreaded words “why
did you stay?” or “how did you not see?” Somehow, I didn’t even leave when he
punched me so hard in the leg I couldn’t walk for days, I knew that I thought
if anyone ever hit me I would not be able to stay with them yet I did. I didn’t
realise I was feeling so inadequate and the more I tried to counter these feelings
by making a lot of effort to please him the more I was rejected.
After a while he would stand me up for dates I arranged making sure there was childcare and a nice thing to do together. I would find him sitting in his car watching pornography rather than do me the
courtesy of arriving on time, a while after that he left a bill for a dating
site in my car waiting to be challenged and see my hurt, but tell me that I was
at fault somehow. Beyond that he would tell me that the pornography he was
charging to the account was “shit anyway”. I was jumping through impossible hoops that now seem so bizarre.
As the years passed this developed into accusations of my
infidelity or my interest in others and ultimately in him having another
relationship. By this time the relationship was more obviously abusive in so many ways. I had known for years and had no idea how to get out because he wouldn't allow that. As I tried to say to him again and again that I would like him to just go and be with this woman, he took it as another gaslighting opportunity. while I was trying to
make sense of things and why after 11 years he suddenly was wanting sex with me and punishing me for now having no ability to respond to his advances, he was telling me that the friends who were informing me about his
relationships were sick and I needed to think about the company I kept; he was asking
what their motivation was for telling me lies and trying to damage our
relationship; he was asking why I would speak to people like that and demanding names
to challenge them. Screaming at me if I refused to share the source of the lies (I didn’t.) which would create
the assertion that I was making it up when I was in fact trying to protect them
from his aggression. You can see how control works like this. Ultimately, he
was very busy lining up and love bombing this other woman and I was actually fine with that by this point and
was desperate to stop feeling confused.
Although there were many other abusive elements to my
relationship this one was so very subtle, the use of sex to undermine my
feelings of worth were consistent throughout. Talking about sexual coercion is
as complicated as identifying coercion in all its subtleties in other areas,
because it can happen slowly. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see how the
result was that he was able to have sex, if and how he wanted in ways that he
chose and I was traumatically bonded to seeking his approval. It damaged my
sexual identity and I lost any sense of how I wanted to feel in the bedroom
rather than worth wanting to have sex with in the first place. If I hadn’t
been so lucky as to have been supported and educated, it doesn’t take a lot to
see how this psychological state could have lead to dangerous outcomes. I was lucky
and really it was only luck that he was not someone sexually motivated but yet he still used sex or withholding of sex as a tool to control.
Emma wishes to remain anonymous, she acknowledged to me that this is part of the problem of being silenced saying "who wants to talk about this stuff or risk speaking out when they have worked so hard to find their way out of these situations and dangers?"
If you are worried about your relationship please contact someone.
In an emergency call 999
Refuge the National Domestic Abuse Helpline can support you.
0808 2000 247
For other organisations and information have a look on the NHS website
Getting help for domestic violence and abuse - NHS (www.nhs.uk)
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