Coercive Control: there doesn't have to be violence for it to be Domestic Abuse.

Following on from Sky's story, which I posted yesterday, Here is a link to a Canadian newspaper article which discusses the Canadian government's plans to expand protections for people in abusive intimate partner relationships, to include Coercive Control. 

The United Kingdom has already made such changes to their law, recognising coercive control as an element of dometic abuse. I hope Canada will soon follow suit. A relationship doesn't always have to be physically violent for it to be abusive, or dangerous. 

Women's Aid UK describes Coercive Control as "an act or a pettern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten their victim."

You can read about Coercive Control here on the Women's Aid website.

Here's their list of examples of coercive behaviour, so you can find out if it's happening to you:

* Isolating you from friends and family

* Depriving you of basic needs, such as food

* Monitoring your time

* Monitoring you via online communication tools or spyware

* Taking control of aspects of your everyday life, such as where you can go, who you can see, what you can wear and when you can sleep

* Depriving you of access to support services, such as medical services

* Repeatedly putting you down, such as saying you're worthless

* Humiliating, degrading or dehumanising you

* Controlling your finances

* Making threats or intimidating you

The coercive control in my violent relationship started early on, but I was unaware of what was happenning. At first, it seemed protective. Complimenting me on my more "modest" items of clothing turned into forcing me to wear nothing but what I can only describe now as giant, baggy sackcloths with head coverings. If I put on anything I used to wear, like a pair of shorts or tshirt, I was told to go and change. I was called a prostitute for wanting to go out without my entire body and head covered on a hot summer's day. 

Friends were judged by him as having bad intentions, or as being uncaring. Being woken in the early hours for sex seemed romantic at first, but this later developed into deliberately engineered sleep deprivation and marital rape. What started as "protective jealousy", explained away as protecting me from males who he thought were eyeing me up, became commands not to have any male friends, because he deemed it "inappropriate for a married woman", to me being severly beaten just for having looked at another human being in the eyes whilst talking to them. 

"Feeling like less than a man" because I had an income and he did not turned into me handing over every penny to him in cash on payday. He started monitoring my online activity, quoting parts of messages back to me that I had written to friends. He had access to everything I wrote in private: the websites I had vivited, the friends I had privately messaged, my emails, my social media. No matter how many times I'd changed my passwords, he had access. 

 He told me that he had "people watching" me when I went out with the children. He would tell me that people had seen me kissing someone (I hadn't). I became too scared of the consequenses of going out without him, so I stopped. He started refusing to come to the supermarket with me, and timing me, He would always be waiting for me when I returned with the shopping, holding his wrist out, looking at his watch:

"You've been twenty seven minutes and fifty three seconds. What have you been doing? Who have you been fucking?"

 

If I defended myself, he would say my defense was proof of my guilt. If I didn't say anything he would say my silence was admission of guilt. I used to be physically shaking most of the time. He would ask me,

 

"Why are you shaking? Only guilty people shake. What have you been doing? I will fucking kill you when I find out who you have been fucking. And I'll kill your fucking bastard children too."

 

He used to take me out dancing. In the beginning, he would dance with me. As our relationship deteriorated, he would take me out, flirt openly with the other women there, ignore me, disappear all evening, then shout at me in front of others:

 

"My wife is jealous when I dance with other women. I don't know why she just sits there like a sack of potatoes. She's like that in bed too." I stopped going out with him and he stopped coming home the evenings he went out alone. When he eventually rolled in, maybe the next afternoon, he'd pretend nothing was wrong and would ask me why I hadn't cooked for him. 

 

He humiliated me in front of people and in private. He made it out to be a joke. He told me I couldn't take a joke. That I was oversensitive. That I was being disrespectful. He would wake me up at 3, 4 in the morning by pulling the covers off me, punching me in the head and shouting:

"Get the fuck up you fucking bitch. I wanna know exactly what the fuck has been going on with you!"

I never had a clue what he was talking about. 

He called me a slag. He called me a prostitute, a bitch. He said that he only married me because I'm so ugly, no other man would want me, but he also accused me of having sex with friends. I never cheated once. I got accused of cheating on a regular basis. He told me I was useless. Fat. Ugly. Stupid. Selfish. Ungrateful. Dirty. Stinky. Boring. Boring in bed. He told me that if I didn't do what he wanted in bed that he would find someone else who would. He watched rape porn and rape gangbang porn and when I expressed my horror at what he was watching, he told me that was what he and his friends would do to me. 

When I finally told him our relationship was over for good, he refused to move out. I had nowhere else to go. He had plenty of friends he could have stayed with, but he refused. He started telling me that if he didn't move out soon, that he was going to end up killing me and the children.

The worst thing about my marriage wasn't the violence. It was the coercive control. The violence might have killed me. But the coercive control made me a walking shell of my former self. I was lost, confused, in constant physical and emotional pain. I was dissociating all the time. I had no energy. I barely got any sleep. I became very badly underweight.

 

"You will never find another man. You will be lonely for the rest of your life. You're not capable of having a normal relationship because you are fucking insane. You are a fucking control freak. You are a fucking lack of repect."

Respect to him was never a two way thing: it meant that if I didn't do what he said, there would be consequenses. Respect, to him, meant fear. The consequenses of disobedience (or just existing) ranged from days of silence, to taunts and sulking, to threats of violence to actual bodily harm and violent rape. 

I don't want to write any more now. My head is tense, my body feels weak, I feel nauseous and I have a ringing in my ears. The memories make me feel ill. But I hope in sharing this that I can help someone recognise the signs of coercive control and take steps to leave their abusive relationship. 

You deserve better.