Canada’s domestic violence crisis
▻https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/we-are-the-dead
Fric’s murder prompted Mailis to write Smart, Successful and Abused: The Unspoken Problem of Domestic Violence and High-Achieving Women, published in September. It puts the spotlight on a population often overlooked in studies of intimate-partner violence, despite a parade of high-profile cases—Nicole Brown Simpson, Reeva Steenkamp, Nigella Lawson—that reveal domestic abuse knows no boundaries, class or otherwise. Focus, understandably, has been on the most vulnerable: immigrants and refugees, disabled women and women in rural and northern communities, while the spotlight has shifted only recently to Indigenous women as well.
Mailis defies the entrenched image of the “battered woman” that veered into public consciousness almost 50 years ago in another way. She was never subjected to physical violence. Rather, she experienced coercive, controlling behaviour, which can be just as or even more traumatic. She was constantly demoralized, lacking autonomy, always “walking on eggshells”—all within her own home.
Her book arrives alongside two new important examinations of the personal and societal ravages of intimate-partner violence: No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by American academic Rachel Louise Snyder and See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Australian investigative journalist Jess Hill. Both books dismantle entrenched biases and stereotypes: that victims can always just leave; that violence in the home is of a lesser order; that a non-violent person cannot become violent; and that shelters are an adequate response. We’re asking the wrong questions, Snyder writes: instead of “Why does she stay?,” we need to ask “Why does he abuse?” and “How do we keep a family safe?” Women don’t “stay,” she explains. They constantly calculate how and if they can leave so they and their children escape harm. Hill is blunt as to why intimate-partner violence persists: “Men abuse women because society tells them they can be in control.” It’s a society, she writes, that can be cruel to men too.