‘It breaks you down into tiny pieces but no one believes you’ – inside the UK’s silent abuse epidemic
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We were in the smoking area, a place where strangers pull out their secrets and present them to the group, to an echo of, ‘Babe, I’ve been there.’
It was a ‘girls’ afternoon’ that was rapidly turning into a girls’ evening, as I got to know this group of women, pulled into their inner circle by a good friend of mine. We were talking about men and dating: the conversation veered from gossip to trauma, and back again, at breakneck speed. ‘Every single one of us has beenhit by a man,’ my friend said, almost casually, gesturing at her friends, all six of them. The ones who had heard simply nodded, sighed, cursed men and crossed their fingers for a ‘good one’ to come along. Then the conversation changed track and we simply moved on. This hard fact of the reality of these women’s lives was normalised and then lost within the sweet puff of candy-scented vape smoke.
We are in the middle of a ‘national emergency’ of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in the UK, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing. VAWG is an umbrella term encompassing various forms of abuse and violence affecting women and girls. However, many in the sector prefer MVAWG, the ‘m’ outlining, in very clear terms that, the majority of the time, this is violence perpetrated by men.
Domestic abuse is – and has been for some time – on the rise, in new generations as well as old. In the year ending March 2024, more than 1.6 million women between the ages of 16 and 59 were victims of domestic abuse. Of these, those aged 16 to 24 made up the highest proportion of victims. And, at the heart of every domestic abuse case? Coercive control.
Coercive control is a persistent pattern of behaviours used by an abuser to dominate another person, erode their autonomy and sense of self, and harm them. And it is abuse, even if it is not accompanied by physical violence. A survivor I spoke to once told me that experiencing coercive control was like being slowly picked apart. ‘You were once a whole person and now you’re just all these tiny pieces,’ she said. ‘But it can be hard to identify when the first bit of you was broken, to identify that and show it to anyone, never mind the police. Most people only understand harm if you’re knocked over, all at once. Not in this slow, deliberate and brutal way.’
Read more https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a66021906/coercive-control-law/
Content retrieved from: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a66021906/coercive-control-law/.
