Kitty

A bit of a rant about domestic abuse:
Murdered By My Boyfriend was repeated on the W channel recently as part of a segment they’re doing on programmes based on real life (other programmes in the segment are fly-on-the-wall documentaries). This segment has been trailed a few times on the UKTV network, & the voice-over woman says “it’s the choices we make that determine our fate”. So Ashley Jones (the young woman who was murdered by her boyfriend) brought what happened to her on herself, did she, by ‘choosing’ to be with her abusive partner Reece? What nonsense! I presume that she didn’t realise he was abusive when they got together, as I gather that he charmed her (that was certainly the case in another film I’ve seen which featured domestic abuse, where the abuser won his victim over by turning on the charm & making her believe he was wonderful, before isolating her from her family & friends & trying to kill her in order to get his hands on her money)- ’twas ever thus. I don’t know if what I just said was what the voice-over woman was implying, but I did feel as though Ashley was being implicitly blamed for being abused because of a ‘choice’ she’d made, & her ‘fate’, sadly, was being murdered. The phrase ‘falling in love with the wrong man’ has also been used to describe both Ashley’s situation & that of another young woman who ended up in an abusive relationship which ended in murder when she had the audacity to try & end the relationship. I have a problem with this, as this also implies choice. I also dislike the phrases ‘crime of passion’ & ‘victim of love’ when they’re used in relation to domestic abuse. Domestic abuse is not about love, it’s about power & control, & it’s not a crime of passion either!
Another thing I’m not happy about in relation to domestic abuse is the way in which some people joke about it (in the same way that they joke about rape, & I think the same sort of people who joke about rape also joke about domestic abuse). I remember an episode of The Hotel Inspector where there were a young couple doing up a hotel, & the guy had already made a comment about how his female partner wore the trousers. A bit later on in the programme, they were having a heated debate/discussion about something or other, & the female partner (I think) said that they were having a bit of a domestic, to which the male partner said, “that’s domestic abuse!”. I thought that was an extremely crass & tasteless remark, & I was displeased to hear him trivialising domestic abuse in such a way. I’ve also heard men making ‘jokes’ about ‘giving their wives/girlfriends a good hiding/thrashing’, which I also disapprove of. What do these idiots get out of joking about things like that? Is it some macho kick, I wonder, to make themselves look like big he-men who know how to keep their girlfriends/wives in their place in front of their mates? If so, then they need to wake up- there’s nothing big or clever about beating women. I’m not saying women don’t do this, however- I’m pretty sure that at least one woman that I know of has joked about domestic abuse (& approved of rape jokes), & that woman I mentioned, who was on The Hotel Inspector, also didn’t bat an eyelid when her partner said what he did about domestic abuse.