What happens to the victims of relational abuse?

 Individual vs mass trauma

It's easy to lose and ignore trauma that happens on an individual level, the inestimable, interminable cruelty of one person to another: the woman who kills herself, found trapped in a flat with an abusive partner, who tried to get help and was ignored. That is an individual horror that affects everyone around her. The horrors of WW2 were many individual horrors on a massive scale.  They, for obvious reasons are remembered.  But she and the many like her are not because they are all separate cases and nobody sees a pattern because almost nobody is looking.

The victims

I had been betrayed on multiple levels, I had been gaslit, I had been made to look like the problem. I started to think about all the victims of relational abuse and what happened to them.

They die.

A lot of them die.

Women who have experienced domestic abuse (there don't seem to be figures for more generalised relational abuse) have a 44% higher risk of mortality from all causes compared to those who have not. The University of Warwick found they have a 51% higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, and a 31% increase in  cardiovascular disease. 

Why diabetes? With chronic stress, cortisol and adrenaline stay elevated far beyond what the body evolved for. These hormones raise blood glucose on purpose (to fuel escape). When this happens daily, for months or years, cells become insulin resistant which is the core defect in type 2 diabetes. It is the direct metabolic consequence of living under threat.

And it’s so easy to blame the victim: they brought it on themselves.  The person is so ill they can’t argue back. They’ve also been crushed. Trauma removes agency, fogs the brain, creates short term memory problems, and fills your days with fear. How can someone in that situation argue back?

Even if you have money, going to a lawyer is not failsafe. Dad's lawyer supported and thus emboldened the abuser. And even if you can afford a lawyer and even if a lawyer helps youyou may not win because an abuser will lie and try to make you the problem. You may end up poor and . 

This is one of the greatest failings of society: the failure to recognise politically, legally, punitively and as a society the evidence that shows that abusers cause long term illness and death in their victims. 

It’s another one of these too messy, too confusing, too hard to prove, too individual issues that crop up when one human causes massive harm to another.  

One national police report showed 93 victim (i.e. suspected abuse related) suicides vs. 80 homicides in England and Wales, 2022-23. What that means is that suicide from abuse can be and has been higher than murder while conviction rates are almost non existent.

That was a very clear sense that I have had all through this ordeal.  That the perpetrator was trying desperately hard to bring about my illness and ideally my death but not in a way that anyone could point the finger directly at him. He knows society is not there yet and he could get away with it. He wants me to "bring it on myself" because, with, no link between harm and illness and death that's the obvious attack. It would get rid of me, he would inherit alone and most of all he would “win”, through domination, control and this lack of interest in messy, harm cases, by society.

Women are also more likely to have chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, three times more likely to develop severe mental illness and other debilitating health issues.

Three female victims of domestic abuse die a week by suicide.

A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK.

Why isn't it treated as a public health emergency? Because 60% of the House of Commons are still men. Domestic abuse doesn’t touch everyone who is in power and some are perpetrators. And there are a lot of other crises, especially in health.

Why is this different? Because it is not random illness. It is deliberate harm inflicted by a man on a woman. But if more people can be saved by spending money in another way in health then that is seen as more important. Maybe it is.

But this is not really about spending money.  It’s about our values, who we are, that we think letting abusers kill women every week and give them life sentences of ill health is not a priority, in fact so not a priority that these astonishing figures are not more widely known.

Remember, those figures are  only about domestic abuse.  Abuse of vulnerable adults like mum does have a name but it’s not really domestic abuse if it’s not by a partner. That’s what domestic abuse is seen as. Other kinds of relational abuse don’t even have a proper name. By how much would those statistics go up if other kinds of relational abuse in families or in other settings were included?