While dictators or those who murder and infringe human rights are eventually often assassinated or pursued, exposed and rightly condemned by history, abusers with similar behaviours on an individual level are largely ignored and usually not caught.
Almost none of them are caught and even fewer punished. Even then the punishments are often felt not to fit the crimes. Again, we can only talk about domestic abuse because the wider relational abuse of the type I suffered isn't even recognised.
Less than 24% of domestic abuse is reported.
Only 6% of those result in a charge and even fewer in a conviction.
Most abusive men are easily clever enough to evade the police, cover their tracks or avoid circumstances where they could be charged altogether while still committing abuse. It's easy to do and the law is weak. For Pigface it was an absolute walk in the park. Too easy, really. The really shocking thing is that the Social Services department that should have investigated the serious allegations of abuse of mum, never mind the carefully planned traumatisation of me, fell over themselves to help him - and they all seemed to be women!
it is often only in the cases of a few incontrovertible and extreme cases of usually physical abuse where the victim (invariably a woman) has either killed herself or sometimes killed the partner in self defence that abuse is investigated at all. There are countless men doing, today, killing and causing life threatening harm, through injuries to women, psychologically abusing them to suicide, causing levels of fear and stress so that many die anyway from stress related diseases and these men are just not being caught. Most frightening of all: they know they can get away with it.
Until it happened to me I had no idea about this. You don’t. You don’t think it will happen to you. You think someone else will take care of it. And when it happens to you you think someone will protect you. There isn’t anyone. Most of us are totally ignored. Unless you have money to pay lawyers. Then someone is paid to listen to and advise you but that by no means brings protection. An abuser can't afford to be wrong, not legally and not in terms of their ego.
They are not punished, or are insufficiently punished, because the witnesses are intimidated into erasure, or because they kill themselves and it is often never known and because we don’t have a strong enough mechanism, or enough interest, to link victim abuse to suicide even when it is long term. We don’t even have that. I think the known, victim suspected suicides are vastly higher even than is reported.
We don’t recognise in a punitive way, the severe physical damage that is caused by the stress of psychological abuse.
We don’t allow torture, officially, but we allow men to torture women all the time and get away with it.
We don’t genuinely recognise abuse that isn’t domestic or sexual and that it can have the same effect.
Sometimes the victim manages to escape or survive as best they can only to ensure the stress induced illnesses associated with abuse victims. The victim just wants to try and reclaim the fragments of their life and not dwell on the past. That's what happened with me. I feel relieved that - so far at least - I have escaped with my life even while my physical and mental health is in tatters. But the last thing you want to do is provoke the perpetrator or expose yourself to more institutional betrayal.
An abuser that is not punished is emboldened and is always waiting.
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