“I don’t believe someone with your professional background could have been in an abusive marriage for 15 years.”
I had just met the person sharing this abrupt assessment at the first function I attended after ending my marriage. I had not confided in them about the relationship; they had heard this from others. I wish I’d been sufficiently emboldened at the time to re-educate them but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt small and ashamed, and mumbled something about it not making sense.
It was not the first or last time I heard similar statements. As a middle-class, well-educated GP, I don’t match many people’s preconceptions about victims. And in all honesty, two years after ending my marriage, I sometimes still feel confused about how I ended up there too. During my medical school and GP training, we were taught little about family and domestic violence – certainly nothing reflective of the fact that it is one of the greatest causes of ill health and premature death in women under the age of 45 years and the seventh greatest cause of ill health in women of all ages.
While we learned about physical violence, I don’t remember emotional abuse and coercive control being discussed. Sexual violence was presented as something that was perpetrated by strangers to lone women, not something that most commonly occurs within intimate relationships and includes not just rape or aggravated sexual assault but unwanted sex that occurs in the context of pressure, intimidation, guilt or other coercive behaviour. I learned these truths after experiencing them and only started acquiring the language to describe them in the months before I exited the relationship. Thankfully medical schools and specialist training programs are now addressing this gap.
What concerns me most about the way domestic violence is being presented in the media is not that there isn’t enough acknowledgment that it affects women across all educational, socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, but that the full spectrum of victim experiences isn’t being represented. The focus still seems to be mostly on deaths or acute physical and sexual assaults. While this is critical and everything possible must be done to prevent these deaths and assaults, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that many more women live with more nuanced forms of abuse and coercive control, often without overt physical or sexual violence, particularly when perpetrators are more highly educated. This is reflected in Australian Bureau of Statistics research confirming that one in four women have experienced intimate partner violence since the age of 15. Although these women may not present with obvious injuries or health issues, living with any level of constant threat still causes enormous harm to a victim’s physical and mental health, and this must be recognised and addressed.
Each time I read of another woman being killed by a current or former partner, I feel the horror and sadness of this loss, but I also feel anxious that my experience of domestic violence becomes less believable. I hear my former husband’s mocking voice saying, “See, you don’t know how good you had it,” and know that it validates his belief that he wasn’t abusive but was just “stressed in a job from hell”.
I worry about the thousands of women in abusive relationships who will hear similar gaslighting phrases while living with the unending fear of another explosion or threatening behaviour, weighed down by the brooding anger, guilt and blame-shifting that is similarly used to control them. After nearly two decades of living with this behaviour, I felt confused and incompetent, emotionally distraught and unlovable. I barely felt like a woman any more, professional or otherwise. I barely felt. This is a normal trauma response to sustained interpersonal abuse. It wasn’t my fault; it is never the victim’s fault.
Being a GP has afforded me opportunities that many victims of domestic violence are without. I work part-time as my mental health improves but earn enough to live on. I’ve been able to meaningfully apply my lived experience in working with other victims and in training my GP colleagues to recognise and respond to family and domestic violence. I’ve had access to an excellent trauma counsellor for the past four years. I moved closer to my family and have been surrounded by a safe, supportive community as I rebuild my life. These ought not to be seen as privileges but necessities that all victims deserve, and adequate funding must be provided to specialist family and sexual violence services to enable victims to access them.
Recovering from sustained domestic violence is a long-term journey and I am still healing but today I am in a much better place, physically and mentally. People praise me for “moving on” but I don’t think you move on from these experiences. I feel as if I’m re-emerging from the rubble of my life, forever reconfigured by what happened in both painful and positive ways. The wounds, memories and grief will fade but will stay with me for ever. They matter because I matter. We all do.
• In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org
