I have long believed in the power of women’s stories. “A free person tells her own story,” writes Rebecca Solnit. “A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.” As a feminist and a writer, this is the closest thing I have to a doctrine: we have to create a society in which women’s stories are told by them, and heard by as many people as possible.
The #MeToo movement has made plain just how many stories remain disregarded, ridiculed or, perhaps worst of all, never heard, but it also revealed how an avalanche of change can occur from the simple, ancient act of a woman telling her story. Then another. And another. And another.
And so I decided it was time to tell my own story in the pages of a book. Despite the thousands of words I’ve published to date, this was one story I have kept secret, a wound less painful if not exposed to light or air. I confessed in my book that I had grown up in a house with a violent and psychological domestic abuser. I wrote that when my mother reported him to the police, she was told there was not enough “evidence” and it felt like my whole existence had been denied, our lives collapsed into nothing; bruises, scars and agony wiped clean off the slate of history.
My book, I figured, was my moment to provide the evidence, to counter the suffocating and silencing narrative that had been forced upon us. But then my publisher said I needed to remove the phrase “domestic abuser”. I could not call the man in my home what he was. I could not name my abuse.
I would, they said, be potentially libelling him, and he could sue. Because the police had found no “evidence”, the Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t take the case, and there was never even the possibility that he might be found guilty of two decades of crimes.
Libel is “a published false statement that is damaging to a person’s reputation”. Because there was a chance of damaging his reputation, I couldn’t share the extreme levels of physical and emotional damage he had caused my mother and me, even if he was not named; even if identifiable characteristics were removed. His reputation trumped all. Editors didn’t appreciate the irony of, or seem to really understand, the severe distress they were causing – they just apologised and looked at me awkwardly over Zoom calls.
I am writing this piece anonymously because media outlets face the same predicament. In order to publicly lambast the impossibility of telling our stories, we have to do so under a cloak of secrecy – unless a court has found the perpetrator guilty, which happens in a staggeringly low percentage of cases. Our legal system is built on the cornerstone of “innocent until proven guilty”, but what does that mean when we categorically know the vast majority of the guilty never see justice?
This has a very real impact on how many stories – stories like mine – actually get told. If a survivor manages to overcome the fear and shame of abuse, and wants to speak out, they remain silenced by the law. When it comes to understanding domestic abuse, we rarely hear anything beyond faceless statistics, fictional accounts in books and TV, or anonymous pieces like this. The one time we routinely learn of women in these situations is in the aftermath of domestic homicide. This means the lived experience of domestic abuse is kept on the edge of public debate, making it harder to campaign for, and allowing for it to be misunderstood and deprioritised – precisely where any abuser would like it to be.
The experience with my publisher was unsettling. In some ways it echoed the police telling my mother there was no evidence – a similar denial, an eradication of something we knew to be harrowingly true, something that shaped our whole lives, every fibre of who we are, once again denied. To wait a lifetime to speak out, only to find out you cannot, feels like a Greek myth, one of a stolen voice, a curse of eternal silence no matter how loudly I scream.
To be a victim of domestic abuse is to be stripped of your self-esteem, a feeling of safety; trust in others; simple, easy happy days; sound, fret-free sleep. These things are all robbed and are never given back. For many victims, our stories are all we have. They are what we have left to rebuild, to claim our survival like a flag in the earth: I made it out alive, here’s my story. To take that too might be the cruellest thing of all.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
