She had been brought up to make the people around her happy and comfortable
Zoskia Beliski at the Globe and Mail talks about the way women’s training in being polite and agreeable can interfere with their ability to stand up for themselves.
I didn’t want to seem frosty and I didn’t want to seem mad.
That was complainant Lucy DeCoutere during her time on the stand last month at the sexual assault trial of former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi, who faces a verdict Thursday. Asked to account for why DeCoutere had stayed at Ghomeshi’s house for an hour after he allegedly slapped and choked her, she explained that she had been brought up to make the people around her happy and comfortable, to “foster kind thoughts” with a “pleasing personality.” She said she’d been raised to be polite to a host – even an allegedly violent one, apparently.
The bar for being acceptably polite is in a different place for women compared to where it is for men. It takes very little in the way of defiance or refusal for us to be called bitches or cunts.
It’s been documented time and again by psychologists and counsellors who work with assault survivors: in reaction to trauma, many women will do things they later regret because they felt somehow compelled to “be nice.” It’s a bit of social conditioning – be deferential, fix problems, avoid conflict at all costs – that keeps women uniquely vulnerable as they recriminate themselves for things that aren’t their fault. Even though no one but rapists are to blame for rape, many women carry their pacifist conditioning over into the aftermath of sexual assault, especially when they know the attacker: Maybe I’m overreacting? Maybe I misinterpreted? Maybe it was me?
And it comes as a surprise to women who react that way.
If the reactions of the three complainants frustrated viewers of the Ghomeshi trial, they are also often a surprise to victims themselves: “As I say this now, it’s outrageous that I stayed and did not leave but that was my reaction,” DeCoutere told the packed Toronto courtroom in February.
“Many victims struggle to explain their own behaviour. We need to remember that until they were assaulted, they probably held all of the same myths about sexual violence as many other people,” says Nina Burrowes, a London-based psychologist who helps victims of sexual abuse.
“When you live your life assuming this will never happen to you or if it does happen, you’ll scream, fight and run away, it can be incredibly confusing when you experience the reality of abuse and find yourself reacting in a very different way.”
I can imagine that so easily – reacting like a wimp or a damn fool and then being confused as hell, since that’s hardly how I like to think of myself. In my head I’m a Woman of Steel but in the real world I’m not so metallic. I’m a great one for thinking “Well I wish I’d handled that differently.”
How to undo the conditioning that compels women to “be nice” at all costs? After all, minimizing doesn’t protect sexual assault survivors from experiencing long-term trauma.
One way? Feminism.
Bystander intervention, Jaclyn Friedman, author and podcaster, says: “We have to stick up for each other. When we see each other doing this kind of thing we need to say, ‘Hey, you know you don’t owe it to that person to be nice.’”
Psychologist Nina Burrowes, says we need to get better at hearing and responding to disclosures of abuse: “It can be massively empowering to help victims understand their own behaviour and their own reactions. Until they do they can think that they are weird, mad, or to blame.”
For Deborah Sinclair, a Toronto psychologist, the answer lies in feminism: “I try to raise my daughter differently and with all the women I come into contact with, I really encourage them to speak up and stand up for themselves. But they’re going against a lot of training. I was raised as a ‘nice Catholic girl,’ too.”
That’s “gender identity” for you.
I have been, at various times in my life, a rape victim, a legal advocate for domestic violence victims, and a survivor of domestic violence. This “why did she stay” question crops up in virtually every discussion of any man-on-woman violence, and there is one fact sorely lacking from the conversation: “she” did not think like an abuser. It’s so simple, and it doesn’t stop within gender lines, and that’s probably why people don’t see it.
Anyone who has been abused will probably agree on one thing: the abuse doesn’t make sense. We know this is true from an objective standpoint too; abuse isn’t actually a reaction to the other person or their behavior, but is instead something that is internally-generated by the abuser. That’s why saying “It’s not your fault” is more than a nice platitude; it’s actually the reason that no amount of effort on the part of a victim to change will ever be enough to end the abuse: it wasn’t about her in the first place.
The reason abused women stay with their abusers is that they see their abusers as people who love them, and they expect that their abuser is pretty similar to other people in that category. When a person who loves you attacks you, it’s confusing. You don’t just move that person into the “monster” category and leave; you twist yourself in knots trying to figure out what the fuck happened, to pinpoint what exactly went wrong, to identify whatever element made things go so suddenly bad.
People frame this in a way that makes it sound like women are stupid or naive or unprepared, but that’s wrong. The victim is the one who is acting normally; what’s wrong is the situation that’s been created by someone who is sneakily operating on a totally different set of rules. It’s very easy to identify a “bad guy” after the fact and say, “Who would spend time around such a bad guy?” Somehow people forget at the same time that “bad guys” had to earn that reputation at some point, and usually get it by hurting somebody who had no way of knowing.
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Other people expect you to know how to handle yourself when you are “strong”, too. Rape tends to happen in secret, but there is a lot of public behavior that operates the same way. Overt sexism in the workplace, sexual boundary-crossing in a social situation, friendly “teasing” that seems oddly malicious.
For example, you might smile and nod in response to someone’s completely inappropriate comment, thinking, “I can’t have heard him right. Or if I did, it must have been something that accidentally slipped out. I mean, every man that age knows better than to say something about a woman’s breasts like that? Everyone else seems not to be uncomfortable… yes, I just… didn’t hear him right.”
Later you find out everyone thought it was bizarre and appalling. But if you’d been offended, obviously you would have raised a stink right there, right? You’re *strong*. Clearly, if you didn’t scold him (trying not to make a scene), it must have been some little inside joke between the two of you, or something.
But that’s not how it works. When someone focuses their rudeness on you, you feel suddenly shaken, in an unwanted spotlight, and you freeze, trying to asses long enough to the moment to be lost and you can’t dredge it back up or you’ll really sound crazy.
So: if you see something, say something. Just asking “Was that okay with you?” gives the victim a little space to speak. If you’re worried they might still feel pressured, a sharp, “I hope you don’t talk like that on a regular basis” to the offender signals it is not acceptable. Maybe if we do this, we can help women believe they aren’t overreacting when the situation is critical.
Any woman who has survived girlhood in this culture is likely to value her passivity more than her own life.
I read a thing by ‘self defense’ expert, a woman, who was livid at this trait in her students. They were so devoted to a sense of pacifist virtue that they were not prepared to fight to prevent any crime against themselves. She could finally get MOST of them to consider the notion of fighting to to keep their children from being killed. Up to that point the default to ‘appropriate,’ ‘feminine’ passivity trumped the most basic self-preservation.
And these were women who had chosen to take a ‘self-defense’ class.