I worked in the domestic violence sector for a little under a year. My job title was ‘Junior Bid Writer’. Naively, I thought that having the word ‘writer’ in my title would make me feel like I was fulfilling the calling I’d always felt. To write, to offer up an interpretation of the world in the hope of changing it.
Instead, I found myself using the same industrial-strength language, day after day. Describing the reality of domestic abuse in words that bleached away reality: words like service-user, perpetrator, data-driven, positive outcomes. Cost-effective. Endless hours putting together funding applications that stretched to dozens or even hundreds of pages just to prove that we could run the refuges we were already running. Knowing, all the while, that funding was being slashed, and that local government was bound to award the contract to whoever promised to do the most with the least money. There were plenty of housing services, most of them with no expertise in domestic violence, waiting to step in and replace us.
That writing had to be emotion-free. A women’s organization couldn’t risk being accused of hysteria; not when those competing organisations professed to see intimate partner abuse as a gender-neutral problem. So I continued to bleach my words. But that felt increasingly at odds with the world I was working in. A world where there’s a checklist to judge how dangerous a perpetrator is. This checklist asks about violent incidents, yes, but it also asks – are you pregnant? Has he ever choked you? Has he ever harmed any pets?
Most of all – are you very frightened?
Unbelievably, much of my writing involved proving there was a problem. I did a lot of research, read a lot of domestic homicide reviews. There’s a website called Murder Map where you can read up on all the homicides in London. Twice in the same week, over the course of work research, I read news stories about men beheading their wives. One in Cambridgeshire, one in Hoxton. Haven’t heard about it? No. You probably wouldn’t have. It wasn’t big news.
Occasionally the phone on my desk would ring. On the other end a woman would speak in low, urgent tones. Needing help. I’d give her the number of the National Domestic Violence Helpline and put the receiver down, shaking, knowing that I’d likely just spoken to someone who’d snatched a moment of safety from a daily reality of negotiating with a terrorist. A terrorist who claimed to love them.
Are you very frightened? Box ticked.
In our applications we had to make the argument that fighting domestic abuse is economical. And, by the way, it is. Every domestic homicide costs the state in the region of 2.2 million pounds. A Home Office report published in 2019 estimated the cost of domestic violence in the year 2017 as £66 billion. Court costs, incarceration costs, childcare costs. Lost productivity. But what I really wanted to do was talk about the human cost of failing to disentangle love and violence.
I’d go home at night and watch Making a Murderer, the series that everyone was talking about. A man hadn’t had a fair trial for murdering a woman – a terrible miscarriage of justice. The fact that the woman was dead, that her name was barely mentioned even as the story of her death was told? Barely a footnote. Same for Serial.
What I saw in culture fit exactly with what I was discovering at work – that misogyny is baked into the institutions of our country. The police who see domestic violence ‘incidents’ and fail to understand the pattern of power and control, the CPSwho weren’t given the time or resources to properly prepare for court cases, local council ads telling women they risked violent assault if they drank alcohol. The local authorities who saw the necessity of refuge funding as an inconvenience. The women who stayed in refuges were, by definition, not from the local area, because the whole point of a refuge is to flee. What’s more, they were legally homeless, which meant they couldn’t vote. What’s the point in helping people who can’t even vote for you? Can’t we just put the perpetrator into an anger-management programme? He might go from hitting her five times a week to hitting her three times. Positive outcomes.
I felt hopeless. The problem was patriarchy, and patriarchy is simply too big, too inexpressible, too unwieldy. I saw it in my friends’ Tinder dates, in the books I read and the advertising I saw. I saw it in the friend whose boyfriend threatened to kill himself if she left him. The friend whose ex took nude photos of her while she was asleep, then treated her angry reaction as unreasonable and disproportionate. In the friend whose ex signed her up to appointments for organising her own funeral from a variety of different companies, to ensure that every few minutes for a whole three days she was constantly asked to anticipate her death. Her house was vandalised and friends quietly admitted he has repeatedly expressed that he wanted to ‘ruin her life’, ‘not make this easy for her’, to make her ‘feel the pain’ than he feels.’
I saw in all these things that power was a man’s birthright. That it was okay – expected, even – for a woman to obliterate parts of herself to make a man feel powerful.
I knew it because I’d done it. Not been abused, not been terrorized, but – quietly, unthinkingly, culpably – made myselfsmaller so that men could feel big.
Eventually I stopped doing that job. I started writing fiction, because, for me, fiction was a way of cutting through the roar of fact. Because, between the tight lines of judgement criteria, in the cramped box of a checklist, there was no space for a story.
And I needed the story. Because without the story we can’t make sense of the statistic, we can’t understand, in our core – that two women a week are killed by a partner or former partner in the UK. That an estimated further three per week take their own lives to escape abuse. That only eight per centof cases reported to the police end in conviction (why doesn’t she just report him?) That when a woman left a violent partner, the risk to her life goes up, not down (why doesn’t she just leave?). Still, she usually does try to leave. It will take an average of between five and seven attempts to finally get away.
People have asked me if I found writing Keeper upsetting. I didn’t. After all those months of anger, it was a relief. There was a well of anger inside me that came pouring out almost from the moment that I started the book. There’s a line from Adrienne Rich that I always come back to – ‘my visionary anger cleanses my sight’. Anger – female anger – can help us to see clearly, rather than clouding our judgement. We’re not insane, we’re not unstable, we’re just looking at the world with clear eyes.
How did my experience inform my writing, people ask me?Some of the little details of life in refuges: the kids’ pictures on the walls; the way the heating was always turned way up. The feeling of entering a kind of underground railroad – a network of secret spaces that exist to keep women safe. Bigger things too. The understanding that women go into hiding because there are men who want to hurt or kill them. That the police and the courts aren’t stopping them.
Almost every time I talk about Keeper, people – mostly women – offer me stories. Stories of friends that they’re worried about, friends who escaped, friends who they fear never will. And every time they tell me about these situations as though they were unique. They say, wide-eyed, ‘but the weirdest thing is that he seems so charming. So nice.’ They don’t know that charm is a control tactic. They say ‘the thing is, I don’t think he’s actually ever hit her.’
They don’t know that violence is a tool of control, that it isn’t the root cause. That abuse might include physical violence, but might not. That the official definition for coercive control is ‘a range of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support’ – that might mean fists, but it also might mean access to family or finances. That ‘threats with a weapon’ might include a gun or a knife, but it also might be a pair of scissors held up close to the face with the whispered threat: I’m going to cut off all your hair. It might include a niqab, but it also might also mean a woman forced to wear revealing clothing so that the world can see what a wonderful object she is, that her beauty is a reflection of her owner’s power. It might mean the perpetrator screaming in the street, or it might mean the victim screaming while the perpetrator smiles calmly and makes eye contact with passers-by. Look at her. Look at how crazy she is.
That abuse is a pattern of behavior. A story. Keeper tells that story, or tries to. It’s my offering. Because I couldn’t write the funding applications any more. Because whatever money I donate or however much I tweet about the Domestic Violence Bill (at the time of writing, still not through Parliament) or however much I write to my MP about ratifying the Istanbul Convention, it doesn’t feel like enough. Because the best I can offer is a story, and perhaps that story might help a woman to understand her own.
