by Les May
I GAVE
up listening to ‘The Archers’ in 2002, so I have absolutely no knowledge of the
‘Trial’. I don’t much like fictional
series which take it upon themselves to tackle ‘issues’ not least because it is
difficult to present any complex and controversial issue in a sufficiently
nuanced way which will not leave some listener or viewer from feeling that
their ‘side’ has been misrepresented.
Far from changing minds it seems more likely that it will reinforce
prejudice.
So last
Tuesday I found myself wondering was it prejudice or oversight which led the ‘i’
newspaper to devote half the space of its letters column to the fictional
‘Helen’ but could not find space for a
story about a real life Helen who had been involved in a ‘domestic’ which
resulted in her death. The Metro managed
just over half a page on the story and the Daily Mail almost a whole page.
Helen
Nicholl hanged herself on the June 4 last year.
Not unreasonably the police arrested her husband Stephen Nicoll on
suspicion of her murder. But after two interviews the Detective Chief Inspector
who led the investigation released him without charge and went on to say 'I
believe that Stephen Nicoll was probably of a victim of domestic violence.'
But the
picture which emerged at the coroner’s inquest was not simply one of a wife
assaulting her husband, but of a woman who also tried to control her grown up
daughters, assaulting one of them leading to a police investigation and becoming
estranged from the other, and of a family in which during rows with their
mother, her daughters referred to her as ‘council estate scum' and 'Liverpool
scum'.
A few
weeks ago I wrote an article for Northern Voices, ‘Danczuk, Feminism
& Family Violence’, in which I referred to the work of Erin
Pizzey. Pizzey distinguished between 'genuine battered women' and 'violence-prone women'. The former she
defined as 'the unwilling and innocent
victim of his or her partner's violence' and the latter she defined as 'the unwilling victim of his or her own
violence.' Helen Nicholl was such a
woman and in hanging herself was the victim of her own violence. But whilst she
may have been the one who used physical violence towards her
daughters and her husband, what for want of a better word I will call verbal
violence, does not seem to have been far below the surface.
It
appears in this case that physical abuse by the mother was reciprocated by the
daughters in the form of verbal abuse; a
kind of mutuality of domestic violence such as Erin Pizzey had identified.
Feminist
campaigners seek to persuade us that because men are more likely than women to
resort to violence outside the home that this is also the case within
the home. But the empirical evidence
suggests that this assumption is untrue.
About
one in eight of adults, i.e. both men and women, in an intimate
relationship admit to low level physical violence towards their partner. As about 50% of inter-partner violence is
reciprocal it is possible these people somehow attract each other or learn and
later reciprocate the behaviour. At
higher levels of physical violence where significant injury is caused, men are
about six times more likely to be the perpetrator, i.e. about one in seven
cases of significant injury during a violent domestic dispute are caused by
women.
Conflict
is a part of life. We all have some
desire to pursue our own self interest even in intimate relationships. What matters Is how we resolve that conflict
of interests. Conflict becomes pathological
when one or both of the parties resort to coercion, whether that coercion is
applied emotionally, verbally or physically.
All too often coercion continues to be applied even after the
relationship breaks down and the parties separate, though in such cases it is
usually given a gloss of respectability through the courts in the form of so
called ‘contact’ orders.
As the
Helen Nicholl case shows simply equating ‘domestic’ violence with
‘male’ violence is misleading and in the long run
counterproductive because it offers no opportunity to think how the existing
level of abuse in intimate relationships can be reduced or how conflict
situations can be prevented from escalating to the point where one of the
people involved suffers significant injury.
As noted above this is more likely to be the woman than the man. Nor does it take into account that abuse can
and does take place in intimate same sex relationships.
It is
perhaps understandable that feminists who see domestic violence being
synonymous with male violence will ignore the empirical evidence that women are
just as likely as men to resort to low level assault in conflict situations but
focus entirely on escalated conflicts where the woman is injured, and ignore
the work of Erin Pizzey and tragic women like Helen Nicholl who was the victim
of her own violence. To do otherwise
would undermine their world view.
But I
find it inconceivable that the women who usually have so much to say about ‘male
violence’ have failed to comment upon what some four weeks ago happened to
Karen Danczuk as a result of the actions of her ex-husband Simon. Are we perhaps seeing middle class snobbery
at work here?
We are
already beginning to see this incident the subject of ‘spin’ seemingly intended
to minimise the severity of the incident.
Whilst a month ago Karen was happy to tell the world, ‘I feared he
was going to kill me’ and ‘Violent row left me paralysed with fear’
and have Simon’s behaviour described as ‘Wild MP yelled and kicked in glass
door’, a recent Daily Mail article included the line that ‘Karen was
taken by ambulance to a local hospital where she was treated for the cut which
officers said she sustained in a fall’.
Perhaps she ‘walked into a floor’ because it must have been some fall if
it required 40 stitches.
A month
ago the story was that she was standing behind a thick glass door when an
enraged Simon kicked at it until it came crashing down on her knocking her to
the floor.
According
to the Daily Mirror her story now is:
'What happened is, he kicked a
door in and it hit me - it wasn't anything Simon physically did to me'
and "I have some scars now on my hand but I didn't press charges
because it wasn't an intentional act.
'Unfortunately,
yes, the foot hit me but it wasn't intentional and so it doesn't seem right to
press charges." No mention here of it being a glass door or
the 40 stitches for the wound in her chest and upper right breast.
And what
was Danczuk’s response to all this? He told the Sunday Times that there had
been absolutely no physical violence, adding: 'Karen didn't
report any violence. The police made assumptions.'
It seems
some Rochdale MPs lead charmed lives. In
1979 Rochdale’s Alternative Paper (RAP)revealed details of then MP Cyril
Smith’s antics at Cambridge House. The
lack of interest by the mainstream media meant that ‘he got away with it’. This subtly different retelling of the story
of what recently happened in Spain between the Danczuk’s and the silence of the
usually very vocal feminists will lead some people once again to think ‘he
got away with it’.
I can
hardly say that I am disappointed by the response of feminists to this incident
between the Danczuks as I have never thought much of them anyhow. But the
saddest thing about this episode is the complete lack of self-awareness on
Simon Danczuk’s part.
At the
end of January this year, his website was crowing that he welcomed a £115,500
grant from Comic Relief to a local charity enabling it to run a ‘dedicated male
perpetrator programme’ to tackle domestic violence in Rochdale (my
emphasis).
His
exact words were: 'Domestic violence is a serious problem in every community
and I have seen from my weekly surgeries what a devastating impact it can have
on families’. and “I am delighted they have received this funding which
will be used to tackle domestic violence by challenging the perpetrators on
their behaviour giving them the support the need to reform.'
Now
contrary to Mr D. I do consider kicking in a glass door is an act of violence
and especially so if we are to believe Karen’s original story together with the
need for hospital treatment. A few
inches higher and the glass which caused the injuries to Karen’s chest and
upper right breast could have severed a major blood vessel. A bit of contrition
(and a quiet prayer of thanks for a narrow escape from potentially much more
serious injury) would seem to be in order here.
As a
well known MP, Simon could have used this experience to draw attention to what
can happen in a domestic situation when a row is allowed to escalate into
violence, even when that violence is not deliberately directed at a partner,
and the importance of making sure that disagreements do not reach this
stage. He failed to do so which in my
view makes him doubly culpable.
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