Believing by Anita Hill

Author:Anita Hill [Hill, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE AND POLITICS

Politics govern how much of our public resources we are willing to invest in challenging gender-based violence. And the politics of gender-based violence is fraught with victim blaming. When public officials categorize intimate partner violence as a private matter, the victim blaming becomes built into our structures. It also shows in our calculation of the cost of the behavior to individuals and the greater society. Classifying gendered violence as a private rather than a public issue has many effects. It reduces the significance of the problem and serves as an excuse for lack of public funding for solutions. We tell ourselves that it’s not so bad. And then we ignore the costs in lives and human resources it causes. Personalizing the impact of gender-based violence is a kind of denial that allows us to tell ourselves “it’s not our problem.” Why should government funding be spent on individual personal problems? Labeling intimate partner violence a private matter has a social effect—stigmatizing victims and marginalizing them in our communities. All of the above reductive approaches to gender-based violence devalue women who experience abuse, silencing the witnesses preemptively.

Victim blaming plays a role in suborning gender-based violence. But it is never more problematic than when it happens to intimate partner violence survivors, who often encounter sexual assault, emotional abuse, beatings, and financial extortion at the hands of partners. Shaming, for “allowing themselves to become victims,” by friends, family, or people to whom they reach out for help can further trap them in abusive situations they are trying to escape. I had read about this part of the cycle of abuse as well as the role that abusers themselves play in entrapping victims of gender-based violence. But I had not witnessed it firsthand until 1992, in a shelter for what we then called “battered women” and their families in Detroit.

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