/ 8 September 2023

Sending the wrong message

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We often write about violence as if it is a love story. This idea is so pervasive and so insidious that, much of the time, we don’t even notice we’re sharing it. 

We let newspapers gossip in their headlines and claim that love triangles are perfectly reasonable explanations for murder. We sing along to ballads telling us that love hurts (and if it doesn’t hurt a little, perhaps it’s not love). Sometimes the theme is couched front and centre in a jaunty tune, a karaoke of barely veiled menace. The Beatles warned their “girl” that she would die if they ever found her with another man.

The Crystals — the American group that sang hits such as Then He Kissed Me and Da Doo Ron Ron — crooned that that when their lover hit them, that was when they knew he loved them. This particular song, He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss), was co-written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin and was originally intended as a cautionary tale, inspired by a domestic abuse case where a babysitter had been beaten by her boyfriend. 

The song’s 1962 arrangement, by then-music guru Phil Spector (who, decades later, was convicted of murdering Lana Clarkson), literalised the narrative, creating an unsettling vision that fared poorly on the charts. 

Other tunes about violence dressed as love have done exceptionally well though: Tom Jones had a multiple number one hit with Delilah, a song about murdering a woman who he believed had deceived him (the song has recently been pulled from the half-time match playlist of the Welsh Rugby Union because of its topic). Guns ’n Roses’ B-side track about killing the woman they loved and burying her in their backyard (so they wouldn’t have to miss her) is a crowd favourite. The group reportedly penned the song as a joke, after hearing a story about a man who was mistreated by his (female) partner. 

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to sing along to Used to Love Her (But I Had to Kill Her). But maybe we need to start disentangling the words of love and romance from those of abuse and trauma — because when we conflate them it perpetu-ates practices of violence that, for way too long, and in almost every place, have not just been permitted; they have also become expected, disregarded by saying “well you know this is just how things are. This is how love is between two people”. 

That, sometimes, when a man really loves a woman, he …

Ambushes her on the way to school. Locks her in her bedroom. Takes away her cellphone. Points his gun at her and threatens to shoot her. Stabs her with a garden fork when she is pregnant. Rents a car so he can follow her without her noticing until it’s too late. Shoots her eight times before shooting himself. Stabs her 24 times and hides her under a bush.

And, of course, when we see things like this, we’ll say these kinds of despicable acts aren’t the ones we mean when we’re singing along to a pop tune, because songs are obviously metaphors, they’re not real. 

Although there are a number of cases where men murdered their former partners and buried them in their backyards, not so much to keep them close as to avoid being caught. 

Or we will say these kinds of terrible deeds are obviously the acts of monsters, not singers, and we will insist that we know the difference between monsters and normal people, the difference between a song and a punch. 

But when you read enough cases, enough court transcripts, follow enough news stories, over time it becomes apparent that perhaps monsters are not always so easy to see — at least not until they have committed a final, monstrous act. 

And you realise that the monsters are among us, frequently obscuring their violence and menace behind a veneer of charm and lies, behind music and chocolate and roses, and more than sometimes, relying on this tacit “agreement” that love hurts.  

This book is a little different from my previous books on fatal violence in that it is not so much a work of research and data as it is an act of retelling. Part of this involves sharing the stories of women who can no longer tell their own; this is a complicated and perhaps a problematic determination, to try and be a voice for the dead. 

Reconstructing a life, even a death, from an act of murder or the body that is left behind, is an imperfect and inherently limited process. 

Through the chorus of the dead that we are most strongly reminded how each individual case is part of a systemic failure to protect women, and how eerily similar so many of the cases are, even when they are thousands of kilometres, lifetimes, communities apart. 

This book looks to actively reword narratives of systematic intimate partner violence — the things that are characteristic of broader society, or the systems that underlie how society functions; violence and abuse that is cumulative and sustained, rather than just a once-off or “situational” incident. 

The distinctions between these types of violence are not always clear, because not all violence is physical and not all violence is visible. The terms are discussed in greater detail later in this book. 

The push to change and update the language we use to describe violence committed by intimate partners follows and joins the efforts of many other women, over several decades, who have correctly and repeatedly pointed out that it is truly well past time we discard calling any form of abuse a form of “love”.

Australian author Jane Gilmore’s Fixed It project, which rewrites problematic news headlines about GBV, shows how words actively disguise abuse.

Domestic Terror is published by NB Publishers and costs R330.