The Language of Battered Women: A Rhetorical Analysis of Personal Theologies

Chapter One. “I’ll Be Scared for Everyone in the World”: THE PERVASIVENESS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

ONE “I’ll Be Scared for Everyone in the World” THE PERVASIVENESS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Don’t trust. Men kill. The police don’t help us and, if the judges don’t do it, we’re lost. I’ll be scared for everyone in the world. —Josephine INTRODUCTION In ways nearly beyond belief, a woman’s body in the world is frequently a body in pain. Women suffer extensively from violence directed at them by their most intimate partners. Some women suffer in silence. Other women, like Josephine, escape to safety and speak out. Some women’s bodies alone tell the story. They suffer and die, many times without redress. Overwhelmingly , domestic violence is violence directed by men at women. Women initiate violence as often as men do, but research makes apparent the gender disproportion of seriously injurious intimate violence.1 Ninety-five percent of serious assaults are acts perpetrated by men against women who are several times more likely than men to need medical care and to experience psychological injuries after an assault.2 The acts of violence against women are many, the list long. Most commonly, women’s spouses or partners throw objects at them. They shove, grab, and slap. They kick, bite, or hit women with their fists. They beat women up. They rape them. They threaten women with guns and knives. 15 33011_SP_WIN_CH01_015-026 10/10/03, 11:43 AM 15 16 THE LANGUAGE OF BATTERED WOMEN The list of violent acts does not always convey the grievous reality, or frightening extent, of male brutality or women’s suffering, but women often are violated in appalling ways and means. A blow to the head is followed by another, and another, and another. A pregnant woman is kicked in her stomach. A girlfriend is hit by a car or pushed from a moving one. Eyes are blackened, limbs broken. Women from the Women’s House depict the violence starkly: — You would think that the times I was choked to the point that I lose consciousness would be enough! — I was pregnant with my third son. My boyfriend came in angry from working. He just started yelling at me because I moved something off his desk. Somehow we ended up on the bed—him squeezing me real tight and I was scratching him in the face. — He did stuff. Putting a gun to my head. Biting me and holding on for a long time. You know when someone bites you really hard for a long time? You can’t feel it anymore. Hit me, beat me with a broom. My body is so marked up from three years, I’m afraid to show another man my body. He’d say, “What man would want you with all those bruises?” He put me in a trunk. I just couldn’t stand it! I begged him to let me out. He put me in for only three minutes, but it seemed like it lasted for hours. [. . .] My son now, he was around this. [My abuser] would hit my kids, knowing it would hurt me. Some women do not even know all the ways in which they are being injured by abusers. Lily was kicked and spat upon by her partner, but her bruised body and self-esteem were only one shard of her suffering: My daughter, she was being molested from the time she was nine until the time she was thirteen. Her father, her natural father, was molesting her. [. . .] I could have been on death row. I could have and it wasn’t that far away because my daughter was being raped by her own father. She was bleeding out of her rectum. I never knew what was wrong with my child. I could find no reason. My child was scared to death to tell it to anybody. He went to her school and kicked her and beat her like she was a dog. They called the cops. Only time my daughter had the nerve to even tell anybody that her daddy been doing that to her. The only thing I could say was, “Lord, have mercy! You’ve been killing my child.” Then I had to look at her when she asked me, “Momma [. . .], you were my mother. Why didn’t you know?” 33011_SP_WIN_CH01_015-026 10/10/03, 11:43 AM 16 17 THE PERVASIVENESS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Women suffer more subtle, less visible, forms of...