Across The World & Once In Mine: Violence Against Women

May 12, 2024

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About 1 in 3 women and 1 in 10 men in the U.S. experience domestic violence, and 1,500 of them die each year. These numbers may be higher; domestic violence remains an underreported issue, and many victims do not seek help. Research shows that victims of domestic violence suffer negative physical and mental health consequences. When I share about this issue, I am thinking of those who have ample barriers, people who identify as women, girls, trans, non-binary and genderqueer. If this inclusion brings something up for you, I urge you to sit with that and read on. Our liberation is connected and always will be.

Gender-based violence and femicide are on the rise due to an increase in global crises and conflicts. I pulled these stats from the UN Women's website and began researching more about this after I watched the three Vice mini-docs shot in 2016 (linked below) about the abuses against women in different parts of the world. It brought to light how deeply unfree so many are from their pain, and because of that, some try to take it out on others when there is no other at all.

The desire for power over someone is a temporary fix to ease the burden of traumas: individually, collectively, and passed down from our ancestors—their buried grief and unhealed parts live within us. In that, the allure of possession over connection holds firm. The entitlement surrounding the false deservedness of a dominant identity is an exhaustive trauma loop— a short-sightedness prevails at the expense of men themselves, women and non-binary people and at the cost of our relationships with each other.

Our differences, our essence, are an opportunity often missed. Instead, we are met with a sleeping curiosity, a desire to extinguish others' rapture that they do not possess, driving their misplaced hatred or disgust toward anyone but themselves. This creates an opening for culture wars, radicalizing men into further violence, not seeking the help they need and deserve.

It pains me to witness the ways patriarchal ideologies have failed men in the areas that matter most, encouraging a rigid performance of masculinity at the expense of their true nature, whatever that may be, connection to others, emotional suppression over exploration, a fixation on tradition that leaves out intimacy, and the pressure of sole provider, what it means about them if they can't live up to that expectation. The missed opportunities to realize that nothing is more holy, even macho, than metabolizing grief, beholding our human frailties and choosing love instead of misplaced hate and control over someone else—to alchemize that grief in a way that brings us together. This is what so many men don't get. There is no real power in power over another. It's an illusion of control where nothing good can grow. There is no love when the subjugation of another is invoked, to feel that ounce of power then gone again because that is what we sell men, even some women. It's the snake oil that keeps replenishing its reserves.

Femicide is a new word to me and was talked about in the first video linked. I didn't take gender studies. I didn't go to University, where this topic is widely discussed. I just lived with a man in my early twenties whose explosive anger outbursts were taken out on me a lot of the time. I see the women's dead bodies lying on the streets in El Salvador, the Indigenous women in Canada disappearing and never being seen again, the Congolese women having to undergo surgery after being brutally gang raped. The dehumanizing ways some men have chosen to act and call it a life, that their hate is only hate for themselves in the end and the useless measuring stick they fell for. I am all for male pride, but not at the expense of others, not if it involves servitude or the diminishing or extinguishing of others to prop up masculinity. Violence is never justified.

Talking with woman after woman, trans and non-binary people, about their experiences in private and, at times, in public, is something that will matter to me until the day I die. People getting free matters to me. I haven't written about abuse in a long time, but I am slowly starting to share this part of my life when it feels relevant.

For a while, I thought that healing from abuse meant I shouldn't talk about it anymore. For close to six years, I didn't. I deleted all my past essays, partly because I was victim-shamed and called a liar about the abuse I endured by someone I called a friend, which snowballed into having to let go of relationships around that person. It was a turning point in my life. It was also because I was finding ways to be in my life as it is now, abuse-free and in a relationship with a healthy man for over eleven years.

In the past, when I've tried to write or speak on a complex topic such as abuse, the ramblings in my head took over, that I was dwelling, or people will judge me or think that I'm not able to move on from a horrific experience or that people would think I was trying to cancel my ex all these years later when all I have ever wanted for him was to get the help he needed and deserved. I have moved on, and although I'm in a healthy relationship, what I went through will stay with me forever. I will continue to write about it, but not in a way that keeps me stuck in a trauma loop.

Whatever is said about me for sharing about my abuse experience is not my issue. I urge people to explore what it brings up for them. I've already done that therapy work. I denied myself healing for long enough and finally began to name my experience in my early twenties that shaped the rest of that decade. Instead of tending to the trauma, I booked trips to Asia, Mexico, and California. I ran all over the countryside, drank myself numb, and tried different ways to forget the lack of reaction from those around me and my ex. I wanted to stuff it down and move on. I didn't know these experiences lived in my body. These docs helped me remember how far I have come and how brutal the conditions are for women, trans, and non-binary people across the world.

THEN

AROUND 22 YEARS OLD, IN THAILAND, AFTER THE LAST AND WORST ABUSE TOOK PLACE. I QUIT MASSAGE SCHOOL WITH ONE MORE YEAR TO GO. I WROTE MY FINAL EXAMS WITH A SPRAINED NECK FROM HIS ABUSE AND WHAT I WOULD GUESS WAS PTSD. I WENT BACK TWO YEARS LATER TO COMPLETE MY DIPLOMA AND PASSED MY BOARD EXAMS ON THE FIRST TRY.

I see life from a lens divorced from the rigidity of gender roles, which has taken boatloads of fortitude, trial and error. An antidote to the exhaustion so many of us face from those trying to control and subjugate us is to create smaller circles less concerned with constructs while refusing to take the bait of toxic narratives and choose joy despite the message that some people don't deserve fundamental human rights and happiness in their lives. It's easier to say this from the comfort of my Canadian non-fundamentalist home. Thinking this way gives me a sense of empowerment regarding what matters to me and my place in the collective. I create safety within myself and the people in my circle despite how others think I should be and act as a woman with liberation in mind, continuously checking on the ways I fall into using supremacy tactics myself.

The need for control and to weld power, dominate others, and villainize what they do not understand in themselves leaves them empty. They are hungry ghosts trying to eat but have no mouths to feed. They furiously write bills into law that destabilize others in the name of something they see as moral, to fight the good fight when there is nothing good about policing others' choices and their identity. I have been on the receiving end of a man's rath, degraded by being snotted on, a disrespect I will never forget and the misdirected hatred towards me, being thrown into a wall, unable to move my neck for weeks. I have also been the woman who needed to police others to feel safe and to control my environment as I worked through that trauma. I have overstated harm in other scenarios, but not this one. My body now knows what is harm and what is not. It's easy to blur those lines after such trauma.

Maybe we aren’t just raging feminists; maybe we are asking men to love themselves a little more. Perhaps we are pleading with anyone who will listen to tend to their grief, to their wounds and stop using others as punching bags. Those brave enough not to play by the dominant cultural norms without becoming culty, I salute you, love you and thank you. I hope that whoever is in the shoes I used to wear comes across this writing and helps them leave or get support or that you have already left and are thriving. If you are a man, I hope you also know how much I love you, get help if you need it. Resources can be found below.