Durban - Graphic images of the shattered head of South African model Reeva Steenkamp shot by her boyfriend, paralympic champion Oscar Prestorius, were strewn across the internet on Thursday.
While the global conversation on social media is fast and furious with media searching for side stories around the main story, little is said or even speculated about whether or not the relationship was abusive.
The point that Dr Amelia van der Merwe makes in her recent doctoral study is that women in abusive relationships often remain silent until it is too late.
While it seems unfathomable to most of us, Van der Merwe, unpacks the power of shame of women in these circumstances.
The statistics add weight to her argument. In South Africa, despite a legal and constitutional human rights framework, which seeks to empower women and which led to the passing of the progressive Domestic Violence Act in 1998, one in two women is still exposed to intimate partner violence. This form of violence is one of the leading causes of illness and death among these women.
Van der Merwe explains that those lucky enough to survive intimate partner violence tend to pretend to be perfectly fine when around other people.
These women often have a so-called “split self” – the authentic self who admits to a great deal of shame when asked about the issue indirectly, and the false self who is described in surprisingly positive terms when asked directly.
For her doctoral study, in the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University, Van der Merwe interviewed 19 women who were living and receiving counselling at the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children in Manenberg on the Cape Flats. The women were between the ages of 22 and 54.
Her findings are as follows:
There was a clear link between their exposure to intimate partner violence and the subsequent experiences of shame.
The women used shame as a “defence mechanism” because they considered it more bearable to believe that they were in fact to blame, and deserved the abuse.
This was easier to accept than the idea of their loved perpetrator – whose abuse is random and unpredictable – harming them.
Their experiences of shame, described as humiliation and embarrassment, coincided with feelings of persistent fear, anxiety, anger, depression, suicidal thoughts, and dissociation as well physical symptoms such as heart conditions, high blood pressure, nausea, headaches and pneumonia.
The dissociation among these women was startling.
They frequently complained of feeling numb, like they were “living in a bubble”, that they felt emotionally deadened, as if they were watching their lives unfold before them from a distance.
Most women were directly exposed to physical violence, witnessed physical violence between caregivers, and were directly exposed to sexual and emotional violence as children. Those who were abused both as a child and as an adult tended to experience greater shame and had more mental health problems than those who were only abused as adults.
The women revealed incidents of being slapped, kicked, beaten and even stabbed by their partners. They were also subjected to sexual humiliation, verbal abuse and threats, jealous and controlling behaviour, and financial deprivation – all forms of emotional abuse.
They tried to cope through religion, support from family, counselling, substance misuse and also by “keeping busy” to distract themselves from their emotional pain. By wearing a smile as a “mask” to disguise painful feelings from others, they tried to protect themselves from feeling vulnerable and exposed.
The women interviewed at the Saartjie Baartman Centre were in a transition phase where some had already attempted to alter their identity from victim to survivor, but few could see beyond an identity defined through abuse.
The danger is that crisis intervention often ends at this point, leaving women to perpetuate their psychological investment in an identity blemished by deficit, stigma and shame.
The study shows that negative self-evaluative responses underlie a shame-prone emotional style borne out of repeated exposure to trauma such as intimate partner violence. Chronically traumatised individuals are likely to have shame-based self-esteems, which should be included as a diagnostic criterion for all chronic trauma-based syndromes.
Unfortunately, the link between intimate partner violence and shame has been under-researched worldwide. South Africa is no exception in this regard.
The Domestic Violence Act is not having the desired effect in primary health care settings, at police stations and in the courts. This may be due to the widespread tolerance of the use of violence against women in South Africa.
We require integrated medical and legal responses to address the needs of survivors of intimate partner violence effectively.
We can only hope that continued and sustainable mental health interventions will help these women to construct narratives that will free them of the bondage of a shame-filled, perpetrator-defined identity. Not forgetting their persistent fear, their wishes to die, their numbness, and their sense of dissociation, their descriptions of seeing the world through a “bubble”, a pane of glass. - The Mercury
l Van der Merwe is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at Stellenbosch University. This article is based on her recent doctorate in psychology at the university.