How about "when it looks like this"...?
For those of you living under an electrical blackout for the past 24 hours, the photos show Charles Saatchi involved in a row with his wife Nigella Lawson. The images are incredibly upsetting. At one point he has both hands around her throat and she clearly looks distressed - not surprisingly, given that her supposedly loving husband appears to be attempting to strangle her in public. Today Saatchi spoke out about the incident, admitting that the images were "horrific" but going on to state they actually show nothing more than a "playful tiff"; the reason he had his hands round her throat was to "emphasise his point".
I don't about the rest of you, Blogverse, but I would be incredibly wary of a man who felt he had to "emphasise a point" by throttling me in public. Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusions of the ups and downs of relationships, and I'm always a teeny bit suspicious of any couple who insist that they never ever row or have even the teensiest disagreement about anything ever, but while I'm happy to have a good old-fashioned squabble about whose turn it is to put the rubbish out (hint - yours) I draw the line at strangulation. Call me strange, but it seems less like a "married couple row" and more like "domestic abuse" that way...
Now I don't profess to know the ins and outs of the Saatchi-Lawson marriage; for all I know the man is a total saint and this was a totally out-of-character, out-of-the-blue, one-time thing for them. Looking at those photos though...well, lets just say my DV radar started bleeping in a BIG way. Having a row in public is one thing; ranting at your wife until you reduce her to tears and then grabbing her throat is, actually, quite another. That's bullying. That's abuse. That is not, in any way, shape or form, a "playful tiff".
I don't know what horrifies me more: the images themselves, Saatchi's attempt to "explain" himself, or the fact that not one single person - not a passerby, not another patron at the restaurant, not the tabloid hack taking the photos - stepped in to help. I wouldn't necessarily intervene in any old argument, but seeing a man with his hands around the throat of a clearly-distressed woman...maybe my moral compass is broken but I'd like to think I would at least go and ask if she was ok. And yet nobody did. Not one person checked to see if Nigella Lawson needed help, or intervened to let Charles Saatchi know his behaviour was waaaaay inappropriate. Not one. And you know what the very worst thing is? I'm actually not surprised.
Violence against women has become normalised in our society, to the point where something like this can happen and no one bats an eyelid. How many prime-time TV shows show the brutal (mis)treatment of women? I know I like a good crime story as much as the next person, but even I'm starting to frankly get a little bit nauseous at the sheer level of bloodthirsty violence meted out to my gender in the name of entertainment. The opening of Ripper Street. Vast swathes of The Fall. That particularly hideous anal rape scene in The Politician's Husband. And that's just off the top of my head, without even thinking about it. (This from the woman who adores Criminal Minds and has a library of books about the psychology of serial killers...) Seeing women as objects, treating them with violence both physical and sexual...this is normal now. And these scenarios play themselves out every single day in this country, and it never changes. 2 women a week are still murdered by their partners or ex-partners. No one knows the true statistics about rape and sexual assault, but I would stake my life on the fact that somewhere in Britain, as you're reading these words, a woman is being raped by her partner. (And it IS rape, despite what certain sections of the media and Parliament would have you believe...) Schools and colleges up and down the country still spend time offering rape alarms to their female students and cautioning them not to walk home alone by themselves after a night out; police forces spend time and money putting together campaigns warning women not to let their drinks out of sight for fear of them being drugged and date-raped, and yet no one bothers to say to the boys "hey fellas, here's a thought - keep it in your pants and don't rape anyone tonight, yeah?" Violence towards women is normalised and it's women who constantly have to adapt their behaviour to deal with the consequences; a recent campaign DID attempt to point out to young men that forcing themselves on their girlfriend after she'd said she didn't want sex was - duh! - rape, but the norm seems to be to remind the girls to be careful. The norm is not to tell the boys not to rape, not to belittle, not to hurt.
Charles Saatchi probably doesn't think of himself as an abuser, and why would he? Someone with his money, with his power and influence...he wouldn't do something like that. And besides, it's not like he hit her or anything. It was just a row. A tiff. No big deal.
Except actually, Charles, it sort of is. It's a very big deal. It's a prime example of both the normalisation of violence and the way some men are so easily able to play down their actions. Society lets them do so. And it's disgusting.
I don't want to tar everyone with the same brush here. I know not every man is an abuser and I know there are many who were horrified by the images released this weekend, and by Saatchi's pathetic "explanation". But there are also a good percentage of males in this country who wouldn't think twice about it, who would nod and shrug and go "yeah, sounds about right". And these young men are going to produce children who will be brought up to believe the same thing, and so on and so on ad infinitum. For goodness sake, we're living in a world where schools are seriously having to consider teaching primary school children that porn isn't the same as sex - how in the name of good stuff did we reach THAT point?!! How has this attitude become normal?!
I don't have the answers. If I did, would I still be on my soapbox banging my anti-DV drum? Unlikely - I'd be dancing through sprinklers or something. But my point is that 'society' needs to sit up and pay attention, to realise that this is NOT ok. In my idealised utopian vision of the world these pictures would make people realise this attitude and behaviour is unacceptable; people would start agitating for change and then maybe we could start making a dent in those statistics and stop these awful crimes, but with my 'realistic' head on I know it's not going to happen. Something else will happen in the next few days and this will be old news very quickly, just like every time some awful act of violence is committed against women. I don't want to be a pessimist, but sometimes I truly despair at the rest of the world.
I want to end this on an upbeat note but, somehow, I can't find the words and so I'll leave it at that...
No comments:
Post a Comment