silent witnesses: perpetuating a culture of silent suffering surrounding domestic violence

**Trigger warning: Discussion of violence and domestic violence**

Dropping into a tackle in a game of social football a few weeks ago, I caught an accidental elbow to the eye. It was an unfortunate little accident that left me with a killer black eye and a fractured cheekbone.

After about 10 days, the bruising faded to a yellowy tinge. After about 6 weeks, the fracture had healed. There’s now no trace of the injury; no residual aches or pains. What does remain with me today, however, is my shock at the treatment I received from strangers as I sported my black eye on the streets of Sydney.

It took me by surprise at first. I woke the day following the match awfully swollen and with deep purple bruising spreading from my eyebrow to the bridge of my nose and right across my cheek. Realising that perhaps my injury needed some medical attention, I went to the hospital. One doctor after another checked my story, on the lookout for inconsistencies – flaws that might reveal a more sinister cause than an accidental knock during a game of social sport. I found this kind of distrustful treatment infuriating, especially knowing that my male teammates would not have been subjected to the same scrutiny had they been in my place. The questions made me feel as though I did have something to hide – some story about which I should be ashamed. But I reminded myself that the doctors were merely professionals carrying out a duty of care, trying to ensure that I was not in need of further help. And, for these probing questions and for their genuine concern, I cannot resent them.

After leaving the hospital, my mother and I went to the pharmacy to buy some painkillers and fill a prescription. While we waited for the prescription, we took a seat on some chairs near the counter. When the pharmacist needed to tell me that he did not have my medication in stock, he did not call me over to the counter as he did the other customers. He came out from behind the counter and crouched down beside me. As he told me I’d need to wait a day or two for my pills, he spoke in a soft and gentle voice – the type that one might deploy to calm a furious toddler or to placate a confused senior. He made a curiously concerted effort to maintain eye contact the entire time. In an effort, I’m sure, to avoid any embarrassment on my behalf.

It took me a moment after leaving the store to realise why he had spoken to me in that way. His effort to avoid embarrassment – both for him and for me – had been built on an implicit assumption that there was something I should be embarrassed about. He assumed I was a victim, a beaten woman.

I saw this same assumption etched onto the faces of those whom I encountered for that entire week. I saw the assumption in their stares, and I saw it in their expressions of shock or embarrassment.  Each time that I recognised their assumption I felt a wave of shame and was forced to remind myself that I was not, in fact, a victim of domestic violence.

As I walked around the streets of Sydney, I saw that same assumption in their hastily averted glances and I heard it in their patronising tones as they cooed gently in response to my coffee order or as they handed me my sandwich. But most of all, I heard the assumption in their silence. I heard it in the questions they didn’t ask, the sympathy they didn’t offer and the concern they chose not to voice.

Now – a clarification. This is not the first sporting injury I have had – far from it – and thus I have some decent points of comparison with regard to reactions to these kinds of things. I have broken a leg and a foot, suffered bumps and bruises and scrapes. Several years ago, my shoulder heavily strapped with tape due to a torn rotator cuff, I received many questions from friends and strangers about the injury. Baristas, bartenders, strangers on the bus, all looked at me with sympathy and asked me about the injury. They had no fear of shame or embarrassment in probing about an injury such as that, and often regaled me with stories of their own similar injuries. That injury was not, they (correctly) assumed, the result of a domestic incident, and thus was fair game for small talk.

But this recent injury stood in stark contrast to these previous experiences. This black eye – brilliantly shiny and patently obvious though it was – elicited only silence in response. Sure, there may be an argument to be made that these strangers who ignored me were merely trying to protect my dignity, to avoid embarrassment or shame. However, in both their assumptions and their silence they were, in my opinion, only perpetuating a culture of silent suffering that exists around domestic violence.

Their very assumption that this injury was inflicted by a partner/husband/father reflects a culture in which women remain perpetually seen as victims upon whom assaults are delivered. A male friend of mine suffered a black eye last year in a game of football. To provide a point of comparison, I asked him about whether he had experienced anything similar; whether anyone had assumed a more sinister cause – and he shook his head vigorously. ‘Not for a moment,’ he said. Indeed, simply because of his gender, his injury was assumed to be the result of an innocuous accident; whereas simply because of my gender, an identical injury spurred an assumption that I must be a victim. My gender transformed this accidental bump into something far darker and more concerning, and despite that – nay, because of that – it became unmentionable.

It is this “unmentionableness” that worries me most. We exist in a paradigm in which domestic violence is something women are expected to suffer in silence, about which sympathy must not be expressed, and that is better ignored than addressed. In ignoring it, in failing to ask if their injuries hurt or whether they feel okay, in pretending not to see the bruises, we encourage women to tolerate these assaults, our silence implicitly sanctioning the cruel treatment of many thousands of women and children at the hands of those they love.

I did wonder if I was perhaps being overly sensitive to the reactions I face – after all, this hideous bruise sat on my very own face. Usually, I rarely go outside without make up – a mask that allows me to control how the world sees me. Now, I was forced not only to forgo makeup, but to bare an awful bruise to the world. Even I was shocked each time I looked in the mirror, so perhaps I was searching for reactions in the faces of passers-by and responding unfairly to these?

In need of a reality check, I called my mother. She had spent a few days with me when I first incurred the injury, accompanying me to the hospital and to doctor’s visits. I asked her what she thought, and she told me she was similarly perturbed by the responses. She noted the patronising tones adopted by waitresses, nurses, recounted her reaction to the scene with the pharmacist, said she wanted to stop them all and tell them it was just a sporting injury, that there was no need to be embarrassed. And she told me she felt the same shame I felt – treated as though the victim status that they assumed for me made the two of us worthy of contempt, looked down upon as members of a lower class of society within which such atrocities happened (as though domestic violence is the exclusive domain of the underprivileged).

She said she, too, had to remind herself that I was not a victim of anything at all, except perhaps my own over-enthusiasm for team sports. That sense of shame conferred by the looks and averted stares had become so real that she found it easy to fall into the trap of accepting the assumptions of those strangers we encountered, despite knowing full well that those assumptions were made incorrectly.

Are we comfortable in living in a society where (assumed) victims of abuse are treated so poorly that they feel they must hide themselves away, dig a hole for themselves to avoid the condescending stares of others? Wouldn’t we prefer to give victims the opportunity to at least feel supported, buoyed by the concern of others, encouraged that there may be help available? For as long as we force them to suffer in silence, we fail them. We fail to let them know that society doesn’t tolerate what has been visited upon them, and we demand that they continue their suffering without complaint.

I’m not claiming to be able to understand what victims of domestic violence go through. I can’t imagine the suffering that those many thousands of women and children endure, and I am extremely grateful for this lucky fate of mine. I’m not writing this piece in an attempt to provide a voice for those who cannot speak up – I can’t speak for those whom I don’t represent. But I can’t simply move on from this experience without trying to bring some attention to those who go unnoticed – or worse, those who are willingly ignored. It is high time society recognised that there are three little words that might have a powerful effect on a woman who needs to know that somebody gives a toss about her and her suffering: ‘Are you okay?’.

The day after the injury, I was waiting for a car to pass so I could cross the street. The car slowed and the window rolled down. A balding Italian-Australian man stared at my face over his sunglasses and called out to me. ‘Jesus, love! Are you okay?’ The question took me by surprise. This man was to be the only person who would actually ask me about my injury (apart from medical types who were professionally obliged to do so).

I smiled, told him I was fine, stepped off the curb. ‘Stop right there,’ he told me, leaning out of the window of his SS Holden. ‘Now, you tell me how you got that and whether I need to get you some help.’ I told him the story – an elbow in the eye, an accident during a football match.

‘Well, thank Christ for that,’ he said, sounding relieved. ‘I thought maybe someone had hit you, and no woman in the world deserves to be treated like that.’

Amen to that.