A Domestic Abuse, Victim vs. Survivor?

It is a familiar and evolving debate when discussing the exact or most appropriate term of those who have suffered abuse and trauma want to be known by — Domestic Abuse Victim or Domestic Abuse Survivor? Personally I have never felt comfortable using the term survivor, it didn’t sit well as something I could identify with and it has taken me 15 years to slowly accept why that it is. Beginning in early 2006, my then new relationship was violent and abusive from the very start. Just three weeks after we met, at his own birthday party at a nightclub, he became enraged and jealous of me dancing with anyone that wasn’t him. Eventually he grabbed my arm, marched me outside, shook me hard and slammed me and my head against a brick wall whilst shouting at me just a few centimetres from my face. I was in such shock I just apologised and stared at the floor and tried to become invisible. Fast forward to 2022, the most recent court documents I received just a few weeks ago, are still full of condescension, false allegations, lies, sickening statements about my mental health, about how he is a victim, how I am an alienator and now most recently, he has begun forcing the term child-abuser into every sentence he can when mentioning me, my life and also my partner. This is called long term post-separation abuse, and as far back as 2015 when I began divorce proceedings, I have been trying to raise awareness and tell people about this. I did not have the terminology, the vocabulary and the knowledge that exists now. We are familiar with coercive control and gaslighting, even DAVRO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim Offender) but Judges and social workers are not wising up to this.

These terms did not exist when I was experiencing them, and even now they are poorly recognised or even understood by the so-called professionals involved in proceedings in family courts. Why I cannot term myself a survivor is because the word denotes that a person experienced trauma or abuse and overcame it and survived the experience.

For many of us, we did not survive, on the basis that litigation abuse continues to damage and deeply affect us. Therefore, we are still victims. For those experiencing family court proceedings, having their children, their contact and their parental rights held to ransom daily and being forced into unsafe space of having to continue communication and contact with their abusers, whether directly or indirectly through court; abuse continues. And the continuation of this type of abuse, as played out in the Kardashian vs West debacle perfectly, highlights the fact, victims remain victims while the abuse continues. And it continues for years and years in ways that most people cannot understand. Even my partner is now a victim of this insidious abuse by my ex-husband. He is now falsely labelled a child abuser and his integrity and kindness questioned and diminished by a man that is guilty of serious violence and a decade and a half of domestic abuse. Are we listened to? No. Is the perpetrator given full control, absolutely yes.

With family court the way it is currently engineered, most victims of domestic abuse, are forced to remain victims for the duration of the experience of court, scrutiny, false allegations, unsafe contact and much more. Parenting apps, designed theoretically to reduce unwanted direct communication, do not alleviate this very serious form of abuse. I have spoken with countless victims that have unanimously agreed that whilst they are forced into communication and litigation by their abuser, they remain victims and cannot progress to being survivors. Even when proceedings profess to being over, the abuser will continue the control and abuse through the children, weaponising yet further more and more false allegations, always gaslighting and denigrating the other parent, to the point most female victims simply cannot cope. They are unable to executively function within their own space and lives. They feel forced, dragged, controlled, monitored, watched and judged by their abuser. This feeling in theory continues until the children are 18. But there is little research and data to say that even after a child becomes an adult, this life-damaging form of abuse does not continues on. I have heard of abusive fathers ‘purchasing’ adult children's loyalty with cars, university fees, claiming they will not financially support them if they remain in contact with the mother-victim. This can continue right up to weddings and house purchases, leveraging the children's needs against their desire to have equal and fair relationships with the domestically abused parent.

How a court stops and controls this is theoretically simple. Denounce Parental Alienation and concepts not be permitted under ratification of the Istanbul Convention for all victims of Domestic Abuse. Putting in place a requirement on the court to act swiftly, order robust measures to stop the controlling abuser from having that control are required, but are woefully not happening. This can be as innocent as stopping the abuser from taking the children’s phones and sanctionable restraining orders that the victims have better, higher rights on child decisions. Currently this is not happening to favour ‘shared parenting’ and the abusive men responsible are far more adept at finding ways around such measures. All the abuser need do is claim they are the victim, they claim they are suffering, they claim they are frightened for their lives. In my own case my abuser claims, through the police to constantly have seen me on or near his home and he feels threatened. Fathers rights organisations are coaching and grooming men to act and inhabit this false role to deceive the courts whilst playing the systems. They are training men to lie and giving them a playbook of what allegations to make and how. Whilst my ex made dozens of entirely fantastical allegations, (I do not know what town he lives in, let alone where his house is) the police reports are used as proof-positive he is feeling intimidated and threatened. The sadistic measures a real abuser will go to to claim their are the victim are truly beyond the realms of normal comprehension.

The answer has to lie in the Harm Report’s recommendations. It must also lie in the collection of vital data – just how many abusers claim parental alienation and victim status in order to gain full access and control of their real victims lives? There must be a sea-change in parental alienation laws, in line with the EU and that all claims in family court of mental health allegations made by abusers, investigated using the Mental Health and Equalities Act, and what it claims to prevent as discrimination and wrongful abuse. I have yet to see a barrister use the Mental Health Act in family law! Parental Alienation is now termed as child-abuse, and potential victims of misuse of it, rebranded child-abusers. The ramifications are permanent and the family courts are currently unfit to accept that most claims of alienation, by abusers, are absolutely false, and yet they are winning in almost all cases. Why this is needs extensive research and rapid, substantial change. The Parental Alienation card is being wielded in almost 100% of abuse cases that then result in mothers losing their children in favour of patriarchal rule that men don’t lie, only women. I know victims of serious domestic violence now forced to accept 2–4 hours of supervised contact a month with their own children because they are termed child-abusers through their abusers claiming they have ‘emotionally harmed’ the children by parentally alienating them. This is a despicable misuse of the law, power and judicial incompetence.