So I worked with a woman number of years
ago and she came to see me because she
was having some difficulties with her
partner, male partner happened to be, by
the way women are violent too, men are
violent, women are violent, not saying
that's not the case okay. This happened
to be a case where the male was being
pretty abusive and controlling
and humiliating. I just got
talking to her about the circumstances
and about what it was that she found in
it, in this man and initially when they
got together and she says well I don't
know, you know, I'm just such a cling-on,
I'm such a cling-on, so what do you mean
cling-on? She said find me an asshole I
cling to him like velcro. So I said what
do you mean by that? She goes well, my
first husband, she said one night you
know we were together I don't know how
how long maybe a year we went out, we
were partying, came home and
when we came home he just went nuts and
he started smacking me around and she
said the only way I got away cause I asked
her, how did you respond when he did that?
She said I hid underneath the bed, she
said it was only about that much room
but I got under there and I hid
underneath the bed and he was like drunk and
falling over the place so he left me
alone and I fell asleep underneath the
bed and when I got up in the morning I
crawled out from underneath the bed and
all his clothes were gone from the
closet and his and his luggage. He left. I
said where'd he go?
She said I didn't know, it took me two
weeks to find out. She said finally, he
didn't call, I called him, he didn't call,
finally she said I called his brother. I
said where is he? I learned he went
back to Dublin, that's where he was from.
So I said what did you do? She goes well
I'm a cling-on what do you think I did I
got on the next plane. So you know she's
telling me is, I make bad decisions about
men, I cling to men who treat me badly,
you know how many women say things like
that. So I said okay you got on the plane
you went to Dublin, did you find him? She
goes yeah I found him, he was working at
the Guinness Factory which I found
disappointing. He was working at the
Guinness Factory. So I said what happened?
She said well we got back together
for a little while but, it was you know,
it was over there wasn't anything there.
So what'd you do? She said I came home.
Interesting hey, so I was trying to
figure out how to propose an idea so I
said okay how about would you move your
chair over here and it was in my office
in my small town so she moved her chair
kind of over beside me and we were
looking out the window down at the bingo
hall. I could practically dob dob dob
from my office, we're looking down
at the bingo hall, so I said okay you and
me are looking down on the street and we
see a man and a woman that come together
and then the guys yelling his face off
and he smacks her you know boom punches
her in the face she goes down like a
sack of hammers he walks off down the
street like this and she gets up and she
runs after him, come back here you
bastard! What does she want? She says dignity. I
said damn straight, you are a cling-on you
cling to dignity. He took your dignity
to Dublin, you went to Dublin you brought
it home. Is this a problem you've always
had clinging to your dignity? So now
we're talking about all different ways
in her life that she's retained her
dignity when she's been badly treated by
men, it's not that she clings to abusive
men when men get abusive she resists. She
refuses to let them take her dignity. So
we go from I'm an awful woman who clings
to abusive men, to I'm a courageous
woman and I don't let people push me
around then I get my dignity back. And
see the difference. And so sadly the
importance of dignity isn't widely
recognised, so especially when things go
to court, actions that are done to
preserve somebody's dignity get widely
misunderstood. So for example in Canada
we had a case where a a big media person
had assaulted a whole bunch of women, it
went to trial and he was acquitted
because once he'd assaulted the women
they still had contact with him the
courts couldn't understand that. You
should have been afraid of him, you
should have been saying you'd never ever
see him again. We see this in cases of
domestic violence all the time saying to
the wife well you couldn't have been
very, scared of him, like you
stayed in the house. But very often what
they're missing is the fact that it's
about dignity. So in one case for example
a man had asked this woman out she'd
always refute him they were working
together for over two years, he asked her
out again, she finally agreed. They went
to his place for dinner. Soon as
they were there he attacked her, he raped
her twice, he anally raped her and then
he basically told her find your own way
home. She didn't have much money, they
were way out of town and she said no buddy,
you're driving me home. And when that
went to court the judge couldn't
understand it, why would you let him
drive you home
when you're saying he just raped you
three times. Well it's so clear when you
understand the dignity piece right, she
was saying you treated me like garbage,
you've used me and now you don't even
have the respect for me to make sure I
can get home. Well screw you buddy
whether you want to or not
you're taking me home. And so like the
judge made that fortunately that case
happened to be a jury case and the jury
got it, so the jury convicted. The judge
gave almost, well he gave a
sentence to be served on weekends, about
30 days to be served on weekends because
the judge couldn't understand that this
could be an act of violence
because she let him drive her home. So
what we're talking about here is to
understand violence you can't just look
at one person you can't look at the
victim and say oh violence has happened
because she's deficient she's passive
she screwed up she's belligerent
something like that, she in other words
she deserves to be beaten and you can't
just look at the perpetrator in
isolation, you've got a look much, much
more socially. So there are at least two
people involved, people that we might
later categorise as  perpetrator and
victim, in any kind of assault
so that means logically that if we want
to get a complete picture of what
happens we need to get a picture of the
actions and responses of both parties
right, otherwise it would be like me
giving you a book
and saying oh please open the book, I
want you to give me a full report on the
book but I want you to read only the
pages on the left-hand side.
Pretty soon the pages on the left-hand
side wouldn't make sense without the
information on the right-hand side, so
it's a bit like that.
To illustrate this we're going to give
you two different descriptions of the
same sexual assault. So this is not
unnecessarily graphic it's just a
physical description and then we're
going to talk about the differences
between the two descriptions and what
that means. He followed her down the
sidewalk, he sped up to catch her, he
grabbed her by the shoulders and threw
her to the ground, he dragged her toward
the bushes, he overpowered her and
dragged her into the bushes, he held a
rock over her head and threatened to
kill her if she screamed, he called her
degrading names, he forced his mouth onto
her face, he tried to undo her belt, he
grabbed out her pant legs to pull them
off, he overpowered her and vaginally
raped her. So that in fact is a pretty
good description of sexualized violence,
you get a clear, quite a clear indication
of what he did. Subject-verb-object,
subject he, followed verb her, so the
sentences are what are called active
sentences in English grammar so they
convey the more clear but who did what
to whom. The victim is in the object
position you notice that she's not an
actor she is strictly acted upon and
against but you have a sense of having a
clear description and if this got to
court that would be great. It would be
extremely good definition in court
description accordion, I rarely see them
this good. Well what do you know about
the victim, nothing right. So I met this
woman about seven years after this
attack and she was kind of up and down
in life she got a very good response
from the police in that the guy was
arrested, charged, convicted, and went to jail.
However she would sink back into some
pretty dark places from time to time and
be sort of troubled by the question why
didn't I, why did I stop fighting, why
didn't I do this and why didn't I do
that, you know, so it would get
really bleak for her from time to time
so we ended up talking about it and what
we've done is added
in red that the print in black is
identical to the previous slide, all
we've done is added in her responses
at each point of the attack. He followed
her down the sidewalk, she sped up, he
sped up to catch her, she moved to the
side, he grabbed her by the shoulders and
threw her to the ground, she rolled on
the ground to get away, he dragged her to
the bushes,
she grabbed the roots of a tree so he
couldn't drag her into the bushes, he
overpowered her and dragged her into the
bushes, she started to scream,
he held a rock over her head and
threatened to kill her if she screamed,
she stopped screaming,
he called her degrading names, she said
you don't want to do this, you don't want
to hurt me, he forced his mouth onto her
face, she averted her face, he tried to
undo her belt, she stuck out her stomach
so that he couldn't undo her belt, he
grabbed at her pant legs to pull them
off, she crossed her ankles so that he could
not pull off her pants, he overpowered
her and vaginally raped her, she went
limp to avoid injury and went elsewhere
in her mind. So what do we have here that
we don't have here. Resistance right.
Which of these two passages gives you a
better sense of empathy, this one or this
one. For the victim, you say the second
most of you. Yeah and which one if I was
to say something like he just lost
control he got so horny he couldn't
control himself, which one would allow
you to contest that better.
Yeah right, because in this one you 
get to see this wasn't just a
singular action, this just wasn't a
moment where he happened to make a
mistake. He made a decision to rape her
over and over and over again and every
time she resisted, he overpowered her so
this wasn't a single bad judgement, this
was making that decision over and over
and over again until he did it to her. So
this one though not bad compared to what
often or even good compared to what
often gets in front of in courts, still
lacks the resistance of the victim
and so in a certain
sense is profoundly inaccurate because
the resistance of the victim is
part of the fact pattern, we're not just
reframing and trying to be you know
positive here, people actually do resist
violence, resistance is as real as
violence, so if your goal is to get a
fact pattern you cannot exclude the
victims resistance from the fact pattern.
So which of these two
descriptions, I mean here for example,
here the defence for the accused is
empowered to ask Mrs. Jones if this was
so horrible why did you not fight back.
And so the lack of overt resistance
by the victim is often interpreted by
the court as consent or possible consent,
enough to introduce doubt. Here that's
not possible, you see that she resisted
at every point, the notion that he would
have gotten mixed messages is laughable
it's not a viable argument in this
particular case. So one of the things we
talked about and we'll get to this bit
about language, Linda's work on language
in a minute, but when we got to this part
of the account and I was asking her how
did he what did you do etc etc, she said
well then he tried to kiss me and I said
you know kiss, kiss is 
something people like to do
together isn't it, it's kind of a
together mutual thing we like to do
together, and she said yeah so I said I
don't know did you want to kiss? She goes
no, so what did he do? And then she came
up with a better description, I think she
actually said he slobbered on my face.
Better description, so I put force his
mouth on your face and then I asked her,
when he did that what did you do how did
you respond at that moment? And she said
uh I looked away like this and she did
the action and then when she did that
she just stopped moving, and sat still
for a while for her breathing changed she
started to cry, we just sat there for a
while, and then I said what happened and
she goes I get it now, I get it why I
stopped, so I said what are you talking
about she said I forgot this but when I
turned my face away I could see there
were two little girls walking down the
sidewalk. She stopped screaming to
protect two little girls, so they
wouldn't come over, so it is not at all
uncommon when people are being raped and
beaten that they respond in a way not
only to resist the attacker but to
protect other people around them. Tiny
children do that. So then it made sense
to her. How many babysitter's when the
parents have been out for the night, you
know or one of them to come home, the
kids are asleep someone assaults the
babysitter, she doesn't scream or yell
because she doesn't want to wake the
kids up. So that kind of response, that
kind of resistance is often again tied
to the social context and it's part of
the concern, the relationships we have
with other people, and again the thing is
if you don't ask you don't give people
an opportunity to tell you. How you ask
is really crucial but if you don't ask
you won't learn that. And so what we're
saying then is that if you're working
with victims of violence and it's your
job to get these accounts, especially in
a forensic context, if you're not asking
about victim resistance, you're actually
engaged in the destruction of evidence,
because you're going to get an account
which is not accurate or minimally
accurate or even actually very
misleading. So when you see how the victim resisted
you begin to see that the offender
anticipated and worked to overcome that
resistance at every point in contact so
that changes the way you see violence,
it wasn't out of control it's not
that he got mixed messages, he wasn't
overcome by sexual desire or something
else, he was making decisions at every
point and so violence, so you
begin to see that the strategies of
violence and the tactics of resistance
are connected very intimately. If the
offender tries to isolate the victim,
anything the victim does to remain
connected with others and avoid
isolation can be understandable as a
form of resistance, if the offender tries
to humiliate the victim anything the
victim does to preserve their dignity,
can be understood as a form of
resistance. If the offender tries to
conceal the violence, anything the victim
does to expose or reveal the violence
can be understood as a form of
resistance. If the offender tries to
blame the victim anything the victim
does to know inwardly or express
outwardly that they are not to blame is
understandable as a form of resistance.
So that's a certain kind of logic we're
talking about here, you get that logic?
When you look at violence you of course
can see that offenders anticipate that
victims are going to resist and so they
take steps to make sure that they 
take that into account so that
they can overcome it. So for example in bank robberies they just don't go up to the clerk and say give me your money, right they
have to bring a weapon, they have to
pretend to have a weapon, but they do
something because they know otherwise the
bank clerk is gonna say get out of here
buddy. So they anticipate that there's going to
be resistance and then they take steps
to overcome it. Purse snatchers rarely done
to women who are walking down the street
next to their six-foot-four brothers who
are really buff and fit, right instead
they're far more likely to pick on the
73 year old woman who's walking alone.
You rarely find home invasion style
robberies on biker hangouts, have you
noticed that, so apparently the people
doing the home invasions they've thought
about it, okay if we go there we go to
the AJ hangout it's not going to work
out so well.
Child violation doesn't happen openly in
public rarely and instead of course it's
done a secret, they lure the child or
children to a place alone, they convinced
the parents that they're trustworthy and
that's when they violate the children.
Bullies tend to pick on smaller and less
powerful people so none of this is
accidental but this all points to is
that deliberation involved, the
sophistication and often the skill
involved in committing violence.
So you see offenders
anticipate and work to suppress victim
resistance, they work to influence social
responses and public appearances, they
exercise control during assaults, even
what are so called 'explosive assaults'
that's why he hits her on the ribs not
the face etc. And when you look at the
beginning of relationships like women
are often told that you pick abusive
guys but when you look at how the men
were at the beginning of the
relationship they were kind, they spoke
out against violence, they were
everything the woman was looking for and
then once the woman was in the
relationship that's when the abusive
violent behaviour began. If men really
thought that women were unconsciously
attracted to abusive men what would they
do? You know if you met a woman and you
thought wow she's pretty attractive I'd
really like to get to know her, you know
if you thought women were attracted to
abusive guys you just walk up to her and go hey bitch, you know, what do you say
I slap you around a bit, call you a few
nasty names we'll go back to my place
it's gonna be great. You know generally
speaking men don't know that, men are not
really quite that stupid, men are
operating on a lot more accurate set of
assumptions about women, men are the vast
majority of mental health professionals.
So even men that are considered to be
really violent of course they'll be
violent with their partners and children
but they won't go to work and attack
their boss. And there's some really
interesting research in the states by a
woman called Patricia O'Connor
she went into U.S. prisons and talked to
lifers, people who'd done murders and said
how did you get here? And then she just
recorded what they told her, and what she
found is that they would do kind of a
spontaneous reflecting on their own
responsibility, they wouldn't be hiding
their responsibilities they'd be kind of puzzling
about it. So a guy would say something
like well me and a buddy we were ripping
off a 7-eleven and I had the gun and the
clerk went for the button and so I
pulled the trigger I shot him and then
in the middle of telling the story
they'll still pause and they'll do
something in linguistics or we call it
discourse shift markers, they'll pause and
they'll go so I don't, I don't know like,
I don't know if I meant to kill him or
you know what I was thinking but
anyway I shot the guy and he died and so
that's why I'm here.
And then they'll finish off the story so
that little part in the beginning, in the
middle I should say, that's called a
reflexive frame break, what that means is
a person stopping from telling the story
to reflect on what he's saying and so
when you talk with men who've committed
violence to their partners for example,
not only men, again women, and they start
telling what they've done they'll often
pause in the middle of what they're
telling you to think what did I intend,
was I responsible, what was I doing, why
did I do that, and those moments are
beautiful moments because then you can
you can see that people who've committed
violence are a lot more involved in
reflecting on their own responsibility
then we give them credit for. And I find
that very hopeful because it means that
people actually already know. But of
course you don't necessarily know what
you know until someone notices that you
know. But of course a lot of other social
responses are when they're taking into
account social responses, a lot of our
social responses aren't about
encouraging men to talk about their own
responsibility, instead they're about
using social responses to make sure
their violence is hidden for example,
that if anybody is going to say that
something's wrong in this relationship
they're going to think it's her that
something's wrong with not me.
As one guy in West Australia said if
someone knocked on the door when I was
arguing with my wife I could stop
mid-sentence, I would instantly become
Mr. nice guy, the second they left it was
like turning a tape recorder back on I
could start exactly where I left off.
It's kind of chilling eh, but actually in
the long run hopeful because what it
shows you is that people who commit
violence actually have control and we
can treat people like they have control
and that turns out to be more effective
than treating them like they don't for example.
