precious

i've just watched the film Precious.

(this is full of spoilers..)

"For precious girls everywhere" said the dedication at the end. acknowledging the millions of young women who have been abused. a shout-out to say: i know you are everywhere, we know this isn't just fiction. i thought that was a really important part of the film: i feel the film really honours abuse survivors, shows a lot of compassion in many big and small ways: i felt there were half-hidden messages in the film to survivors. it wasn't a film about abuse, the way so many are: fiction that exploits abuse as a device, while forgetting/choosing not to believe that it is such a common lived experience, that survivors will be watching. this film kept that fact at the forefront the whole time: i thought it acknowledged and honoured the experience of family abuse, and the experience of having survived it.

i felt relief at how it had a good shot at trying to tell the truth of abuse: its degrading inaneness (Precious' mother making her eat the dinner and then cook it over again: this was a realistic example of abuse that is non-violent and difficult and humiliating to describe) as well as its brutality and cruelty, and that it can combine with other bullying, and with bad luck.so many films show abuse in terms of cliches and 'nasty' incidents that in no way do justice to the banal horror of domestic violence.

the film also portrayed the difficulty of telling the experience of abuse (Precious at first mutters the facts to the social worker person and then takes it back), and the consequences of telling, so the viewer is invited to think about how near-impossible it is to tell such things, let alone to professionals. it also had a good go at showing the ineptness and sickening cheque-wielding too-much-power of professionals.

later the film showed Precious being believed and supported by her teacher and classmates after telling them, which i felt was a whisper to survivors: tell the truth, it will bring you freedom and friendship. this was a feel-good moment for me: a part in the movie that felt too-good-to-be-true, but that gave the character a break, a relief from the harshness of the rest.

immediately after the film, though, i was was riled, feeling that the film had followed so many discourses of abuse in blaming someone other than the perpetrator and the structures of oppression around all of the characters. like so many discourses, i thought, it blames the mother, ignoring her own abuse and curtailed choices at the hands of Precious' father. the mother is judged by the white social worker type near the end, for having "allowed the abuse to happen", and media discussion of the film seems to have leapt to demonise the dysfunctional, abusive, black single mother. nowhere in the film is the abusive father actually blamed for the abuse, or the mother's own situation described as abuse. this film handles child abuse so well in so many ways, yet manages ultimately to make it a woman's fault??

while i realise it happens in social care offices and law courts everywhere, to me it absolutely beggars belief that any viewer (or social worker character) could blame a female character for the fact that her male partner abused their three year old child on a pillow next to her. the man is responsible for his actions. a man is responsible for his actions. right? no one else. and he was also in control of that situation. what if the mother had fought him? what if she had run away as soon as possible? these may not have been realistic choices. i am not saying the mother bears no responsiblity at all for this 'failure to protect' (as it would be called in uk law), and the mother is wholly responsible for her own physical and emotional abuse of Precious, but the pain of her situation as a mother must be acknowledged, and i initially thought that the film brushed over this, painting the mother as the primary abuser, as if it was too painful for this survivor-focussed film to also look at the ways in which the mother was also surviving. the father wasn't given a voice in the film, to sound as outrageous as the mother does, as defensive, as much living in a self-justifying fantasy world. it bothers me that the mum is given so much space in the film to be crazy and hateful, while the father is only glimpsed in a flashback, and somehow escapes responsibility in the eyes of the social worker type who passes judgement, and thus potentially in the judgement of the viewer.

i don't necessarily think that the mother was portrayed as a monster in the film, she was human and realistic according to descriptions of abusive mothers i've heard, rather she was portrayed in a way that was too easy for reviewers/journalists to demonise in the absence of anyone else being judged in the film. i hope that blaming the older generation of women for the abuse of this generation is not the only way forward. i hope that some people can look at the bad choices mothers made and allow that their choices were so often so much more limited than those of fathers. setting daughters against mothers is the ultimate divide-and-rule and reviewers of this film seem to have fallen for this tactic. abusers are responsible for their abuse. Precious' mother is responsible for her own abuse of Precious but not her partner's. only he is responsible for that.

what didn't sink in til later, though, was the fact that Precious herself rejects the social worker's judgement at the end, standing up to tell her "you can't handle any of this", takes her children and leaves smiling. i think now that this is an acknowledgement of the complexities that can't be spelled out and fixed in a two hour film, that the social worker and her judgement are useless. Precious has to leave her mother and step away from the toxic pain of her family but we don't know who, if anyone, she blames. Precious has the last word.

abuse, oppression, addiction and community responsibility

Meanwhile, a psychiatrist type who actually has wise, caring, link-making words to say: talking about abuse and addiction on Democracy Now:

DR. GABOR MATÉ: The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, but according to all studies in the States, as well, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse. In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they need for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related both psychologically, in terms of emotional pain relief, and neurobiological development to early adversity.

[...]

Unfortunately, my profession, the medical profession, puts all the emphasis on genetics rather than on the environment, which, of course, is a simple explanation. It also takes everybody off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, it takes people off the hook?

DR. GABOR MATÉ: Well, if people’s behaviors and dysfunctions are regulated, controlled and determined by genes, we don’t have to look at child welfare policies, we don’t have to look at the kind of support that we give to pregnant women, we don’t have to look at the kind of non-support that we give to families... And so, if it’s all caused by genetics, we don’t have to look at those social policies; we don’t have to look at our politics that disadvantage certain minority groups, so cause them more stress, cause them more pain, in other words, more predisposition for addictions; we don’t have to look at economic inequalities. If it’s all genes, it’s all—we’re all innocent, and society doesn’t have to take a hard look at its own attitudes and policies.

[...]

If people who become severe addicts, as shown by all the studies, were for the most part abused children, then we realize that the war on drugs is actually waged against people that were abused from the moment they were born, or from an early age on. In other words, we’re punishing people for having been abused.

And...this incredible post by BFP at Flip Flopping Joy, more to the point:

As I’ve worked through this [sugar] addiction, I’ve kept asking myself over and over again. Why do we expect individual responses to what are ultimately the vestiges of (slavery, colonialism, patriarchy, nationalism, heteroviolence, etc)?

What is addiction, but a reaction to racism, to sexism, to heteroviolence, etc?

[...]

Is it possible to take better care of yourself when living under such extraordinary violence? Is it possible to survive alone under the burden of structural violence?

~The personal is political~

...and so much more, in that post...

I want to write lots more about addiction, forms of "self-harm", responses to abuse and oppression... Today though I only seem to be able to scrap-book other people's thoughts here.

gender policing

ah, refreshing to wake up to a good bit of swearing. Queers Against Obama has something to say about proposed changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its 'classification' of transgender people, check it out.

on gossip

my friend and i were talking about a 'healthy level of gossip'. we felt that a community in which there is zero gossip is unhealthy. people need to be able to talk to one another about each other to avoid the 'divide-and-rule' tactic of isolation used by all controlling people. outside of the context of countering abuse and control, people also talk about one another out of care. my friend and i were comparing notes on someone who had cut off contact. i wasn't sure if the person was being rude or if i had upset them, but by speaking to my friend i realised the person was having other difficulties and i should keep trying to contact them.

i remember when someone who had been emotionally abusive to another person in my community within a relationship, plus controlling of things within our community organising, left for another city. we talked about whether to warn the equivalent communities in the city where they were going to end up. at the time we decided not to. we felt it was unfair to deny someone the chance of a new start, unfair to slur their name before they'd even arrived.

when that person arrived in the new city they enacted the same patterns of control over methods of community organising, but on a larger scale. i have no idea whether the person also continued to be abusive in relationships. in later conversations we felt that we should have warned people in the new city so that they could have seen the early signs and prevented the person from gaining so much control. when, further down the line, i was talking with people in the new city about this person's behaviour, some also identified patterns of control, while others said things like 'they've been perfectly alright with me. i don't want to hear anything. i'll make up my own mind'.

i think as part of a community i'm responsible for more than just how someone is with me. i think it perpetuates abuse and control to ignore what other people say about their experiences of someone. in a domestic abuse context, the most powerful abusers are those who are the most charming to the outside world, as the victim is all the more likely to be disbelieved if they tell the truth. in any context, successfully controlling people will display reasonable behaviour most of the time, and ensure the silencing of anyone who has seen the twisted behaviour.

i find that the people most anti-'gossip' are those who are afraid of people comparing notes on their behaviour. someone in my community feels entitled to send cleverly worded emails to others, requesting them to "work on your behaviour" and proceeding to list life-advice in the form of apparently-caring-and-concerned questions that are in fact stunningly manipulative (example below). i perceive this to be a very subtle but immensely controlling thing to do. i have been called out by this person, who chooses to interpret my talking about their behaviour with others in our community as malicious gossip. i fervently disagree. and i see this calling-out as an attempt to silence and isolate me as someone who understands this behaviour as controlling. furthermore i think it is essential to talk with people around you about difficulties you are having, including receiving an angry-but-'compassionately-concerned' email requesting you to "work on your behaviour", and when i received one, i did so. when it turns out that other people have also received such emails, and been put in a position by the sender that they cannot talk about it to others, it becomes all the more important to break the silence.

it was receiving one particularly charming question in a list of 'compassionately-concerned'-questions-to-consider that led me to decide i could have no more to do with this person despite our shared history of community organising and friendships: "Do you have a tendency to turn around challenging situations so that you are the victim?".

what do you think? do you think i'm overreacting? i see this as an incredibly manipulative thing to write. it is impossible to challenge this statement in any way without confirming it. in objecting to that question, either by replying to the person's email, or here in blogging about it, i am portraying myself at the victim: and their 'insightful' point is proven. also, like many tactics of control/abuse, it is almost indescribably subtle. it is very difficult to object to, and perhaps anyone reading this will think i'm overreacting.

this person demanded a response to their email and made it clear that it would be incredibly offensive and disrespectful not to reply. i.e. here on in i must operate on their terms. so the only option left open to me is to agree, to go "oh wow, thank you for that insight, i do really need to think carefully about my behaviour and my tendency to manipulate things to play the victim". at the time i started writing a reply similar to that. partly because so many things in the email did strike chords (talking about our shared history), to the extent that i wanted to engage, and almost missed the manipulation. also, i knew that in doing anything other than agreeing with this person would cause difficulties for some mutual friends who would be asked (indirectly, subtly) to take sides. so even after realising the sheer unacceptableness of that statement and the premise of the entire email correspondence, i still wanted to reply in a way that would placate the person and maintain some possibility of a relationship between us. the more i thought about it though, i realised that i cannot operate on the terms of someone who thinks it's acceptable to use such techniques of control.

so that relationship has ended. the person let me know that my disengaging is disrespectful and regretful.
any relationship ending means losses and it has hurt. but i couldn't see any other way out. and it has been a massive lesson in the use of 'divide-and-rule' and how incredibly difficult it is to counter and resist those tactics. i am interested in anyone else's thoughts on dealing with controlling people in communities: problems you've had and especially if you've managed to overcome it more successfully. i'd be really happy to publish some guest posts here (on any relevant topic in fact).

cosy opposition

i was writing the other day about a social work manager's use of assumed shared racism to distract from the fact that she was trying to deport a mother experiencing domestic violence. i have just read exactly what i was trying to say:

"“We” ostensibly embraces all true-born, good-hearted native folk, rich and poor, in thrilling yet cosy opposition to the alien menace. Even the humblest citizen may join this noble project. Or face the consequences. Such is the magic of populist politics, and the road to fascism."

The quote is from a remarkable article that my friend alerted me to: Too Many of Whom and Too Much of What by the folks at No One is Illegal. i love them, just feel relief at reading bang up to date, well-researched analysis of what is happening in UK political discourse at the moment. please read it.

reproductive coercion

Just wanted to alert you to a marvellous post by Cara at The Curvature: Reproductive Coercion is Sexual Violence.

protecting whom?

This has blown my mind recently:

"Law enforcement approaches to violence against women MAY deter some acts of violence in the short term. However, as an overall strategy for ending violence, criminalization has not worked. In fact, the overall impact of mandatory arrests laws for domestic violence have led to decreases in the number of battered women who kill their partners in self-defense, but they have not led to a decrease in the number of batterers who kill their partners. Thus, the law protects batterers more than it protects survivors."

From Incite! Critical Resistance Statement

I don't know the details of 'mandatory arrest laws' in the US and don't have time to research it just now. I'm irritated at how much more easily i'm finding analysis/critiques of US domestic abuse legislation as opposed to stuff from over here. I really want to know what impact the new legislation in the UK has had - and whether it's keeping men safer over and above keeping women safer!