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IN TOUCH – Domestic Abuse

TX:Ìý 11.10.2022Ìý 2040-2100

PRESENTER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý PETER WHITE

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PRODUCER:Ìý ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý BETH HEMMINGS

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Montage

I didn’t realise at first that it was domestic abuse, I just thought, you know, this is life, if you like.

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When you can’t see you can’t really know what is going on fully.Ìý It’s a lot more scarier.Ìý And the person who is doing that knows that.

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Obviously, I know who it was but like other people would say – well, you don’t know for sure, how can you know because you can’t see them?

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It’s like go and make me a cup of coffee in the green mug and you make a cup of coffee in the red mug, so then the red mug comes flying across the room at you –You’re useless, you can’t even make a cup of coffee.

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Most people would say horrible words but he was saying sight loss stuff, you know, like, who is going to go out with you, you can’t even see you blind bitch.

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White

These are the words of visually impaired people describing and reliving their experiences of domestic abuse.Ìý They’ve been talking to researchers who’ve produced the Unseen, thought to be the first report to concentrate specifically on the direct experience of blind and partially sighted people.Ìý It was published yesterday by the Vision Foundation working alongside Safe Lives, an organisation which has been highlighting the shocking scale of domestic abuse in the UK.Ìý The report’s authors believe that one in 12 blind and partially sighted people could have been the victims of domestic abuse.

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In this programme, we’ve been talking to three people whose experiences illustrate the findings of this report.

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Female voice

I ended up in the marriage at 16 years old and it was a forced marriage.Ìý It sort of happened very quickly, I was at sixth form, came home, found out that my wedding clothes were bought.Ìý Nobody asked me any questions; I was on a flight and I ended up married 11 days later.

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White

And the marriage took place at the wish of your family, with the support of your family?

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Female voice

Correct.

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White

Now that clearly was something that you hadn’t wanted to happen, when did you realise, though, that it was perhaps worse than you’d imagined?

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Female voice

Well, when I did get married to him things were actually pretty good.Ìý The first year, I would say, I was actually head over heels in love with him.Ìý Of course, I was a teenager.Ìý When I was seven months pregnant that’s the first time I realised – okay, this is not what I thought it was, that I wanted to start buying pushchair and cots and there was no money in the saving safe that we had been saving money in and I had questioned him about it, it was the first time that he thought I was being disobedient and actually slapped me across the face.Ìý I realised, okay, I’m in a compromising position.

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White

Can we just explain about your visual impairment and how that started, what was the actual situation with your visual impairment?

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Female voice

When my child was about two years old, he wouldn’t let me leave the house to attend a hospital appointment with my mum.Ìý He was tripping me up and on that day I’d sort of had enough and I pushed him away and he became extremely violent.Ìý I was repeatedly kicked in the head, it was to the point where one of my eyeballs had actually come out and to stop me from calling an ambulance he’d taken my phone and he gave me medical care himself, so we both put my eye back in the socket.Ìý I just remember being numb, not knowing what to do and I started experiencing blurred vision and I kept telling him – something’s not right, I need to get to a hospital, I’m losing vision in my left eye, it’s all a blur.Ìý And he said – oh, when the swelling goes down it’ll get better, you’ll be fine.Ìý And we carried on like that for another seven months to which I had lost about 80% of the vision in my left eye by then.

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White

How did this develop?Ìý I mean what you’ve explained seems a terrible thing to happen but this then went on for a long time didn’t it?

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Female voice

It did.Ìý The first time I’d ever gotten to a hospital I sort of walked into an A&E and I didn’t tell them the truth, I sort of said to them I’m having issues with my left eye.Ìý And they kept asking me if there had been any trauma to the eye because it looked like something had happened.Ìý And I kept saying no, nothing had happened.Ìý They said to me – you have got retinal detachment.Ìý Another few months later, where my only child, at the time, was making a t-shirt and she wanted to draw her mummy but she was too young and so she wanted the teacher to draw mummy, which they drawed a woman and she sort of was drawing blood on one of my eyes and they asked her about it and she said – well, my mummy’s eye got hurt because my daddy hit her – and that’s how it escalated.Ìý And he got arrested that day and I was taken into safety for that day.Ìý My family then supported my child and they painted a picture that they didn’t know, which was not true.

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White

Did you think of any organisations designed to help visually impaired people – blind or partially sighted people?

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Female voice

At the time I actually didn’t know anything about anything to do with visually impaired or blind, I wasn’t even registered.Ìý I had no access to any of that information.Ìý I can’t explain – I mean I was so unready to get help, I still didn’t feel comfortable or safe enough because I was scared of losing my children.Ìý I thought, as a disabled woman, I wasn’t going to be able to keep my children.

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White

Because in spite of what you’ve explained to us, you went on, you had more children with him and you carried on with him for how many years?

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Female voice

A total of 15 years.Ìý But every time I had tried to escape or did escape things had happened that I had to come back, I was left with no choice.Ìý So, there were instances where, when I was separated from him, there was a threat to my life and that threat was not just from his family, also my own family.Ìý It was very real that I had to play along or at some point I wouldn’t be around and I was just really scared that I would leave my child in the same situation.Ìý It was made obvious to me that I couldn’t move on as a single parent with this impairment that I now have, that nobody would accept me.Ìý I fell into that trap and I believed it.

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Male voice

My wife would read out letters to me and then deliberately withhold the vital information.Ìý One example of this is a utility service who’d written to me saying you haven’t paid such and such, you need to sort this out within a week otherwise we will be taking steps etc. and she would read it by saying, and we can be contacted on (phone number).Ìý And I would say – what is the phone number – and she’d say – after all I’ve done for you, you’re going to have wait for three days for it.

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White

Why do you think she would do a thing like that?

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Male voice

Power, I think to a certain extent.Ìý It was a kind of coercive control that relied on her feeling the need to be needed and therefore to keep me dependent on purpose.Ìý She would deliberately hide medication in obscure places.Ìý And so, if I had a headache, I had to ask her for headache tablets.Ìý And it was only after she’d gone that I discovered that there were braille on the boxes because she hadn’t even told me that.Ìý And sometimes there was gaslighting.Ìý We would have an argument and at 9.30 she would say – I am your carer – at 9.45 she would say – I never said I was your carer.Ìý One of the classic examples, she would blame me for pains in her forearm because she didn’t want to be guided by the elbow in the usual way.Ìý And at one time, she just suddenly decided she wasn’t going to guide by anymore if I was going to insist on doing it the way that I’d been trained to, she wanted me to hold on to her in a completely inappropriate way.Ìý So, she broke away from me and left me in the middle of lanes of traffic on the slip road from a service station to a motorway.

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White

How long did this go on for?

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Male voice

We were married for 10 years in the end.

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White

Ten years, though, is a long time…

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Male voice

Ten years is a long time.Ìý I did, at one time, report to the police and the guy that I spoke to on reception was good but the people that they sent to speak to me, they were thinking in terms of if you’re a man, the balance probability is that you are going to be the perpetrator.Ìý But they never actually thought somebody is actually starting to taken to throwing objects at you in temper.Ìý If you’re sighted you can duck, if you’re blind the first thing you’re going to know about it is wallop.

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White

What was your fear as time went on and this all continued?

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Male voice

One of the things that she used to do was to say things like – you think your friends like you but you can’t see what you look like, you can’t look into a mirror, so I have to tell you that your friends think you’re ugly.Ìý And there was a lot of – you would be too much hard work for anybody else, nobody would want you.Ìý And then eventually things got so bad that I thought I’d rather be on my own than having nobody else in my life but her and all of my friends driven away.Ìý More in sorrow than in anger I said – you’re going to have to go, otherwise heaven knows where this is going to lead.

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White

When did you realise that you had got a problem with your partner?

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Second female voice

Well, I felt it was the first day of honeymoon, to be honest with you.Ìý He actually made me cry on the first day of the honeymoon and it was decisions on what we were going to do and the way he spoke to me and the way he sort of decided what was going to happen, it just made me burst into tears and I thought – oh my god, what have I got myself into.Ìý

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White

Had any of this emerged in your relationship leading up to getting married?

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Second female voice

The odd thing he would like fly off the handle quite quickly, I thought that was perhaps just he’d had a hard day at work, you know, and he was very quick to temper.Ìý But I just thought – that was life, you know.Ìý It was only as time progressed, it came into the fore that he sort of wanted to control everything I did, wanted to know where I was, what I was doing, I had to keep in touch with him, let him know.Ìý When I went to work, he used to ask about the gentlemen that were at work and did they come over and talk to me and things like that.Ìý And it was like, well, I’m an independent woman, I can look after myself, just because I’m blind doesn’t mean I’m going to be taken advantage of or you need to keep control of who I talk to.

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White

In terms of the kinds of things he did, what made that particularly distressing to you from the point of view of your lack of sight?

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Second female voice

Well, I must admit he would never ever touch me physically, that’s what I’m thankful of but he’d made it perfectly clear that he was capable of doing it.Ìý He would throw cups or plates at walls and smash them, that I would feel go past the side of my head.Ìý And by him doing that and him sort of almost near missing me, me thinking – oh my god, I’d better do what he says, keep quiet, you know, tread on eggshells every day.Ìý I mean he would get up in my face, right up in my face and shout at me and it got to the point where I was afraid to go out because then, I thought, he’s only going to take it out on the kids.

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White

You said it happened on the very first day and it upset you, did it develop, I mean did it get worse or was it just a steady kind of…

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Second female voice

I would say it was gradual because in the first instance I could see the size of a saucer and to me the size of a saucer is quite big, being a field of vision but it got to the point of being the size of a five pence piece and then it totally disappeared within that five pence piece.Ìý So, as time went on, as my sight got worse, he realised that I became more vulnerable at that point.Ìý When it came to the point that I started to answer back and actually put up a fight against him – with words obviously – then yes, that did not help things, it kind of made things worse.Ìý

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White

Did you talk to anybody about this, did you seek help?

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Second female voice

Not – not with any kind of organisation, no, to be honest, I didn’t know that there were organisations specifically for visually impaired people.Ìý I talked to, obviously, my very, very closest friend but back when it was happening to me, coercive control wasn’t a thing.Ìý To me, domestic abuse or things that happened in the house were violence, people getting hit, well I wasn’t getting hit, he wasn’t touching me, so I thought – well this is just how it is.Ìý

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White

Did you ever think about just walking out?

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Second female voice

That was another thing that stopped me, because of my sight I didn’t think I could cope.Ìý My safety is my home, knowing where I am and to move out and be somewhere else, not being able to find my way around, that would really scare me.Ìý He knew that I liked the security of somewhere where I knew where I was.

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White

Well, I’ve been talking about these issues to Olivia Curno, she’s Chief Executive of the Vision Foundation which commissioned Safe Lives to research the Unseen – this report on domestic abuse.

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Curno

We were really concerned before we started the research but I think we’ve been, frankly, shocked by the scale, the seriousness of the situation and also how hard it is for victims to leave.Ìý The scale is massive, Peter, we’re talking around one in 12 visually impaired people, which equates to 188,000 people across the UK who are currently or have previously experienced domestic abuse.Ìý The nature of the abuse is really harrowing, it’s specific and abusers use the individual, the victim’s sight loss as part of their kind of arsenal of abuse.

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White

Why do you think people seem to have found it so difficult to get help in a situation like this both from organisations, you know, designed to help visually impaired people and even from their own relatives?

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Curno

I think that we now know, because we did a survey of over 70 professionals working in this space, that services are not accessible and too often what victims found is they also weren’t confidential.Ìý So, frequently, victims would describe how they were at a medical appointment or in a situation in which they might have been able to disclose but the abuser was sitting next to them and at no point asked to leave the room because there’s an acceptance, it seems, that if your carer is there, it’s still confidential.Ìý So, people didn’t get opportunities to disclose.Ìý

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We also heard from people that when they disclosed to friends and family, in some instances, their disclosures were kind of disregarded with throwaway remarks like – you can’t do any better – or – what do you expect – or – you should be grateful that he or she takes care of you as you’re a blind person.Ìý

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White

People will be shocked by a lot of this report but what should happen as a result of your report, what actually needs to be done?

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Curno

The Vision Foundation will be investing in this area and we really welcome others who want to invest to support the sector to respond.Ìý We’d like to see a really seismic shift in how services approach individuals.Ìý We know there are multiple touchpoints with healthcare professionals and other practitioners that visually impaired people have.Ìý It is essential that they can have those meetings in private and it’s essential that these conversations are opened up.Ìý If you are at risk of domestic abuse, contact the National Domestic Abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247.Ìý I would like to say, you know, what we also learnt from the research is that 90% of relationships are safe and positive and happy, it is perfectly possible for a visually impaired person to have a wonderful relationship with a sighted person.Ìý This is the minority but we are talking about around 9% of people having experienced this, so we have to provide those opportunities for them to disclose.

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White

That really plays to the last question I wanted to ask.Ìý The problem with a report like this is that it frames visually impaired people always as the victim and the truth is, surely, that people are people and that visually impaired people can be manipulative and abusive as well.Ìý There is grounds for misunderstanding with somebody who just reads this report isn’t there?

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Curno

I think that’s a really important point to make.Ìý We did hear about visually impaired perpetrators but we also heard about the extraordinary power and bravery of people who had chosen to leave abusive relationships.Ìý We definitely don’t want to reframe visually impaired people as de facto victims in any way.Ìý I’d actually like to use the words of one of our interview participants, this individual said that he wanted to highlight how strong people are, how worthy they are of help and that their disability doesn’t make them powerless or voiceless.

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Female voice

I’m definitely much confident, I’ve found my voice and this was definitely through the sight loss world that I was introduced to and I met these people that were blind and had different disabilities that were so independent.Ìý I never knew that there was actually a world out there where people lived like that.Ìý I now – I’m not afraid to speak out, I feel like nobody could convince me otherwise that I am happy as a single parent of four children with my disabilities, that I can take care of them and myself.

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Second female voice

I eventually managed to divorce him and keep the house that I’m in, which, as I mentioned before, was my safety net.Ìý I’m now with a guy who treats me absolutely amazing and I know how I should have been treated all that time.Ìý I can walk in through the front door and not dread what’s going to happen when I shut it.