Domestic Violence and (sexual) humiliation

Humiliation doesn’t cause physical harm, so what’s it to do with Domestic Violence?
Everything.

However, this quintessential part of domestic abuse is one not often discussed. It is usually grouped under emotional and/or psychological abuse, but the intricacies are even more forgotten than this aspect of DV itself. For DV survivors the effects of humiliation and degradation have profound consequences and the shame from it usually lasts for years to come. Emotional and psychological abuse, albeit usually the foundation for the abuse (and first stages thereof), all too often take a backseat in criminal and civil court cases, and its effects are routinely underestimated by those responsible for keeping victims safe, despite extensive research which accounts for its devastating consequences.
Many victims live under constant threat, and with constant humiliation and degradation, as those are very effective aides to the abuse. The more shame and embarrassment they experience as a result of the mistreatment, the less likely they are to ask for help or share the details of it, because, after all they would have to tell the tales of their humiliating trauma.
Aside from making the victim feel worthless, useless and unwanted, the humiliation often also makes her feel stupid and embarrassed. The shame of being abused, often in the worst ways behind closed doors, but sometimes also very loudly in public, is one factor keeping many victims silent.

So, let’s talk about humiliation for a change.

To my own horror, the further I get away from the abuse, the more episodes I recall.
I had either suppressed them by sheer force of will to the point of almost forgetting them, or I don’t like to think about them, because they still make me squirm with shame. The worst thing about it is the thought of how readily (and often!) my perpetrator used these tools and how awful they made me feel. I’ve not experienced any domestic violence in 9 months, and yet I am still embarrassed to talk about a few very personal incidences because they make me feel stupid, and worthless. The humiliation and degradation has hurt me worse than the violence ever did!

Once incident, which left me hoping the ground would swallow me, so I would never ever have to encounter a human being ever again, was in public and whilst out for a meal. We’d been arguing about something trivial, and he’d fallen into his usual pattern of blaming me for everything and aggressively swearing, threatening and calling me names in front of our child. I told him to stop treating me like this, and in my defence told him this was ‘abuse’. He laughed right into my face, as a couple walked past and watched our altercation and threatened to ‘smash my face in’ once we got home, then mocked me by putting on a stupid voice saying “Oh no, that’s abuse, right? You gonna end up crying again, like a pathetic little girl? You need to grow up!”. He then grabbed me by my wrists and started hitting me with my own hands. Sounds hilarious right?
I was mortified!! He kept laughing at me, saying “Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself! Is this abuse? Why do you keep hitting yourself? You’ll end up being sectioned!”, as he kept forcing my arms to hit my face again and again. I could have died. The couple turned around curiously, and he faced them to say: “It’s ok, she hasn’t taken her meds today.” I had tears burning in my eyes I was so ashamed, and felt so stupid. He’d made me look like a total idiot, and then he pushed me into the direction he’d wanted me to walk and slapped my head whilst he carried on laughing. There was nothing funny about it. I was shaking badly, and I wasn’t even physically hurt at that point…

At times he spat in my face in public, like I wasn’t even human, and then saw me clumsily searching my bag for a tissue trying to keep some dignity, whilst he growled in my face, threatened me and told me I deserved this. I was too embarrassed to even try and meet eyes with bystanders, let alone ask for help. Other times he threw food at me, spat food in my face or poured food over my head, sometimes just minutes before I was due to leave the house.
Once he cornered me in the kitchen, spat his breakfast in my face and then proceeded to hit me with the towel I was supposed to clean myself with because I looked, as he put it, pathetic, with cornflakes all over my face. Of course this didn’t hurt anywhere else but my pride, but it was deeply humiliating. Every time he’d made a mess like that, it was always me who ended up cleaning it up too… so not only had I been spat at, and food thrown into my face and into the room, I then had to clean it up, whilst he watched.

Other incidences, which left me deeply ashamed, were when he publicly talked about sexual details of his wild past, and always made me out to be frigid and boring in contrast or elaborated in great detail on the few occasions I hadn’t been in his opinion. He would publicly tell everyone who sat still long enough, that I was “crap at giving blowjobs”, for instance, or how I apparently had a preference for “doggie style and couldn’t get off ‘my’ knees” or liked to be “f**ed” in a certain way, or other.
It’s hard to put into words just how degrading and deeply humiliating it was to sit with people and listen to someone, you thought you loved and trusted, talk about you like this, whilst keeping a straight face and not letting on just how upsetting it is. Sometimes I saw other people cringe for me, try and change the subject, sometimes I had looks of sympathy, sometimes the men just hollered at his tales, whilst other times I just sat quietly hoping for the embarrassment of the topic to pass.

Abusers have no empathy for their victims, and their suffering or the emotions that go with it means nothing to them, except to make them more likely to comply in future because their self worth over time becomes completely destroyed.

In domestic abuse where sexual abuse and violence occurs, sexual humiliation is also commonplace.

Abusers demoralise victims by forcing them to perform sexual acts they don’t want to do, or using coercive control or manipulation to gain participation, only to later berate their performance. Perpetrators often argue their demands as a given right in the relationship, i.e.
“You’re my partner, you have to have sex with me”, or “You’re my girlfriend, you should be doing this”, or proclaim how the victim should want to do certain things in order to prove their love – “If you loved me you would …” or “If you don’t …., then that means you don’t love me.”, are usual sentences, as well as threats to end the relationship, or have sex with other partners instead, shifting the blame always onto the victim.

In my case, (when I wasn’t “outright” raped) I was often told, I should count myself lucky he was here with me, and not with the many women he could have, that I should be grateful he wasn’t cheating on me right now and that I ought to work harder to please him sexually.
Being on some sort of probation, depending on my performance was embarrassing and mortifying and not exactly stimulating, and yet all I really wanted to do was engage in a meaningful way with the person I once loved. At the time I sought the fault with me and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Everything he took from me with force would have been given freely in other circumstances, but he liked the dominance and he liked my pain.

He found intense pleasure forcing me to pleasure him orally, for instance, being extra forceful and watching me gag, to then berate and belittle me. A few times he forcefully held my head in place whilst he ejaculated and laughed when I choked, gagged and my vision blurred with the tears in my eyes. With his ejaculate all over my face and body he then told me to go and have a wash and called me dirty, filthy and a whore. The humiliation when he then referenced my “poor sexual performance” in front of other was like no other …

He also caused me a lot of body shame, either by publicly proclaiming how other women had “nicer t*ts” than I had, or looked like they could take “c*ck better” than I could, or criticising the way I looked. Again, the reactions from others were mixed, but usually only added to my humiliation.
The blame game and body shame didn’t end here, on a few occasions I dared to menstruate when he wanted to have his way, which often ended in a public tirade of how disgusting women’s periods were, and how he hated blood on his penis. The stress about feeling dirty every month got to me so much, I felt ashamed to menstruate and eventually I stopped having a period altogether for a while.
He’d regularly told me I was dirty, often after he’d just spat at me, or ejaculated all over me, or caused me to bleed, but each time I felt so deeply humiliated by being told to go “and have a wash”, that I ended up with contact dermatitis (irritant dermatitis) and infections from over-washing. To this day I struggle ‘to feel clean’ and over-wash, and feel dirty very quickly.

Being in an abusive relationship is emotionally and physically draining for the victim, because one is not only constantly living under threat, and walking on egg-shells to try and not trigger an episode, or diffuse a situation, whichever way it goes, one is caught in a dilemma.
Refusing to go along with the (sexual) abuse, is likely to result in a physical attack (or rape), emotional blackmail or emotional abuse, but agreeing to whichever demand the abuser places on its victims often causes deep emotional distress, feelings of shame, guilt and disgust in oneself.

The shame caused by the humiliation in Domestic Violence doesn’t stop when the abuse ends. And although psychological and emotional abuse is contained within the definition of Domestic Abuse, and forms the very basis of it, I know of very few cases where it is acted upon legally, let alone acknowledged.