Denise Chong’s latest book is Out of Darkness: Rumana Monzur’s Journey through Betrayal, Tyranny and Abuse.
Some people have told me that my book might be too upsetting to read. In the notice for a coming conversation I am going to participate in about my book, the organizer has issued a warning to the audience that the content “contains reference to intimate partner violence which may be distressing or triggering for some individuals.” My book tells the story of Rumana Monzur, who made headlines after a brutal domestic assault left her blind.
Today, Ms. Monzur is a lawyer practising in Vancouver and thriving in her life. In 2011, after returning home from a year of study at the University of British Columbia, and while on leave from her job as a professor of international relations at Dhaka University, she told her abusive husband she was going to file for divorce. Days later, she was quietly at work on her thesis when he slipped into the room and, in a vicious attack, gnawed off the tip of her nose and bored his thumbs deep into her eyes. When the story broke, the shock was not just the savagery of the attack – it was also that domestic violence could claim someone of Ms. Monzur’s status: She was an educated, independent woman. It underscored that there is no typical victim.
The writer Azar Nafisi, in exalting the power of narrative for the writer and the reader, speaks of the “intimate stranger.” Most of us think we are far removed from the scourge of intimate partner violence. To learn about incidents is distressing, but is it reason to avoid engaging with the topic? Granted, women who have suffered abuse and who struggle to cast off victimhood carry the burdens of memory, and they can be triggered by details that mirror their own story. But if we who go about safe and free in our daily lives, if our imagined selves balk at stories of intimate partner violence because they evoke a domain of cruelty and harm, what prospect is there for unravelling and addressing what is, in fact, a societal problem?
Instead we should steel ourselves, if that’s what it takes, to be distressed.
Cultural contexts can account for the varying severity of acts of violence against women, but the problem is pervasive and global. In Canada, a woman is killed by a partner or ex-partner every six days. Every night in Toronto, some 300 women and their children flee their homes to gender-based violence shelters. When Ms. Monzur’s father happened to see bruises and welts on his daughter’s arms and learned it was her husband’s doing, he said to her, “If a man has done this once, what will he do next?” The answer: an attempted murder. It took the near-deadly assault to lift a curtain on what for Ms. Monzur was a decade of escalating abuse.
What happened in Ms. Monzur’s case is typical: Only when such relationships come to grievous harm do others learn of the abuse.
A first reaction is to question why the victim stayed, why she didn’t speak up, as if the onus is on the woman to extricate herself from the relationship. Or, once it becomes a case for the law, to look for what tipped the perpetrator into violence against his victim, as if the explanation lies in their personal circumstances. My book aims to step into the day-to-day reality of an abusive relationship and see how it plays out. As the control, harassment and aggression of Ms. Monzur’s abusive partner escalates, her response alternates between confusion and self-blame, disassociation and numbness.
If we empathize with how difficult it is for the woman to leave, what of the circumstances of the abuser?
In a recent lecture titled “The Making and Unmaking of Violent Men,” Miglena Todorova, a professor in social-justice education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, said, “Violent men are not born – they are made by social and cultural forces.” She points to the structures that organize our society, of the bonds of patriarchy, where everyone suffers, and of gender inequality, which keeps all women down.
Ms. Monzur’s first impressions of her future husband as respectful of her as an individual in her own right were shown to be untrue on her wedding night. In the course of her marriage, with every threat she posed to his control over her, he tried to rein her in. She soon learned that the stability of her marriage depended on not challenging his authority. In the year she spent away from her husband in Vancouver, less subject to his control and mental abuse, she felt empowered to assert herself. But once home, her telling him she was going to file for divorce shifted the power dynamic between them. As she planned a future without him, he shifted to revenge, to plotting and planning.
We won’t make real progress on addressing the menace of domestic and intimate partner violence unless we consider the actions of abusers like Ms. Monzur’s partner as much a singular act as a collective act of society. Maybe empathy, by way of engaging with a personal narrative, can help break the paralyzing inertia around how normalized day-to-day violence has become for millions of women around the world. Maybe distress will help rouse us from our complacency.