Strategic Silence and the Most Dangerous Moment

Oh, thank you so much.

I especially like you paying careful attention to, to the intersectionality of some of us that are experiencing that kind of trauma, and even the services that are out there might not be set for them.

But right now, I wanna come back to where we started.

Women who are killed by a partner are killed after they separate, including my own daughter, or while they're trying to get out.

So help us understand why that window is so dangerous, and why the idea of strategic silence is there to protect women.

Absolutely.

I think the first stage is understanding the escalation pattern and how abusers operate.

So if we think about how abusers operate, they o- operate from a, from a perspective c- of control.

And so when the survivor tells their abuser, "You no longer have control over me," they will do whatever it takes to gain that control back.

I can give you an example.

On the day I told my abuser I was leaving him, he, uh, grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to drag me back into the house.

Now, I had safety mechanisms employed on the day.

I had family members standing outside my, my home.

I had my best friend in the parking lot waiting there in a car.

I had called the police the day before.

I had a court order that I had sitting on ice.

I had engaged my lawyer.

I had spoken to my employer about it.

So I had taken all these very strategic steps.

So I told as many people as I could just prior to the event to ensure that they were aware that there was gonna be this heightened risk, and I put in safety mechanisms in a way that was legal because I, it engaged a lawyer, and I made sure that was all in place, and I made sure that my position was the best possible position that I could be in a very difficult situation.

Again, I appreciate that everybody has their own circumstances, but for me, that was when I came to terms with the fact that, wow, this really got bad, and it was on the day that I told my abuser I was leaving him.

So that gives you an example of how the escalation pattern works.

Now, in terms of the real statistics, um, the, uh, I believe that in the UK, 43% of women are killed by partners when they're trying to separate or, or they're having to separate, uh, which is actually likely to be an undercount, so that's a very high statistic.

And I think when we tell survivors to just leave, the difficulty with that is, I w- I don't even wanna say twofold.

It's threefold, multiple-fold, but I think I'll cover a couple of the points as to why it's difficult.