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Why are more women battering their men?
8th August 2011
Mary Bowers from The Times examines the disturbing trend of female domestic violence and the harrowing stories of their male victims.
Ian McNicholl leans forward and lifts up the sleeve of his T-shirt. “You can see the diamond of an iron there,” he says. And there it is, stark lines branded into his broad upper right arm. He has a matching one between his shoulder blades, along with deep scarred grooves along his face. His eyes are sunken in his skull and he walks with a severe limp.
In the past McNicholl was often mistaken for Chelsea captain John Terry. “I’d be asked for my autograph,” he says, “but I now know I look nothing like him. I’ve had my septum replaced. I’ve got to have reconstructive surgery on my cheekbones. I need skin grafts.”
Five years ago McNicholl, 47, met Michelle Williamson on a station platform. They shared a taxi and within three months they were living together. She was tiny: 10in shorter, 6st lighter and ten years younger than he was. But soon she showed a very forceful side.
“There was an argument that came out of nowhere,” he says. “She accused me of paying more attention to her friend. She just lashed out and punched me completely out of the blue.”
That blow was the first in a torrent of abuse. Over the course of a year, she hit him with a metal bar, with a portable TV, with a Hoover and with her mobile phone. She poured boiling water in his lap and stubbed cigarettes out on his chest and up his nostrils. She denied him sleep and, he believes, slipped drugs in his food. She abused him sexually and ran up £25,000 worth of debts in his name. He lost his friends, and was cut off from his family. She discouraged him from phoning them. When he did, she stood over him with a hammer, telling him what to say. Some days he would sit at his bay window, helpless, hoping someone would see an attack and call the police.
We sit beside each other on the black leather sofa as McNicholl tells his story. He points to the spot where his head split open the day Williamson attacked him with a hammer. The force she used was so extreme the handle flew off.
“It’s like looking into the eye of the storm,” he says. “You hope that the last punch, the last kick, the last bite, the last crack with a metal bar will be the final blow that will give her some peace because she’ll see blood spurting from your nose or your mouth.”
The hammer attack came the same day Williamson vowed to kill him and hours before the police came to find McNicholl malnourished and half-dressed, with blood matted in his hair and on his jogging bottoms. He refused at first to admit what had been happening — Williamson had already persuaded him that if the police came he should blame his injuries on loansharks — but an unusually shrewd police officer coaxed it out of him.
“The relief was like puncturing a balloon and with my last breath of energy I mumured the word ‘Yes’ to the question posed by the police, which was: ‘Is the person who caused you those injuries in that house?’”
According to figures from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the charity ManKind, the number of women convicted for domestic violence has risen from 1,500 in 2005 to nearly 4,000 last year. One man in six and one woman in four will now experience partner violence in their lifetime. In addition, one in three murder victims of domestic abuse is male.
Though domestic abuse comes in physical, emotional and sexual form, women are more likely to use the first two than the latter. Females are more likely to use a weapon from around the house than their bare hands.
Mark Brooks, ManKind’s chairman, says that one man he met was subjected to extreme sleep deprivation when his female partner held a radio to his ears at maximum volume every hour, on the hour, throughout the night. “It’s about emotional control, psychological control, financial control — men cut off from their families. Some women will say, ‘If you leave me, I’ll tell the police you raped me’. Then men are afraid that they will lose their children.”
Men often fail to come forward because they feel emasculated by their abusers, a perception Brooks says is not helped by campaigns aimed at female victims. “We need to make it clear that any men who are suffering are not alone. A lot of men think, ‘I’m really weak because I’m the only man in Britain who’s undergoing it’.”
McNicholl’s injuries had begun to heal long before he realised the damage to his masculinity. “I’d walk on the edge of the street to the point where I was trying to be invisible and anonymous because I felt people would look at me and think ‘He’s been hit by a woman’, when actually they wouldn’t have a clue what had caused my injuries.”
It is not clear whether the reasons for the increase are that women are getting more violent, or are more likely to be identified as such by police. Some perpetrators, like Williamson, are sober but many more have problems with addiction and alcohol abuse.
A prime catalyst is an increase in binge drinking among women who are consuming stronger alcohol in greater amounts than a generation ago — and doing it in a very public way, says Nicola Graham-Kevan, a psychologist and scientist at the University of Central Lancashire. “Men generally have been seen to be the violent sex and responsible for town-centre hooliganism,” she says. “But what we have seen is rising cases of women using alcohol-fuelled violence in public places on strangers. As women causing violence in streets becomes more common, it allows police officers seeing calls on domestic violence to believe the woman might be responsible.
“Police used to be unwilling to arrest because the CPS wouldn’t prosecute but on that count the rise of CCTV has helped. On it you will see women acting like men used to 20 years ago.”
Ben [not his real name] knows what this behaviour looks like behind closed doors. After repeated beatings and attacks with sharp objects, he found himself cowering in the bathroom as his wife stabbed the door with a kitchen knife. He had her mobile phone, and on it a text message that proved she had been sleeping with someone else. She’d often leave and stay out all night on drink and drug-fuelled benders while he stayed at home with the children.
He met his wife in a nightclub when she was 19 and he was ten years older. They had a happy couple of years until she started drinking — and arguments and slaps around the head progressed to full-blown violence. “I don’t hit women,” he says. “She knew I would never hit her back.”
In the midst of his wife’s attacks his two children, now aged 6 and 9, would come down the stairs crying and she would shout and swear at them. Now he is bringing them up alone. He didn’t have to fight hard for custody, because she refused to turn up to any hearings. The children have never seen her since the night Ben emerged from the bathroom to find her gone. Ben, like 41 per cent of male victims, has never reported the incidents to the police for fear of getting arrested himself. “I once lifted her elbow to get her out of the house,” he says. “She was drunk and I was worried about the kids. I was arrested for common assault. Another time we drove somewhere and she tried to strangle me with a seat belt. The police came, took her home and advised me to stay out of the house.”
It is a hard job for law enforcement to identify the perpetrator in a row, says Detective Superintendent Ray Marley, head of public protection at Surrey Police, even if one party is clearly more gravely injured than the other.
“The first thing we’re going to look at is the physical evidence and if there is any witness,” he says. “Neighbours that have heard something — that’s something to go on. Otherwise you’re presented with two people, each of whom says it was the other one that did it. How do you make a judgement in that case? You’ve got to do something. You can’t just turn up.”
He also concedes that leaving a mother with her children is a factor, but in extreme circumstances, both partners will be arrested. “You can’t get into lengthy conversations when you’re there because it’s a highly charged atmosphere. So there is a tendency to take both people out of the situation and arrest them.”
Ippo Panteloudakis is the helplines manager at Respect, a telephone advice service for the perpetrators of domestic violence. He says that women, who make up 5 to 10 per cent of his callers, are actually more likely to recognise that they have an anger problem and more willing to address it. They often call, he says, in a state of extreme shame.
“Women who use violence in the relationship are more honest generally. They will say ‘I’m really embarrassed to tell you this, but . . .’ They understand more than men what their impact is on family, partner, children.
“There are some complex situations. There can be some women who in the past have been victims of domestic abuse or sexual abuse and when they start a new relationship they become the aggressor. Some women use violence not as primary aggressors but because they have been living with a perpetrator for a long time and they become abusive because they’ve had enough.”
Daniel [also a pseudonym] knows this situation well. Though the physical wounds have healed, he has sought to understand the behaviour of his alcohol and amphetamineaddicted former girlfriend. She beat him, stubbed cigarettes out on him and left him homeless without access to his children.
“I learnt so much about her after I left the relationship,” he says. “She had a deep hatred of men. She was let down by them her whole life. She had been a victim of drug rape. Her father was a womaniser and a drunk and a wife beater.”
A string of men — including Daniel — were drawn into funding her habit. “She grew up adoring men because they would feed her lifestyle,” he says. “I had the potential to make her financially secure.”
It was when the money ran out that the adoration ceased. Daniel’s girlfriend hit him, chased him with knives. She threatened to take away their three young sons. A selfharmer, she would call the police and tell them he had inflicted the wounds. He was arrested several times. She set fire to their flat, he lost his job and eventually he found himself homeless living under Brighton Pier. It was then he sought help from ManKind. Eventually he left her, found a job and is now working with children with learning difficulties. But it took several years battling the courts for access to his children.
“If you love someone, it’s not easy to leave them,” he says. “That process takes a long time. You have to go through that process of letting go.”
Unlike many support charities for female victims, ManKind has no government funding. Ian McNicholl believes that had one existed back then, a helpline would have saved him sooner. He was isolated from friends and family. His neighbours later admitted that they heard his screams but were too terrified to call the police. But for an anonymous police tip-off, he is convinced he would be dead. “Where would I have gone for help?” he asks. “Women’s Aid? Women’s Refuge?”
For him, there is some closure: in 2009 Williamson received a seven-year jail sentence for grievous bodily harm. Others have pieced their lives together in different ways.
Hours after we speak, Daniel sends a text. “Be in no doubt we are all at risk,” he writes. “I’m a lucky man to have survived and not a day passes when I don’t remind myself of how wonderful my life now is, because I forced myself to heal my once broken world.”
ManKind: 01823 334244 or mankind.org.uk
Respect: 0808 8024040 respectphoneline.org.uk
Facing the facts
40% of stalking victims in 2009-10 were male
Married men (1.5%) are less likely to be a victim of partner abuse than cohabiting men (3.5%) and single men (3.2%)
20% of men who have suffered partner abuse have done so for more than one year (97,000 men) in 2008-09
The average male victim is 43, is 5ft 9in tall and weighs 13st. The average female perpetrator is 40, 5ft 4in tall and weighs 10st 7lb
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