Maria and Eric, the couple at the center of this blog, are fictional characters that I have created in order to illustrate various issues regarding men's psychological violence against women.
Before they married, Eric was a prince charming in disguise. Maria believed he was everything she had ever wanted, and he made her feel like a celebrated princess. His controlling side manifested itself fully only after the birth of their first child. Initially Maria told herself that she would be able to negotiate her life through Eric’s increasing oppression masked as solicitude for his family by doing everything she could not to annoy him. For years, in order ”to save peace”, she thus habitually gave in to Eric in all matters that were important to him – up until the day when she finally had to admit that their home was not a good environment for their children to grow up in. Deep down she knew that it could not but be harmful for them to grow up with a father who abused their mother verbally on a daily basis and a mother who accepted to be repeatedly threatened, degraded, criticized, ridiculed, supervised, controlled, increasingly isolated from her own family and her own friends and lately even physically assaulted or threatened with physical violence by the man who had vowed to love her.
But it wasn’t until she finally left her husband in a panic after a more than usually vicious attack that her real purgatory started
Starting out from these characters and fictional (but typical) events I discuss what victims of psychological persecution can do to protect themselves within the framework of current legislation. At the same time I point to the many weaknesses in current routines and laws that need urgent attention in order to protect vulnerable women and children. But above all I want to show other victims that even if societies put lots of obstacles in their way, it is nevertheless possible to escape from a remorseless avenger’s hateful destruction campaign!
Cissi Blom
Before they married, Eric was a prince charming in disguise. Maria believed he was everything she had ever wanted, and he made her feel like a celebrated princess. His controlling side manifested itself fully only after the birth of their first child. Initially Maria told herself that she would be able to negotiate her life through Eric’s increasing oppression masked as solicitude for his family by doing everything she could not to annoy him. For years, in order ”to save peace”, she thus habitually gave in to Eric in all matters that were important to him – up until the day when she finally had to admit that their home was not a good environment for their children to grow up in. Deep down she knew that it could not but be harmful for them to grow up with a father who abused their mother verbally on a daily basis and a mother who accepted to be repeatedly threatened, degraded, criticized, ridiculed, supervised, controlled, increasingly isolated from her own family and her own friends and lately even physically assaulted or threatened with physical violence by the man who had vowed to love her.
But it wasn’t until she finally left her husband in a panic after a more than usually vicious attack that her real purgatory started
Starting out from these characters and fictional (but typical) events I discuss what victims of psychological persecution can do to protect themselves within the framework of current legislation. At the same time I point to the many weaknesses in current routines and laws that need urgent attention in order to protect vulnerable women and children. But above all I want to show other victims that even if societies put lots of obstacles in their way, it is nevertheless possible to escape from a remorseless avenger’s hateful destruction campaign!
Cissi Blom
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