Domestic violence is abuse between two adults who share the same household . Criminal domestic abuse may include physical assault such as slapping, hitting, pushing, shoving, etc, sexual assault/rape, stalking/harassment, or blackmail. Non-criminal domestic violence may include emotional abuse like intimidation, mind-games or financial abuse like controlling money. These latter forms eventually turn into criminal behaviors in 80% of cases. Domestic violence can in fact be perpetrated by and against people of any gender, age, income level, race, religion, or any other demographic area. Perpetrators of domestic violence often try to explain/justify it with circumstances outside of their control: drugs, alcohol, mental illness, troubled childhood, anger problems, hard day at work, etc, in some cases claiming that if only the victim didn’t provoke them, the abuse would not have occurred. The victim adopts this perspective by walks on eggshells, yet seems unable to prevent or even predict the next violent episode. Perhaps due to the fact that they aren’t the one responsible for it.

In accordance to my project, I have spoken to a good friend of mine who has unfortunately been through an abusive relationship and as far as her story goes, one of the most shocking in my opinion is where there was a phase within her relationship where her boyfriend would come home and he would start to beat her  when she said or did something that angered him. However, this differentiates from other stories I’ve heard because of the fact that  he would make her go and find objects that he would then beat her with. For example, she was telling me an incident  where he came home, they had an argument and he told/instructed her to go and get a belt. When she refused, he hit, shoved and kicked her and asked her again. And this would be repeated until she did what he asked of her. So she would then get what he wanted, and he would beat her with whatever object he could get. In some cases she would be instructed to find a belt, and in one extreme case, she was told to bring a lit candle which he then poured boiling hot wax on her body.

Something that I found quite shocking and unfortunate to hear was when she said how easy it is to say ‘I am never going to be in an abusive relationship, i’ll just leave him…’ In my friends case, she wasn’t actually aware that she was in a relationship, and every time it happened, she thought and really believed that ‘he would never do it again.’ She also stated how this was her first relationship and her first real love, she says now how looking back, she wishes she would have done something and not just accepted the way he treated her. She was in this relationship for three years, and during the second year, she went away to university only to find out that his intentions were to follow her there. Fortunately for her, they split up a year later as he was moving  to a different country.

One of the ways in which she was able to fully understand the severity of what she had been through was because she opened up to one of her friends at uni and explained everything that happened to her. Her friend insisted that she call the police but she refused and didn’t in the end. Even as crazy as it sounds, she said that through everything that happened to her, she still felt something (albeit small) for him.

My response to this will be staged, and will contain a woman holding the weapons that were mentioned in the story. Although some portraits will incorporate facial features and expressions, some will focus on specific elements/objects within the image. The two main objects that I wanted to focus on was the belt and the candle/wax element.

I quite like how disturbed this image is and I would like to produce a similar representation as it fits perfectly with what someone told me. It was valentines and her boyfriend bought her some flowers, later that evening they got into an argument about something petty (like usual) she says to me. His first reaction was to go to the flowers, rip them off the  stem and rip them into pieces. He then headed to her as a target and started pulling her hair and shoving her down until she fell on the floor. As that wasn’t enough, he then got the pieces from the flowers and shoved them into her mouth. She told me how whenever he did thing like this, he would have this look in his eyes, like he was looking at her but he wasn’t. “His eyes would look wild” she says and that was probably one of the most scariest things because “you never know what’s going on in his mind”.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/mar/28/rubi-lebovitch-photographer-home-sweet-home – image