Coercive Control
There seems to be no let-up in the reports coming in from around the world of shocking violence against women. Sadly, the tragic events in Dunedin seem to add a further New Zealand instance to that shameful catalogue.
Most cases of domestic violence involve physical or sexual abuse; but increasingly, that abuse is preceded or accompanied by psychological abuse as well.
New Zealand was among the more enlightened countries when Parliament in 1995 added psychological abuse, as well as the more familiar physical and sexual abuse, to the definition of domestic violence. As the current advertising campaign against domestic violence “It’s Not Okay” makes clear, psychological abuse can be just as damaging as other forms of domestic violence.
Sadly, though, Parliament’s 1995 intentions have come almost to nought. Counsellors and psychologists, lawyers and judges, have almost uniformly chosen to remain ignorant of, and therefore to ignore, allegations of psychological abuse. One example; whereas the Family Court and its officers would never, in a case of physical or sexual abuse, send the parties to mediation, that is often their first resort in cases which might involve psychological abuse.
The current orthodoxy is that the parties to a relationship break-down should be encouraged to behave as much as possible like a “normal” family, especially where children are involved. Shared parenting is the order of the day. But this is clearly not possible in cases of physical and sexual abuse – and it is no more appropriate in cases where the reason for the break-down was the psychological abuse of one party by the other.
The courts do of course have great difficulty with psychological abuse (or “coercive control” as it is now often called in the literature). It is hard to establish good evidence, because psychological abuse “does not leave bruises”. And, unlike physical or sexual abuse, it does not occur in the form of single and recognisably traumatic events but usually comprises, over many years, an endless succession of small incidents, usually constituting a deliberate and cumulative pattern of behaviour which can do great damage to the victim and other family members.
There is a growing body of research about what constitutes psychological abuse, much of it in the US and some of the best produced by psychologists who actually work with the perpetrators of the abuse. The essence of the abuse is the determination of the abuser to control, bully and dominate the victim – and in the end to destroy her identity as a person in her own right.
Typically, an abuser will seek to isolate the victim. He will forbid her to leave the house except for purposes he approves. He will antagonise her friends so that they no longer visit. He will limit her outside interests and insist that her role is in the home.
He will attack her self-esteem by constantly telling her she is “useless” or “brainless”. He will denigrate her in front of the children. He will treat her as a drudge or minion. He will make unreasonable and constantly changing demands. He will keep her short of money (while spending freely himself); he may insist on being shown detailed receipts for every item of expenditure, including food and other groceries. He will withhold love and affection, except when sex is required.
The victim will begin to feel worthless, and will believe what she is constantly told – that “it is all your fault”. She will feel powerless to change the situation, doubting her own ability to decide and act for herself, and convinced that her partner cannot be challenged.
None of this need involve physical violence, though it might do. The perpetrator is usually able to present a reasonable exterior to his own friends in the outside world. He reserves his abuse for the domestic context. The abuse does not stop with the victim, but will usually affect the children of the relationship as well.
The research shows that if the victim is finally able to summon up the courage to break away, the abuser will often use the post-separation process – exploiting issues like financial support or contact with the children – as an opportunity to try to re-assert control and to punish the victim for seeking to escape. The use of the courts over a prolonged period is a typical weapon to this end. The abuse does not end when the relationship ends.
The Family Court’s preference for sending cases to mediation is meat and drink to the abuser. It is a chance to dominate the victim all over again, to re-create in her that sense that she cannot stand up for herself and that her abuser will always win. The legal process that should be protecting her from the abuser she has escaped from seems intent on thrusting her (and often her children) back into his control.
The only way that the law can be made to work as intended is if those appointed as mediators in such cases are properly trained to recognise and act on psychological abuse. Without it, the law is a dead letter, and we might well ask – why did the legislators bother?
Bryan Gould
16 January 2014.
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 24 January.
Light Cast on the Future
Every now and then, a single event can cast a bright and unexpected light on a complex issue of much wider significance. Just such an event was the government’s decision to award the contract to build a new ferry to a Bangladeshi firm rather than a New Zealand boatbuilder.
At first sight, the main reason for concern may be seen as the safety and reliability of the new vessel. Bangladesh does not have a boatbuilding industry of any repute; the New Zealand order will be their first contract for a foreign customer. Those who eventually travel on the ferry – bearing in mind recent bad experiences with ferries plying Pacific routes – will hope that the government’s confidence is justified.
But the real worry lies in the reasons given by ministers for the decision. The factor that weighed above all others, we are told, is that the Bangladeshis could build the vessel much more cheaply. The reputation for quality and technical excellence painstakingly built up by the New Zealand industry, it seems, counted for nothing. The efforts made to promote that industry to world markets – as witness the taxpayer subsidies to the America’s Cup campaigns – were apparently just money down the drain.
And if even our own government preferred to rebuff the New Zealand industry by buying foreign, why should any other customer reach a different conclusion? If the reasoning followed by ministers is sound, the decision means, in effect, the death knell of a proud New Zealand industry that has represented one of the few (and dwindling) instances of a technically advanced capability that can look world competition in the eye.
But the light cast by this decision illuminates yet more. If the reasoning applied in the case of boatbuilding is correct, why would it not apply to any other New Zealand manufacturing sector? We have already seen the consequences of such thinking in areas like railway rolling stock and aircraft maintenance; what will be left if, setting aside all other considerations, price alone must always determine the issue?
Why does the government not take a more strategic view, recognising that money saved on an individual contract may cost the economy hugely more over time? If one contract after another, each taken in isolation, is awarded on the single criterion of price, and one industry after another accordingly disappears, will that not threaten the destruction of our total manufacturing capability, leaving all our eggs (or milk) in the one basket of dairying?
The answer constantly offered to these questions is that “the market must prevail”. If decisions do not comply with market realities, we are told, our economy will be weaker in the long run. But, as Keynes’ famous dictum put it, “in the long run, we are all dead”. By the time the last person turns out the lights, those responsible will have departed the scene and will not be around to see the results of their handiwork.
Do they not wonder why so many of today’s economic powerhouses (including many who now enjoy higher living standards than our own) have found it advantageous to provide some protection to domestic industries while they are building up their strength? Why do we think that we alone are so invulnerable that we can successfully entrust our future to a global market place in which we are a tiny player whose interests will be wiped out without a moment’s thought?
And if even our own government puts New Zealand interests second to the dictates of the “free” global market, what does that tell us of the government’s attitude to the protection of New Zealand interests in contexts such as the negotiation for a Trans Pacific Partnership? Must “market realities” prevail there too? Must New Zealand interests be abandoned – in areas like intellectual property and pharmaceuticals – if they run counter to the demands of the major players in the international marketplace?
The ideologically driven insistence that the “free” market must always prevail might not be so damaging if the market really were “free”. But the market is rigged – and rigged against our producers and exporters in respect of precisely the issue that our government says matters above all – that is, price.
Ministers have decreed that decisions on contracts must be made on price alone; and they then ensure that New Zealand manufacturers must, by virtue of the overvalued dollar, carry an enormous price handicap in the race for orders. Our dollar is overvalued because comparatively high interest rates, and the prospect of higher rates to come, offer easy pickings to overseas speculators; our currency, the tenth most traded in the world, serves the interests of those speculators at the expense of our own producers.
We have learnt nothing from past mistakes. We are about to embark on another destructive round of raising interest rates, thereby pushing up the dollar’s value, destroying yet more of our industry, weakening our ability to pay our way, worsening our trade deficit, increasing our need to borrow, and leading to yet higher interest rates.
The boatbuilding decision is, in other words, just the latest instalment in a deliberate but disastrously short-sighted policy – and it casts a warning light on our economic future.
Bryan Gould
14 January 2014
The Voters’ Anger
The disenchantment of British voters with democracy, we are told, is to be explained by the anger they feel at the failings of politicians. Those failings, it is supposed, are to do with the perception that politicians are “on the make”; but that conclusion – while no doubt partly justified – is surely far from the whole truth.
The Guardian/ICM poll finding that 50% of respondents chose “anger” as their principal sentiment when thinking of politicians may well conceal a deeper malaise. The scale and depth of public disaffection is, I believe, to be explained by something much more fundamental than the sadly all-too-common instances of politicians breaking the rules governing their “perks” and allowances.
What is in play instead is a growing realisation that the political class – which extends far beyond the ranks of elected MPs to include the whole of what used to be called the establishment – has failed a country that is now in a state of unmistakable national decline. Those responsible for what passes for serious debate about the state of the nation – and that includes business leaders, the media, civil servants, leading academics and experts, as well as politicians – have contributed to a process that has not only meant manifestly hard times for many of our citizens but also offers little hope of a better future.
Despite constant assurances that better times are just around the corner, the UK has over the last four or five years suffered the sharpest fall in living standards in over a century. Those who have borne the main brunt of that precipitate decline have been the weakest in our society, for whom the safety net is regressively being withdrawn. Economic decline and social disintegration are now seared deeply into the national consciousness.
None of the major contenders for government seems to offer anything but further retrenchment. The voters look in vain for an alternative to the current orthodoxy. Labour continues to suffer the burden of the New Labour legacy. The Tories commit themselves to self-harming austerity and promise to make life tougher for the already disadvantaged. The Liberals look for ways of distancing themselves from Tory failure without giving up the fruits of office. Even those voters tempted by UKIP recognise that they offer a counsel of despair rather than redemption.
Little wonder that voters feel a sense of frustration and anger. They understand that the democratic process has not protected them from national failure and decline and that – although the formal power of decision is exercised by government – the shots are really called by global business interests whose dominance over what actually happens has, if anything, increased as the failure of the policies they enjoin has become more evident.
What the voters expect from those who govern them is what they expect from any other group of supposed professionals – simple competence. What they see instead is a bunch of amateurs with little understanding of the economy they are supposed to manage and therefore totally at the mercy of political prejudice and vested interests.
The cure for voter disaffection with democracy is simple. Politicians have to convince the electorate that they are able to abandon a failed orthodoxy that continues to smother new thinking, in favour of a fresh and more positive economic policy – and then deliver on that promise.
What should be the elements of that new policy? It should focus on real issues and not on imagined problems. It should take as its starting point the need for a sustainable rate of growth which current policy is incapable of delivering.
It should recognise that decades of comparative failure have left us with a profoundly uncompetitive economy and a manufacturing industry that is on its last legs. We cannot rebuild our productive base for as long as we cannot compete in international markets.
The loss of competitiveness means that we cannot and dare not grow for fear of ballooning trade deficits and rising inflation. It means that the government’s debt – even while public spending is being cut – will continue to grow faster than the economy as a whole. And while growth languishes, unemployment continues to cost us lost output, acts as a brake on recovery, and undermines our social structure.
We need to face facts and to engineer an exchange rate that allows us to make a fresh start by immediately improving competitiveness. We need a new approach to monetary policy, treating it not primarily as a means of restraining inflation but as an essential facilitator of increased investment in productive capacity. We need an agreed industrial strategy and new investment institutions to ensure that an increased money supply goes into productive investment rather than into consumption or bank bonuses.
Above all, we need to restore full employment as the central goal of policy. An economy that offered productive work to everyone able to work, that provided ample finance for those ready to invest in new and competitive businesses, that found ready markets around the world for all it could produce, would not only restore faith in the value of government and democracy; the Labour Party should note that putting such proposals forward might get them elected as well.
Bryan Gould
29 December 2013
This article was published in the London Progressive Journal on 31 December and in Comment Is Free in The Guardian on 6 January.
A Dose of Reality
As the cheerleaders for economic recovery build up to a Christmas frenzy, it is worth injecting a dose of reality into the optimism. Let us recall that the so-called recovery comes off the back of five years in the doldrums – a period of policy failure that has cost us an immense amount of lost national wealth, thrown thousands on to the scrapheap, relegated thousands more (and not least their children) to poverty, and left public services, including the defence force, in tatters.
The recovery, such as it is, owes much to the Christchurch re-build, begging the question of why we had to wait for an earthquake before finding the money to get the economy moving again. But the real questions arise in respect of where the recovery is likely to take us and – most importantly – whether it means that we have at last resolved our deep-seated economic problems.
The key feature of the government’s policy is, after all, – as the Herald identified in its leading article on Monday – short-termism. The government’s apparent strategy has been merely to apply a series of sticking-plasters rather than to find long-term solutions.
Asset sales, for example, have filled an immediate gap in the government’s finances, even though in the longer term there will be a significant loss of government income; that, apparently, is something for future governments to worry about. The so-called industrial strategy amounts to no more than large taxpayer-funded subsidies to film companies, ill-judged deals with the likes of Sky City, and jeopardising our environment by backing any overseas project to dig up or drill for hoped-for mineral wealth under our land or sea.
None of these strategies helps in any way to resolve our economic problems – indeed, the opposite is true. Our dangerously narrow productive base? We are more dependent than ever on high dairy prices which won’t necessarily last forever. Turning our backs on investment in new productive capacity in favour of an overheated housing market? Much of the increase in economic activity comes from the greater spending power home-owners imagine they have as a consequence of the rise in house prices.
Our predilection for consuming and importing? Stronger than ever. The need to borrow from overseas and to sell our remaining assets to foreign owners in order to fund our spending spree? No change there. Our continued use of interest rates to restrain inflation as the sole goal of economic policy, with the consequent overvaluation of the dollar and its damaging impact on our ability to compete in the world? No lessons learnt. All of these familiar problems are about to rear their heads again.
We are enthusiastically getting back, in other words, on to a money-go-round that means a damaging failure to pay our way and a weakened productive base. It is a safe bet that – after a brief consumer bonanza – there will be (with much wringing of hands) a new outbreak of bewildered concern as to why our powerful new competitors in Asia and elsewhere are doing so much better than we are.
In the meantime, the government will carry on with the bizarre conviction that our economic future depends essentially on sucking up to overseas corporates whose sole interest is in cherry-picking our assets – actual or potential – and leaving us to pick up the pieces after they leave with the booty. At the same time, it is apparently believed that the plight of an increasingly large proportion of our population – with no jobs, poor prospects, worse education, sub-standard housing, third-world health standards – is irrelevant to our economic prospects and is merely a matter of individual responsibility.
The government certainly cannot be accused of proceeding by stealth; it has loudly proclaimed its sadly misplaced faith in international finance and overseas corporates coming to our aid; it has been equally clear in its casual dismissal of any thought that our fellow-citizens might be worth consideration, not only as essential elements of a healthy and integrated society but also as important contributors to our economy.
There will be, quite understandably, those who accept this critique of current strategy but look in vain for an explanation of what an alternative strategy might look like. But we can’t even begin to understand the need for an alternative until we understand why the current strategy is doomed to be self-defeating. And the case for an alternative is inevitably more complex than can accurately or persuasively be described in 800 words; readers might like to look out for my next book!
The first important step towards a better strategy, though, is to avoid misplaced optimism as the economy recovers from a long period of stagnation. And one point is clear; the best guide to a better economic future is to enable our own people to become economically active and productive, so that everyone can share in economic success – everyone, after all, is entitled to a merry Christmas – rather than accepting the doubtful benefits of the self-interested whims and vagaries of overseas bargain-hunters.
Bryan Gould
17 December 2013
Live Mandela’s Principles In Our Own Society Today
The world’s response to the death of Nelson Mandela is a richly deserved recognition of the suffering and struggle he endured in defence of his principles, and the humility and magnanimity he showed when he finally achieved his, and his people’s, freedom.
He didn’t just proclaim his belief in human dignity, and his insistence that we are all equal in our humanity – he lived it. It is this shining example, this living embodiment of the quest for freedom and justice, that has touched so many people.
Nelson Mandela at least had the satisfaction of living long enough to see his life’s work vindicated, even by many of those who opposed him. It is a safe bet that a substantial proportion of those world leaders who paid him homage at Tuesday’s memorial service would not have given him the time of day when he was incarcerated on Robben Island; some, we are told, “can’t remember” what they thought of him at that time and others condemned him as a terrorist. The prospect of the presence of such people at his memorial service was an irony that was not, it seems, lost on Mandela himself.
But history is full of examples of brave men and women who stood against the prevailing tide – in other words, against the dominant power structures of the time – in order to stay true to the ideals of freedom, social justice and human dignity but, unlike Mandela, went to (or were sent to) their graves without ever seeing the fruits of their efforts. For many, it was only in death, and often much later, that their true worth, and the rightness of what they fought for, was recognised.
Mandela was, in this as in so many other respects, an exception to the general rule. While he himself was the first to recognise that his eventual triumph did not mean that South Africa became overnight the promised land (in economic terms at least), the outpouring of love and gratitude for what he had achieved shows how much the freedom from repression and injustice has meant to the people whose interests he served so faithfully. In his case, he was left in no doubt that freedom and justice – and the chance of a better life – mattered greatly to those who had been denied them.
So we must ask why so many of our leaders were so slow to value the universal issues that Mandela stood for and why even today we still resist them when they arise in our own societies and in our own times. Why is it that it is only when history and distance lend a longer perspective that understanding spreads as to the worth of what the champions of human dignity and equality – the fighters for the vote and the rule of law, the opponents of discrimination on grounds of race or gender or sexual orientation, the defenders of equal and basic rights for all – were trying to achieve?
Is it a failure of imagination? Are we are so comfortable in our easy lives that we cannot conceive that many people – even in our own country – are denied what we take for granted? Are we so persuaded by the constant propaganda that everything is fine that we close our eyes to the real lives of so many of our fellow-citizens? Instead of making the small effort needed to remedy the deficiencies, would we rather deny the facts or blame the victims?
What to make, for example, of the now incontrovertible evidence of the growing extent of child poverty in our supposedly prosperous society? Are we really prepared to dismiss the the Unicef finding that New Zealand is no longer a good place for children to grow up in or the report commissioned by the Children’s Commissioner that showed more than a quarter of a million children live in poverty?
At a meeting in Auckland last week, an American woman told me that, when she decided during the course of her first visit to New Zealand in the 1970s that she would settle here, her bewildered family back in the US asked her why. “Because here,” she replied, “there is enough for everyone.”
It is hard to think of a better definition of a society that functions well and successfully. So how did we become a society in which, despite our increased wealth, there is no longer enough for children who are brought up in cold, damp and overcrowded houses and have to go to school on empty stomachs? Why are we surprised that the illnesses of third world poverty are now rife amongst us and that our educational standards are slipping?
Will those who find it opportune to pay homage belatedly to the achievements of Nelson Mandela now bring that apparent conversion to bear in the here and now? Will they recognise and act on the claims of so many our children to an equal chance in our rich and beautiful land?
Bryan Gould
10 December 2013
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 11 December 2013