It’s the domestic part that gives domestic violence its particular horror: private brutality concealed within the public bonds of affection, intimate terror exposed in visible wounds and court reporting. It’s often hard to see from the outside, and hard to speak of from the inside. All of us, after all, are entitled to our private selves as well as our public version. How much harder to give yourself up when the self you reveal is the victim of another’s violence – and you are liable to be punished for the revelation.
One of the triumphs of feminism has been to break that tyranny of privacy. We no longer accept that violence within a relationship is protected by a sacred bond between abuser and abused. It’s a recent change, though: the Court of Appeal only established the right of a woman not to be raped by her husband in 1991. And so perhaps I should welcome anything that breaches the stigma around domestic violence – including the pictures in today’s Sunday People that appear to show Charles Saatchi attacking his wife Nigella Lawson in public.
Content from our partners
