Director’s Blog – Lisa Charlotte Davis
I read such an interesting interview the other week with Denise Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, who was murdered by her ex-husband, the former American football star OJ Simpson in 1994.
Her new book “For My Sister Nicole” charts her learning about domestic abuse and how to support someone in your life experiencing this, from her recognition that, whilst on some level she knew something wasn’t right in Nicole’s relationship with OJ, she was “saying all the wrong things” at the time.
She references how the persistent stereotype that domestic abuse “happens to poor people” was one of the barriers to recognising that it was an abusive relationship and posits that, if she had known then what she knows now about domestic abuse, she “could have saved Nicole’s life.”
At the same time, I was reading a surprisingly beautiful book about coercive control – “Nesting” by Roisin O’Donnell. This is such a powerful portrait of the concept of the “reduced space for action” coined by the late Evan Stark alongside Professors Liz Kelly and Marianne Hester, as a way of describing the impact of coercive control on the victim’s capacity to think outside of the immediate need to safety-manage the behaviour of their abusive partner, carefully calibrating their own behaviour to mitigate the risk of any escalation.
I have to confess that, as I started reading it and immediately recognised it was going to be a portrayal of domestic abuse, I had a moment of questioning whether I wanted to read something in much-needed “relaxation time” so completely on the theme of my day job. But it was such a beautiful and sensitive portrayal, it wove its spell around me and I couldn’t put it down. And I concluded that it’s a really important contribution to society’s understanding of why it’s so incredibly hard for survivors to “just leave.” How can you find the space to make a plan when your own voice has been drowned out by the domination of an abusive partner crowding out your thoughts?
For anyone in the domestic abuse sphere looking for books that support insight and understanding, I’d highly recommend.
Both feel very “on message” for the Findaway conference we’re contributing to on Friday 16th October – as Findaway is a website focused on supporting family and friends of those affected by domestic abuse.
