Editor’s Note: the victim’s name has been changed to protect her identity. Abusers’ names were removed to protect the victim as well.
Grace Bennett has been involved in toxic relationships since she was a teenager, suffering and surviving years of violence at the hands of multiple men, all of whom claimed to love her.
“They had the same soul. I don’t know any other way to explain it. The same eyes, same intentions, the same controlling manipulation, and for whatever reason, they were both able to just pull me in. It’s like I just could not fight. Emotionally, spiritually, I could not fight them,” Bennett said.
According to Bennett, the first time she realized she was in a toxic relationship was nine years ago when she was 18 years old. She and her then partner were at a party.
“It was the first time I had been in a situation where I knew I was being manipulated, and I could feel something horrible happening,” she said. “He got really angry. That’s when he started hitting me. Really nonchalant, throwing [things] at me.”
Even though there were plenty of people around, Bennett said that no one stepped in or tried to stop the abuse.
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“I remember looking at them thinking, you’ll meddle in a good relationship, but watch somebody literally being abused and do nothing,” Bennett stated.
Over time, the abuse continued. Bennett said her partner would hone in on her insecurities and use them to degrade her. He filled her head with all the reasons that no one would ever love or accept her, and all the reasons why that was her fault. According to Bennett, her partner even went so far as to tell her that someday he would kill her.
Bennett stated that by the time she realized she needed to get away, she couldn’t. Her partner would follow her everywhere, rarely allowing her out of his sight.
Even as she searched for a way out, she was too afraid to tell anyone the truth about what was going on.
It wasn’t until her partner shared his plans to kill Bennett, that someone finally chose to intervene.
After she escaped, Bennett said that she could not shake the feeling that her now ex-boyfriend would somehow track her down. That’s when she met him again in someone new.
“At the time I had no idea that the reason I was drawn to him was because of the similarity between him and [my ex],” said Bennett. “That same sick, brokenness, but I wanted to believe there was goodness in there.”
Bennett said that when the relationship started it seemed relatively normal, but then she started losing time. She described “waking up” from long periods of time that she had no memory of, covered in bruises, burns and other injuries.
As she would eventually discover through pictures on a friend’s phone, Bennett’s boyfriend had been drugging every meal and every drink she consumed. It was during these times that he was beating her.
“I trusted him,” Bennett said. “He had related to me, made me feel safe, you know. He did things that I thought were things that people did to show loyalty. Now I know those are just things you do to manipulate people. He said everything right and did everything right.”
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The manipulation continued and the violence progressed. Bennett was kept locked away in a shed, brought out only for sex with her abuser or his friends, or when necessary to keep up appearances.
Bennett said her spirit was broken.
“My will power was gone. I never said no. Everything just happened, and I let it happen,” Bennett said. “I knew eventually he would kill me and that’s what I wanted. I wanted to die.”
In a chain of events that Bennett said can only be described as miracles, she was able to escape with the assistance of one brave woman and a few kind strangers along her route home to her family.
Bennett is finally feeling safe now, though: her abuser was arrested last week on attempted murder charges in Tennessee after setting his shed on fire with a woman and her child locked inside. The woman and her child both escaped with minor burns.
More than 10 million adults in the United States experience domestic violence every year according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The details vary case by case, but the underlying patterns are the same.
The NCADV defines domestic violence on their website as the use of “abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control perpetrated by one intimate partner against another. It includes physical violence, sexual violence, threats, economic, and emotional/psychological abuse.”
According to Dr. Ruth McClelland-Nugent, it is that pattern of power and control is helps us better understand that domestic violence is not just about the physical. McClelland-Nugent is associate professor of History and interim chair of Augusta University’s Department of History
“It’s not just physical violence, although that can certainly be a part of it,” McClelland-Nugent said. “It is about control and domination. So, one of the more common forms would be economic, when you have a partner who is not able to access a bank account and kept financially dependent.”
According to NCADV statistics partner violence accounts for 20% of all violent crime. In 19% of cases, intimate partner violence involves a weapon.
While many people may associate these cases with weapons such as firearms or knives, according to McClelland-Nugent, almost anything could be considered a weapon in these cases.
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“We have to consider that lots of things are weapons or can be weapons,” she said. “Any blunt object can become a weapon.”
A study conducted by the American Journal of Public Health showed that access to a weapon, specifically a firearm, increased the risk of femicide “at least five-fold.”
National statistics also show that one in three women and one in four men experience violence at the hands of an intimate partner. For one in four women and one in ten intimate partner violence results in fear for their safety, PTSD symptoms, injury, or need for victim services.
McClelland-Nugent said this is a common occurrence when the victim has been isolated from friends or family.
“They may move across the country, and they have no one to turn to. They have no support,” she said. “There’s a mental and emotional effect.”
In these situations, victims are often also dealing with continuous gaslighting by their abuser.
“It’s the idea that this is someone that’s going to try to mess with your head and change your reality and make you doubt yourself,” McClelland-Nugent said. “That’s very important because it makes it that much harder to leave.”
In the state of Georgia, these numbers increase, with intimate partner violence impacting 37.4% of women and 30.4% of men according to NCADV.
In fact, in 2017, the state of Georgia was ranked tenth in the United States for the highest rate of women murdered by men, as reported by the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
According to McClelland-Nugent, this might be attributed to higher levels of reporting, but is likely more so due to the cultural attitudes found this state.
“There’s still a lot of attitudes about marriage and relationships that emphasize male power – men as head of households,” she said. “And if you’re living in maybe a very religious community where it’s not acceptable to leave, that can exacerbate the problem.”
NCADV reports that national domestic violence hotlines receive over 19,000 phone calls in a typical day, averaging approximately 13 calls per minute.
Sheriff’s departments locally are all too familiar with these calls.
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Richmond County Sheriff’s Office alone, has already received 7,439 calls about domestic violence this year. Of those, they could not provide how many generated incident reports or resulted in arrests.
In Columbia County, 1,839 incident reports have been filed for domestic violence cases since 2018. Of those cases, approximately one third have occurred in the past 12 months, indicating a spike in violence among intimate partners.
Aimee Hall, executive director of Safe Homes of Augusta attributes that spike to COVID-19 and the shelter in place order that occurred last year.
“COVID hit no one was calling – and it hit me, everybody is sheltered in place with the abuser. So, they don’t have the liberty to go to work and have a safe place to call. He’s not going to work, which gives them a safe time to call,” Hall said. “Our children are not going into schools where victimization is reported. Everyone’s safe place was relinquished.”
According to Hall, as soon as the shelter in place order was lifted, their number of phone calls received increased by sixty percent.
“Not everyone reaches out the police,” Hall stated. “So, I can guarantee that any numbers you get, they’re higher. Not everyone reports.”
“I was so scared that if I said it, or that if he knew that I was leading on that he was abusing me, that he would kill me,” Bennett said. “He would already burn me with cigarettes, he would … the same things that [my other boyfriend] ended up doing.”
Bennett said it wasn’t until she allowed herself to be vulnerable enough with strangers to share what was happening to her, that her life was able to change.
“I think we’re scared of our vulnerability because the people that hurt us taught us to be scared of that and to be ashamed, but our vulnerability is what saves us,” Bennett said.
Anna Porzio is a researcher and editorial assistant. Reach her at anna@theaugustapress.com.
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