Conflict and Society Webinar: 28
September 2021
School of Humanities & Social Sciences
UNSW Canberra
‘He “assaulted me at the matrimonial home”: captivity
trauma and domestic abuse.’
Introduction: captivity trauma and
domestic abuse
‘Twice
my husband attempted to kill me’, Madeline
Reed stated. ‘The first time he held a carving knife against my throat and
was stopped from going any further by our son [Peter] … coming into the room. The second time, without any
argument or quarrel, he knocked me over and kicked me about the face and head.’
He ‘assaulted
me at the matrimonial home’, Hayley Myatt
attested about her husband, ‘grabbing me by the hair, shaking me and banging my
head against the wall’.
Blake Reed and
Marcus Myatt were former airmen
prisoners of Stalag Luft III, a Second World War German prisoner of war camp. Both
experienced captivity trauma. Both perpetrated domestic abuse against their
wives, in front of their children.
In
the years following the Second World War, violence in the home was often
‘subsumed and silenced by the broader question of domestic readjustment’ after
homecoming. It was viewed as just one of a number of social ills arising from
resettlement. With little concrete evidence collated in the immediate
post-Second World War decades about violence arising from war service
generally, it probably isn’t even possible, as Christina Twomey has noted, to
determine the extent to which captivity contributed to family unrest. But it is
perhaps easier to highlight historical domestic abuse by examining a small cohort.
*****
This webinar draws on my PhD thesis ‘Emotions of Captivity: Australian Airmen Prisoners of
Stalag Luft III and their Families’ in which I studied the captivity
experience of 351 Australian airmen and their loved ones – from capture until
death. A condition of use of some records is anonymity. As
such, I have used pseudonyms, and these are written in italics. And a content
warning: I will be quoting graphic testimony of domestic
abuse which some may find distressing, or potentially triggering.
For
my thesis, I compiled a medical sample of 128 of Stalag Luft III’s former Australian
POWs. This is based on evidence from Prisoner of War Trust Fund records,
divorce cases, coroners’ reports, family members, and other sources. The
majority came from repatriation files held by the Department of Veterans’
Affairs, most of which had been created by the former Repatriation Department. I
found that eighty-five former POWs had experienced some degree of psychological
damage during confinement, after liberation and homecoming, in the immediate
post-war years, and in later life. Domestic abuse figured in the lives of at
least 10 per cent of that psychological sample. All had been experiencing mental disturbance when perpetrating
abuse. I found that, while some
domestic abuse arose from a ‘crisis of masculinity’, it was also an expression
of captivity trauma. As such, I positioned abuse as a psychological issue. But
domestic abuse is also a gender issue. It is an emotional and
sensory experience. It has a moral
dimension. It also ‘lingers on in …
memories’; it has an intergenerational legacy. These broader
contexts are what I will highlight this evening.
Evidentiary challenges: subsumed and
normalised
In
the immediate post-Second World War decades violence in the home was still
portrayed as ‘wife-beating’ or ‘wife bashing’
and women were considered to be ‘battered wives’. There was nothing as wide-ranging as current
definitions of abuse which include physical, sexual, emotional, economic, and
verbal abuse. Not all of these behaviours involve violence. As such, I favour
the broader term of ‘domestic abuse’ with the understanding that it encompasses
acts against intimate partners and other family members.
I
found evidence of abuse enacted by Stalag Luft III’s former POWs against their
parents, spouses, siblings, and children. Unfortunately, time does not allow me
to go into all of them here, so I will focus on the former POWs, their wives,
and their children.
My
main source of domestic abuse in Stalag Luft III’s distributed archive comes
from women’s testimony created in the
immediate post-war decades, before the advent of second-wave feminism, and
before the term ‘domestic violence’ was coined in the late 1970s. Children’s
testimony was uttered more recently. Evidence of domestic abuse falls into two
categories: empathetic veteran-centric narratives from the medical archive and
lived experience, and combative statements from divorce records. I refer to
those who responded compassionately to domestic abuse as ‘helpmeets’. Those who
assertively decided to take no more I dub ‘combatants’.
Some accounts must
be treated with care. Coded language appears in more recent narratives
to either protect the suffering veteran or to create a barrier against the
memory of abuse. Anything created for financial or personal
benefit, such as to support pension claims and medical expenses, or, in the
case of divorce proceedings, to elicit maintenance settlements or favourable
custody decisions, could have been heightened to facilitate the best outcome.
Some evidence has been recast by legal or medical practitioners to emphasise
facts; they have been rendered devoid of emotion.
I encountered other evidentiary challenges.
In describing their captivity trauma as part of the repatriation
process, former POWs rarely articulated narratives
of perpetration. Where domestic abuse was admitted, the causes
were seldom explored: medicos and repatriation bureaucrats considered abuse as
symptomatic of a psychological condition. Men were not treated as perpetrators of
abuse. They were ill. Family members, particularly wives, were not viewed as victims
of abusive behaviour. They were valued witnesses to traumatic responses. They
were carers of the psychologically damaged and had a significant place in the repatriation system.
There is
much silence in the distributed archive. In a post-war society where domestic
abuse was subsumed and normalised, abuse was usually kept within the home. The law did not acknowledge some behaviours: rape
within marriage was not illegal. Women did not perceive some acts as abusive because they had yet to be
defined. Keeping a wife on a tight budget –
limiting her financial independence – would have been usual in many households
dominated by a male breadwinner. Also unrecognised at the
time was what we now know as coercive control where an abuser deliberately and
systematically tries to restrictively manage all aspects of a person’s life;
and gas-lighting, where the victim is forced to
doubt her memory or perception of events.
Despite
the evidentiary challenges and silences, testimony from the medical and divorce
archives – and lived experience – is important. When
examining narratives of abuse, therefore, we need to deploy two lenses. A
contemporary one which allows us to see how women and men viewed themselves and
behaviours within their specific culture and time, and a modern one so we can
look beyond what men and women said or wrote (or didn’t say or write) to what
we can infer – or label – in light of more modern definitions and
understandings.
Edric Parr’s actions, for example, appear
coercive. He ‘became very controlling … the
insecurities behind those behaviours’, his daughter Angela told me,
‘in their own way[,] held my mother “captive” to the emotional bind’. But Edric ‘was not physically abusive’. As
such, his family did not see his controlling behaviour as a form of abuse. His
obsessive compulsive disorder was a diagnosed psychological condition, arising
from the ‘trauma and emotional damage [resulting from] his POW experiences’.
When I asked Bethany Lane if she had witnessed or experienced domestic abuse, she told
me that her
father’s moods were erratic and he could turn suddenly. Bethany was only
three when her mother was hospitalised after a ‘scene’ during which Gerard ‘was furious’. She was ‘often
terrified but didn’t know why’. The young girl also ‘endured a lot of
verbal abuse’. ‘Loud shouting that made me very fearful’. Bethany also confirmed that she had lived with coercive behaviour. ‘Dad’
was ‘very controlling [in] what we did or said’. ‘If
visitors came we were to be seen and not heard except if we recited something.’
He had high expectations and ‘the pressure
from him stifled me’.
Petronella Barrie
also suffered emotional abuse and coercive control. Her husband Hugo restricted her social life, forbidding
her to accompany him when they were both invited out because he was ‘ashamed of
her’. He undermined her self-esteem, Petronella
attested, and ‘incessantly criticised’ her – using ‘expressions of the most
offensive and insulting nature’. He stressed that he considered her to be
‘quite worthless’.
Hayley Myatt
described an occasion where her husband gas-lighted her. Marcus viciously twisted her nose, still painful and
healing after surgery. ‘[A]s he was doing it’, she claimed, ‘he said “you are
just imagining it, I am not touching your nose or hurting you at all”’. Given
much of
her abuse took place at night in their bedroom, Hayley may also have been sexually assaulted. ‘[W]hile in
bed’, she stated in her divorce testimony, Marcus
[‘struck] me on a number of occasions … forcing my arms into a position which
caused me great pain’.
Helpmeets
and Combatants: collateral damage
Woman today are recognised as victims of abuse, but with
urgent calls to replace ‘victim’ with the more affirming ‘survivor’. Men are
uncompromisingly categorised as perpetrators. Helpmeets,
however, did not see their husbands as perpetrators.
Their presentation of evidence to the repatriation
bureaucracy was entirely veteran-centric: it emphasised male victimhood not
their own. They were witnesses to masculine fragility.Some helpmeets unconditionally loved their husbands.
Cassie and Edric Parr were a ‘devoted couple’ for sixty-nine
years, with ‘an adoring love and
affection for each other that was a soul journey of its own’, their daughter Angela recounted. Others may have felt obliged
to remain within difficult marriages because of children, religion, economic
dependence, or because a society which condoned domestic abuse did not provide
a place for those who wished to escape it. There was also a societal imperative
to stay and support. As so many of their grandmothers
and mothers had done in the wake of the Great War, these women accepted
society’s and the repatriation department’s expectation to care for a new
generation of ‘shattered Anzacs’ or, in this context, ‘fragile flyers’.
Even
in the most challenging relationships, helpmeets recognised the pain of
captivity trauma. Accordingly, they chose to stay, to make a home, to support their
husbands, and to protect their children. They found ways to
accommodate the fragile flyers’ behaviour. But
their compassion exposed them to abuse.
Madeleine Reed, who
felt cold steel against her throat, separated from Blake shortly after the knife attack. Six years later, she was
close to destitution so allowed him to come back. It was a financial necessity
but empathy intermingled with pragmatism. She knew how much Blake loved their son; saw what a good
relationship they had. She also pitied her husband who ‘had deteriorated
greatly. … he drank more than ever and would sit … staring into space. …
Sometimes for hours he would talk in a low voice about [the] POW camp. I was
frightened, but did not like to leave him when he was so troubled’.
Cynthia Lane
inured herself to abuse. She ‘was used to dealing with trauma’ inside her
marriage and often told her daughter, Bethany,
‘just allow the pain to wash over you like water off a duck’s back’. As a
consequence of her husband’s treatment, Cynthia
‘suffered incredibly emotionally’. She had no other family to turn to and ‘in
those days you never divorced’. Cynthia
put her children first, protecting them from Gerard’s behaviour by trying to create a ‘safe place’. ‘In her
quiet way’, Bethany recalled, ‘Mum
built … a small spark of hope in us by reading the Bible’.
Bethany
is also a helpmeet. Despite a difficult childhood and a period of estrangement in her early twenties,
she
never stopped loving and supporting her father. She
has spent much of her adult life actively trying to fathom Gerard’s trauma and, before his death, reconciling with him. By
trying to accommodate her father’s behaviour and to forgive him, she has composed a narrative of acceptance which attributes domestic abuse mainly
to ‘the war’, but to other life experiences as well. She knew he was ‘so
damaged’ and in pain but ‘without … understanding what it was all about’. She later
considered that ‘what Dad had been through’ during the Depression, war, and
captivity, stimulated him to ‘make us ready for anything we might meet up with
in life’. She also realised that ‘Dad usually eventually came through with
compassion [to] those he inflicted with emotional pain’.
In
her attempts to comprehend Gerard’s
experiences and the root cause of his trauma, Bethany has exerted loving, empathetic agency. So, too, did her
mother and other women who embraced a helpmeet role to fragile flyers shattered
by captivity trauma. Some recognised the blessings despite unrelenting mental
pain. Cassie and Edric Parr derived ‘genuine appreciation and benefit’ from their
long, happy marriage.
*****
The
divorce archive reveals no helpmeets. Plaintiffs did not present their husbands
as fragile flyers. Hayley Myatt sued
for divorce on the grounds of repeated assaults and cruel beatings. Petronella Barrie cited cruelty and
desertion. They described their husbands as malicious
wife-beaters. They provided no mitigating statements relating to psychological
state.
Hayley
and Petronella were combatants. Their
weapons were searing accounts of physical and emotional brutality in
matrimonial homes that had become war zones. Fronting the divorce court in an
era before no-fault divorce took courage.
Intimate and prurient details were often aired in the press. They had children
to raise, with no income other than their husband’s and no home to go to
unless, like Hayley, they could move
in with parents, or like Petronella,
had husbands rich enough to maintain two households. There would have been an element of shame in publicly projecting an
image of helpless, battered wife, but it was necessary. In making the decision
to leave for the sake of self and children, risking social stigma to argue
cruelty, and positioning themselves as victims, combatants exerted pragmatic,
protective, and survivalist agency.
Combatants
and helpmeets both maintained a degree of personal power despite their abusive
situations. They were women of agency. Although
perpetrated against, they were not entirely victims. They were survivors. But they were also the collateral damage of captivity
trauma.
The emotions of domestic abuse:
emotionally, visually and aurally distressing
Domestic
abuse has an emotional landscape. It is a profoundly affective and sensory
experience, comprising both negative and positive emotions. Helpmeets
are motivated by compassion. They feel pity. Love precipitates what Bethany Lane calls her ‘amazing journey’ to understand her
father’s pain and reconcile with him. Love was also the prevailing emotion in
the Parrs’ life. Negative
emotions, however, predominate the experience of abuse.Women
lived in anxiety, awaiting the next physical attack or emotional blow. They
endured cruelty from men they had once trusted. The visual evidence of bruises
lasted beyond the beating. Some women suffered deep psychological pain; Petronella Barrie was often driven to
hysterics by her husband’s violence.
Fear
is perhaps the strongest emotion. Women dreaded what their husbands would do to
them or their children. There were many
occasions when Hugo forced Petronella ‘to the
wall with his forearm across her throat and holding her with great force and
vicious threats for long periods’. She would have been
terrified, fearing for her life. And indeed, how close had she been to death?
We now know that those who strangle their partners are eight times more likely
to kill them.
*****
Children
also experienced the negative emotions of domestic abuse. They learned to walk
on eggshells around their fathers, apprehensively anticipating the next
explosion. Bethany Lane was ‘often
on ‘tenterhooks [with] a constant fear’ of how she would ‘cope with the next onslaught’. Without
warning, and in front of Bethany, her
father ‘was suddenly slapping Mum
across the face’. The teen was ‘shocked and left the room crying’. Gerard’s behaviour precluded intimacy; Bethany lacked the warm, ‘safe, stable
foundation’ she needed. ‘Hugs were not something we indulged in when we were
young.’ She became withdrawn and alienated from her father.
The
Myatt children were somewhere in the
house every time Marcus attacked
their mother, if not in the same room. They, and other youngsters, could not
have blotted out the sounds of arguing, their fathers’ assaults, or the damage.
During
one tussle with his wife, Marcus Myatt smashed
a frying pan on top of his six-year-old daughter’s birthday cake. Peter Reed
came into the room while his father
held a knife against his mother’s throat; he saw the glint of what was now a
weapon, and perhaps imagined a bloody gash preceding his mother’s death.
Abuse
is emotionally, visually, and aurally distressing for anyone, but especially children.
It was not seen as such at the time, but we now recognise that exposure to –
witnessing – domestic abuse is a type of child abuse. And the memory of it
intrudes into the present. In the week before
this webinar, two children of Second
World War POWs – including Peter Reed
– told me they could not attend. Years after the deaths of their fathers, decades after its perpetration, domestic abuse
is still too ‘fresh’ in their minds.
The
moral dimension: unresolved moral troubling
Domestic abuse has a moral dimension. It
is an assault on the recipient’s self-esteem, sense of self, and human dignity.
The perpetrator betrays trust; subverts love; and destroys the family unit’s
safety and security. He engenders psychological distress in intimate partners
and defenceless children.
Perpetrators assailed
their victims’ moral selves, but they were also morally afflicted; they suffered
agonising moral emotions. I determined that at least forty-two of Stalag Luft
III’s Australian airmen POWs – just over 12 per cent – were morally troubled to
some degree about their service or captivity. The majority were also
psychologically damaged. Family and medical evidence suggests that some, like Gerard Lane, Hugo Barrie, and Blake Reed
suffered moral injury, that is the end point of extreme, distressful unresolved
ethical troubling.
Given some morally
troubled, like Blake, Hugo and Gerard, had also perpetrated domestic abuse, it is important to
consider whether their behaviour was an expression of moral injury. Jonathan
Shay, an American psychiatrist whose work has proved foundational to our
recognition and understanding of moral injury, believes moral injury can give
rise to domestic abuse.
Shame and guilt are two
separate but linked moral emotions. POWs generally experienced deep shame when
captured. Stalag Luft III’s airmen prisoners worked to overcome their shame in captivity. They embarked
on a dedicated program of active disruption, which included harassing and
hindering their captors, theft, sabotage, and escape. Their martial pride,
however, took a blow when they arrived home: Australian society did not look
kindly towards POWs of Europe who, they believed, had sat out the war in
something akin to a holiday camp. Unlike those of former prisoners of Japan, their traumas of captivity, generally,
were not recognised. But like those captured by the Japanese, they lived, until
relatively recently, with the stigma of captivity in a society which revered
the bronzed fighting Anzac.
Research
now suggests that domestic abuse is an enactment of shame: as the perpetrator’s
deep-seated humiliation is triggered he lashes out to gain a sense of power. It
was unlikely that Hugo Barrie’s
alcohol-fuelled abuse arose from a stalled career, because he was riding high
on success when Petronella first endured
‘many
bitter incidents’ during their early years
of marriage, including ‘abuse and criticism’. We must ask then,
was Hugo’s deep shame of not being
able to participate in Stalag Luft III’s escape organisation a catalyst for his
abusive behaviour? We must also ask if Gerard
Lane’s and Blake Reed’s rage and
abuse were unconscious displays arising from guilt over their powerlessness to
protect and save the men for whom they, as bomber pilots, were responsible? And
what part, if any, did Gerard’s deep
moral guilt over his part in the civilian bombing campaign factor into his perpetration
of abuse?
Power
and choice: fragile flyer
Domestic
abuse is now recognised as being about male power. It is seen by many as a deliberate choice to exert control and
perpetrate violence. A considered decision. But some behaviour, as Angela Parr reveals, was not deliberate.
It was symptomatic of a captivity-trauma related psychological condition. Bethany Lane sees Gerard’s controlling behaviour as deriving from love but also reflecting his mental pain and moral
injury She recognises that her father had no control over his abuse. Gerard Lane, Blake Reed, and Edric Parr were
powerless in the wake of their captivity trauma. Their perpetrations were not deliberate,
calculating choices. They were consequences. Their experience indicates that
contemporary models of male power and choice don’t necessarily apply to
historical cases, particularly where the fragile flyer was also morally
troubled.
Many
fragile flyers suffered some degree of
business or work stress; there was a disconnect between successful flying
careers and the ability to thrive in post-war employment. Family and social
tensions further compromised a traditional male identity as provider and loving
husband and father. Some could not adjust to a changing gender dynamic.
Benedict Shaw,
who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for ‘technical skill and
courage’ was particularly thrown off kilter by his inability to adapt to
post-war life. Violence in his first marriage was repeated in his second. After
one tussle where he shoved a sideboard over, his second wife called
the police and a few days later took out a summons against him. Did Benedict’s reliance
on strong, economically independent wives trigger a violent retaliation in an
attempt to overcome an overwhelming sense of masculine powerlessness? If so, it
ultimately failed. The fragile flyer who had been in and out of psychiatric facilities for years,
committed suicide on the day the summons was to be heard. Blake Reed also took his own life. While both men had experienced
marital, work, and social crises, both suicides were attributed to captivity
trauma, not masculine crises arising from post-war
resettlement difficulties.
Conclusion:
more to do
Historical domestic abuse is a gender issue with
significant psychological, emotional, moral, and intergenerational dimensions.
It has a place within medical, gender, and memory studies, as well as moral
inquiry, and also should be considered within the history of emotions. My sample of abuse in the lives of former prisoners of Stalag
Luft III and their families is small but it reveals that captivity trauma
precipitated abusive behaviour. It suggests that domestic abuse arising from
captivity trauma sits awkwardly with current models of power and choice. It
indicates that women in the pre-feminism era were not necessarily victims; they
were women of agency. The Stalag Luft III sample also highlights the emotions
of captivity for perpetrator and survivor. Empathy and love prevailed in some
lived experience, even as fear, terror, anxiety, shame, and guilt, predominated
in others. It shows that the memory of abuse lingers. It may never fade.Because of my findings, and because our knowledge of
historical perpetrations is so limited, it is imperative to delve deeper into
the archives to recover more traces of historical domestic abuse; and to emphasise
abuse’s profound intergenerational legacy. I have raised many questions this
evening which must be answered. There is much more to do.
Thank
you.
My research into this subject continues. If a member of your family was an Australian airman imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, and your life has been touched by domestic abuse, please get in touch.
Dr Kristen Alexander |Adjunct Associate Lecturer
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
UNSW Canberra
kristen.alexander@adfa.edu.au
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