Week 8
This week I listened to recordings of a couple’s conversations to listen for evidence of domestic abuse. The allegedly abusive partner wasn’t actually physically abusive (as far as their partner claimed and this seemed to be backed up from what I could hear on the recordings). Because physical violence is more obvious, this meant that I was listening for evidence of more subtle kinds of abuse – specifically verbal, emotional, and financial. This experience made me wrestle with what counts as abuse and how outsiders should recognize it.
An outside observer may only overhear one interaction between partners, and it can be difficult to draw any serious conclusions from a single moment. Even after listening to hours of conversations, I only started to have a narrative of how the partner was being verbally and emotionally abused. I could see patterns of abuse, and I could even point to moments on the recordings when I thought that I had found something especially incriminating. But when I considered how those same moments might be viewed by a judge who hadn’t listened to the other hours of recordings and didn’t have the same goals I did, I couldn’t be positive that the judge would see it the same way. Sure, the partner was manipulative, controlling, and often cruel. Among other things, they justified their own infidelity and made their partner feel inadequate as a partner and as a parent. Even as I recognized each of these interactions as abusive and the victim as abused, I could still see how someone might look at any single interaction and determine that it was just an argument that got out of hand.
Trying to show how the partner was financially abusive was also difficult. Taken together, the recordings demonstrated a pattern of abusive behavior, but none of the conversations was a ‘smoking gun’ on its own. After all, it’s not uncommon for one partner to be in control of most of the family’s finances. This arrangement isn’t abusive on its own, but it can create circumstances where financial abuse is easier to perpetrate. In this case, there were additional difficulties because the abusive partner was the one with the H-1B visa. This meant that they had an additional degree of control over their partner, since spouses of an H-1B visa holder typically aren’t allowed to work. This meant that, financially, the abused partner was left almost completely at the mercy of their abuser, with few legal pathways to establish their independence in the United States.
Their immigrant status also added other dimensions to the dynamics of domestic abuse. The abused partner’s status as an immigrant isolated them. Their support network of family and friends was back in their home country, which left them with fewer places to turn for help and fewer people to notice that anything was wrong in their relationship. Their immigration status also made choosing whether to leave their partner more difficult, since it would potentially mean returning to their home country and having to leave their child with the other parent in order for them to grow up with more opportunities in the United States. I cannot imagine what it must feel like to be faced with such an impossible choice.