“Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together”. (Robert Browning: My Last Duchess).
Browning’s poem is a chilling account of a husband’s jealous rage in retrospect. The widowed Duke is showing the poet a portrait of his late wife that he keeps behind a curtain and expressing satisfaction that she’s now in her place – completely reduced to a piece of property. Never again will any man glance at her beauty unless he permits it. From her place on a wall, fixed in paint, the Last Duchess will never again smile or blush at anyone but him. Did he kill his lady? We are not told in so many words but can see how it happened.
This series traces the love story of Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp, from the perspective of what is known about intimate-partner violence and the relationships in which it occurs. [ See Part 2 of the series here. ]
As their story unfolds, it is apparent that the last three months of Reeva’s life set a context for her death and how she is remembered. Not as a beautiful picture but a real person, who made mistakes, including taking a risk with her own life that she may have dimly understood – but who never stopped loving.
This is not to take a position on what happened that early Valentine’s morning, which is a matter for the court. Whatever their relationship was or was not, does not pre-determine the outcome. However, since it is a story that South Africans are already trying to understand, we may be able to learn important lessons about ourselves and how our attitudes towards gender enable abuse.
The context of intimate-partner violence is the inequality of the genders along with the rules and beliefs that support this inequality, keeping it going down successive generations of men and women. Some key rules and beliefs are as follows:
Rules: ONE: Real Men should stay in control, and not show pain or fear TWO: Real Men do not experience emotional vulnerability or discomfort THREE: Real Men take charge unless there’s a clear line of male authority already FOUR: Real Men exercise authority in disconnected, non-relational ways FIVE: Women (or gender-disobedient males) are forbidden to provoke, discomfit or diminish a Real Man. Men lower in the male hierarchy are similarly forbidden.
Beliefs: a) “men and women are fundamentally different and opposed” (hence, “opposite sex”) b) women are “the weaker sex” who stand in need of male protection and guidance c) “women being responsible for the comfort of men, must anticipate and defer to male needs
Moving on from Part 2 which covers early intensity and jealousy, Part 3 describes how abusive partners treat their partner as their own personal property with no right to make their own choices unless the perpetrator of abuse gives permission. In a context where violence is routine (South Africa this is us) and where guns are readily available, the consequences are often disastrous. It’s often said that guns don’t kill people; other people do. But research in America has found that when a woman abuser owns a firearm, the likelihood of an abused woman ending up dead is five times higher, while assaults involving a firearm are twelve times more likely to be fatal.
When Reeva first met Oscar she may not have been aware that Oscar collects creatures and objects that represent power and beauty. His costly collection included race horses, fast cars, boats, white tigers, guns. And women: he had several previous girlfriends, who were described as a “string of blondes”, all looking very much alike. Reeva was the most beautiful and independently successful but she also conformed to Oscar’s type. However, it’s my belief that Reeva turned out not to be a collectible: that she really got under Oscar’s sensitive skin, a dangerous situation with a short tempered, impulsive and violent man.
Since her death, the media has often failed to afford Reeva her own individuality. Many times, she’s described as a “stunning blonde” or “petite blonde”, “Oscar’s girlfriend”. She’s defined by her physical attributes; and in a way Oscar is as well – his missing lower legs, his athletic prowess.
Yet Reeva was her own person and nobody’s property. Shortly before her death, she told her mother that she’d decided to ‘give everything to the relationship’ with Oscar – but did that mean she would sacrifice everything she’d worked for, her “big break” into television, her modelling career, her social network, to be the Blade Runner’s woman? It doesn’t seem likely. Like the Last Duchess, she continued to show love and attention to others, whether Oscar was present or not. Sometimes he seemed able to handle that, but at other times, not so much.
As South Africa hears some of the messages she sent to Oscar being read out in court, we can hear her authentic voice – a woman who stands her ground and resists double standards, who confronts her lover with his own messy relationship history and affirms her right to have a past as well. And we also hear that she loved Oscar greatly, despite everything. She was going to try and make it work, despite the reservations of her friends, her family and maybe her own concerns.
What did this mean for Oscar? As previously said, Reeva may have brought back deep feelings of love that he once had for his mother Sheila, who was the same kind of person as Reeva – brave, independent minded, warm, encouraging. But Sheila died and left him, a young teen at odds with his father and feeling so alone. His instant strong attraction to Reeva suggests that for Oscar she was not just another one of the “string of blondes”.
Regarding possessiveness, women can be dangerously deceived,choosing to feel flattered and see the possessive partner as a “gentleman”. They focus on attentiveness, caring, and the idea of being important to someone – overlooking the fundamental disrespect that’s at work. It is possible, though, that Reeva was wise to this early on. Cecil Myers warned Oscar: “If you want this girl, give her some space”. Oscar didn’t listen, but Reeva also changed tack – making her own plans to negotiate the relationship into a better space (Belief c). She was after all, a trained lawyer and as a teenager had managed to bring her own warring parents back together, so confidence in her ability to work things out had a rational foundation.
In the aftermath of Reeva’s death, Oscar’s supporters have highlighted the idea that as the man in the situation, Oscar believed it was his absolute duty to “protect” or “defend” Reeva and himself from the supposed intruder (Rules 1, 3 & 4; Belief b). Without taking a position on what was in Oscar’s mind as he prepared to shoot, I find this troubling.
How could Oscar believe for one second – let alone try to argue after the fact – that Reeva would accept the ruthless slaughter of some unknown person presenting an unknown level of threat concealed behind a door? Reeva was trained in the law, she cared about justice. Would she have tolerated this act of bloodshed, done in her name but without so much as a whispered word to her (supposedly) sleeping form?
Surely this is pure fantasy, even if Oscar really did think an intruder was hiding in his en-suite (such ideas weren’t unusual with him). But the impression this version of the story leaves could hardly be worse. In this account, Reeva is not even a body – she’s an accessory, an excuse for violence.
Like many South African males, violence and aggression featured in Oscar’s thinking and occasionally in his life. He was often seen to be ‘on a short fuse’, willing to mix it with other men and seldom bothering to hide his flashes of anger, for example when journalists asked questions he didn’t like. And he never went anywhere without a gun. He’d grown up around guns, and hunting. Guns were seriously important to Oscar (Rules 1, 2, 3, & 4), and he may have regarded his gun as an extension of himself or even a representation of his manhood.
Reeva had a very different upbringing, growing up with animal-lovers and always around horses as her father Barry was a trainer. Did their very different early experiences with animals lead to conflicting values in adult life? It’s often said that when we’re exposed to cruelty to animals as normal behaviour that is justified (including hunting for sport), this can limit the human capacity for compassion and empathy. On the other hand, co-operation with animals – especially horses and other large, intelligent animals– fosters respect for life, good character and inner strength.
Oscar and Reeva could be poster children for this debate. At any rate, it’s clear that for Oscar a gun was as much a part of himself as his leg prostheses or running blades. His former friend Darren Fresco described Oscar’s fury when the two young men and Samantha Taylor, Oscar’s then girlfriend, were stopped by traffic police on the freeway.
Darren, the driver, was outside the car, talking to one cop, when Oscar decided this had gone on long enough and climbed out to intervene (Rules 1 & 3). Did he feel slighted that, like anyone else, he had to show respect to the law and their right to inconvenience people? Perhaps there was something threatening in his manner, that caught the other policeman’s attention. The officer spotted Oscar’s gun on the car seat, seized it in an instant, and emptied the magazine – traffic cops don’t plan on being shot by aggressive road users.
None of this seemed to register with Oscar who was, said Fresco, beside himself, loudly protesting: “You can’t just touch another man’s gun!” – an anti-authority attitude but also a decidedly Freudian one. As they drove off – according to Fresco though denied in court – Oscar relieved his feelings by firing out of the sunroof in a childish display of phallic defiance (Rules 1, 4 & 5).
Did Oscar use physical violence against Reeva before he shot her? Forensic experts are arguing about the meaning of this or that bruise, but it is quite clear that their disagreements had escalated beyond lovers’ tiffs. June Steenkamp said that Reeva had conflicts with Oscar, interpreted as “we’ve been fighting a lot”. Her own messages to Oscar refer to some of these fights and what they were about.
Reeva wasn’t one of those people who thrive on drama in a relationship. June noted that Reeva never fought with her previous boyfriend, Warren Lahoud, and disliked personal conflict. Perhaps Oscar had become aware of this, as one of their conflicts seems to have started when Reeva shared a “happy story” from her time with Warren, triggering what looks like insecurity for Oscar. And violent men quickly cover insecurity with verbal or physical aggression (Rules 1 and 2). His previous relationships, by contrast, had been stormy, bringing Oscar into conflict with the women themselves and/or other people around them. He doesn’t seem to have experienced a happy, secure, lasting relationship in his entire life, since his mother died.
June was worried about the fights – but Reeva chose hope for the relationship (Beliefs a & c). When they weren’t fighting, things could be very good for Oscar and Reeva. They were seen as a “perfect couple” and “awesome together” – and Reeva’s messages show that she also believed this to be possible.
When everyone else thinks things are great, it’s easier to convince yourself that maybe they actually are, despite your own misgivings. In relationships, things are seldom black and white, all or nothing – even though this may be the impression that Oscar’s legal defence tries to give to the court. It is entirely possible that both views are correct: Oscar and Reeva were in love, Oscar and Reeva were hurting each other and had an unstable, unsafe relationship. To say otherwise is to deny women (or men) in abusive relationships any shred of dignity – to depict them as pure victims without the sense to know what is happening to them. This is almost never the case.
Part 4 will look at how perpetrators of abuse act in controlling ways around their partners, and the ways in which tactics of fear, obligation and guilt may be used to stay in control.
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