(Trigger warning, for both this post, and for the links it contains.)
Photographer Sara Naomi Lewkowicz didn’t intend to be taking photos of Shane violently assaulting his girlfriend Maggie, but that’s how things turned out. This Time photo-essay is disturbing and well worth your time. For me, the photos showing Maggie’s two-year-old daughter Memphis attempting to protect her mother are particularly heartbreaking.
I had met Shane and Maggie two-and-a-half months before. Southeastern Ohio was still warm that time of year and brimming with small regional festivals. I had gone to the Millersport Sweet Corn Festival to shoot my first assignment for an editorial photography class. Almost immediately, I spotted a man covered in tattoos, including an enormous piece on his neck that read, “Maggie Mae.” He was holding a beautiful little girl with blonde curls. His gentle manner with her belied his intimidating ink, and I approached them to ask if I could take their portrait. […] Before they drove home, I asked if I could continue to document them, and they agreed. […]
After I confirmed one of the housemates had called the police, I then continued to document the abuse — my instincts as a photojournalist began kicking in. If Maggie couldn’t leave, neither could I.
After the photo essay, you should definitely read Amanda’s analysis, “Photo Essay Shows How Abusers Manipulate Victims,” which is spot-on. Here’s a selection, but please read the whole thing:
The images of the fight itself are arresting and disturbing, but Lewkowicz does more than bear witness to domestic violence. She also chronicled the entire process of domestic violence and how an abuser sets up the opportunity to beat his partner. I thought it might be a useful exercise to go through these photos (with links, because I don’t have the rights to the pictures) and explicate the steps an abuser goes through in order to manipulate the victim into accepting abuse.
1) Whirlwind romance. Shane and Maggie had only been dating a few months, but already they were living together and Shane was aggressively trying to become the father figure to the children, even though the older one was skeptical of him. Abusers commonly try to rush things, because it’s important to them to lock the victim down. They know, if only subconsciously, that if they don’t have it all locked down and they give into the temptation to hit their partner, the chance of the partner walking away goes up. This also helps establish the romantic narrative that their love is “different” from other people’s—more passionate, more romantic—which makes the abuse easier to write off as overblown passion.
2) Create dependence. As becomes clear in this photo essay, despite Shane’s economic woes, he provided a roof over Maggie and her children’s heads and by leaving him, she lost her housing.
3) Isolate the victim from her support network. Again, this makes it harder for the victim to leave, because she has no one to turn to and nowhere to go. From the photo essay: “Within a few months of their relationship, Shane moved Maggie and her children to a trailer park in Somerset, Ohio. The location was farther away than Maggie had ever been from her family and friends before, and she said her feelings of isolation only increased over time.”
We get the most fantastic tales about how these guys are calculating Svengali figures, but I think you can just as well explain everything based on the thesis that they’re stupid and have poor long term decision making ability and impulse control.
Another Alex:
I think it’s possible for abusers to tend to do a similar series of things to exert power over others without necessarily doing it intentionally as a plan for future domestic abuse. It’s likely that a person who gets an emotional kick out of making someone else dependent on them by cutting off social ties is also generally a person who is prone to abuse, without them consciously doing one to lead to the other.
I’m in agreement with Another Alex.
I had seen the photo essay; thanks for linking to that article as well. Another red flag I saw was the age difference, his 31 to her 19, and also the fact that Maggie was just so young. Age differences in relationships between mature adults aren’t always an issue, but the difference between 19 and 31 is pretty substantial, and it is something seen more often in abusive relationships (the abuser being appreciably older than the victim). Young people, with their relative lack of power, can be more vulnerable to abuse. And it can be harder to break out of those cycles of abuse once your boundaries have been crossed at an early age. I’m glad it seems Maggie was able to get away from that relationship.
This photo essay has stuck with me over the past few days, as I’m sure it has for others as well. There are three more things I’ve been thinking about…regarding the photo of Maggie vomiting, I wonder to what extent this reaction was a symptom of Shane choking her specifically. Some women (and I say women b/c 99% of IPV attempted strangulation occurs to women) are so disoriented after an attack that they don’t even realize they were choked, and side-effects can hang around for weeks after the attack, sometimes even becoming more severe and resulting in death if medical care isn’t sought. It’s unfortunate that more info about strangulation wasn’t included in the captions. Second, I worry for Maggie and the kids and their reunification with their father. She’s entering into another situation of dependency where she could become trapped by another abusive partner. We don’t know why she left him to begin with. This is just another example of how economic dependency ties in to abuse. Finally, what happened to Shane? It’s not enough to bring a victim to safety, and it’s not enough to incarcerate offenders. The sad truth is that Shane will find another partner when he’s no longer incarcerated, and he will abuse again.
I was going to leave it, but I can’t express how much this comment infuriates me.
All we know about this guy is that he is serving his country, his wife leaves him, he’s separated from his kids, she moves in with a man who beats her in front of them – and then he takes her back. And your (and also Amanda’s) response is to ask questions about him? Are you kidding me? He looks like a saint compared to anyone else in this sorry story. If we’re going to question anyone’s parenting why isn’t it that of the woman who endangered this guy’s children by taking them to live with a thug?
These are extremely powerful images.
I’m particularly disgusted, though, by the one of the officer photographing the woman’s back. She’s been assaulted — she is the victim; how can we, as a society, possibly condone pressuring a victim to expose his or her body to an authority figure to “prove” abuse? (Of course, it makes me even more angry that such a thing as a “rape kit” exists.) We need to fight to change the laws to make this kind of “evidence” inadmissible in court for a living victim, or else abuse/rape survivors are going to continue to be coerced into submitting to these sorts of violations out of fear of being accused of lying about the assault — or, as is extremely common, simply not reporting the abuse or testifying against the abuser to avoid state-sanctioned/medical violation.
We need to fight to change the laws to make this kind of “evidence” inadmissible in court for a living victim, or else abuse/rape survivors are going to continue to be coerced into submitting to these sorts of violations out of fear of being accused of lying about the assault
Ok, I’ll bite. Are you suggesting that the word of the victim is enough? Would you like to extend this courtesy to self-declared victims of assault, attempted murder, etc? If yes, are you serious? If not, why not?
In tying in with what Another Alex said at 1, sometimes I think our stereotype of abusers keep people from recognizing the abuse they are enduring. Someone who expects a cold, calculating person who follows the checklist of abuse doesn’t tie that in to the person who completely emotionally immature and doesn’t have an overarching plan. In a way, it reminds me much of the “stranger rapist” fallacy, where rape victims cannot name their own violation because they expect rape to be something so vastly different from what happened to them.
It’s strange to me how the power of words to describe the tendencies of abusers and rapists can serve to disconnect from the experiences lived behind those words. The words of warning keep us from being warned.
(Full disclosure: On other threads, I have identified as an emotional abuser in previous relationships. It took a long time for me to recognize the abuse I was perpetrating due to my own confusion about not fitting the model steps.)
I find it very hard to believe that anyone concerned about victims would argue in good faith that physical evidence of rape and abuse should be inadmissible in court. Particularly as the physical evidence was not taken by a police officer.
We’re not kidding. Maybe he’s reuniting with her because he loves her and the kids and he’s a great guy; maybe he’s a controlling snake who sees a chance to reassert control over the woman who got away. WE DON’T KNOW. Under that circumstance, it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned.
In general, people who make a choice because it’s the only possible route open to them, are more likely to wind up in trouble than those who have a menu of attractive options to choose from. Again, under that circumstance, it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned.
As for why we’re not blaming the victim for being abused… the reason we’re not doing that is that we’re not victim-blaming asshats. It’s not complex.
So Lewkowicz was originally trying to make this photo array about Shane’s stigma? (And presumably she would try to draw sympathy to him?)
Guess she will have to vet her subject candidates more thoroughly before she tries that narrative again.
Seconded.
Actually, double-seconded.
This is the BEST KIND OF EVIDENCE. Physical evidence is the most objective thing we have. It’s useful both to convict (it’s his DNA!) and to acquit (it’s not his DNA!) The vast majority of other rules* have an unequal cost/benefit ratio and selectively help either the accuser or defendant. Physical evidence is a great exception.
*For example, the standards of proof, or the weight given to testimony, or the ability to raise (or not) specific defenses and evidence, etc.
Another Alex: We don’t know anything about the father of Maggie’s children – whether he’s a saint or a snake or somewhere in between. Again, like Ampersand also explained, the concern is around dependency and how that narrows choices and clouds judgement. I’m not sure why this concern would “infuriate” you? It seems like odd response.
Guess she will have to vet her subject candidates more thoroughly before she tries that narrative again.
Give her a break.
She was trying to examine the stigma of being a convicted criminal. She just may have been a bit limited in what she had to work with. Someone who did time for being caught thrice with drugs for personal use will not have the tattoos, the hole in the employment history, and the mannerisms that would leave him stigmatized.
Yes, that could all be the case. But, from what the essay says, it seems she did not have a prior plan to explore the subject of convict stigma or an intention to seek candidates for that specific subject. It was kind of impromptu when she encountered the couple.
It seems that Lewkowicz decided upon the stigma narrative off the cuff when she first encountered Shane, primarily because of the contrast between his intimidating appearance and his “gentle [sic] manner” and that he seemed to make for a sympathetic subject.
Seems she wanted to do a story about how Shane was a sympathetic person with a good heart who was being wronged and ruined by the “prison industrial complex” and such. And it all might have been well received in progressive circles.
However, her sympathetic expectation of him crumbled before her very lense. He committed a kind of crime that usually riles progressive audiences, and that required the “dramatic” change in the photographic story.
I do wonder, had Shane committed some other kind of crime during the time Lewkowicz was documenting him, like stealing a car, burglarizing a house, or robbing a convenience store, would she have still dramatically changed the story? Or would she just have incorporated his recidivism into the stigma narrative? I guess we’ll never know.
I thought it took very few drug convictions to be sufficiently and permanently stigmatized? Not quite sure what else you mean here. Are you saying that any person who is sufficiently and visibly stigmatized by criminal status will have necessarily committed domestic violence at some point?