Marriages like this are more common than you think
‘Deadwater Fell’ is dark, but reflects reality, says the show’s consultant psychologist, Coral Dando
When I started out on my career as a police officer in Kingston-upon-thames in the late Eighties, I came across numerous seemingly perfect middle-class couples with secrets to hide – couples very like Tom and Kate, the central characters in Deadwater Fell, Channel 4’s Friday night fictional crime drama, which has just taken an even more sinister turn.
Tom, played with menacing charm by David Tennant, is a local GP in a picturesque Scottish village. Kate is a primary schoolteacher and they have three gorgeous daughters, a beautiful house and a circle of equally funloving, affectionate friends. Then, on a summer’s night after a village party and barn dance, a devastating fire breaks out.
Tom is rescued from the flames but his wife and children can’t be saved. When the investigation reveals that the fire was set deliberately, Kate, who was suffering from postnatal depression, is the chief suspect and neighbours rally round to comfort the bereaved widower.
Look away now, though, if you haven’t seen last night’s penultimate episode, because dark secrets have bubbled to the surface. In flashbacks, we’ve discovered that Tom has slept with one of Kate’s closest friends – and that behind closed doors their marriage is very different to the way it appears.
Tom, the affable doctor, is a private despot: he orders Kate around, tracks her movements and listens to her voicemail. He deliberately breaks up her friendships and subtly belittles
Often, wealthy women with highpowered husbands stayed because they had so much to lose
her at every opportunity. In other words, he subjects her to coercive and controlling behaviour – a form of psychological and emotional abuse, which was made a criminal offence in 2015.
Psychological coercion and control wasn’t even on our radar during my 12 years with the police. Domestic violence was not uncommon – yes, even in leafy Kingston – but it was hard to prosecute offenders and impossible for us to understand how a woman could get beaten half to death one day, only to return to the perpetrator the next.
I was newly married and had little experience of the world, but none of my more experienced colleagues seemed any the wiser. Time and again, we would charge an abusive husband only for the wife (and it was usually the wife, though men can also be victims) to refuse to give evidence.
We knew these women were scared and it saddened us that we could not keep them safe. Some had no money and nowhere else to go, but even if we got them into a refuge, within a few days we’d often find that they’d returned home.
It is only my more recent work, as a professor of psychology at the University of Westminster, that has allowed me to make sense of what I witnessed in the early part of my career. Not least, working with the HIG (High-value Detainee Interrogation Group), set up by President Obama in 2009 to research new and effective ways to elicit information from prisoners without resorting to harsh “enhanced interrogation techniques”, such as waterboarding.
As background, we looked into methods used to control prisoners of war, particularly in Korea, where American servicemen who had been released astonished their colleagues by sympathising with their Communist captors. The phenomenon was examined by Albert Biderman, a social scientist who created a “chart of coercive control” to list the behaviours used to break prisoners’ spirits, including isolation, alternating between punishment and reward, and demonstrations of omnipotence. Everything suddenly fell into place. Violence was only part of the abuse being perpetrated on the women who kept returning home: their mind and spirit had been slowly broken down by controlling behaviour. Their partners would keep them guessing – nice one day, abusive the next – so they never knew what to expect and were always treading on eggshells. The controlling partner would demand to know where they were going and who with at all times. They had to be compliant and ask permission to buy shoes or even visit their parents. Their confidence was slowly eroded until they effectively became psychological slaves.
Despite it being five years since coercive control was made a crime, most people I talk to still seem confused about what it means. I’m hoping Deadwater Fell – for which I’ve been acting as an adviser – might help people to recognise just how nuanced psychological abuse can be; empowering women and men who experience this type of coercive control to ask for help, and educating family and friends on the signs.
The first thing I told writer Daisy Coulam and the Deadwater Fell team was: be subtle. Having power over someone else isn’t always about violence. Coercive control can masquerade as affection and intimacy – paying someone’s bills, sharing an email address, wanting to know where they are, and who they are with, phoning and turning up unannounced to make sure they are “safe”. In reality, this type of behaviour is about control and becomes obsessive, slowly draining victims of agency over their own lives.
Sally Challen is probably the most high-profile victim of coercive control. In photographs taken during their 25-year marriage, she and her husband Richard look the picture of happy, middle-class contentment. But behind the scenes, he reportedly belittled, criticised and raped her, while openly conducting affairs and visiting brothels. Eventually she snapped and bludgeoned him to death with a hammer. She was convicted of murder in 2011 but released last year when the mental impact of his coercive and controlling behaviour was recognised on appeal.
Like the women I met in Kingston – all too often wealthy, professional women with very high-powered husbands, who stayed because they seemingly had so much to lose – Challen kept her husband’s behaviour a secret. It can feel shameful to admit that someone else has control over you.
One woman told me that if she was going shopping, she was required to write a list of everywhere she planned to visit, then present her husband with her parking and shopping receipts when she returned. When I asked why she complied with his demands, she said she couldn’t face “the hassle” that would follow if she disobeyed.
Now almost everyone has a smartphone and a computer, people’s ability to track, manage and control others is enhanced, and car trackers and spyware are easy to get hold of and install. One partner might tell the other that it’s “silly” to have separate email addresses or mobile phone plans, when they could share. It’s all too easy to keep tabs on where your partner is, what they are doing and who they are speaking to, 24 hours a day. Many may not realise that breaking into someone else’s emails, monitoring their communication to find out where they are going or what they are spending – even in an intimate relationship – is a criminal offence.
But we must be alert, not just to signs of controlling behaviour among family and friends, but to injustices going on right across society. I’ve also been involved in research into modern slavery: next time you visit one of the many nail bars that have sprung up across our cities, think about the girl doing your manicure and whether she might be controlled by the owners. We know that coercive control techniques were also used to enslave teenagers who became victims of the grooming gangs in Greater Manchester and beyond. Children are also being coerced and controlled by so-called county-lines gangs. So, if you are following Tom and Kate’s story in
Deadwater Fell, remember that this is more than a simple tale of a marriage that has gone off the rails. It is a reflection of an insidious crime that is being committed nationwide.