Why won’t she get into the ambulance? I wanted an answer
It was eight o’clock in the evening and already dark when we arrived at the address, a Victorian building that had been split into flats. The flashing blue lights of the ambulance sparkled through the misty night rain, lighting up the open front door of the house and creating an uncomfortable eeriness in the quiet suburban street, writes Professor Jane Monckton Smith in the prologue to In Control.
I was a newly qualified police officer, still in the first weeks of patrol duties, attending a 999 call with my supervising sergeant. We were coming towards the end of a long, hard shift and were due to finish around 10 that evening. All we knew as we walked into that building was there had been reports of an assault. I remember very clearly being warned by an experienced detective that the most dangerous calls I’d attend would be so-called “domestics”. The detective had suffered a serious injury at one of these calls and I was thinking about this as I peered into the dim stairwell.
We climbed to the first floor and entered the living room of a cold, tidy apartment. The furniture and decor were a blur to me in comparison to the blank, staring face of the young, red-haired woman, who was probably no more than 18 years old, sitting calmly on a chair surrounded by ambulance staff. She had been hit on the head with a lump hammer. Her boyfriend – her assailant – had fled the scene. The woman was simply gazing at the floor, quiet and very still. There was blood trickling down the back of her neck and on to the carpet. The paramedics were trying to convince her to go to hospital with them but she soundlessly refused and nothing would persuade her. As a young woman myself – barely 20 and fresh out of police training school – I stood perplexed, listening. I could not understand why any human being would refuse medical care, especially if their life was in danger.
The static crackling voices on our radios intruded on the pretence that we could stand there all night trying to convince her to do something. We could see that there was no way she was going to help us prosecute her assailant. And so we left her there, sitting alone, staring at the blood-spattered floor and went about our increasingly pressing business – me, my sergeant, and the paramedics – powerless and frustrated.
“Why?” I remember asking my sergeant.
“Why won’t she get in the ambulance? I don’t understand.” “Get used to it,” he replied, sighing. “It’s what they’re like.” By they, he meant victims of domestic abuse. He was not an unkind or an uncaring man: this belief – that victims of abuse behave differently to “normal” people – arose not out of a lack of sympathy; it was just his experience of domestic violence calls. He was used to seeing victims refuse help, often time and again. He, like many others before and after him, made the assumption that as an adult woman, she had the ability and the choice to just get up and leave. He likely also assumed that getting up and leaving would free her from the abuse and from the abuser, leaving her emancipated – safe. So he thought this person, and others like her, were not acting as any normal person would or should.
I didn’t see the young woman again but I never forgot her. The question I asked my sergeant has haunted me ever since. I wanted an answer to that question.