Nigella is the real face of domestic violence

This week in London the art investor Charles Saatchi was cautioned by the police for the actions which shocked many on the weekend – the assault of his wife, Nigella Lawson, in Scott’s, the Mayfair restaurant. Lawson is the celebrity chef and broadcaster.

 

Saachi was photographed by the paparazzi with his hands over his wife’s throat on four separate occasions while they argued, and allegedly giving her nose a good tweak as they left. She was then photographed crying as she left the restaurant and then leaving her house with a suitcase and her son later that day. Of the incident Saachi said, “There was no grip, it was a playful tiff. The pictures are horrific but give a far more drastic and violent impression of what took place. Nigella’s tears were because we both hate arguing, not because she had been hurt.’ He says he suggested she leave their London house to avoid the press. Lawson has not yet made any comment.

 

The pictures are shocking for lots of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ reasons. They are shocking because we are seeing something which is usually private, in public. And shocking because this image is not the media image we conjure when we think of Nigella Lawson…she is not the typical face of domestic violence. Except that, of course, we are wrong.

 

Domestic violence and the spectrum of behaviour it encompasses has no typical face in reality. In our minds it’s probably still the face of poor people, or of house-wives. It is still a wife, rather than a girlfriend, still a middle aged woman rather than a teenager. It is still a woman, and not a man, and an adult and not a child.

 

Today, when an event like this happens and is reported on, it is not the mainstream media coverage of most interest to me, it’s the comments left by readers on noticeboards, news sites and Twitter tell us so much more about what wider society thinks. The digitisation of news and media has given us unprecedented access to the thoughts of others, and a view on public perception of issues that continue to dog women as a group.

 

Yesterday there were 145 comments on the Time’s Monday article about Saachi’s assault. They varied from those who thought the story was not news, to those who thought this was a matter for the couple privately, those who wondered what on earth Nigella might be scared of ‘what, losing her mansion?’, and no one else’s business, to those who wished they’d been there to lamp Saatchi good and proper. As one man wrote ‘my father told me to hold a woman by her waist and a wine bottle by its neck….Saatchi has got this the wrong way around.’

 

As I read through the comments I would say the majority thought Saachi’s behaviour was unacceptable. But many thought it wasn’t news, and a few thought the whole scheme had been enflamed by charity workers, the police state and ‘those people at Everydaysexism’. I was delighted to see a (male) journalist from The Times join the comments to write back to defend the Everydaysexism Project and suggest its detractor spend a bit more time understanding why your average run of the mill sexism was dangerous.

 

So is it news? Yes, I think it is. The fact we are shocked at the assault suggests we still aren’t used to the idea that domestic violence can happen to anyone. Does it matter that it’s Saachi and Lawson? No, but if we don’t report this, and don’t profile an event which took place in public how else do we shine the light on an issue that is still so common. Even one comment suggesting it’s no one’s business but theirs suggests we haven’t gone far enough to deal with this sort of violence.

 

In other opinion pieces in the week, such as Channel 4’s ‘4thought’, there have also been suggestions that domestic violence toward children is woefully underreported, with a suggestion that it’s women who are the main perpetrators of violence against their children (and we’ve all seen it in shops and the streets), and that physical and psychological violence toward men in the home, or from their spouses, goes virtually unreported. My gut feel is the latter probably is right, in the same way the Government wilfully ignores statistics on rape committed against men in prison. Like Nigella and Saatchi, the reality is all too uncomfortable, too inconvenient.

 

Violence is violence wherever it takes place, and in whatever form, and whoever it is done to. It is a shame we cannot dispense with the tags that seem to confuse our natural understanding and acceptance of that.