A new documentary looks at women who survived domestic violence -- then faced jail time
Midway through And So I Stayed, Kim Dadou Brown — a survivor of domestic violence who served 17 years in prison for killing her partner — sits in a semicircle with a group of women, sharing her experiences of abuse. She relates an anecdote about a time she went to a store with her then-partner. Dadou Brown said she was wearing jeans with an intentional rip in the upper back of the thigh.
When she came out of the store, her partner was angry. He asked her if she thought she was cute, and told her to turn around. When she did, Dadou Brown said, he grabbed the hole in her jeans and tore it, exposing her in public. For a moment, she was frozen in shock. Then he shoved her, and she snapped back into the moment. “There’s guys on the street,” she says, gesturing in front of her. “There’s drug dealers. There’s kids. There’s people barbecuing, like — nobody said anything. No one ever did.”
Dadou Brown was describing her own experiences: how it felt like the people in her community would rather look away than face the uncomfortable truth of what she was living through. But she might as well have been describing a broader instinct on the part of society to turn away from, and ignore, the abuse victims in its midst. Some things have changed in the 30 years since Dadou Brown was convicted of manslaughter in the first degree. There’s greater awareness now of the difficulties domestic violence victims face in being believed, and the danger they face when trying to leave abusive relationships.
Other elements of understanding have not changed, perhaps especially when a survivor says she was defending herself or responding to an abuser’s attack. The proliferation of true crime as entertainment, through television and podcasts, has only made it worse. Among the most egregious examples is Snapped, the Oxygen network mainstay that repackages real stories of crimes committed by women, often in the context of domestic violence and abuse, as sensationalist curios. Women who kill their partners are portrayed as devious, malevolent, out of their minds.
https://www.vox.com/23010236/and-so-i-stayed-documentary-domestic-violence
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It’s not just the survivors’ grief that animates the film. Much of its forward momentum is provided by Dadou Brown, who aptly describes the pain of being abused and then disbelieved by the legal system. “I felt that I was screwed over by the same system that I used to go to for help,” Dadou Brown told me in an interview, noting that she had police reports and hospital records that corroborated her prior abuse.
Which makes the Rittenhouse verdict even harder to accept.
