Psychological violence - Spokes in the wheel

    Those that have been lucky enough never to have had to live with constant persecution by a vengeful, rejected former husband/boyfriend/partner usually find it hard to imagine all that it entails.

     Try imagining what it would be like to live with the knowledge that someone hates you and sees it as his goal to destroy you mentally or physically! Try to imagine what it would be like to have to live, day and night, with constant threats and incessant telephone harassment, to have someone constantly trying to peep through the windows of your home, someone who is waiting for you when you open the front door to go out, someone who intercepts you and the children when you arrive with them at the school in the morning, or when you pick them up in the afternoon, someone who turns up as soon as you park your car outside the shopping centre, when you take the children to the playground or on a Sunday walk, when you get out of the car outside your home – all with the sole intent to harass you: to put himself in your way, taunt you, threaten you, spit in your face, pull your hair, threaten your friends, tell the children he is sorry for them that they have to be with their mother, but that he intends to rescue them soon...

     In the following I will call the man that most of my blog will focus on “Eric”, and his ex-wife “Maria”.

     From the day that his wife left him, the guiding principle that Eric has consistently followed has been to sabotage every single decision that Maria has ever taken in her daily life with or without the children. What I refer to is simple, daily little decisions of the kind that every person makes every day without even thinking about it - like who she chooses to have coffee with, who she talks to in the school yard, what other children she lets her kids play with, who she invites into her home, who she visits with the children, who she sees without the children, who she hires as baby-sitter, what paediatrician she consults for some commonplace ailment, what ordinary after school activities she lets the children participate in, what she writes in their school contact books, how she helps them with their home work, who she asks to collect them from school when she is otherwise engaged, who she allows to be present in her home when her ex (or his replacement) collects or drops off the children, how she dresses them, where or with whom they spend their holidays etc.

     Eric has not only consistently opposed every single decision that he has known of, but he has also done everything he can to prevent Maria from carrying them out. His imagination, when it comes to inventing new methods to put spanners in Maria’s wheels, has been all but inexhaustible.

     And how has Eric been able to keep himself informed about all these, most often completely commonplace little decisions?

     In short: he has supervised Maria with all available means. He has kept her home under surveillance day and night, he has kept track of all her comings and goings, followed her when she has left her home, hacked into her email, surpassed the security settings of her Facebook account, contacted her landlord, her neighbours, her friends and acquaintances to question them and denigrate Maria, he has interrogated the children as well as various employees at their school, and he has demanded of teachers, headmistresses, as well as the daughter's childminder, that they must keep him informed of absolutely everything that concerns his children.

     For a long time, before Maria managed to understand how he could get access to her new password as soon as she changed it, he could also enter her internet bank account, and in this way he could check her income and expenses as well as her geographic movements. He also searched for information on the internet, e.g. checked up on every new person who appeared anywhere near her, and if he found contact information, he contacted them to threaten them with ”serious consequences” if they did not stay away from Maria and the kids. Every time that Maria managed to put a stop to any of the ways Eric made use of to check up on her, he always invented new ones.

     In the beginning, when Eric still talked to his children on the phone every day while they were with their mother, he always made sure to squeeze Maria’s plans for the near future out of them. As soon as he got wind of anything at all (e.g. a shopping trip, a visit to the playground, a walk in the sunshine, participation in a village fair, a visit to someone’s house, friends coming over, plans for a children’s party, a trip out of town…), he made sure to either put a stop to the plans or to ruin the events. He turned up in the grocery store or in the playground, he intercepted the family in the street and put himself in their way and harassed Maria until she took the children home with her again. When he knew that she had guests, he came to her home, threw pebbles on the windows and yelled that the guests must leave and never again get anywhere near his children, or else there would be ”serious consequences” for them.

     And last, but not least: Without any kind of proof or even a hint of circumstantial evidence, Eric has conducted a massive denigration campaign against Maria at all conceivable levels. In a long succession of pleas to the court he has put forward shameless, invented, completely uncorroborated allegations against Maria as well as everyone near to her, and he has also repeated the same slander high and wide among a large number of people: his own as well as Maria’s friends and acquaintances, his family, work colleagues, school personnel, social workers, welfare officers, psyhologists, openly on Facebook etc. etc.  
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