Abusive men are everywhere – and some of us love them

For months, the #MeToo hashtag has rolled like a tsunami over the careers of famous producers, directors, photographers and politicians. It has felt like every woman has a story to tell; I certainly have loads. It seems a change is coming and most decent people are joining in the chorus to say “time is up”. Bravo. But I’ve noticed that, as well as thinking how awful it all is and trotting out the obvious line that it’s not just Hollywood but is endemic in every walk of life, we seem completely incapable of realising what that means. It means that we know and love abusive men. I know I do.

The phenomenon is not a new one to anyone who has worked with abused women and girls and we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for being massive hypocrites. When working at Women’s Aid, I met countless women whose families had not believed them when they spoke of their abuse at the hands of another loved one. I remember one girl who had told her mother that her stepdad had been forcing her to have sex with him from a young age. It took a huge amount of work to get to the stage where she could tell her mother. She felt it could not be true and accused the girl of jealousy, of childish attention-seeking and histrionics. Their relationship broke down and this teenager left home, leaving her mother still living with the man who had raped her.

Even as I am writing this, I can feel you, the reader, judging this mother, thinking how awful she was, putting her own relationship before her daughter. You would never do that; you would never believe your partner over your child; you are better than them. You want to “other” her; you want her to be a pantomime villain of a mother. In your head, she is desperate, lonely, probably a bit mutton dressed as lamb, with a fag and a drink. She wasn’t – she looked like you.

You might find it hard to believe but you would probably do exactly the same as her. Imagine the bloke you love the most in the world, the one you trust to look after you if things go wrong – your dad, your husband, your brother, your son. No matter what you think, if someone told you that he had groped her, raped her, exploited her, your first instinct would be to assume that she was mad or mistaken. You would try to find a way to explain it away. “Oh no, you’ve misunderstood – he’s just overfriendly with everyone.”

Lena Dunham, a vocal feminist and a woman I respect, found it difficult to believe that her friend Murray Miller, a funny, liberal, smart guy whom she loved, could have assaulted someone. So she accused the victim of lying: “While our first instinct is to listen to every woman’s story, our insider knowledge of Murray’s situation makes us confident that, sadly, this accusation is one of the 3% of assault cases that are misreported every year.”

Well, not quite your first instinct, Lena. Your first instinct was the normal human reaction to protect yourself from horror. When your worldview is challenged, you’d be surprised how quickly you can find a way to dismiss reality. Don’t let’s leap on Dunham as a monster. Let’s recognise that we’d all find it hard to compute; this instinct has to be trained out of us.

As the sexual harassment scandal came across the Atlantic, it alighted on the decrepit Houses of Parliament. Unsurprisingly, the same disbelief was the response.

Politicians can trot out the line about keeping the victim central to the process and making sure that the procedures are fair so that women can come forward. But when it’s their mates, it’s a different story. Theresa May goes on TV all shrouded in care for victims and solidarity with the women, but when it came to it, she was quicker off the mark in accepting Michael Fallon’s resignation from her cabinet than she was in ditching her friend Damian Green.

Both the Tories and Labour have quietly dropped all investigations into a number of their MPs or staff being accused of groping, making colleagues buy sex toys and sexting teenagers. I assume they think that the women were lying? How will the parties feel when more women come forward? In some cases, I know there are more victims.

The reason people like me plead for specialist services for victims is because people need training to recognise their biases. The reason I ask for an independent system to be the arbiter on sexual harassment in politics and in workplaces is because I know how hard it is for people to believe that their friend/relative/trusted colleague/partner could do such a thing. I’m not sure I can bear to read another article hating a person who wanted to give an abuser the benefit of the doubt because the truth is that is the most common reaction.

I’m not excusing cover-ups; I am asking for us to recognise that there is a problem with how we handle this stuff when it happens around us so that we can make it better. Not all men are abusers – I think most aren’t – but most people know an abusive man and we need to be braver about recognising that.