Revealing hidden realities: disclosing domestic abuse to informal others

ABSTRACT

Little is known about the initial disclosure process when victims of domestic abuse break their silence and tell family, friends, neighbours or colleagues. This study draws on interviews with 21 Swedish women and analyses the interactional and emotional processes of the first disclosure. Shame, perpetrator threats, child custody issues, fear over increased/expanded violence, and how disclosure will affect social interactions were mentioned as reasons for hesitating to reveal the abuse to their social network. Women who had a planned disclosure had decided to tell someone regardless of concerns about potential negative outcomes, referring to the need for emotional and practical support. These women told a person of their choice in a situation they themselves chose. Women also revealed their hidden realities as an unplanned response to a specific situation described as turning points. Unplanned disclosures were also a result of someone in the woman’s network noticing the abuse, more or less forcing the woman to tell. This study reveals the dynamics resulting in the interviewed women’s first disclosure of being abused. We also discuss the nuances in disclosure decisions and offer insight into what is crucial for making domestic abuse visible to others.

KEYWORDS:

• Qualitative interviews
• domestic abuse
• planned and unplanned disclosure
• informal others

Introduction

Violence against women in close relationships is a widespread phenomenon found in societies all over the world, across all socioeconomic classes, cultures and geographic areas. Almost one out of three women who have been in a relationship is estimated to have been abused by a partner during her lifetime (WHO, 2013). The abuse often influences numerous aspects of women’s everyday lives, affecting their social and economic situations, but also their physical and psychological health (O’Campo et al., 2006). This social problem has long been a public concern, and domestic abuse has been a target of both criminalization and socio-political efforts in many countries, and certainly in Sweden (Boethius, 2015), where this study was performed.

Considering that being in an abusive relationship is not altogether unusual, and that the violence is illegal and in contemporary society publicly condemned and morally questioned, it can seem like a paradox that many women do not disclose the abuse and seek help. Shame, a desire to protect the perpetrator, stigma, guilt and fear are some reasons that women subjected to abuse give when explaining why they do not turn to the police or seek help from other official institutions (Montalvo Liendo, 2008; Naved et al., 2006; Overstreet & Quinn, 2013; Petersen et al., 2005). Because of these obstacles, a large proportion of abuse is not visible in official statistics; thus, violence in close relationships is often referred to as a ‘hidden crime’. Violence in close relationships may also be hidden to relatives, friends and colleagues.

In this study, the interviewed women had kept their hidden realities from others, leading themselves to live in parallel realities. In his sociological classic, Simmel and Wolff (1964, p. 330) pointed out that ‘The secrets offer, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is decisively influenced by the former’. Reflecting on disclosing their situation, many of the interviewed women in the present study describe lives in which they experienced a ‘second world alongside the manifest world’. They kept their realities at home a secret while interacting with others at work or with friends or family. However, at some point, they revealed their hidden realities. The present article focuses on the process leading up to this disclosure as told by Swedish women who experienced domestic abuse by a former male partner. The aim was to explore the first disclosure to informal others, including the situation leading up to this initial disclosure, the people to whom the women confide, the forms these disclosures take, and what motivates them. The stories reveal the complexity and nuance in this disclosure process and give details on both the women’s unplanned and planned first disclosures.

Previous research

Disclosure and non-disclosure are well-documented aspects of intimate partner violence. The focus has been on women, as victims, disclosing abuse, specifically the rates of disclosure, who they turn to for help, and barriers and motivators for disclosure (Andersson et al., 2010; Ansara & Hindin, 2010; Ashley & Foshee, 2005; Barrett & St. Pierre, 2011; Dunham & Senn, 2000; Fanslow & Robinson, 2010; Lempert, 1997; Mahlstedt & Keeny, 1993; McKle et al., 2002; see also Sylaska & Edwards, 2014). Two categories of recipients of interpersonal violence disclosure are discussed in research: persons from informal social networks (family, friends, etc.) (Lempert, 1997) and formal institutions and help/support actors (police, law system, medical professions, etc.) (Domenech del Rio & Sirvent Garcia del Valle, 2019; Edwards et al., 2012; Keeling & Fisher, 2015; Pratt-Eriksson et al., 2014).

Previous research on domestic abuse has suggested a number of barriers to disclosing such violence. Shame, a desire to protect the perpetrator, stigma, guilt and fear are some obstacles to disclosure mentioned by victims (Montalvo Liendo, 2008; Naved et al., 2006; Overstreet & Quinn, 2013; Petersen et al., 2005), in addition to anticipating that others may engage in efforts to make one leave one’s partner, not realizing that the women, for various reasons, may want to stay in the relationship (Andersson et al., 2010; Lempert, 1997).

Quantitative research has shown that most female victims of domestic abuse eventually disclose it to someone, and that they most commonly turn to persons from their informal social network (Edwards et al., 2012; Fanslow & Robinson, 2010; Goodkind et al., 2003; Johnson & Belenko, 2019; Mahlstedt & Keeny, 1993; Moe, 2007). However, the victim often tones down the abuse when disclosing it (Dunham & Senn, 2000). Hydén (2015) pointed out that domestic abuse is not as hidden as it is often depicted as, considering that some people in the couple’s social network may suspect or know about the abuse. Studies of disclosure to informal social network members have also investigated what is perceived by the victim as positive and/or negative responses. On the one hand, disclosure can lead to women gaining emotional support, someone that listens to her and aids her in getting practical help. Such support from social networks is likely to play an important role in victims’ well-being (see Sylaska & Edwards, 2014). On the other hand, disclosure can lead to victim blaming, avoidance and minimization of the abuse from those in whom the woman confides (Goodkind et al., 2003; Trotter & Allen, 2009). Research also indicates variability in when women disclose victimization of abuse. Studies have shown that approximately half of the victims choose to disclose immediately after a violent situation, whereas more than one-third wait for more than 2 years before they tell anyone about the abuse (Dunham & Senn, 2000).

Despite disclosure being a well-researched area, we know little about the interactional and definitional processes and the detailed situational context of disclosure to informal parties for victims of domestic abuse. Our qualitative interviews with victims examined the first disclosure and highlight an important division between unplanned disclosure, which is more common, and planned disclosure that has not been much discussed in the research literature.

Theoretical perspective

As sociologist Robert Emerson (2015) pointed out, most socio-legal analyses view outsider involvement in troubles as a matter of formal third-party intervention, focusing on consequences, such as partisan outcomes or more balanced settlements (e.g. Aubert, 1965; Black, 1998). Aubert (1965) pointed out that responses can take two general stances: responding to the trouble as conflict or as deviance. In responding to trouble as conflict, the ‘trouble-shooters’ adopt a stance of equal commitment to both; they may try to become equally involved with the two parties by trying to mediate a settlement. Responding to troubles as deviance implies siding with one of the troubled parties. In Emerson and Messinger’s seminal article (Emerson and Messinger, 1977), they extended this inquiry to social control theory through a natural history framework, i.e. following how an event or incident develops chronologically. In this way, they engaged in exploring how personal troubles become public problems and are redefined and reorganized when official third parties become involved.

However, in the book, Everyday Troubles, Emerson (2015, p. 136) noted that the focus on official third parties ‘slights the processes whereby informal outsiders become involved in relational troubles’. He described the emerging understanding of various personal troubles and the processes by which informal others get involved in them. The analyses of beginnings and turning points, and the social consequences of such informal others’ involvement are highly relevant to our study.

Thus, this study was inspired by Emerson’s theories of processes of social control and trouble, as they concern issues of when and how ‘troubled parties’ turn to others, to friends, relatives or colleagues, for support, sympathy, advice and help. More specifically, we explore the participants’ initial disclosure of being victims of abuse to members of their social network, the informal others. This is not an easy step; being a victim of domestic abuse is, as shown in other research referred to above, associated with shame, a hidden stigma that one does not want the world to recognize. Being abused seems to be perceived as somewhat of a ‘non-sharable problem’ (Cressey, 1953).

Materials and methods

This study is part of a larger study of Swedish women who have been victims of domestic abuse and their social networks. In this article, we analyse qualitative interviews with the abused women that we conducted during 2017 and 2019.

Participants

This study includes 21 Swedish women who had been physically abused by a former husband, cohabiting partner or boyfriend, all male perpetrators. In all cases, the physical violence was combined with other kinds of violence, such as sexual violence, isolation, psychological violence, stalking and material violence. All of the women had turned to help centres for abused women in Sweden, and 20 of the women had filed at least one police report regarding domestic abuse against the partner. Before filing the report, at least one person in the woman’s network knew that she was a victim of domestic abuse.

Potential participants were identified by the staff at the help centres, who provided written and oral information about the study to persons of interest. The women interested in participating in the study supplied their phone number or email address to the staff, who further mediated the contact information to the researchers.

One of the aims and advantages of qualitative methods is to capture variation in experience and situations. Our sample provides such opportunities. For some women, the relationship with the abusive man lasted only a couple of months, for others it lasted years, and in a few instances more than 20 years. Most of the women were born in Sweden, and a few had an immigrant background. All of the women spoke fluent Swedish and had graduated from the Swedish school system. The length of time from the first violent episodes to disclosing the abuse varied. One woman told members of her informal network about her boyfriend’s aggressive behaviour from the start, whereas others waited much longer. The longest a respondent waited to disclose the abuse was 18 years.

How long the relationship had lasted before the man began to physically abuse the woman also varied. For some women, the violence was present almost from the start, whereas for one woman, her husband physically abused her for the first time 10 years into the marriage. In most cases, the perpetrator had shown aggressive behaviour early in the relationship and been verbally abusive prior to the first physical incident. However, some women were surprised when her partner became physically violent the first time. All, but one woman, were abused repeatedly. Some of the women were beaten almost every day, others had weeks between violent incidents, and for some many years passed between the perpetrators violent behaviour. Some men also used violence against pets, children or other family members, whereas others were abusive only to the woman. One woman was not abused during the relationship, but shortly after the separation.

The women were between 27 and 55 years of age and separated from their perpetrator at the time of the interviews. Some of the women were with new partners, and some were alone. Some had children, others did not.

The interviewed women mainly made the first disclosure of the abuse to other women. When disclosed to fathers and brothers, this was always in the presence of other women. Some women disclosed the abuse to someone they were not very close to, such as a co-worker, neighbour or boss. These were described as persons that did not have any ongoing contact with the abuser. Other women described turning to the people closest to them, people they trusted to support them, such as their best friend or mother. A summary of the characteristics of the interviewed women is given in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographics of the interviewees in the current study (N = 21)

		Frequency
Occupation	Work	17
	Student	2
	Sick leave	2
Age, years	25–35	7
	36–45	10
	46–55	4
Children	Children with perpetrator	9
	Children, but not with perpetrator	5
	The perpetrator has children from previous relationship	3
	No children	6

Qualitative interviews

In this study, we used a teller-focused interview approach (Hydén, 2014). This approach entails deciding in advance to include some themes in the interview, but also letting the interview be guided by topics the women introduced. The interviews were all audio-recorded and later transcribed.

Because we were specifically interested in the women’s interactions with their informal social networks, we used a targeted method to initiate conversation on these networks and the people in them. We started the interviews by asking the women to identify which people were part of their social networks. Using a piece of paper with a circle drawn on it, the women were asked to think of themselves as being in the middle of the circle, and then to pinpoint people from their social network around the circle, in the following predetermined categories: family, relatives, co-workers and friends. They were also encouraged to think about people outside of these categories and list them.¹ The ‘closeness’ the women were asked to describe was not defined by such categories, but rather by the feeling of closeness. We used this method in an effort to grasp the women’s complete social network and to be able to talk about their options for telling and involving specific persons. In addition, we used a short interview guide with a few questions, sometimes reformulated, to ensure the inclusion of our two main themes: experience with police involvement and social network responses to the abuse and police involvement.

Most of the interviews were conducted at support centres for abused women, but some were conducted in the women’s homes, and a few at the university. The interviews lasted an average of 90 min and were conducted by the first author, who has extensive experience in interviewing victims, perpetrators and witnesses of interpersonal violence (Boethius, 2015, 2016).

Analysis

The issue of first disclosure was not planned to be researched when designing the project but, as occurs in many qualitative studies, new analytic themes attracted the researchers’ curiosity (Åkerström, 2013). Our interest in disclosure came from reading all transcribed interviews in the first step of analysis, and was a result of ‘key readings’ of the textualized data (Åkerström & Wästerfors, forthcoming), an analysis inspired by Emerson’s ‘key incidents’. R.M. Emerson (2004) argued that as researchers, we should allow ourselves to take our surprise or curiosity seriously, instead of following a predefined logic or technical approach, such as the established strategies for analysing qualitative material, grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) or analytic induction (Katz, 2001). Emerson’s suggestion is that key incidents may fill that gap for ethnographic analyses, as ‘theory-focused approaches leave aside entirely the actual experience of many ethnographers, the frequent sense that their eventual analyses were strongly shaped by particularly telling or revealing incidents or events that they observed and recorded’ (Emerson, 2004, p. 429).

Our key readings of the transcribed interviews are one such case of taking our curiosity seriously, even if this theme did not belong to the design of the project or was not included as a topic in the interview guide. We noticed how some interviewed women described the scenes and situations when they revealed what they had kept hidden in detail, and this first telling turned out to be an important and sensitive issue. After the key readings, when we discovered and were struck by the saliency of the first disclosure, we read through the transcriptions again and coded them according to who she told, when she told, why she told, in what situation she told, and how she told of her situation. When sorting the data into these categories, two major analytical sub-dimensions emerged: unplanned and planned first disclosure. Extracts² from the interviews were coded into one of these two categories, and then further divided into different subcategories that are discussed in this article.

Ethical considerations

This project demanded special ethical considerations. First, all of the common demands regarding participation in any social science research project were met by all participants, who were informed about the project before we started interviewing them. They received a letter about the project, including information about the right to withdraw participation at any time and information about the aim and use of the participation-generated material. The contact information of the researchers was provided. All information was also repeated in conversations before the actual interview. All interviews were conducted in private, and the participants signed informed consent forms.

Second, for physical safety, all interviews were conducted at the time and location of the women’s choosing. Risk of emotional distress to participants was something we worried about before the interviews. Therefore, we arranged the possibility for a debriefing with a counsellor after the interview, an offer a few participants accepted. As the sample consisted of women who had filed a complaint, they had already talked about their experiences several times. In the interviews, it was clear that they had not only talked to the police, but also to the staff at the help centres, some to social workers, and all had talked to at least one friend or relative.

Third, we have taken great care to guard the participants’ anonymity. The interviewees have not only been anonymized with changes of names and any locations, but in cases when detailed information is included, which we think is often relevant to convey the womens’ stories, identifiable details have been left out or changed to sociologically equivalent actions or descriptions. This was done to avoid the possibility of associating information from included excerpts with a specific individual.

Forth, the original empirical data have been kept apart from all personal contact information (name, phone number, email address) and are stored in a locked safe, with all contact information kept in another. The transcriptions, anonymized versions of the interviews, were made on an off-line computer. Regional Ethical Review, Lund reviewed and approved the project (Dnr. 2017/1077).

Unplanned and planned disclosures

Many of the interviewed women described how they had not only kept quiet, but also had lied or denied that they were victims of abuse when people from their social network expressed concerns about their well-being or the relationship as such. To understand the dynamics of disclosure, we include some of the interviewees’ descriptions of why they had not told anyone about the violence, as this is tied to the process of disclosing.

For some women, disclosure resulted from a plan, with arrangements on when, how and who to tell. Other women had not planned to tell anyone, but did so anyway when they found themselves in situations where they acutely needed help or support, or told as a response to someone confronting them with knowledge about the situation.

Unplanned disclosures

Some women described how they had planned to keep the abuse hidden from their social network and how this plan failed and the abuse became disclosed in an unplanned manner. Disclosure occurred in a situation of crisis, during or immediately after an incident of violence or threats, or as a result of others’ interventions.

Emergency disclosure as turning points

Some women described how they had no intention of telling anyone about the abuse but then something happened, an emergency situation, when telling someone was explained as necessary in order to end a violent situation. This became a turning point that made them change their mind and decide to disclose the violence. Such turning points are often reached when troubles escalate, an increase in severity, seriousness and consequentiality, and is frequently built into the accounts troubled parties provide to outsiders (Emerson, 2015, p. 163).

Consider Olivia’s story. She was in her 40s with young children, and her husband had been physically abusive for more than 10 years. She told her sister, who had sometimes expressed concerns, that her husband just became a bit angry when he drank. However, one day, when the husband had picked up the children from school while drunk, the staff filed a complaint with social services. When a social worker came for a home visit, Olivia denied, as she had done many times before, that her husband abused her and claimed that she had everything under control. After the social worker left, her husband started to hit her in front of their children:

I think it was, he did it so palpablye, very very severe. I had never experienced that he was so rough as he was at that time … he was sitting on my chest and kind of jumping and tried to bend my fingers and, so this was when I felt that this is not working. This can’t go on. I guess it was my facade that cracked there at the same time, I can’t keep this up any longer, no strength left for this.

The severe abuse that happened right after the social worker had left and in front of their children made Olivia describe her response in terms of a turning point: ‘This is not working. This can’t go on’. When her husband left the house to go for a ride in his car, Olivia took a suitcase and the children and ran away, calling her sister to pick them up. The sister came and Oliva, being hurt with visible injuries and acting incoherent, told her about the abuse that had just happened and revealed that her husband had abused her for a long time.

Other stories are about the necessity to call someone to end a particular violent situation. Anne, a woman in her 30s with no children had been physically abused by her boyfriend for 3 of the 4 years they had been in a relationship. Anne had always denied the abuse when her mother had voiced her suspicions. Anne explained that she had kept the abuse hidden from family and friends since the perpetrator became more violent when she contacted them, and that he had also threatened to hurt her family: ‘And then I felt, I’ll have to take the consequences myself, so at least I’ll have some control’. When Anne finally told someone, in the form of an SMS as a call for help, her boyfriend had beaten her badly, and she had managed to lock herself in the bathroom:

I couldn’t make a call ‘cause he could hear it, so I texted my colleague and I explained my situation and so she could call the police. So it was her that called the police, and the police came, and then she came and met me in the hospital. She drove me to her house so I could rest a bit … and when I was at her place I could call my mother and explain.

The first disclosure in this case was to her colleague, who later picked her up at the hospital where she had been taken by the police. When settled in the colleague’s home, she called her mother and finally told her that her suspicions had been accurate.

Another example of an ‘emergency disclosure’ comes from Sarah, a woman in her 40s who had been living with her boyfriend for 3 years and been physically abused by him for 2 of those years. Both Sarah and her partner had children from previous relationships, and every other week the children lived with them. It was during the weeks that they did not have the children that her boyfriend physically abused her on a regular basis. Sarah explained that she kept quiet because of the perceived threat of official third parties becoming involved. When ‘private troubles’ become public knowledge, there may be various consequences (Emerson & Messinger, 1977; Emerson, 2015). The social consequences Sarah anticipated concerned an ongoing custody battle regarding her children that she had with a previous boyfriend. She wanted to keep the abuse hidden from everyone until after the trial so that her situation would not be used against her in the custody battle: ‘I had to be quiet about what happened to me so I could keep my children’.

Similar to Olivia and Anne, Sarah’s disclosure came about as a result of a specific violent situation, despite her earlier efforts to keep the situation hidden. Sarah had been visiting a former neighbour who had apparently heard screaming and noises from Sarah’s apartment when they were neighbours, but they had never talked about Sarah being a victim of abuse. When they parted, the neighbour said, ‘If he is angry when you come home, just come back’. Sarah tells about how her partner was indeed angry when she arrived home, and she then told him that she would leave. This made him even angrier:

I had to lock myself in the bathroom, but then, he got into the bathroom, and then, I had tried to keep the lock shut but he had a big pipe wrench that he used to open the door … I had no power to keep it shut, so I called this neighbour that I had visited who had moved, but her voice mail was on, so she did not answer, but it was recorded when I screamed, ‘cause right then, he gets in and starts to hit me with this big pipe wrench. So she [the neighbour] gets that [message on voice mail] where I am screaming for help and screaming in pain and when he says, ‘You may scream, there is no one that can help you now’. Then she [the neighbour] calls the police.

The bathroom figures as a temporary refuge from the violence in both Anne’s and Sarah’s stories, but Sarah did not manage to keep him out. In both cases, however, these women relied successfully on their mobile phones to get help. These contacts also led to subsequently more elaborate disclosure to both the informal others, and to others belonging to a closer social network.

Spontaneous revelations

Some women described having found themselves in emotional turmoil after a violent incident. If the situation afterwards provides them with a listener, this may ‘lure’ them into disclosing the abuse. Elisabeth, a woman in her 50s with teenage children from a previous relationship, depicted such a situation as, ‘it just came out’, describing a spontaneous revelation. The secret that she had worked hard to protect was described as more or less simply leaking out. She recalls how her family, friends and co-workers all thought that she was abused by her new boyfriend after her children, who had heard fights and screams, told people, but she always denied it. In part, she did so because she did not see it as ‘abuse’ at first, ‘he didn’t hit with his fists, you know, he threw me around in the apartment’.

Elisabeth explained that she loved the boyfriend and wanted a future with him, a violence-free future that she thought was possible because she interpreted his violent behaviour as a result of his drug use. She felt that if he stopped using drugs, the violence would end. However, her family and friends defined it as abuse early on, advising her to end the relationship. Giving such advice may be sensitive, and the trouble itself may become a source of contention (Emerson, 2015, p. 147). As Elisabeth did not end the relationship, her family and friends distanced themselves from her; she was no longer welcome at family gatherings and parties, and her children moved in with their father. Elisabeth became more isolated, and her social network diminished, so that she was spending most of her time outside work with her abusive boyfriend.

As she increasingly isolated herself from others, she, similar to others in our material, faced ongoing challenges to her own definition of reality. When the violence escalated, she recalls how she started to see the violence as abuse and herself as being a victim of abuse. Despite this redefinition, she kept denying that her boyfriend was abusive when people asked her. During the interview, she explained her reluctance as being ashamed and afraid of becoming even more socially isolated.

After a violent episode, Elisabeth finally told her boss and sister about the abuse. The story is dramatic, and Elisabeth vividly described the actions and the emotional turmoil. One morning, she got into a verbal argument with her boyfriend, and he started to physically abuse her. She had promised to pick up her sister and her boss on the way to work that same morning. Elisabeth, now late for work, managed to get out of the apartment and ran towards her car:

Then I have this crazy person [the boyfriend] running after, who grabs a rock and is going to kill me. But, but he comes to his senses and I manage to get into the car and he jumps in on the other side, and I don’t know, somehow, I get him to calm down and he let me go ‘cause Martin [the boss] is waiting for me. I was terrified that he would hit my head with the rock, but he got out of the car and I drove off. And then when I drove down and picked up my boss, I thought, ‘just jump into the car quickly so he won’t come’, I was afraid he was coming after us. Then I drove and picked up my sister, and then it all came out. If I had been by myself in the car, I promise, I wouldn’t have said anything this time either, but I was so shaken up, so I couldn’t keep it to myself. It just came out.

Elisabeth had not intended to tell anyone but, under great emotional stress, she blurted out her experiences in an unplanned overflow of emotion: ‘it just came out’ because she ‘couldn’t keep it to myself’. Furthermore, she thought that if she had been by herself, she would not have taken the initiative to tell someone.

In summary, these unplanned disclosures in the form of asking for rescue in an acute situation or in cases of ‘leaking out’ are responses to immediate situations and not planned. Furthermore, they are disclosures that the women themselves initiate.

Others’ initiatives

Some interviewees talked about situations in which others revealed the abusive relationship. As in Elisabeth’s case above, people from the women’s social network often suspected that something was not quite right in the relationship. These suspicions were sometimes voiced by parents, co-workers, children or friends. Martina, a woman in her 30s with no children, had kept the abuse hidden because her boyfriend had threatened to release a video he had secretly filmed of the two of them being intimate if she were to leave him. Thinking that her parents would make her end the relationship if they knew she was abused, Martina always denied any concerns they raised:

[My parents] had cross-examined me a hundred thousand times about this relationship, but I flatly denied it and defended him, over and over and over and over again.

Again, as in Elisabeth’s case, we note that advice-giving in ‘troubles-telling’ may be sensitive. In Martina’s case, part of the problem with unsolicited advice is that it implies implicitly describing the victim in a somewhat critical and demeaning way, suggesting that that ‘the person either does not know what to do or has been doing something wrong’ (Emerson, 2015, p. 147).

The response from Martina’s parents was not to distance themselves. Instead, they intervened by starting to collect evidence against the boyfriend. When her parents found evidence that the man had been unfaithful and presented this to her, she left the perpetrator and moved into her own apartment. However, the boyfriend kept harassing her, and one evening when the boyfriend was screaming and banging on her door, she called her father. The father came and drove Martina to the police station so she could file a report. Afterwards, Martina went home with her father and told her parents about the physical abuse that he had inflicted on her for the previous couple of years.

Disclosure can also occur when someone who has witnessed the abuse tells someone else, who in turn engages with the woman about the information. Children, who are not necessarily socialized yet to keep information to themselves, are especially apt to tell others what they witnessed (Simmel & Wolff, 1964, p. 330). None of the interviewed women said that they had had a conversation with their children about the abusive situation before they left their partners. Some women even said that they denied the abuse when the children asked about it, even though they knew that the children had both heard and seen it. Some children told other people from their own network, such as teachers, relatives and friends, about violent episodes at home. Such revelations could lead women to deny the abuse, but they could also result in the women validating the children’s stories. Such was the case with Hanna, whose child told the day care staff that his father had hit his mother over the weekend. Hanna told how she acknowledged this fact:

It was at my children’s day care centre, there was one teacher who, ‘cause at one point one of my children had told her that I had been pushed into the wall and that Lasse had hit me so that there was blood on the wallpaper. And then she asked me if Lasse was violent. And then I said, ‘Yes, it happened and it will not happen again’.

Hanna did not deny the abuse when questioned about it, but she told the teacher that it would not happen again, and they never spoke of it afterwards. However, her revelation differs from the others. In their narratives, the disclosure of the abuse is depicted as a result of an interactional, situational and emotional process. It is described as a response to emergency situations or in close connection to violent events that are described in detail. In contrast, in Hanna’s narrative, the disclosure seemed to belong to a brief ‘admission’ or statement of fact.

Planned disclosures

Some of the first disclosures that the interviewed women talked about were not a response to a particular situation, but followed a plan, described as being carefully reflected on beforehand. Who they told, when, and how much they told were all issues they had considered. Some talked about plans being made to protect social ties. Others described how they wanted to secure safety for themselves, their families and friends, and their pets before disclosing the abuse.

Ebba, a woman in her late 20s, described an elaborate escape plan. She recounted how she deliberately kept her distance from her family because she was afraid her partner might hurt them: ‘I kept them away, as a way of protecting the situation’. Ebba described how she was petrified of the man and believed that she had to escape and then go into hiding to get out of the relationship alive. While keeping family and friends at arm’s length, she was making a plan for her disclosure and escape. She described how she had to find new homes for her pets without raising suspicion from her boyfriend, getting a place to live where he could not find her, and in the meantime making the boyfriend think that he had control over her. During this time, she also documented the abuse in diaries that she kept hidden. She explained that, if he managed to kill her, the diaries would then disclose the abuse. After almost 1 year of planning, Ebba told her sister and her best friend about the abuse because she needed help to realize her escape plan. She needed someone to send a notice about a fake doctor’s appointment to her house so that she could be away without raising any suspicion from her boyfriend. She also needed a car, and someone who could ensure that the perpetrator’s children would not be near him during the time of the escape, out of fear that he would hurt them after discovering that she had left him. She explains how the time for disclosure coincided with putting the escape plan into action:

And that’s when I actually told, ‘cause, because we [she and her sister] got an escape car to me … It’s all about getting the children … to safety, because he’ll get to them directly when I leave, and me and the pets to safety, so it was a long process. It was not just like, ‘Now, I’ll get out!’

Others, such as Nicole, told less dramatic stories when they describe planning who and when to tell. In Nicole’s case, the plan did not emphasize fear or safety, but focused on protecting social ties. Furthermore, for her, the timing of disclosure was important. She wanted to wait until after Christmas because the Christmas gathering was important for her and her family:

It’s weird how rational one can be in all, in all, in this sort of irrational everyday life one lives in. Because we were about to celebrate Christmas … It had been going on [the abuse] a good while then, but I, from the beginning it was so sporadic and then I was ashamed, and then I felt, ‘All right, now we plan Christmas celebrations’ … we would be at my house for Christmas and things got worse and worse. And I knew somehow that they will not come [if they knew about the abuse], they will not act normal towards him [her husband] or act (pause) I don’t want to expose them to that. I felt. That they know. And that they should act towards him as they do towards anyone, sort of. So I did not tell them.

Nicole, describing the need for emotional support, disclosed her home situation to a new co-worker with whom she had recently started to socialize through their children’s playdates. Nicole told her colleague little by little during their daily walks with the strollers. She waited, however, until after Christmas to tell her family.

Rita also hid the violence from her social network for a long time. For her, the challenge in telling was closely associated with defining the disclosure as implying that she was leaving her husband, which in turn also meant leaving friends and colleagues and the life they had together. Rita and her husband’s lives were strongly interwoven, both at work and in private circles. She and her husband spent 25 years together before they divorced, and for more than 15 years he physically abused her regularly. When asked if she had told anyone in her social network about the abuse before she left him, she said:

How could I do that? At the same moment that I would’ve said anything to anyone I would’ve taken the decision to step out completely. My ex-husband was a friend to all my friends, really, and our families and relatives knew each other. And he worked at my workplace with my co-workers.

Rita highlights how an interwoven life affected which experiences she could share with her network. She was close to all of his friends, and he was close to all of hers. Her husband’s sister was a close friend, telling her about the abuse would cause a crisis in the family and change the relationships in their social network. Rita and her husband worked in the same organization, and she believed it would be hard for her and her husband to keep working there if she told anyone at work. The couple had children, owned their house, their cars, and a big boat together, and had joint finances, making it hard to cut all contact with him.

When Rita decided to leave her husband, she decided to first tell their family, friends and colleagues about him being abusive.

I wanted him to be alright, and I realized that it would be a lot worse for us [her and the children] if he lost it, afraid of how he would respond.

She arranged a series of ‘disclosure meetings’ held in close proximity. During these meetings, she organized practical arrangements, such as when and where to move, and also tried to arrange social support for her husband; she had his parents promise to be supportive towards him. Furthermore, she described how she asked a family who were their friends not to pick a side, but to focus on helping their children with emotional support and providing a living space if they did not want to be with their parents.

In this case, Rita talked about a socially intertwined life in which social ties may be broken if she disclosed what happened behind closed doors. As was the case for Nicole, Rita never described not telling because of fear or being isolated from her social network, as many of the other women had done. In contrast, it is precisely this network that she wanted to protect and preserve. Aligning or affiliating with one partner is common when one party outside the relationship is told about conflict, and often the complaining partner expects the others to be sympathetic (Emerson, 2015, pp. 146–158), but Rita acknowledged the difficulties not only for herself, but for others involved.

Discussion

Men’s violence against women in close relationships is often, when it starts, a secret that women keep hidden. Even though women disclose being victims of abuse to people from their informal network earlier than to formal, official parties (Edwards et al., 2012; Sylaska & Edwards, 2014), there is a period of time during which the informal network does not know about the abuse. This study adds to the existing research via qualitative interviews with Swedish women, showing how the hidden realities are revealed mainly through the interactional and emotional dynamics of unplanned situations, but also as a result of planned decision-making. Our research offers insight into what is crucial for the social process of making domestic abuse visible to others.

The women’s considerations for not disclosing the violence correspond to findings in the literature, particularly feelings of shame and guilt, a desire to protect the perpetrator, and fearing that violence may escalate if they tell someone (Montalvo Liendo, 2008; Naved et al., 2006; Overstreet & Quinn, 2013; Petersen et al., 2005). The women also took possible responses from people in their social network into account: how they thought others would look upon them, others’ expectations of leaving the partner (see also Andersson et al., 2010; Lempert, 1997), and the social consequences in regards to mutual interactions among the members of their informal networks. For some women, such as Elisabeth, abstaining from telling others was also explained by defining the trouble as not being complaint-worthy, as she did not define the violence as abuse at first.

Disclosing means transforming the private trouble into a public problem, which could lead not only to informal others responding to the troubles as conflicts, but also as a way to define it as deviance, which could lead to the involvement of official third parties (Aubert, 1965; Emerson & Messinger, 1977). The interviewed women expected informal others to define their partners’ violence as deviance, and would expect them not only to leave their partners, but to involve legal authorities, which may in turn involve social authorities if the couple had children. This raised concerns. Some of the women did not want their partners to be punished, and those who were mothers voiced concerns over involvement by social authorities.

Most of the interviewed women had invested in keeping their situation a secret, had kept up appearances with some effort, and had denied the abuse when questioned by friends or family. Socially and culturally, women expect to give and receive help and support from friends and relatives (often other women), as Riessman (1990, p. ix) pointed out in her study of the process of divorce, we cope with events by talking about them, by reflecting on what has happened, and assign motives and characteristics to various situations. Thus, to reveal what had been kept hidden took some effort.

Breaking the silence was something that was significant and memorable for the interviewed women, as indicated by the topic being introduced by them, and not ‘interaction-initiated’, i.e. as a response to questions from the interviewer during the interview. Such initiatives from the women may be seen as answers to a moral discourse about how these women ‘should have acted’. They are in a position of what C. Wright Mills (1940) called a ‘societal question situation’, i.e. responding to implicit questioning of their deviations from contemporary cultural assertions. Why did they not seek help and leave earlier? As for the mothers; why did they expose their children to such a destructive environment? Thus, they engaged in ‘anticipatory accounting’ (Murphy, 2004). They implicitly pointed out what they found meaningful to explain and defend.

The way the interviewed women talked about the first disclosure of the abuse was as the result of a social process not necessarily leading to a deliberate decision to disclose. In most cases, disclosure was unplanned, a response to situational demands, such as when asking for help to get out of particularly violent situations, or as spontaneous revelations in an unplanned overflow of emotion after a violent episode or being confronted by others’ knowledge. Yet, in some cases, disclosure was a result of strategic planning, including who, when, and how to tell, which was often part of a plan to leave their partner.

The women described deliberating, in short moments, such as during ‘emergency disclosures’, especially about to whom they would disclose in terms of the anticipated consequences of disclosing the abuse. This selection process involved deciding who would be sympathetic and supportive, but in some cases as Vaughan writes about ‘uncoupling’: “‘avoiding those with a vested interest in the relationship’s continuance (e.g. not a mother-in-law or a friend who is a friend of the other’ (Vaughan, 1986, pp. 34–35). In such cases, in our study, the woman could end up choosing a more peripheral person, such as a co-worker or a distant neighbour, as a confidant. Anne texted a colleague when locked in the bathroom because she knew that the colleague had been in a similar situation, ‘a companion in suffering’. Others in need of more continuous emotional or practical help chose to tell the people closest to them, often their family or close friends, who they trusted the most with such support.

Qualitative studies of how informal others become involved in dyadic troubles have discussed how the disclosures are received by others (Lempert, 1997; Emerson, 2015; Vaughan, 1986).³ Trouble-tellers often expect others to be sympathetic to their grievances and to take their side. This was certainly the case of our interviewees. When Olivia called her sister, she came and picked her up, and Ebba’s sister and friend helped her with various concrete details in her escape plan. However, such affiliation or alignment may be problematic during the process. When informal others give unwanted advice, such as encouraging the women to leave their partners or to file a police report, the response may be that the women distance themselves from those persons.⁴

There are differences in the tellings of unplanned and planned disclosures, which call for further analyses in the future, but we note that the planned disclosure stories are presented as being very carefully planned, are described in detail, and more coherent than the stories told by those relating unplanned disclosures. When the women who talked about a planned disclosure, it involved plans for leaving the partner and for other parts of a future life, such as living arrangements and consequences for work and/or studies, implying a narrator very much in control of her (former) life as a victim of domestic abuse.

Though our material has promise for such future research possibilities in narrative analyses, our study illustrates the varied accounts of women revealing their previously hidden realities to informal others, not only in whom they confide, but also in which situations. These complicated interactional and emotional processes are important because they constitute the first steps in making the social problem of abuse visible.

Declaration of interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interests with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Professor Margareta Hydén for inspiring collaboration and Professor Ann-Mari Sellerberg for valuable comments on this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by FORTE, The Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [Dnr: 2016-00987].

Notes

1. This network data are part of an ongoing study and will be analysed in a different article.

2. When presenting the excerpts, brackets [] are used for the authors elaborations, … are used for removed dialogue and (pause) indicates an extended pause.

3. See Edwards and Dardis (2020) for a quantitative study on recipient responses to disclosure of violence in intimate relationships.

4. As our study also includes not yet analysed interviews with the social network, the responses from informal others will be the subject of future work.