What Did You Replace Your Cheater with?

I’m so glad this stuff speaks to you because it certainly spoke to me. I remember a phrase that I think is a quote from a Holocaust survivor, that “the innocent love their innocence.” To the extent that survivors of domestic abuse and certain crimes are often “indicted” as “partly responsible” for the crimes against them both by bystanders and helping professionals, the far more humanizing view of victims which has been codified by people like Stark or founding psychotraumatologist Frank Ochberg (original theorist behind Stockholm syndrome/captor bonding) feels “exonerating.”

It’s like winning an appeal and being declared “innocent” at last. Which is partly a relief and partly alarming because the vast majority of survivors are and always were innocent. This is such an intense theme that it’s really the core of Holocaust survivor and historian Primo Levi’s famous memoir, “The Drowned and the Saved,” in which he describes something he calls the moral “Gray Zone” or the process by which Nazi captors would inculcate prisoners and compel them to turn against each other in order to first kill captives’ souls– by attempting to bring victims down to the level of perpetrators, destroy their identities as innocent– before outright killing them. Another theme in the book was the devastation of survivors in not being believed by others after they escaped and tried to tell their stories. Not being believed was a common serial nightmare of former prisoners.

I’m quite sure the late Primo Levi wouldn’t mind if victims of other types of crimes related to his work and drew validation from it since it’s clear his aim was to make humanity recognize this kind of evil in all its many larval forms. And certain Nuremberg researchers even speculated that the seeds of a capacity for evil in many of the Nazis imprisoned and tried at Nuremberg was their brutalizing family upbringings. There is an argument to be made that decontructing the roots of evil within family dysfunction and domestic abuse and stopping the generational cycle is a politically crucial activity.

But not everyone wants to see that cycle stopped– namely all the many adult abusers in power. For instance, the reason you hadn’t heard of Stark or his wife Ann Flitcraft despite the truly monumental achievements they’ve made over the past fifty years– like launching the shelter movement in the US and UK in the 70s, scientifically debunking former victim-baming theories in psychology, coining “coercive control” and spearheading a global movement to criminalize it– is because the mainstream media in the US has had a general policy of silence towards issues they represented and doesn’t seem very enthusiastic about more surgically defining what constitutes domestic abuse and sexual consent. Basically it was no accident that all the attacks on CL and novelist Sarah Manguso in the NY Times, New Yorker and New York Magazine mostly centered around preventing the definition of abuse from advancing beyond fists, tire irons and fire arms– for the same reason Stark’s name and the concept of Coercive Control has only been mentioned about three times in the NY Times, including his rather brief obituary.

Stark’s passing was a loss to the world and I hope others pick up the torch and keep running with it. I intend to in whatever small way because, like I argued above, I see it as one of the main political lynch pin issues for humanity. I know Dr. Christine Cocciola– Stark’s former student as well as a coercive control survivor and former chump– is making a concerted effort to do this and was instrumental in getting Jennifer’s Law passed in Connecticut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyszZ2gJ9sA

The biggest victory was getting CC criminalized in the UK and Scotland where CC is now punishable with serious prison time but a lot more work needs to be done and it’s all two steps forward, one and a half steps back. But I don’t mind being a “Sisyphus” type advocate for a fraught cause even if I don’t see significant progress in my lifetime because, to quote philosopher Albert Camus, “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

One clue that the above has truth to it was something everyone who personally knew Stark said about him, which is that– as contradictory as it sounds due to the dark subjects he spent his life delving into– he was a infectiously joyous human being. That’s something else I don’t think is any accident. I think it relates to something another philosopher said of Primo Levi, that– as dark as the subject matter was that Levi focused on, the “light came from him” for having the courage to do it. I think it’s a fine endeavor to follow that light.