Control Through Destruction: Stalking as righteous retribution
Image by John Hain at Pixabay
Last week, 38-year old professional cricketer Grant Hodnett was convicted of stalking involving serious alarm or distress after pleading guilty to the offence at Warrington Magistrates Court. He received a 24-week prison sentence - suspended for two years, a two-year community order, 20 days of rehabilitation activity and 150 hours of unpaid work.
Hodnett had embarked on a cruel smear campaign against his ex-partner after the end of their relationship. This involved an email to her father that included photographs of her working as an adult model, in which he claimed she was at risk and needed help. He sent messages to her friends saying she was a liar and a psychopath. He contacted the clients of the self-employed woman urging them not to give her business. He sent a letter to the charity shop where she worked, including a photograph, details of her personal life and references to adult website where she had done modelling work in the past. He signed up with her email address to receive alerts about alcohol products, knowing full well that she was in recovery. He sent messages to a friend in her Alcoholics Anonymous group, trying to cause trouble. He called the NSPCC and alleged that the victim had engaged in a sex act in her daughter’s bedroom.
These actions ensured that she couldn’t escape him – he was always there.
This isn’t a hurt ex-partner lashing out in the heat of the moment. The volume of these acts and their diverse nature points to something a lot more sinister. It’s organised, it’s strategic, it’s been carefully engineered to do maximum damage.
Hodnett’s defence claimed that he’d behaved in this way because of the relationship – and more specifically it’s breakdown. This is a cunning way of diverting attention away from the individual’s responsibility for their behaviour. Focusing on ‘the relationship’ is also a sneaky way of blaming the victim. It must be something that she did to provoke this. Had it not been for his relationship with her this wouldn’t have happened.
His defence also claimed that Hodnett’s cricket club and gym had been sent material about him but that he didn’t report this to police because he wanted to get on with his life. This simply serves to give him the moral high ground and indulge his ‘poor me syndrome’. Don’t fall for it, it’s nonsense. Hodnett had previously been cautioned for harassment in 2015, this was no bolt out of the blue.
In my recent research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Violence Against Women, I gave this behaviour a name – retributive omnipresence. Retributive omnipresence does not appear overnight in otherwise ‘normal’ men – it is a clear and defined stage in a pattern of misogynistic behaviour among those who have fixed, sexist ideas about who women are and how they should behave. It happens at the end of relationships characterised not by love, mutuality and respect but by control and coercion.
Separation represents the victim breaking away, taking back control, asserting agency and independence – which is the ultimate breach of his rules. This is not what a woman should do, because she is his, he calls the shots. Unable to control her under the guise of an intimate relationship, he changes the project. The aim is still control but the objective is now destruction.
The things that made the victim an independent woman who doesn’t need a man to survive and thrive came under attack. Her business. Her supportive relationships with family and friends. Her professional reputation. Her identity as a mother. Her success in recovery. These factors were the foundations upon which she built an identity as a strong, fulfilled, resilient human being. This wasn’t just about muddying her name, it was a venture to obliterate her personhood.
She felt he was trying to drive her to a breakdown through making her life a misery. She was absolutely right. Hodnett’s defence claimed that the victim made contact with Hodnett to discuss a reconciliation. If this was indeed the case, this comes as no surprise to me. When a perpetrator has chipped away at someone’s sense of self-worth to this degree, they become isolated, vulnerable and ultimately easier to control. They want to make it stop. They want to put the brakes on. They want the abuse to go away. ‘Going back’ becomes a rational option to keep themselves safe.
The determined way in which perpetrators set about destroying victims during retributive omnipresence is characteristic not only of their drive for control but of how neoliberal society encourages misogyny through its interpretation of ‘success’. Criminologists Steve Hall and Simon Winlow talk about Rousseau’s concept of amour propre—a competitive individual who gauges their accomplishments relative to the downfall and subjugation of others. These people are not satisfied simply by winning, but by the failure of others that their winning represents.
As a professional cricketer, Hodnett likes to win. As a misogynist, he likes women to fail. We must see offences like his for what they are. They are not ‘domestics’ in which hysterical women drive men of ‘good character’ to do terrible things. They are evidence that patriarchal, sexist value systems continue to thrive in cultures where the achievement of one is premised on the ruination of another.
References
Hall, S., & Winlow, S. (2018). Ultra-realism. In W. S. Dekeseredy & M. Dragiewicz (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical criminology (pp. 43–56). Routledge.
