Gaby admits she has bad OCD-Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Brian not putting things in their proper place was upsetting her.
Snipped for focus. Lots of people
say they have OCD, but they don't really have that diagnosis. It's just how they describe being a neat and organized person and being very bothered by messes. I don't think Gabby's family has mentioned whether she actually had that diagnosis or not, right? Just wanted to point this out. She may actually be diagnosed OCD, or it may just be how she self-deprecatingly describes her quirks, or it may be how BL belittles her neatness if he is a messy person. Just don't want us to take the OCD as fact, in case she is using it as a way of speaking rather than an actually personality disorder that she's been diagnosed with.
Unrelated, but the scratches, and the way the police and journalists automatically assumed they meant GP was the aggressor (not to mention the way BL quickly showed them off) are bothering me.
Seminal domestic violence scholar Michael P. Johnson described the different kinds of violence involved in relationships. Although popular culture usually regards physical violence as the worst, most unforgivable kind, Johnson differentiated what he calls "intimate partner terrorism" and another excellent DV scholar, Evan Stark, calls "coercive control" as by far the most dangerous and most likely to lead to fatality.
Johnson also describes the following 2 types of violence that I feel may be a factor here:
2.1.2. Violent resistance
Many victims of intimate terrorism do respond with violence of their own. For some, this is an instinctive reaction to being attacked, and it happens at the first blow—almost without thought. For others, it doesn't happen until it seems that the assaults will continue forever if something isn't done to stop them. For most women in heterosexual relationships, the size difference between them and their male partner ensures that violent resistance won't help, and may make things worse, so they turn to other means of coping. For a few, eventually it seems that the only way out is to kill their partner.
2.1.3. Situational couple violence
This is violence that is not part of a general pattern of coercive control, but rather occurs when couple conflicts become arguments that turn to aggression that becomes violent. It is by far the most common form of intimate partner violence, and also the most variable. Somewhere around 40% of the cases identified in general surveys involve only one relatively minor incident, but many cases do involve chronic and/or serious, even life-threatening, violence. In contrast to intimate terrorism, situational couple violence does not involve an attempt on the part of one partner to gain general control over the other, and unlike intimate terrorism and violent resistance it is roughly gender-symmetric in terms of perpetration. The violence is situationally-provoked, as the tensions or emotions of a particular encounter lead one or both of the partners to resort to violence.
Gender and types of intimate partner violence: A response to an anti-feminist literature review - ScienceDirect
When people are completely powerless in a situation, it is not at all uncommon for them to use minor violence such as scratching and slapping. I'm not saying it's right, only that it's frequent for that minor violence to be twisted by perpetrators and systems to frame the primary aggressor as the "real victim" and the victim as the perpetrator. I cannot tell you how frequently I see this in the real world. In fact, here in Colorado, we had a state rep whose female family member was taken to jail for DV because her partner had scratches on him and she appeared to have no wounds. Her politically powerful relative advocated for her to be taken to the hospital and medically examined. (A person who wasn't related to a state rep would have never succeeded in this request, but fortunately, it was granted.) At the hospital, damage to her throat indicative of strangulation was discovered. It was proven that her partner had strangled
her (strangulation is the form of DV most predictive of lethality according to the research:
Prevalence of strangulation in survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence - ScienceDirect ) and the scratches were defensive wounds from her fighting for her life. Yet she was deemed the abuser and taken to jail.
Obviously there's a lot we don't know yet, but I see dynamics I recognize from years of work and study in the DV field--and let's recognize only one party is up and vanished with a high likelihood of being dead, and it's not BL.
