Jennifer O’Connell: ‘How are victims of domestic violence supposed to seek help now?’

She walks the dog most days. Head bowed against the wind, the leash grasped tightly. She walks in a loop around the town where she lives, eyes on the path. The dog – a cloud of toffee-coated joy – bounds beside her.

On weekends, they walk it together in perfect lockstep. They hold hands, but they walk in silence. A brisk, determined circuit, and then back inside the home where the blinds were always drawn.

I saw her often, but I never knew her name.

One evening, she was there on the usual route – not walking, but sitting on the verge in the fading light, the dog beside her, her forehead pressed to her knees. She was crying: hard, rasping sobs, the kind that do not want to be left alone to abate in privacy.

It was just a fall, she said. Just a fall that happened as she was running away. Just a fall after he pushed her. Just a fall that left her with a limp. She didn’t want the police called. She didn’t want anyone called. She didn’t want a cup of tea. She didn’t want to go home. She nodded wordlessly when I told her where to find me, if she ever needed someone.

A car passed, stopped a few yards away, and circled back. He was in a suit. He nodded. “Come on now,” he said. “Come on back.”

She stood. She walked – limped – to the car. “Thanks,” he called over. Then he drove her home, back to the house where the blinds were always drawn.

It was almost unbearable: that slick nod, the gruff “thanks”, my shameful silence. Just like that, he and I became complicit.

Confused complicity

They count on that, the men and women who push and shove and hit and grab. They gamble on the confused complicity of neighbours who hear too much and say too little, or the friends who suspect, but don’t ask. They carry on with the tacit blessing of a society that decides what goes on behind drawn blinds, or in locker rooms, is just “guys being guys”.

As of last week, that blessing stopped being merely tacit.

Trump's treatment of women presumably didn't win him the election: the factors that enabled him to bulldoze a path to the White House have as much to do with class as gender or race. But it didn't hurt. His bragging about sexual assault; his threats to roll back reproductive rights; his use of words like "nasty", "pigs", "dogs" and "disgusting" to describe women; his slobbering over his own daughter; the accusation that he has assaulted many women – none of it hurt at all. Fifty three per cent of white women voted for him anyway. Sixty million Americans voted for a man who sees women as accessories to his ego, receptacles for his lust, mouths to be kissed, p*****s to be grabbed.

The message this sends to girls and women everywhere is clear: know your place. Put up and shut up. The commissioner of the US National Football League (NFL), Roger Goodell, acknowledged this the day after the election, when he said the result would make it harder to reduce domestic violence in the league. That's true in the NFL, in the US, everywhere.

Already, you can feel the sands shifting. Mel Gibson, ostracised six years ago after a spate of racist and misogynistic hate speech – including recordings in which he threatened to burn his then-partner's house and then bury her under the rose garden – is back and being tipped for an Oscar. Johnny Depp's rehabilitation was quicker again: he is to be cast again in the second Fantastic Beasts movie, accusations, by Amber Heard, of abuse already behind him.

Reporting abuse

But Trump isn’t just another out-of-control actor. His misogyny was calculated, even ramped up, to appeal to a certain type of voter. And appeal it did, more than 60 million times.

Just like that, we can abandon the idea that gender equality is real, or even close to becoming realised. If it was difficult for women to report abuse or assault before, imagine how much tougher it will be now, not just in the US, but everywhere.

In this country, Women’s Aid heard more than 22,000 complaints of abuse of women and children in 2015. Those are just the women who made the call, and who got through. Men are the victims of domestic abuse too, of course: one Irish charity received 6,500 calls from male victims in 2014. How are any of those victims supposed to feel safe now? How are they supposed to seek help in a world where sexual aggression is something future presidents brag about; where that brand of frenzied, white, hyper-masculinity is in danger of becoming normalised? It has begun already: in the US there has been a spate of hate crimes against Muslims, Latinos and African Americans.

And who knows what is happening behind those closed blinds.

I never saw her on her own again, after that time. But I did see them together on a few subsequent occasions. He always nodded “hello”. I always looked away.

Next time, I won’t look away.