Why are we so obsessed with this process?
Van Mieghem: “One in seven women and one in five men is a victim of intimate partner violence. So on the one hand, many people are dealing with it themselves and are therefore interested. On the other hand, it’s also just bread and play, a bit of a Greek tragedy. People who are not in such a situation themselves have a hard time imagining what it is. And now you get to see all the juicy details. We can gloat in the suffering of another.
“That smoothness also works very well with films. Think of The War of the Roses with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. In it, a couple kills each other to the bone to achieve what they want. That is pure sensation. I’ve seen some videos of the process myself, but once I realized how polarized it was, I gave up. I don’t like that culture where we throw everything on the street. That total lack of privacy is not good for them and makes them even more vulnerable.”
Doesn’t the process help to remove partner violence from the taboo sphere?
“Intimate violence is certainly still a taboo. But I don’t feel like the process is breaking that taboo. On the contrary. Due to its overt nature and the fact that society can act as a jury, people will see partner violence even more as something isolated and special. As something exceptional that only happens to rich movie stars, when it is actually rife. I think that just reinforces the taboo.
“Also for Amber Heard and Johnny Depp personally, I don’t think it’s right to conduct the process so publicly. Everyone has something to say about them. They will both come out battered, no matter what the verdict will be. The fact that a man comes out as a victim is, of course, groundbreaking. That doesn’t happen so easily, so it might be positive in that area.”
What impacted you most about the process?
“Amber Heard’s movies. I immediately thought: this is intimate terrorism. Thirty percent of intimate partner violence is intimate terrorism, in which the perpetrator often has a developmental disorder. When I see her, I see ten different masks between which she switches every second. How she speaks of him is total psychological humiliation.
“I read that she would have borderline, and that doesn’t surprise me. Someone with borderline has a huge fear of being abandoned. They really need the other in their entire circus. Someone said to me: ‘He presents himself badly.’ But no, she’s not bad at all. She is who she is, and that is totally unpredictable. It was very scary to watch her.”
At the same time, you plead for empathy for the perpetrator. How far can you go in that?
“Just writing off Heard as a perpetrator is too oversimplified for me. Seventy percent of intimate partner violence is mutual. What you see are two damaged people further damaging each other.
“A perpetrator does not just become a perpetrator. You are not born that way. Becoming a perpetrator is often a survival response to an injury that was done to you during your childhood. Traumatized people end up in a triangle in which they can easily switch roles between victim, rescuer and perpetrator. They only know that language and it is therefore difficult for them to enter into relationships outside that triangle. And so they pass it on from generation to generation.
“So you can no longer speak of guilt in the long run. Heard and Depp both need therapy. I know that if they each worked on it separately, they would come out much happier. But I do see a lot more debt insight with Depp than with Heard.”
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