Come rain, come shine, come sick children whenever my husband phoned I had to stop what I was doing, answer the phone and spend as long as he wanted to talk to me. Should I complain or say I had other things to do, he would hang up. I would panic and phone him back and apologise; his response was always dismissive. Why should he accept my apologies when he achieved what he wanted: A compliant, cowering wife, worried that he would leave her.
Originally his phone calls took place when his job took him away. My life revolved around when he would phone. I became an expert at time zones. When we lived in the USA on the West Coast, the East Coast was three hours ahead of us; the UK was eight hours ahead. Living in the UK, Europe one hour ahead, East Coast of the USA five hours behind, the West Coast eight hours behind, you get the picture. Where ever he was in the world, I mentally put myself on his time zone, that way I was prepared for his call.
After we moved back, I eventually had my own mobile phone. He didn’t just phone when his job took him away from home, but when he was working at the UK factory. Unless he was doing paperwork, he spent much of his time in the workshop. It was from there that he would phone, or when he went for a walk at lunchtime. I never knew when he was going to phone or on which phone. My life revolved around his calls.
The video calls started when we returned to the UK. These took place when he was away and would go on for hours. Not once a night, but twice a night. Dinner was sandwiched in between the two calls. It wasn’t every couple of nights, but every night he was away. I was asked the same questions each time we spoke. It was almost as though he didn’t believe me. I guess he didn’t.
It wasn’t only the phone calls he used to check up on me, but he also used to monitor my internet usage to see what sites I was looking at. Heaven help me if he saw that I had been looking at the acting career of an actor. He immediately assumed the worst. In his eyes the fact that I was looking at a picture of a man meant that I wanted to have an affair with him, thereby betraying him. The truth was that I was only looking at the career of a particular actor when I wanted to check what other TV shows or films they had been in. You know, when you think such and such an actor has been in a particular film, but aren’t quite sure, well that is when I checked. However he assumed the worst.
This jealous behaviour only happened in the later years when we had moved back to the UK and had unlimited internet. When we were living in the USA, we had dial-up and then satellite internet. The dial-up was slow and the satellite although faster we only had a limited amount of bandwidth we could use per month so I was careful what I looked at on the internet. Even so, he did check on what I was looking at, but it didn’t occur to me this was part of his control.
When he said he needed access to my then Yahoo email, the one I used for home schooling related activities, I gave it to him. Likewise, when he said he needed to know the lock screen pattern on my phone, I gave it to him. The reasons he gave were so believable. If anything happened to me he would need to be able to access them. Sounds reasonable, but it wasn’t; it was yet another part of the control he had over me.
My sons, having grown up with the internet, were far more tech savvy than me. They knew how to clear their browsing history and keep their phones away from their father. They also knew how to hide documents on their computers away from his prying eyes. I never did. My husband did though keep a lot of very strange documents on our main computer, ones that I only discovered after his death. From his perspective, it was a good thing that I never found them as they shed light on his true character and it would have alerted me to his true nature.
Technology is wonderful and in many ways it does make our lives easier. Of course, that does depend upon your perspective. What has happened with the advances in technology is that there are more ways for abusers to assert control. It be by constantly phoning you, checking what web pages you have been viewing or putting tracking devices in your vehicle.
The phrase cyberstalking has entered our language. Cyberstalking is abuse. Monitoring your email is part of it, so is checking your social media profiles and posting to them. As is sending you threatening emails, instant messaging, and texts. The abuser may also post on social media intimate photos or videos of you without your permission. They might also resort to hidden cameras, GPS locators and spyware. This is abuse. I was never subjected to this type of abuse apart from him having access to my email. When he was alive, I wasn’t on social media. Having the knowledge that my husband loved all things technical it would have only been a matter of time before I was subjected to this kind of abuse.
The opportunity for me to stand up to my husband and stop his abuse never arrived. What it doesn’t do is stop me from speaking out about the various aspects of abuse that I was subjected to and how they evolved. Technological abuse is one that is evolving, but the more we are aware of it, the more we can protect ourselves and take the power away from the abuser.