Content warning: This post deals with domestic violence, and may be triggering for some readers.
Today, Valentine’s Day, people everywhere will be gifted with red roses.
Vases will be fetched from cupboards, and promptly filled with water.
For most accounts, that will be an act of love and celebration – one that acknowledges a caring, happy, vibrant relationship.
But that will not be everybody today.
For some, the flowers they will receive do not represent brightness. They represent something far more sinister. Something powerful in its darkness and brutality. Something menacing and breathlessly cruel.
For some, flowers represent ‘Sorry’ for the violence of the night before.
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It was Tuesday, September 25, 2012, and Simone O’Brien was steeling herself to break off her engagement with Glenn Cable, a local real estate agent she met online.
From the exterior, the pair from Horsham, in Victoria’s west, were a happy couple. Glenn was affectionate and, from time to time, would show this materially as most partners do; promising his fiancée handbags and dinner dates. Despite Glenn’s displays of ‘love’, Simone was uneasy.
“I just had this gut feeling that I had to get out of the relationship,” Simone tells me some four years on. “Money was being stolen, the messages and contacts on my phone were being deleted, I was blaming my son that he had lost his technology and games – but it turns out he [Cable] was taking them and selling them.”
Top Comments
What can I do to have people think about the fact that wives and same sex partners can be violent (physically and emotionally) and manipulative? This flower thing once again underscores the dangerous falicy that only men commit DV and only women are victims. For the sake of the one third of hetero victims that are male and the significant issue of same sex partner violence (men and women) this has to stop. Please, from a male victim.
Why do men stay with abusive women?
Agree. I have known 2 couples, where the wives were the abusers. I also dont like the fact that there is no shelters for male victims.
Why do women stay with abusive men?
It's awful & really more needs to be done, I don't understand why the different awareness campaigns etc cannot be all encompassing.
I realised a few years ago that almost ALL males that I know (friends & family) have been victims of DV at some stage, with the female being the perpetrator. That's just taking into account physical violence & for many it occurred in public where people just watched on or raised an eye brow & went back to their business - not one of them had someone step in or say something. I've even had a female (ex) friend BRAGGING about giving her boyfriend a black eye & was LAUGHING about it! I stood up for him & told her exact how disgusting it was & that she seriously need to go into anger management but I just got an eye roll & giggle in response.
Not enough is done to raised awareness of how vast this issue is.
Hugs Simone. I'm glad he's put away and you get to live free of him. xx