Those So Blind They Cannot See

What is it about some women that they will allow themselves to be viciously abused in an odious relationship with a man whom they convince themselves loves them. They have become so dependent on that man that regardless of the insults he lavishes on them, the mistreatment, the violence, the women forgive all.

They think only of the times of calm, when there is no rage to contend with, when the man is temporarily quiet and at rest.

When they can pretend that all is well. When the woman convinces herself yet again that she is cherished.

Despite the bruises on her body, the lumps on her darkened soul, she will convince herself that this man who takes such a perverse pleasure in attacking her both verbally and physically truly loves her. She receives the pain with the stoicism of the martyr. She is loved and that is all that matters.

Even when the man, a nasty hoodlum like Jermaine Gillespie, who took his sadism to new levels by showing her videos of himself having sex with other women, no doubt appreciating her anguished wounds, she still loved him. How much can she have loved their six-year-old child to allow that child to live in such an abusive environment?

The little girl, old enough to see her parents' violent encounters, the vicious behaviour of her father toward her mother, her mother's placating of her father, will have been scarred for life. Even without having witnessed her mother stabbing her father fatally in a last fit of anger-induced desperation to have him stop tormenting her.

Surely Melissa Lewis is delusional to think her love would impact on Germaine Gillespie to the extent that he would finally become a decent human being, recant the horrible things he said to her, grieve for the harm he had done her and their child.

Was she so insecure as a woman, as a human being that she could act the masochist without understanding what she was becoming?