From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Chinese wall
n. A barrier, especially one that seriously hinders communication or understanding: "still believe a Chinese wall can exist between public and private selves" (Gail Sheehy).
From Investopedia:
Chinese wall
The ethical (not physical) barrier between different divisions of a financial (or other) institution to avoid conflict of interest... The "wall" is thrown up to prevent leaks of corporate inside information, which could influence the advice given to clients making investments, and allow staff to take advantage of facts that are not yet known to the general public.
I'm going to be talking about a Chinese wall in an entirely different sense here, a sense that I'd actually not heard used in this context before now.
What follows below the fold is a story that was told to me by a follow member of the Daily Kos community in a series of emails over the past week.
The words in blockquotes are hers. All I have done is edit to remove any detail that I felt could potentially aid in identifying her.
It's a long story. Part 2 will be posted next weekend.
My father died when I was 10. I did not know he was dying, and was completely blindsided when he did.
Maybe I'd have been safer and grown up smarter about what relationships should be if Dad had lived, but I'll never really know. One reason why I think that: when my mother was pregnant with me, Dad built a nursery onto the house. The easy thing would have been to turn the carport into a bedroom, and moved the two older kids into the bigger rooms and put me in the smaller of the two original children's rooms. But Dad didn't do that -- it was built beyond Mom and Dad's, which required pouring a new foundation. So literally, my brother and sister had to go through their bedroom to get to mine. Why this is significant: my sister remembers my brother doing all sorts of weird things to terrorize her, and verbally abusing her. But she never said anything to anyone, and didn't think Dad knew. I think he did -- he wasn't dumb. I think he built on that room the way he did to protect me. I know he kicked my brother out of the house at one point, two years before he died, but Mom let him come back home. I really believe Dad would have done everything in his power to keep my drunk, coked-up brother away from me. Mom just made excuses and papered everything over. I couldn't tell her the truth, she wouldn't have believed me.
I was at a very vulnerable point when I met the guy who abused me and forced me to abandon my identity and everything else in order to protect myself. I’d gone through a very difficult period, and my circumstances had forced me to move home with my mother and older brother, who were never the most supportive people in the world. My brother was still verbally abusive to me when I moved back home. I had nowhere else to go at that time, and wanted to get out of that house as fast as I could.
And god, did I ever pick a bad way out -- yep, you guessed it, a relationship with a real loser. Thank god I didn't marry this creep -- he was sexually and emotionally very abusive. It didn't take long for the situation to start deteriorating, because he was a control freak with a knife fetish. I did manage to get out of it before I was actually physically hit, but it was a very near thing. I'd gone to visit my mom, who had just had surgery, to see how she was doing, and to see if she needed me to help her with anything. When I got back home, he was absolutely ballistic, and on the phone with a friend of mine. She asked to speak with me, so he handed the phone over to me. The first words out of her mouth were "Don't react in a bad way, just stay normal and tell me how your mom is doing. But you have got to get out of there and away from this guy before you're found lying in a pool of your own blood." I made like we were having chit-chat while she proceeded to tell me some of the scary shit she had been hearing.
- One in twelve women and one in 45 men are stalked during their lifetime.
- One million women are stalked each year.
- 87% of stalkers are male. 94% of female victims have male stalkers, and 60% of male victims have male stalkers.
- 59% of female victims and 30% of male victims are stalked by an intimate partner.
- 81% of women stalked by a former intimate partner were also physically assaulted, and 31% were also sexually assaulted by that partner.
- 76% of female murder victims are stalked by a [former] intimate partner in the year prior to the murder.
I didn't emerge completely unscathed, because after I got off the phone, he started in on me about not being home to cook his supper and how I neglected him. The bastard stood over me with his fist clenched and drawn back on a direct course for my cheekbone. Something inside me just rose up on its hind legs, and I said "It takes a really big man to hit a woman." It then turned into a shoving match, during which I told him I wasn't going to tolerate this kind of behavior, ever. I was pretty mad myself, and unfortunately I'd completely forgotten my friend's warning at this point. I then turned and went to the kitchen, saying "I'm hungry and I'm going to cook dinner." He followed me into the kitchen, snatched a glass mixing bowl out of the cabinet and threw it on the hard floor at my bare feet. There was glass everywhere, and he refused to clean it up. I literally had to tiptoe over to the laundry closet to get the broom and dustpan so I could continue to cook without cutting up my feet.
Over the next couple of days, while I planned my escape with the help of a couple of friends (he hadn't managed to isolate me completely yet), he kept up a patter of talk that essentially deprived me of all sleep, then faked acute appendicitis so I'd take him to the ER. He was just sick enough to really need one, besides the surgeon said he did it just to shut the asshole up and minimize the chance of a neglect lawsuit. It gave me my chance to escape, and I went to a shelter.
I went back to work after a few days at the shelter, at the insistence of my employer and over the strong objections of the shelter staff, once I had the temporary restraining order in hand. My supervisor, bless her, kept me back in the stockroom as much as possible and away from the phone. The phone harassment started early and turned me into a total nervous wreck. After a few months of this, and violations of the TRO and a year-long restraining order that never quite landed him in jail, I had had enough. I packed up my stuff, put it out to friends that I was moving back home over money issues, and left the state with my cats and as many clothes and kitchen and bedding essentials as I could cram into my compact car.
- About half of all stalking is reported to law enforcement. Only about 25% of the cases that are reported result in the stalker being arrested.
- 12% of reported stalking cases end up being criminally prosecuted.
- 25% of female stalking victims and 10% of male stalking victims obtain protective orders.
- 69% of females and 81% of males with protective orders report that their stalkers violate the protective orders.
It still didn't end, a couple handfuls of states away. After the year-long restraining order expired, he went to a crooked private investigator and got the address header off my credit report. Apparently he'd stolen one of my old pay stubs with my social security number on it before I threw his stuff onto the curb. I only found out because I called an old friend on her birthday. The first words out of her mouth were "He knows where you are, and no-one has seen him in two weeks. Watch out."
- Although stalking victims experience intense fear, less than half are directly threatened by their stalker.
- 26% of victims lose time from work.
- 7% of victims are unable to return to work.
- Stalking victims are more likely than the general population to suffer from anxiety, insomnia, social dysfunction, and severe depression, particularly when the stalking involves being followed or having one’s personal property destroyed.
It was at that point that I decided to take drastic measures: I built a Chinese wall. Every lawyer ought to know what that term means. I essentially tore my identity up and started over. My Social Security benefits from the pre-wall period are lost to me, I'm sure. Credit -- gone, and had to be rebuilt from scratch. Sold the newish compact car my mom had helped me buy and bought a nondescript clunker -- after all, the abuser might have copied down the VIN, and you can't change those legally.
To be continued...
Stalking stats are from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.