“A man has been sentenced to life after admitting decades of sexual abuse against a woman and her older sister. The woman increased her weight by nearly 10 stone to repel Peter Tweed, the court was told. After the ploy failed the woman, who is in her 30s, told police about the way she — and her sister — had been abused by Peter Tweed from the mid 1970s. Tweed, 48, of Ramsey, Cambs, who admitted 21 offences, was sentenced by Peterborough Crown Court on Tuesday. Prosecutor William Redgrave said Tweed was a ‘bullying, controlling, violent sexual predator’ who put tape around the woman’s door frame so he would know if she had gone out while he was away. ‘(The woman) became a sexual plaything. In effect a puppet for Peter Tweed to act out his increasingly unpleasant charades,’ he added. The woman and her sister were daughters of a friend of Tweed, the court was told. The abuse had started when the woman was aged around eight and her sister around 12 and continued until the last few years. Prosecutor William Redgrave said the woman’s sister moved away when she was in her late teens. But the woman had remained under the control of Tweed into her mid 30s. Mr Redgrave added: ‘She put on more and more weight in the hope that it would stop Peter Tweed being interested in her sexually. By 2002 — after she had weighed nine stones when she was a teenager — she had gone up to 19-and-a-half stones.’” — BBC (UK)

Here is a mug shot of Mr. Tweed, and here is another picture of him on the street. It’s no wonder he was a lifelong rapist, since he couldn’t have gotten many girls with a creepy face like that. He looks like an alcholic bachelor from the 1970s — the very decade in which he began to abuse his two victims. Perhaps he wanted to stop time somehow.

At any rate, two things about this case leap out at you. First, it’s hard to understand how any person could allow herself to be manipulated for decades. Imagine that — an adult woman still subject to a regime of rape that began in her childhood. It attests to precisely how powerful routines of coercion and control can be. A friend likes to tell how you can’t throw a frog into boiling water without it trying to jump out, but if you put a frog into a pot of lukewarm water and then slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will never try to save itself. Evidently this situation must have been the same. The abuse carried on for so long that the woman found herself in a boiling pot that she never would have tolerated as an adult.

The second interesting point about the case is the woman’s attempt to repel her abuser by making herself obese. It’s not an unusual strategy among people suffering from longterm abuse. They get fat, stop bathing, wear dirty clothes, make themselves ugly in every way they can in a desperate effort to rid themselves of their oppressor. It’s common enough — and knowing that, knowing that ugliness is sometimes a symptom of abuse, can certainly alter your perspective. When you find yourself on a crowded bus or airplane and a fat person is trying to squeeze his cellulite into the seat beside you, maybe you’ll reign in your contempt, your disgust, your internal comments about how that person should leave off with the french fries and cake. How do you know the person next to you isn’t ugly but rather attractive — too attractive — to someone he wishes he could disgust?

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