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Buffy the Vampire Abuser?

© Ellen Ross

When the character of Spike was originally introduced during the second season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," viewers were immediately captivated by Spike's strangely tender relationship with the insane vampire Drusilla. Although Spike was an unrepentant evil vampire, who bragged that he had killed two slayers, he was passionately protective of the vulnerable Dru.

Although we saw only brief hints of it, it was made clear that Spike and Dru's relationship included the mutual enjoyment of violence, both toward others and toward one another. They were soulless vampires, after all.... but, as Dru said several years later, vampires can love, "well, if not wisely."

When Buffy and Spike began their sexual relationship this season, it appeared that Buffy was becoming more like one of the vampires than one of the humans. Spike told her that she had "come back wrong," since his implanted electronic restraint chip no longer recognized her as human and off-limits, and this played into her deepest fears. She felt increasingly isolated from her friends, and Spike encouraged that isolation and worked to separate Buffy even further from her "Scooby gang," in a tactic well-known to abusive boyfriends and husbands around the world.

Viewers wondered whether Buffy or Spike was really the abuser. It has already been established (in the "Angel" episode "Sanctuary," among other references) that slayers are physically stronger than vampires. Buffy certainly does not fit the classic model of a victim of domestic violence. In their encounters, Buffy was the more aggressive of the two, initiating both sex and violence, and she constantly reminded Spike that he was evil and worthless - another classic maneuver of an abuser seeking to make a partner helpless and dependent by tearing down the partner's self-esteem. She made it abundantly clear that she was ashamed of her sexual attraction to Spike, assuring him repeatedly that she had only contempt for him, and despised herself for being with him. In many ways, each of them was an abuser, and each a victim of abuse.

The mutual abuse reached a nauseating peak when Buffy viciously battered an unresisting Spike, who was trying to keep her from turning herself in to the police for a crime she did not commit. In the process of trying to do the right thing, what she perceived to be the moral thing - surrendering herself to the authorities - Buffy ultimately shocked herself with her own behavior toward Spike, recognizing consciously for the first time that she had been mistreating him as well as herself. She ended the episode overwhelmed with guilt, begging Tara to tell her what was wrong with her and not to forgive her.