CCChat-Magazine_5

Sophia Cooke
"Overall, I think things are on the up,
which I used to believe would never be possible."
PhD student
Sophia Cooke
featured in the
November edition
of CCChat
magazine. she had
recently come out
of a very abusive
relationship and
her ex partner had
subsequently sold
his account of their
relationship to the
papers.
The account I
heard from Sophia
was markedly
different,
alarmingly so. She
released a blog
and a voice
recording of her
experience of the
relationship.
Here Sophia writes
about the
aftermath to
releasing the blog .
R
eleasing
my blog was one of the scariest
things I have ever done. I had no idea how it
would be received and, having had the
experience of the trial and being in the
papers, I was not particularly hopeful.
However, having been silenced and unfairly judged, I had to speak,
regardless of the consequences. I wanted people to understand how
abuse worked and what I had been through. Fortunately the reaction
was better than I could have ever imagined and I cannot express my
gratitude enough for the support I received.
I have had a huge number of emails from other women who have
suffered similar experiences, saying how much reading my blog
helped them to understand what they had gone through, and emails
from friends of abuse sufferers, telling me reading it helped them to
provide better support.
This gave me a lot more confidence and helped me to feel that at least
something good had come out of it all. However, the feeling of being so
let down and badly treated - by the justice system, the media, my
institution and by individuals who didn’t understand abuse or the effect
their judgement of me had - has continued to haunt me.
I have felt throughout that I wanted to try and improve support for
those who suffer domestic abuse and to work for change in the
system. In fact, some days that was all that got me through - I needed
to feel there was a point to everything I had gone through.
This led me to apply to become the Graduate Women’s Officer at my
new college at Cambridge, which I moved to in October. Unfortunately
some aspects of the way in which my former college handled the
situation made it much harder for me to cope with it, partly because
they had no system in place to deal with something like this. I therefore
decided to work on establishing a policy at my new college to support
students who suffer domestic abuse.
I set up a group of staff, students and external experts to look at this
and so far it is going very well. I have also been asked to speak at
several domestic abuse conferences around the country as well as
training events for police and support staff which I am very excited
about. Overall, I think things are on the up, which I used to believe
would never be possible.
2018 is the Year For Making The Invisible Visible