CCChat-Magazine_Issue-25-The-Further-Learning-Issue

After about a year of volunteering, a
paid position came up within that
same refuge and I applied and I got it.
The rest, as they say is history!
M: Did you ever hear back from him,
after his prison sentence?
He was hiding in the wardrobe in the
bedroom and when I came back, he
jumped out. He had a knife and
stabbed me and this all happened in
front of our daughter who was two and
a half at the time. Luckily, it went
through my hand, as I put my hand out
to protect myself, but it severed the
nerves in my hand and I had to go to a
hospital in London which specialised
in micro surgery. After that, he was
obviously arrested. The trial was at the
Old Bailey in 1988 and he received 6
and a half year sentence and that kind
of gave me the time to get myself
sorted out. I was moved by the council,
to the house I am in now, before he
came out of prison. About 10 years
later, I saw an advertisement in a local
paper, for a refuge worker and I
thought, very naively, that I could do
this, because I’d been through
domestic violence, so I applied for the
job. I didn’t get it but the manager of
the refuge called me and said that I
should volunteer at my local refuge
and get to know everything about it
and so that’s what I did.
S: Oh yes, when he was in prison he
got himself a solicitor and applied for
contact with our daughter and I was
forced to take my small child into
prison to see him. Basically the court
said that if I didn’t, I would be in
breach of a court order and so I had to
take my child into prison to see her
father. He didn’t want to see her, it was
his way of getting to me, to try and
stop me from getting a divorce, to try
and get me back. He wasn’t really
interested in our daughter.
When he did come out of prison, she
was about five, because he didn’t do six
and a half years, he did about 2 ¾
because he had already served a year
on remand. She had supervised
contact with him for a while and then I
was persuaded to let it be
unsupervised. She didn’t particularly
want to go, but it happened and
contact went on and then when she
was about 11, her behaviour became
very difficult.
To cut a long story short, she told our
GP that she was experiencing
emotional and physical abuse from her
father. She would say she wanted to go
to the toilet and he would say no and
make her sit there until he let her go,
so then she would have an accident
and then he would hit her for having
the accident. At that point I went back
to court and contact was stopped but
the damage was done and she was
diagnosed with PTSD. She was 11 years
old.
Making The Invisible Visible