Sex was a duty of marriage and if you didn’t do it, then you would get your face punched in

A DOMESTIC abuse survivor has spoken of the years of ‘torture’ inflicted upon her by her former husband which left her ‘a total mess’.

‘Claire’ (not her real name) spoke out after a recent analysis of Dublin Metropolitan District data revealed the number of barring order breaches more than doubled in 2020, with only a fraction resulting in convictions.

The number of Section 33 charges – those which deal with barring order breaches – jumped from 428 involving

296 persons in 2019, to 968 involving 644 persons in 2020. More than eight-in-ten (82%) of these resulted in no conviction.

Recalling her own harrowing experience, Claire told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘A barring order meant nothing to that man. It was only a piece of paper. He tore it up when we came out of court.

‘He came back [at a later date], came through the house, smashed the house up. I had the police there. We got another barring order and he got a suspended prison sentence of three months.

‘He continued to break the barring order and then he broke into my house with a woman on Christmas Day.

‘He was in my bed with her. The police were called again. Six of them had to escort him out of the house.’

Claire said the abuse had started before their ‘shotgun wedding’ when she was 17, and then continued ‘right through until our marriage ended when I was 31’.

‘The violence was on a continual basis,’ she said.

‘It would happen if he was drunk, if he wasn’t, if he had no money or if he was in bad form.

‘Violence, rape, anything. Sex was like a marriage duty and that was it. And if you didn’t, you’d get your face punched in.

‘If he saw me speaking to anyone while I was in work, even a customer I was serving, I got it on the way home.

‘I was being too friendly to people. He treated me like a piece of s***.

‘It was torture, because you’re living on your nerves all the time. You don’t know what mood he’s going to come home in, you don’t know if you’re going to get beaten tonight. You don’t know if you’re going to have to leave your home.’

Claire eventually fled to a refuge hostel in England with the couple’s two children. She was followed by her husband, but she managed to evade him until she had to return to Dublin to avoid losing her home.

‘I went to London [where her husband was then working] to try to get him to stay there.

‘He didn’t beat me up that time but he held a shotgun to my head.

‘He frogmarched me from his flat in London to the airport, and bought a ticket for himself.

‘He dragged me back to Ireland and held me prisoner in the house for over two weeks. It ended up with me talking him into going back to work in England. So he went back to London that time.’

She eventually secured a 12-month barring order around this time, which her husband breached repeatedly, turning it into a three-year barring order – which he continually breached over the next number of years.

‘The courts were an absolute disaster,’ says Claire.

‘I ended up in court on New Year’s Eve one time [applying for a protection order, which precedes a barring order]. I was standing there with two black eyes, and my husband beside me half drunk. And the judge shouted at me, “You go home and make your marriage work.”

‘I remember saying to the judge, “I’ll be in the hostel before 6 o’clock.” And I was, because I couldn’t go home.’

Priscilla Grainger, who runs the frontline support group Stop Domestic Violence in Ireland with her daughter Ainie, said it is too difficult for abuse victims to get barring orders in courts.

‘Your head would want to be hanging off you to get a barring order,’ she told the MoS. ‘Some of the judges won’t give them. They need to retrain, they need to upskill.

‘They need to be more assertive and aware about domestic violence.

‘Some just don’t believe that a barring order is necessary, so they’ll give a protection order until the safety order hearing is heard. Which means the perpetrator and the victim are living in the same house.

‘If the judge sees fit, they will grant a safety order to the victim but that’s not worth the paper it’s written on.

‘The abuser will just tell the victim, “Go f*** yourself.”

‘Barring order meant nothing to him’

‘I was held prisoner for over two weeks’

‘Or they’re at home and they ring the guards. They eventually get the guards and they say, “No, that’s not a breach. He or she didn’t do anything.”

‘But this is a guard that doesn’t have a notion about domestic violence or any training in domestic violence.

‘Sometimes we’d have to go to another station where we know they’re more experienced with domestic violence.

‘Then you have to wait to get back into court. You could be waiting two years to get back into court for the hearing of the breach of an order.’

Claire says her husband, who is now deceased, eventually left her alone after becoming involved with another woman.

She added: ‘And I’d met someone else who was bigger than him.’