‘Can we have an ambulance please, my daddy has just attacked my mammy’ The sickening domestic abuse epidemic gripping Wales – by those who survived
in two places, requiring her to use a wheelchair for months. She was in the early stages of pregnancy at the time. He knew this.
This was the first time her partner had been violent towards her, but the emotional abuse directed at her was already taking its toll. A few months into the relationship, the facade of the “perfect man” he had presented himself as at the start had started to crumble as he called Emma names and quarrels would lead to him screaming just inches away from her face. Any disagreement would turn into a battle.
“It [the relationship] started off quite fastmoving. He liked everything I liked, it was like he was the perfect man. And then he started saying he couldn’t live without me, love-bombing. We moved in together, we got engaged, I was quite keen to get married, but I wasn’t in a rush to get married. And then we bought a bigger house. In this time, there was a lot of coercive behaviour.”
By this point he was buying her clothes he wanted her to wear, starting to limit aspects of her social life.
Despite the obvious emotional abuse, the first violent incident came in early 2017, after the pair had been watching rugby in the pub with their friends. Emma had just found out she was pregnant with her second child, her first with her partner.
“We went to the rugby and had a lovely time. I’d just found out I was pregnant. But, before that, I’d had numerous miscarriages. Absolutely numerous, to the point of having to be hospitalised for one of them. So I was just ecstatic. I was ecstatic.”
As the pair arrived home, Emma said there was a supermarket food delivery waiting for them which she asked him to help her take in.
“Obviously I didn’t want to do anything to risk the pregnancy because, well, my miscarriages were in the double figures by that point probably, so I asked if he could help me carry it in and he told me to ‘F off you, stupid c***’. He was screaming and shouting abuse, it was constant verbal attacks.”
The mother from Swansea says to this day she still doesn’t know what triggered him to make this night different to any others. It wasn’t the fact he had been drinking.
“He was equally nasty sober as he was drunk,” she said. “I had my phone in my hands, he grabbed the phone and flung it, it bounced off the wall and completely smashed. He charged in and grabbed me. His hands were on my neck, on my shoulders and he was just shaking me like a rag doll.
“He was violently shaking me, to the point
where I felt like my teeth rattling. My daughter jumped on his back to get him off and he sent her flying.
“He was shaking me so violently that I lost my footing and my ankle snapped. As I yelped in pain it didn’t scare him to stop, he just carried on. It snapped up the bone and across the bone. And then he just went back into the bedroom, our bedroom, as if nothing had happened.
“I was on the floor in agony, absolute agony. My daughter got my phone and rang for an ambulance and that’s when he started again as you can hear on the call.”
The 999 call handler sent police to the home and he was arrested and released the following day as Emma decided not to press charges against him.
“The police officer did ask me to press charges and consider it, but obviously I was in shock. I didn’t know what to do. I was embarrassed, I was in shock. I was in shock for a long time. I couldn’t believe what had happened,” she said. “I didn’t tell anybody. I was so embarrassed.
“I’ve run through the whole night. What could they have done to upset him? What would have triggered him? We had some quite nasty namecalling and things like that, but nothing to this degree. For at least six months after, I kept going over it.”
After the first violent incident happened, the emotional abuse and coercive control continued. By this point, she had started to hide money away should she need to leave him.
While survivors of domestic abuse have been documenting the signs of coercive control for decades, it was only officially considered a crime in 2015 under Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act. Coercive behaviour offences that reached a first hearing at magistrates’ court rose 38,400% from just five in the first year of the act to 1,925 for the year between April 2021 and March 2022.
Again, millions of people will silently experience this type of abuse. Emma and, by now, her two children were subjected to this for another year before the next violent attack happened, the day before her 40th birthday after a disagreement about his attitude towards her at a family BBQ.
“He grabbed me and hit my head against a TV that was mounted on the wall. He got on top of me and he started hammering my head. As I was trying to fight him off, he banged his head on the corner of the table. And then he just hammered and hammered and hammered my head.
“I could see her [child’s] face, she was going to try to jump on him again. And I shouted, ‘Don’t get involved’, as he was hammering my head on the floor, she was screaming. So much so, that one of the neighbours called the police.
“And as soon as the door was knocked, and it was quite a heavy knock, I knew who it was. And I was thankful because he wouldn’t have stopped. And he would have killed me.
“And all I could think was – because I could see her face – what would happen to the girls? What will he do to the girls? Because the baby was screaming upstairs in her cot. She [eldest child] was shouting, ‘Stop Daddy, you’re scaring me. You’re going to kill her’.”
Emma said that the police body cameras from that incident were also later shown in family court which showed him relaxed, asking officers, “How can I help you?” after they’d arrived.
“It shows how he controls his temper, from the point he was going to kill me and then very quickly calmed himself. It was very eerie that footage.
“He was arrested then as well and I didn’t press charges again. I was embarrassed, we had a mortgage and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t know what I would do about the girls. He said that he couldn’t live without me. I just did not know what to do. I hadn’t told anybody about anything.
“We got back together. We split up, we got back together. And I got pregnant with my son.”
It was during this pregnancy that she had the courage to leave after another argument. He has never met his son as Emma decided for her safety not to tell him when she gave birth and family court proceedings have forbidden him from having any contact with his children.
“The day he left was a relief. I just breathed. It was like a weight had been lifted off our shoulders.”
Despite leaving, she says the post-separation abuse continued in family court while the parents battled for custody of their children. There were initially supervised visits, but Emma says these had to stop due to his erratic behaviour. He would turn up drunk or not at all, she claims.
“At that time, my son had been born, he didn’t know. I didn’t want him there because I knew he and his family would be trying to control it all. And I was lucky enough to meet a fantastic midwife I confided in. I told her the whole thing of what had been happening. She was absolutely amazing. She wrote a safety plan. She put me in a separate room on my own. She contacted social services, she contacted the police.”
Emma was then faced with a family court case in order to get full custody of the two children. She said this was a “huge battle” as she worked to prove what she and her children had been subjected to.
Her abuser tried to pose as a victim throughout the process, which eventually ended in an injunction, meaning he can have no contact with her or the children and cannot go anywhere near where they live.
“After going through court and telling my experience, there was a long process having to prove that I was the victim. I felt like I had the world against me. I just felt I had so many people against me. And I wasn’t going stop fighting. But it was traumatic. Really, really traumatic.
Now, 18 months later, Emma is still struggling with long-lasting impact of the abuse.
“I’ve got PTSD so I don’t have a very good memory. It’s either a million miles an hour or I have no thought process at all. It is a really bizarre feeling. Until I was diagnosed I thought I was developing dementia or was starting menopause.