IT HAS been 26 years since she left her husband’s emotional and physical abuse but it only takes a few seconds for it to all come flooding back again.
A local woman, who wished to remain anonymous, married at the age of 19 and lived with domestic violence for 21 years.
It’s a curse which she describes as ever present; it only took her daughter to say ‘Dad would have taken us and looked after us’ to feel crushed and raw once more.
With too many people in the Peel region in the same position as she was, the mother of four said she wanted to speak out to give people the courage to leave a violent lifestyle.
“The assault is now a bit of a blur but somehow I broke free of him,” she said.
“I remember running down the driveway and he grabbed me and rammed my head into the fence causing my forehead to bleed.
“Next thing I am running down the street; I must have knocked on someone’s door.
“They gave me a dressing gown and called the police.
“In the back of the police car, my husband said: ‘If you charge me, I will kill you’.”
The police wanted the woman to charge her husband but she said she couldn’t do it out of fear, which she carried with her everyday.
She said she was on tenterhooks all the time, remembering only her husband’s actions in the previous attack.
“This all built up until one day when he came near me, I was in the kitchen and the knife was just there,” she said.
“Being fearful, I just threw that big knife at him; it missed and ended up embedded in the door.
“I knew then that I desperately needed help.”
Wanting herself and her children to be safe she went to the police who placed her in a Salvation Army home and her daughters in a children’s home.
“It was if the nightmare was starting all over again,” she said.
“I remember when I was four years old, I was taken and placed in an orphanage and now my daughters were being placed in [withheld] children’s home.”
Due to limited funds and wanting to be with her daughters again, the woman went back to her husband almost a week later.
It was two decades before she worked up the courage to leave for good.
“I know I’m not alone,” she said.
“There are many other women who have lived with the horror and fear of domestic violence.
“I hope this story empowers others to break their silence.”
