The Advertiser’s shocking story about domestic abuse this week is not as unusual as we might like to think.
It’s impossible not to shudder at the thought of victims being locked down with the one person in their lives from whom they would most like to get away. Their own home may be their least safe environment.
But the other facet of this story which will ring loud bells with too many people is that it happened to a young woman who thought herself too strong a personality ever to be intimidated or abused by a partner.
Some years ago a woman with whom I worked confessed to me that her husband was beating her up. To say I was astounded isn’t the half of it.
This was a colleague who was physically strapping with, as they say, the gift of the gab. A woman you might imagine who could hold her own in any company and any argument.
Yet she was a woman for whom I had to find a safe place, whilst she tried to sort out where she could re-locate and how she could extricate herself from a relationship which had gone so very sour.
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One thing I’ve learned over the years I’ve spent in journalism, though, is it’s not just the most unlikely people who survive abuse. Their abusers come from every section of society.
There’s no shortage of middle class, middle-aged people behaving behind closed doors in a way that might shock their perjink neighbours.
Add in children witnessing this, and thinking it normal, and you have the perfect recipe for a continuing cycle of violence down the generations.
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