This may be very hard for some people to read, and it get progressively worse.  Please, if you start to find this story distressing, stop reading it immediately.

It has been very hard for me to write, and I can only imagine how hard it will be

Often people think that if they try harder things will change and improve, that it won't get any worse than it is, or that there is no better option out there.  Some stick in a bad situation because they fear what might happen if they do leave - and the abuser's threats of what they will do in that circumstance, only concrete the belief that they are better off where they are.  Some believe that no one can help, that there's no safe place to go, and they will only end up forced to go back, where things will then be worse for trying to leave in the first place. Some think that staying in the situation for the sake of the kids is important, that the kids won’t be hurt by it, and they won’t be affected by it. Some simply think it can’t happen to them.

This story is one that most people would think can’t happen to anyone, but it did, and it blows all those excuses for staying in an abusive situation completely apart. I am not telling this story to upset anyone or to undermine anyone else’s experience with abuse. Any level of abuse is traumatic. I’m writing this in the hopes that no one else has to suffer to this extreme, in the hope that someone else will realize that things can get this bad, and they will get out in the early stages before it’s too late.

If this story can make someone aware to get out while they can, and they do, then the person that this story is about will no longer have suffered for nothing.  For the sake of keeping the identity of the people involved anonymous I will use false names, and we shall call the victim Vicky and the abuser John.  This story will be a little fragmented as I don't know every single detail, and some things I simply can not write about without making this read like a graphic - to the point of could even be illegal - horror novel, but I'll do my best to be as accurate as I can without making it seem offensive.

My advice is:  If you are in a situation of domestic violence, get out, stay out, and, DO IT NOW!  If your life has been threatened, even if you don't think the threat was meant to be serious, don't take the risk - call the police to escort you out of there IMMEDIATELY.

 And don’t look back. If you don’t get out, you could end up like this…  

Background:

(Most of this story takes place in a small isolated city.)  

Vicky was raised with a violently abusive father. He went to jail for a couple of weeks, he came home. He saw numerous doctors and counsellors, took medications, and nothing worked. Her mother left with the children, and the father re-joined them. Her mother talked to the police with Vicky present, and blatantly lied to the police, and the father was not arrested. Vicky, just after her 14th birthday was date raped, having no trust in any figure of authority, blaming herself for being so gullible as to allow herself into the situation, and feeling ashamed, she didn’t tell anyone about it. She just cleaned herself up and tried to avoid that situation again.  A few months later, her father, after many years of directing his violence towards the mother, finally turned on Vicky directly. She ran from the house with a mouth full of blood, a split lip and cracked teeth at the age of 14, and didn’t return. She couch surfed with friends for a couple of months, the more people she met the older her new friends got, and eventually she was offered a chance to live in the home of an independent 17 year old young man, John.  

Months 1 to 2:

Vicky kept attending school, her parents knew she was going each day and so long as she seemed safe and unharmed, they didn’t do anything, hoping that she will eventually forgive, forget, and go home. The house she lived in was tiny and messy, but she had her own room and got fed, had clothes, and was treated nicely by John, so it all seemed okay. There was no telephone connected to the house and mobile phones and internet were almost unheard of.  

Month 3:

John started with the emotional abuse. If you love me, you’ll do this and won’t do that.  If you ever leave me, I won’t be able to live without you, and I’ll kill myself. Being young and naïve, she believed what he said and gave in to him. She stopped seeing her friends, stopped talking to most of the other kids at school, and when she wasn’t at school, she stayed home all the time. She never went anywhere without John. He started to pressure Vicky for sex. After her previous experience, she was not only disinterested, but also afraid.  

Month 4:

When Vicky and John had a disagreement, he started reacting with violence. It started with pushing and shoving, and evolved into slapping and eventually punching. John’s pressure for sex reached the point of being forceful, and eventually one day he raped Vicky. She didn’t trust anyone to tell, so again, she kept quiet and blamed herself. From this point on, rape became a standard thing, and eventually she became brave enough to seriously try to fight back.  This just angered John and he became violent and beat her up. It didn’t take long after that she learned that if she didn’t fight back and struggle, it didn’t hurt so much and so she gave in whenever he desired.  

Months 5 to 6:

John gradually and steadily became more abusive and more controlling. There were several defining moments where the level of abuse reached new heights. He was a total slob with housekeeping, and it wasn’t uncommon to find food scraps, fast food and drink containers, cigarette butts, even cat poop on the floors of the house among the clothes and any other household items. Nothing was ever cleaned up by him, and he rarely let Vicky clean up either. They lived in filth, and even though Vicky tried to clean up every chance she got, eventually she was simply incapable of doing so.  

One defining moment was when Vicky was in the shower. John walked in the room, started yelling at her about wasting water and he can’t afford the electricity bill for the hot water. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out of the shower and into her room and locked her in there after giving her a few hard hits. After that she asked permission to shower – and if he wanted to “punish” her for anything he would refuse. As the months went on and things got worse, he’d make her go for weeks without a shower, and then would beat her up and throw her in a cold shower or bath, calling her filthy.  

Another of those moments was when Vicky wanted a snack she went to the fridge and made herself a sandwich. She had barely taken a bite when John came in and saw her eating. He punched her repeatedly in the stomach until she vomited, dragged her to her room, locked her in there and told her that she would eat what he said when he said. As the months went on and things got worse, she would go for days, even longer, without food, and when she did get to eat it was often just food scraps from John’s meals. She eventually became quite adept at cracking open chicken bones to eat the marrow inside, that’s how bad it became for her. She was eventually not permitted to drink anything but water, and sometimes John would make her go without that as well as another ‘punishment’. She eventually became quite weak, lost a lot of strength, and reached a point where she physically could not fight back even if she did find the emotional strength to do so.  

John started keeping her locked in her room. He would threaten to kill her if ever she told anyone about anything he did. He would let her out to go to school, but would escort her there and home again. He would tell Vicky about things that happened to her at school, as he seemed to know someone else there, but she didn’t know who, that he would talk to and find out things from. Vicky felt totally trapped. He had become very careful to make sure any and all bruises that he put on her were easily covered by clothing, and was starting to learn ways to cause her pain without leaving lasting marks. She was too scared to say anything, and fully believed that no one would or could help her if she did. After her father returning home all the times her mother reported him (Vicky didn’t fully understand at this point that it was actually her mother perpetuating that problem), she believed that she would end up with no choice but to go back to John, and she believed that things would be worse for her if she did that. So she remained silent and was too scared to try and get out.  

Everything was getting progressively worse. The violence was worsening and happening with lesser provocations, as if John was starting to look for any excuse to be abusive. The rapes became more violent as well, as if he was getting bored with her submission. He would find more painful ways to hurt her. At one point she developed a lump in her breast, he took her to the doctor and went into the surgery with her while she talked to the doctor about it, and she was given a course of antibiotics. The antibiotics caused her breast to swell and redden, and it became excruciatingly painful. John asked her what she was crying about this time, and when she told him about her breast hurting, he ‘gave her something to cry about’ and punched her sore breast. She thought it was going to explode, and the pain was intense enough to knock her unconscious. 

On that day she stopped crying, and she still has trouble crying about anything to this very day. Her breast healed up after a few more days, but she has never forgotten that pain, and even today – about 20 years later - it takes her every bit of courage she can muster to go to a doctor about anything like that.   Vicky’s birthday came and went. She was now 15. John had a birthday soon after, he turned 18. Living in fear, pain, filth and starvation,

Vicky started to gather enough desperation to try and escape, as she was starting to feel that risking death might be a better option than living in those conditions, but in her first attempt she hesitated for too long and was caught out.  After that, things went from extremely bad to totally psychotic.  

Months 7 to 9:

John had gone out for a few hours. Vicky, locked in her room, pondered for some time about what she might do if she did get out of there. She considered hitch-hiking to another city – even on the street the living conditions would have to be better than where she was. She would have to go somewhere far enough away that he wouldn’t find her. Sure, bad things could happen, but they were happening to her anyway, how much worse could it get? Eventually, her mind made up, she smashed the window and started climbing out. The mistake she made was that she waited too long, as John was coming back into the house as she was climbing out the window. She received the worst beating of her life. He tied her wrists tightly to the bed post and whipped her across her bare back with his belt until every inch of skin was welted, swollen and red. Then he went outside and boarded up the window. The following two months were nothing short of torturous.  

John became totally sadistic. He started experimenting with torture methods on her. Sometimes he’d just enter the room out of the blue and hurt her for seemingly no reason. He ‘played’ with the traditional Chinese water torture. He regularly whipped her with belts, lengths of rope, and a strip of bamboo. Vicky was perpetually chained or tied up and often gagged, was often kept naked even on the coldest nights, usually tied to the bed in her room, except when she had to attend school. She started wearing gloves to school with the excuse that it was winter and cold, when it was really to hide the marks from the bindings on her wrists. She was failing school completely as she could not concentrate on anything, let alone learn and study. Towards the end, John’s favourite torture was to tie her down to the bed and drive sewing pins into the bottom of her feet with a hammer, pull them out, and repeat the process until she fell unconscious. He would have very loud music playing most of the time so that no one in the nearby houses or street could hear her scream.   His sexual treatment of her became worse as well. 

She has vague memories of a night when John came into her room, gave her a hiding, tied her face down on the bed and rapped her anally – something he hadn’t done before. It was excruciatingly painful for her, and he then rolled her over onto her back, tied her back down on the bed, and told her that she finally had a use in life and if she so much as whimpered he would come back in and do that again, but next time with ‘this’. He showed her a piece of broom handle with barbed wire tightly wrapped around one end of it. He had ‘traded’ her in exchange for drugs and alcohol to his 12 ‘mates’, who took turns in raping her, repeatedly. It lasted all night and at dawn he finally dragged her into a cold bath, calling her a filthy slut and other such degrading insults.   Another night, he brought home another young girl about the same age. She was so heavily drugged that she wasn’t even aware of what was going on. With Vicky chained up on the floor beside the bed, he laid the girl on the bed and raped her, but he did it very slowly and gently, the whole time saying things to Vicky like, You want to be treated like this, don’t you. It’s never going to happen because you don’t deserve this. You don’t even deserve to die. You only deserve to suffer… along with a whole heap of other degrading comments and insults. The other young girl was then taken away. Vicky doesn’t know what ever happened to her. It also became obvious that he was having sexual encounters of some sort with other girls or women, as occasionally he would return home and make Vicky perform oral sexual acts and he had menstruation blood on him.  

The escape:

Some of the people that Vicky met during the time she was couch surfing had heard rumours that John was seeing other girls and was treating them poorly, and Vicky hadn’t been seen or heard of by anyone in the gang for some time. They also heard that she wasn’t doing so well at school. They became concerned about what was going on. Two of the guys in their early 20’s, that were on friendly terms with John decided to drop in for a visit. They brought a carton of beer with them and sat and drank the night away with John. Vicky could hear some of the conversation from her room. They kept 99% of the conversation about general stuff and local gossip. When they asked about Vicky, John told them that she was ill and sleeping. They didn’t push the issue, but came back again the next night with another carton of beer. From that point on, they kept coming around and would stick around for most of the night. John seemed to think it was cool that these guys were suddenly so interested in being his mates, and he let them take over the house and boss him around, as he viewed their gang as really cool and was hoping for acceptance (admittedly amidst the city’s gangs, they were among the most feared at the time, more so because of their sheer number and outward appearance than anything nasty they did, but reputation went a very long way.  To give you an idea, the typical appearance of the gang was long haired, black leather clad, big, rough, scruffy looking blokes). It also helped that Bob was one of the bigger and rougher looking in the gang and Chris was one of the more respected. This gave a lot of relief to Vicky, for while they were there John would leave her alone, and her wounds were finally starting to heal.  

By the end of the week, the guys (we’ll call them Bob and Chris) started asking more about Vicky and started shooting down John’s excuses for not seeing her – and eventually demanded to see her next time they visited. He let her out of her room the next night before they came around, made her shower and gave her clean clothes. They noticed that she was far from the same girl they previously knew. She was now terribly shy and timid and easily startled. She remained silent until she was required to speak, and when she did, she spoke softly and with great thought about every word she uttered. If asked to do something she would look to John for a nod of approval and then get the task done as quickly and efficiently as possible. She spent most of the time sitting curled up in a ball on a pile of cushions in the corner of the room, staring at the television.  

Bob and Chris started dropping into John’s house at every opportunity. John had to leave Vicky alone as he never knew when Bob and Chris would come by. At one point they didn’t go home and partied on there for a couple of days, inviting a few of the other guys from the gang to join them. After the booze and the food ran out, and everyone had gone home but for Chris and Bob, Chris demanded that John allow Vicky to walk to the nearby store with him to help carry back some food. John was not too sure about that, but wasn’t quite prepared to argue the case with them. Bob stayed behind with John and Vicky obediently went to the store with Chris. Chris bought just enough fast food and drink to satisfy two people, and as Vicky followed him out of the store, Chris turned in the wrong direction to go back to John’s house. Vicky became very worried and pleaded with Chris to take her back to John’s house. Chris took her by the arm firmly but gently and told her that she was to go with him, and that she was never allowed to go near that house or John ever again. Chris took her back to his home and shared the food with her. He said that he doesn’t know exactly what was going on in that house, and didn’t expect her to tell him any details, but he knew things were not right and she needed to get out and stay out.    

Over the next couple of years Vicky gained her status within the gang and they guys treated her as ‘one of the guys’. She was the only female to gain such status. They taught Vicky how to stand up for herself and defend herself, and gave her the confidence and strength to get on with life as normally as possible. They protected her and kept her out of trouble, and gave her a safe place to go 24/7 whenever she needed it. It is now about 20 years later, she has moved on and is living her own independent life in another city, is in a healthy relationship and has a few kids, and she seems to be doing okay.

Had she not been rescued by someone else, she may very well have died or been killed there.  She considers herself lucky.  She never went to the police about it, as the idea of having to re-count even a small part of her story was just too hard, and now that she can talk about it a little bit, she can't bring herself to talking about it in front of a heap of strangers in a court room.  Consequently, John will probably never see the inside of a jail for his crimes.  However...

Vicky doesn't know exactly why, though she has her suspicions, but John never so much as attempted to contact her.  John apparently spent some significant time in hospital as the result of hurting another girl, courtesy of a different type of black leather clad, big, rough, scruffy looking blokes that were quite nastier, a few years later.  By all accounts he hasn't hurt anyone since.  Probably too scared to try.  The last anyone has been able to say about him now is that he is a nervous person, always looking over his shoulder for something terrible to happen to him.  Gee, I wonder why?