Domestic Violence - Why You Must Get Out While You Still Can - edited and updated

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 for

Originally I posted this after writing it in the third person as if it happened to someone else, now I’ve edited it and I am going to face my demons even further and re-post it as it should have been written the first time. I don’t want any sympathy and I don’t want to hear anyone say how sorry they are. Don’t be sorry, it wasn’t your fault.

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 I will no longer have suffered for nothing. 

For the sake of keeping the identity of the other people involved anonymous I will use false names, and we shall call the abuser John.  This story will be a little fragmented as I can’t remember 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.)

I was raised with a violently abusive father. I'll be posting another advice about this later, which will better explain in what way he was abusive. He went to jail for a couple of weeks, he came home. He saw numerous doctors and counselors, took medications, and nothing worked. My mother left with my brother and I, and our father re-joined us. My mother talked to the police with me present, and blatantly lied to the police, and my father was not arrested.

Just after my 14th birthday I was date raped, having no trust in any figure of authority, blaming myself for being so gullible as to allow myself into the situation, and feeling ashamed, I didn’t tell anyone about it. I just cleaned myself up and tried to avoid that situation again.  A few months later, my father, after many years of directing his violence towards my mother, finally turned on me directly. I 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. I couch surfed with friends for a couple of months, the more people I met the older my new friends got, and eventually I was offered a chance to live in the home of an independent 17 year old young man, John.  

Months 1 to 2:

I kept attending school. My parents knew I was going each day and so long as I seemed safe and unharmed, they didn’t do anything, hoping that I would eventually forgive, forget, and go home. The house I lived in was tiny and messy, but I had my 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, I believed what he said and gave in to him. I stopped seeing my friends, stopped talking to most of the other kids at school, and when I wasn’t at school, I stayed home all the time. I never went anywhere without John. He started to pressure me for sex. After my previous experience, I was not only disinterested, but also afraid.

Month 4:

When John and I 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 me. I didn’t trust anyone to tell, so again, I kept quiet and blamed myself. From this point on, rape became a standard thing, and eventually I became brave enough to seriously try to fight back. This just angered John and he became violent and beat me up. It didn’t take long after that I learned that if I didn’t fight back and struggle, it didn’t hurt so much and so I 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 me clean up either. We lived in filth, and even though I tried to clean up every chance I got, eventually I was simply incapable of doing so. 

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

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

John started keeping me locked in my room. He would threaten to kill me if ever I told anyone about anything he did. He would let me out to go to school, but would escort me there and home again. He would tell me about things that happened to me at school, as he seemed to know someone else there, but I didn’t know who, that he would talk to and find out things from. I felt totally trapped. He had become very careful to make sure any and all bruises that he put on me were easily covered by clothing, and was starting to learn ways to cause me pain without leaving lasting marks. I was too scared to say anything, and fully believed that no one would or could help me if I did.

After my father returning home all the times my mother reported him (I didn’t fully understand at this point that it was actually my mother perpetuating that problem), I believed that I would end up with no choice but to go back to John, and I believed that things would be worse for me if I did that. So I 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 my submission. He would find more painful ways to hurt me.

At one point I developed a lump in my breast, he took me to the doctor and went into the surgery with me while I talked to the doctor about it, and I was given a course of antibiotics. The antibiotics caused my breast to swell and redden, and it became excruciatingly painful. John asked me what I was crying about this time, and when I told him about my breast hurting, he ‘gave me something to cry about’ and punched my sore breast. I thought it was going to explode, and the pain was intense enough to knock me unconscious.

On that day I stopped crying, and I still have trouble crying about anything to this very day. My breast healed up after a few more days, but I have never forgotten that pain, and even today – about 20 years later - it takes me every bit of courage I can muster to go to a doctor about anything like that.

My birthday came and went. I was now 15. John had a birthday soon after, he turned 18. Living in fear, pain, filth and starvation, I started to gather enough desperation to try and escape, as I was starting to feel that risking death might be a better option than living in those conditions, but in my first attempt I 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. Locked in my room, I pondered for some time about what I might do if I did get out of there. I considered hitch-hiking to another city – even on the street the living conditions would have to be better than where I was. I would have to go somewhere far enough away that he wouldn’t find me. Sure, bad things could happen, but they were happening to me anyway, how much worse could it get? Eventually, my mind made up, I smashed the window and started climbing out. The mistake I made was that I waited too long, as John was coming back into the house as I was climbing out the window.

I received the worst beating of my life. He tied my wrists tightly to the bed post and whipped me across my 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 me. Sometimes he’d just enter the room out of the blue and hurt me for seemingly no reason. He ‘played’ with the traditional Chinese water torture. He regularly whipped me with belts, lengths of rope, and a strip of bamboo. I was perpetually chained or tied up and often gagged, was often kept naked even on the coldest nights, usually tied to the bed in my room, except when I had to attend school. I 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 my wrists. I was failing school completely as I could not concentrate on anything, let alone learn and study.

Towards the end, John’s favourite torture was to tie me down to the bed and drive sewing pins into the bottom of my feet with a hammer, pull them out, and repeat the process until I 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 me scream.

His sexual treatment of me became worse as well.  I have vague memories of a night when John came into my room, gave me a hiding, tied me face down on the bed and rapped me anally – something he hadn’t done before. It was excruciatingly painful, and he then rolled me over onto my back, tied me back down on the bed, and told me that I finally had a use in life and if I so much as whimpered he would come back in and do that again, but next time with ‘this’. He showed me a piece of broom handle with barbed wire tightly wrapped around one end of it. He had ‘traded’ me in exchange for drugs and alcohol to his 12 ‘mates’, who took turns in raping me, repeatedly. It lasted all night and at dawn he finally dragged me into a cold bath, calling me a filthy slut and other such degrading insults.

Another night, he brought home another young girl about the same age as me. She was so heavily drugged that she wasn’t even aware of what was going on. With me 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 me 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. I don’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 me perform oral sexual acts and he had menstruation blood on him.

The escape:

Some of the people that I met during the time I was couch surfing had heard rumours that John was seeing other girls and was treating them poorly, and I hadn’t been seen or heard of by anyone in the gang for some time. They also heard that I 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. I could hear some of the conversation from my room. They kept 99% of the conversation about general stuff and local gossip. When they asked about me, John told them that I 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 one was one of the bigger and rougher looking in the gang and the other was one of the more respected.

This gave a lot of relief to me, for while they were there John would leave me alone, and my 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 me and started shooting down John’s excuses for not seeing me – and eventually demanded to see me next time they visited. He let me out of my room the next night before they came around, made me shower and gave me clean clothes. They noticed that I was far from the same girl they previously knew. I was now terribly shy and timid and easily startled. I remained silent until I was required to speak, and when I did, I spoke softly and with great thought about every word I uttered. If asked to do something I would look to John for a nod of approval and then get the task done as quickly and efficiently as possible. I 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 me alone as he never knew when Bob and Chris would come by. I do remember one day when Chris accidently walked into a room where I was getting dressed and asked how I got the bruises on my back. I can’t remember what I said, but I know I made up some lame excuse. He didn’t believe me but he didn’t push the issue.

At one point Chris and Bob 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 me 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 I obediently went to the store with Chris. Chris bought just enough fast food and drink to satisfy two people, and as I followed him out of the store, Chris turned in the wrong direction to go back to John’s house. I became very worried and pleaded with Chris to take me back to John’s house. Chris took me by the arm firmly but gently and told me that I was to go with him, and that I was never allowed to go near that house or John ever again.

Chris took me back to his home and shared the food with me. He said that he didn’t know exactly what was going on in that house, and didn’t expect me to tell him any details, but he knew things were not right and I needed to get out and stay out.     Over the next couple of years I gained status within the gang and the guys treated me as ‘one of the guys’. I was the only female to gain such status. They taught me how to stand up for myself and defend myself, and gave me the confidence and strength to get on with life as normally as possible. They protected me and kept me out of trouble, and gave me a safe place to go 24/7 whenever I needed it. It is now about 20 years later, I have moved on and I am living my own independent life, have children with another child on the way, and I’m doing okay, at least most of the time.

Had I not been rescued by someone else, I may very well have died or been killed there.  I consider myself lucky.  I never went to the police about it, as the idea of having to re-count even a small part of my story was just too hard, and now that I can talk about it a little bit, I can't bring myself 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. Only two other people that know John or I know all the details and the truth. Everyone else I would rather not tell. Some would never believe me, others would put themselves in jail just for the pleasure of getting revenge on him. I don’t want anyone that cares about me going to jail over something John did. As a result of this trauma I now suffer from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have written other advice about that, as the effects of it are a different story.

However, having lived through this has not made me immune to domestic violence. When I was 20 I was bashed by a boyfriend. I left and never saw him again. When I was 27 I was smacked with a belt buckle by a guy who I lived with during an arguement. Again, I left. Earlier this year I found myself in another serious domestic violence situation where I was bashed into unconsciousness in front of my son, and after going to the police about it I started receiving death threats. I stood my ground. I refuse to drop the charges. The events leading up to the assault and the assault itself has resulted in reports of child abuse upon my son being made against him as well, as my son witnessed everything it constitutes child abuse. I had to move state, change my name, set up a new identity, and erase everything that could link my former identity to my new one and where I now live. I have come out on Minti as who I previously was, but no one can link that to where I am or my real name. This required selling my home, giving up most of my possessions, and even losing contact with many friends. I even had to give most people the impression that I was moving to a different place to where I was actually going. It was hard, but I will never allow anyone to get away with treating me like that again. I also have an example to set for my children as I will not have them growing up the way I did as a child.