Dear Mary

During the marriage, it ended up that both the children and I were suffering abuse from my wife. The first indication of this was when I came home from work, the children would naturally run to say, "Daddy, Daddy", which is something which all children would do. My wife was very jealous of the relationship that I was developing with my children. We eventually we ended up having five. She became extremely jealous and she used say, I loved them more than I loved her!

I used to have to steal time with my children. She would explode and would go into verbal abuse. Shortly after this was the turning point in our marriage, where the first time she actually did some physical violence was to bite into my arm. And I still have the remnants of that scar today. After she did this, she laughed and she laughed for days afterwards, she thought it was very funny. This was also very significant because of the fact that this was the first time she did commit physical violence and she found that I would not hit her back, and from that point on she knew she could rule by violence. She could dominate the household and she could do whatever the hell she liked and she did.

the level of violence actually increased. It was no longer once a month or once a week, it was virtually every single day. As I said, it wasn’t just me, it was my kids. The sort of things that she would do to me were to beat me with the T.V. aerial lead, stab me in the hand. She would drug my tea with medication, attempt strangulation and tried to throw a radio-cassette player into the bath. Fortunately enough the lead was about six or eight inches too short.

About a year before my marriage actually ended, I was diagnosed mentally and physically exhausted by the doctor. My body weight dropped by two and a half stone. I was having blackouts. It got to the stage where I was actually frightened to say anything in case it actually invoked her violence and anger and boiled into more physical and more extreme violence.

After the marriage actually finished, her legal people wanted the children to see a psychologist for assessment before the courts. I had the first interview with the psychologist and I explained the sort of behaviour of my wife towards the kids and me. And her first reaction was, "What did you do to make her do it?" What I did is, I stood in front of my children when she came after them, I took the punishment instead of my kids and I don’t apologise for that, I’d do it again. I had the nerve to say no, to disagree with what she wanted to do and if that didn’t work, she went to the old reliable taking medication and pseudo-attempted suicides. But this time there were actually social workers getting involved with the family and they had witnessed the assaults on me and the children, but I never received any support. My wife did but I didn’t, and at one stage she actually moved out of the house and she took the kids with her. The Health Board put her up in a house with the children and that same night she moved a man into the house.