People don’t enter relationships with someone they know to be violent. That assumption – “Well, you chose him” – is ludicrous and cruel. It’s victim-blaming disguised as wisdom.

The truth is, perpetrators of violence and abuse don’t reveal their true selves at the start. What you meet is charm, attentiveness, someone who seems perfect – someone who makes you feel seen. By the time the mask slips, you’re already entangled. People talk about “red flags,” but often these aren’t visible early on – love, after all, is blind.

What we really need to talk about are the white flags: the subtle signs in ourselves – low self-worth, shaky boundaries, buried trauma – that leave us vulnerable to being targeted in the first place. Self-awareness and self-compassion are the true protectors. I didn’t know that then. I was 20, shy, naïve, gentle and unequipped for the storm that followed.

Three months in, he became violent. Not shouting, not slamming doors – extreme violence. The kind that leaves you in permanent survival mode. I lived that way for years – constantly scanning, adapting, walking on eggshells. Then one day, he tried to end my life.

I left. I left my home. I left my body.

That’s the only way I can describe it. I fell into what I now understand to be a dorsal vagal state – a trauma response where the nervous system shuts down. I wasn’t safe, so my body made me disappear. Numb, disconnected, leaking tears without sound or sensation – like my body was crying, but I wasn’t even there to feel it. I was living in a round, grey cell beneath the pavement cracks I’d always stared at when walking. No exits. No hope. No comprehension of joy.

That’s where I was the day I stood in Court One, supported by victim services, as he was found guilty and bound to keep the peace for 12 months. I was awarded £300 in compensation for the years of terror. He refused to pay. The courts told me it wasn’t worth pursuing. The message was loud and clear: my suffering had a price – and even that wasn’t worth collecting.

That afternoon – yes, the same day – I was summoned to Family Court. There, I was told I had to hand my children over at 4pm to the very man who had tried to kill me.

If you’re a parent, try to imagine that.

Try to imagine being forced to place your child in a cage with a wild animal – and being made to watch. That is what the family court system did to me. For two years, I endured a legal chess game designed to protect his “rights” as a father – not my children’s right to safety.

He was never interested in the children. This was about control, punishment, power. And the system let him play.

Eventually, his mask slipped in public. He physically assaulted the court welfare officer – the first professional to dare challenge him. He also took off with my youngest child, using fear like a weapon.

I had seen it coming. I felt it in the energy. I had lived with it for so long I could tell when his mood shifted – when the storm was about to break. I warned them. I tried to explain. I was dismissed, minimised, and ignored.

It took that – the assault of a professional – for the system to finally act. At the next hearing, I was praised, validated: “a kind and loving mother doing everything in her power to protect her children.” He was branded a violent man unfit for contact. Not even a letter. At last, the outcome we had needed all along.

But it came for all the wrong reasons.

Why did it take institutional harm to prove what lived experience had been screaming all along?

This is why lived experience matters. Because no theory, no policy, no textbook can replace the insight of someone who has lived through what you’re trying to understand. The family court system cannot afford to be deaf to those who have walked its halls in fear. Those who have watched their children be handed back to danger. Those who know that safety isn’t something you can always see on paper – but you can feel it in your bones.

I survived. But not because of the system. I survived in spite of it.

And I will keep speaking – not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary. For all the women (and men) who are being failed today, and for all the children who need someone to see what’s really happening – before it’s too late.