Bearing witness to domestic violence

ONE morning 17 years ago, I woke to find the window broken. The curtain fluttered on an empty space; there was a brick on the floor lying in a heap of glass. My boyfriend David arranged for a glazier to come, while I took my six-year-old son to school using the back door, so that he wouldn’t see. I knew who’d thrown that brick.

When I listened to the phone message left the night before, it was confirmed: a former boyfriend; a man I had lived with; a man who still lived nearby. It was the usual threatening, rambling stuff: “I’m going to f****** kill you both” (me and my son; he didn’t know about David). “I will burn the house down.”