EMMA’S* ex-partner used to make her children get out of bed in the middle of the night and force them to watch her being beaten until she was unconscious.
“He would beat me for hours at a time,” she said. “There were moments where I thought I was going to die.”
The mother of three told The Courier she spent two years “in a flood of tears” with her children as they tried to rebuild their shattered lives after fleeing a violent home.
“We cried together every day for years,” Emma said. “Their little souls were broken because of what they had seen.”
The Ballarat woman who endured years of abuse at the hands of her former partner praised Berry Street’s new family violence campaign.
The campaign is being launched by family violence advocate Rosie Batty on Tuesday and focuses on the long and short-term impacts of violence on children.
It comes in the wake of the landmark Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence. Emma said the physical and psychological abuse she suffered during her ex-partner’s alcohol-induced outbursts was crippling.
“He had complete control over us,” she said. “Despite being separated from my ex-partner I still feel like a prisoner in my own home because I can’t leave without having a panic attack.”
It was seeing the impact the abuse was having on her youngest child which made her flee her partner.
“I saw myself in my child, I saw her drowning in it like I was and I had to save my kids,” she said.
Emma said she was born into violence and was sexually and physically abused from early childhood.
She has also been sexually assaulted and beaten by other former partners and vividly recalled being hit by her first boyfriend when she was only a teenager.
“I thought it was the norm,” she said. Emma credits therapeutic programs which focus on strengthening the bond between a mother and child as helping her to finally break the cycle.
For the past two years, she has undertaken intensive counselling, art therapy classes and equine therapy for post traumatic stress disorder with her children. While Emma does not receive counselling from Berry Street directly she has applauded the new campaign.
“The shame and stigma around violence needs to go,” she said. “Women need to know there is support out there for themselves and their kids.”
IF you need help, call: 1800 RESPECT, LIFELINE 13 11 14
