Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Kate* spent most of her childhood afraid. The violence in her home was so bad, she’d lie in bed bracing for what was to come.
“It was scary,” she says. “I’d wake up and I’d already be having a panic attack, in fear of what the day is going to throw at me, what argument was coming.” Her coping strategy was to make herself small.
“I was too scared to express myself; I was bare minimum words.” When she was in her early teens, she escaped. A night or two at a friend’s house gave her room to breathe, “and once I’d figured out I could do that, I kept sneaking out, I kept not returning from school, and I’d be gone for weeks at a time.
” Often she slept rough, perched on top of play equipment in a freezing, empty park. It was dangerous – “I was so scared” – but home was frightening, too. At 15, she fell in love.
They moved in together, and Kate became pregnant. But he hurt her. It began with pushing, then slapping, then “grabbing me by the hair, holding my throat, punching me to the wall, tripping me over”.
Studies suggest that girls who grow up in violent homes are more likely to become victims of domestic violence themselves. That was true for Kate, who felt deep down that the physical abuse was wrong “but everything else, the emotional abuse and the sexual abuse, I thought that was just normalised”, she remembers. It was the way things were during her childhood.
“I thought .