It's a domestic abuse article published in a respected newspaper, so I don't feel a 'trigger' warning is required.
Living with domestic abuse: ‘Our marriage is over when I say it’s f**king over’
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“He was a true gentleman. A really lovely guy. He couldn’t do enough for me. And then, the second night of our honeymoon, the abuse started.”
Priscilla Grainger was a strong, independent woman before she married her ex-husband. She was streetwise and proud of it. The only child of two parents who adored her, she had never known anything except love and kindness in her relationships.
So while “there were red flags” in their five-year relationship before the wedding, she adds: “I didn’t see them, because I was never looking out for them. He would do this thing of ‘You’re not going out with your friends again’. He was quite controlling and very intense.”
What she was beginning to experience, though she didn’t yet recognise it, is ‘coercive control’ – a pattern of acts of assaults, threats, humiliation, and intimidation or other forms of psychological or emotional abuse.
According to the EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) in 2014, one in three Irish women have experienced some type of psychological violence by a partner since the age of 15.
Coercive control, which is to be punishable by up to five years in prison under the Domestic Violence Act 2018, is so common amongst perpetrators of domestic abuse it’s as though they’re following a script. It frequently starts in the same way – with an unhealthy intensity.
“We met on a blind date when I was 20. Within a couple of weeks things had gone from zero to a hundred,” says Aisling Byrne of the early days of her relationship. “I saw him every night, he’d ring me five or six times a day from payphones. It was only a few weeks before he asked me to marry him.”
She was madly in love, but her parents didn’t like him, Byrne says, which she now recognises as a warning sign.
“We broke up for a few weeks, and I was devastated. I remember my mam saying ‘You don’t have to get back with him. We don’t like the way he treated you’. He was telling me not to see my friends. He was critical of everyone. He’d drop me to the bus in the morning, and I’d come out of work and he’d be waiting for me. I thought that was love.”
For both women, who feature in a TG4 documentary to air on Wednesday night, the control became more intense after their wedding; and more intense again after they became pregnant with their first children.
The mantra
It was on the second night of their honeymoon that the abuse in Grainger’s relationship turned physical. She was jetlagged, and wanted to go to bed, and so she said goodnight to her husband in the hotel bar, and told him she was going upstairs to read a book. When he came up later, he was furious.
“He started on at me, ‘Don’t you ever leave your husband downstairs in the bar like that’.” Grainger, who was in bed reading, stood up. “He grabbed me and fired me onto the bed, and he kicked me in the side.”
She was shocked, but he immediately said: “I didn’t touch you, I only tipped you.”