Abuse was normalised in our Surrey home
Speaking to Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One, he said: "She'd done the worst act anyone possibly could do. [She] took away my father."I couldn't understand it, but I knew something had been rolling... something was happening and I just didn't have the words."
A law passed in 2015, which recognises psychological manipulation as a form of domestic abuse, helped secure Mrs Challen's release from prison after she had been jailed for life for murder in 2011.Coercive control describes a pattern of behaviour by an abuser to harm, punish or frighten their victim and became a criminal offence in England and Wales in December 2015.
David said this description had set him and his mother "free"."It gave us a language to describe what was going on in that home, to describe the insidious nature that is mostly non-physical violence," he said.Not having a name for the abuse had "robbed us of our right to have an ability to protect ourselves," he added.He now uses his experience of "intergenerational trauma" to help others, with a book telling the family's story being released on Thursday.
"I buried my childhood with my father, so I had to dig up the past to find the child I had left behind," he said."It was the child that I always hid because I didn't know how he experienced that world."But I knew I was born into this world with a gut feeling that [there was] something inherently bad about my father, and I never knew why."I normalised the coercion and control in my home, this life of servitude that my mother lived under... sexual violence was routine."
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, help and support is available via the BBC Action Line.
He said he wrote the book to "give voice to what it's like to grow up in a home where domestic abuse wasn't the word - it was coercive control and it didn't appear on my TV screens".But, a decade on, "we're not tackling it enough", he added."I continue to speak out because I don't want these events to happen again."
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Some cycle lanes at junctions are so labyrinthine that they are difficult for both pedestrians and cyclists to navigate. The sad fact is that at present some cycle lanes are so badly designed that it is often safer, and certainly quicker, to avoid SpenceSale, Cheshire Sir, The residents of Streatham Hill are due to suffer more than a year of roadworks as Transport for London and Lambeth council reduce the motor vehicle capacity of the A23 to a single lane. The reason is that it is safer for cyclists and pedestrians to create a segregated cycle lane with floating bus stops and reduce access from residential side roads. I believe that if they wanted to keep everyone safe — and save money — they could ban cyclists from this stretch of the A23 and direct them to the low-traffic neighbourhood along the southbound carriageway. 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My choice would be BostonKingshill, Kent Sir, David Hockney has spent a great deal of his time on British landscapes, most notably Garrowby Hill, and his innovative artwork on the iPad is ClarkeRye, E Sussex Sir, Anthony Roberts (letter, Aug 14) brings to mind the warning attributed to Henry Longhurst that 'If you call on God to improve the results of a shot while it is still in motion, you are using an outside agency and subject to appropriate penalties under the rules of golf.'John Murray Compton Chamberlayne, Wilts Sir, A friend of my parents had his bicycle stolen. It was found two days later and, being a good Catholic, he went to church to thank St Anthony. On leaving church, he found that it had been stolen YoungSouthampton Sir, Public statues in London have always been controversial, for many reasons (News, Aug 8, and letters, Aug 13 and 14). In 1937, a decision was made to site the memorials to Admiral Jellicoe and Admiral Beatty in Trafalgar Square, which required moving the statues of General Napier and Major General Havelock, and there had even been discussions about moving William IV from his plinth to an island at Virginia Water. It was all too much for Sir Patrick Duff, secretary of the Office of Works, who was still reeling after controversies about the statue of Field Marshal Haig on Whitehall. In a letter to the first commissioner, Sir Philip Sassoon, in January 1938, Duff fumed that the best site for all statues was at the bottom of the CrellinThorner, W Yorks Sir, Marion Brown's letter (Aug 13) revived an old misapprehension of my own. As a child I had a box of watercolour paints with the printed name of the tint under each pan. Owing to inconsistency in the printing I was convinced for many years of the existence of the colour Clive DorrPlymouth Write to letters@
