NHOsNow

This is not an isolated case. Fartoo often cases are not progressed due to an early closing down, victim pushed away without proper investigation…. This is where our advocacy service @TMOFCharity steps in to help In Scotland, Danielle MacDonald has waived her right to anonymity after her former husband was convicted on 14 charges for r*pe, s*xual assault, attempted murd*r, and coercive and controlling behaviour following a 16-year campaign of abuse. Finally, Danielle can speak out, and she and her children can heal and recover. She handed police video evidence in 2017 showing her being s*xually assaulted while drugged and unconscious. It is clearly not an anomaly. She says officers told her there was no criminality, accepted his claim that it was consensual, and treated it as a "domestic dispute." For women to get to the point where they're willing to go to the police with evidence only to be told there's no criminality, where does that leave them? Straight back into living in constant fear, except now you also know that being believed is unlikely. Two further details show exactly how coercive control works. In 2016, Danielle filed for divorce. While under general anaesthetic, he used his status as next of kin to authorise a hysterectomy after complications were discovered. She later developed sepsis and her weakened condition allowed him to manipulate his way back into the family home. The moment she was least able to resist him was the moment he moved back. For years, as a working dental nurse, she was pressured into handing over much of her earnings to fund his drug use. That is financial abuse, not a side issue, not "money problems," but a deliberate mechanism of control that kept her trapped when she needed independence most. Danielle, a mum of three, believes police and social services missed repeated chances to stop him much earlier. The violence culminated on 18 December 2023, when he pulled her onto a sofa, dropped a heavy weight onto her body, and strangled her until she lost consciousness. If they had divorced in 2016, he would likely have been given unsupervised contact because domestic violence is not a good enough reason to withhold contact. The children have experienced extreme harm over the same period. No survivor should be going to police with evidence like that and be told it's not criminal, or that it's something for a husband and wife to settle between themselves. How often are women told this at SAPS? We have enough data to know exactly where a woman is most at risk: in her own home, with her husband or partner as the perpetrator, yet it is referred to as a dispute and told to go home and seek it out. This was never an unpredictable case. It was a documented, escalating one and resonated with so many women in South Africa, because it isn't a Scottish story, it's our story too. We have watched women here do everything right; they got protection orders, and they reported every violation. They moved towns, they changed jobs, they did the things we tell women to do to stay safe, and the system still failed them. Some were abused again, some were kill*d. The order is just paper and has no protection if nobody enforces it. Every part of that system carries responsibility: police who decide what counts as "criminality," courts that issue orders nobody enforces, housing systems that leave women with nowhere safe to go, and counselling services that arrive, if at all, only after the worst has already happened. Coercive control is not isolated incidents; it is a pattern, and patterns have consequences that compound when nobody intervenes. Physical abuse is never the first abuse experienced; often, it happens when the abuse escalates, yet when many think of violence, they think of physical abuse. Coercive control is violent. Every single stakeholder needs to better understand coercive control and the cycle of abuse. #violenceagainstwomen #believeher #stopgenderedviolence #coercivecontrol