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    How long does it take for some victims to reveal their abuse?

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    How long does it take for some victims to reveal their abuse?

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    The short answer is: it can take a lifetime or, even more sadly, it can take for ever.

    Last week’s controversy surrounding children’s author JK Rowling and her position in the transgender debate obscured an even bigger scandal.

    The sheer length of time it can take for the truth to come out about past violence and abuse behind closed doors.

    In Rowling’s case, a brief and abusive marriage to Jorge Arrantes lasted just 13 months, ending in 1993 and being formally dissolved in 2005.

    So why did it take more than twenty five years for such a highly successful – and presumably powerful and well-connected – author to tell the world about the real reasons for her first marriage’s break up?

    The answer is, as we well know from thousands of stories we hear in NCDV, because the decision to speak out is not only daunting but complicated.

    In her case Rowling cites the common experience that “those things [that] happened to me…they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.”  

    But she goes on to reveal other reasons for her silence, “I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too.”

    So much for the past: it was only with her daughter’s encouragement that she broke the story.

    Survivors’ decisions to speak out today can be every bit as complicated and multi-layered as Rowling’s.

    Financial hardship, losing the family home, risks to other family members’ physical safety or wellbeing, and as some tell us, the twists and turns in many ‘stormy’ relationships can all combine to create unbearable pressure to keep shtum.

    Rowling herself reveals that she only managed to escape her abusive husband in Portugal with difficulty.  He later admitted to slapping her ‘very hard’.  She eventually had to take out a restraining order against him when he sought her out back in Scotland in 1994.

    Yet the scars left by the violence said Rowling “don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you have made.”

    Which is why, all these years later, Rowling’s decision finally to reveal her past abuse is still a hugely brave and topical one which NCDV fully salutes.

    Our standing advice to all victims today once a relationship as turned abusive is not to tolerate any abuse for one second.

    “Get out and speak out” must be the right response. Disclosing the fact of violence to a third party is the first and most important act in a survivor’s self-preservation.

    Yet we never underestimate the huge courage which thousands of domestic abuse survivors have had to summon in order to speak out and begin the process of freeing themselves of their terrible burden.

    Twenty five years late in Rowling’s case is still not a moment too soon for the truth to emerge.

    Mark Groves CEO

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    By Fiona Bawden, Times Online (8th May 2007)

    “Steve Connor, a student at City Law School, is a man on a mission. Six years ago he was a fairly directionless 27-year-old. Today, as well as taking the Bar Vocational Course, he is chairman of the National Centre for Domestic Violence, a ground-breaking organisation that he dragged into existence after a friend could not get legal help to protect her from an abusive partner.

    Connor’s route to the Bar has been circuitous. In 2001 he returned from a year in Australia (he says that he would not dignify describing it as a gap year), and took a job as a process server in South London. The job (“I just saw it advertised in the paper”) was not quite as dull as it sounds. On one occasion he was threatened with a machete, on another, he was nearly stabbed by a man he had arranged to meet on Clapham Common to serve with a non-molestation order: “He’d seemed really friendly on the phone…”

    The turning point in his life came when a friend, who was being abused by her partner, turned to him for support. Connor went with her to the police. She did not want to press criminal charges so the police suggested that she visit a solicitor to take out a civil injunction. “We must have seen 12 solicitors in a morning. We just went from one to the next to the next to the next. Everyone was very eager to help until we sat down to fill in the forms for the legal aid means test,” he says. The woman, who had a small child, did not qualify for public funding. But, Connor says, her financial situation as it appeared on paper did not bear any relation to her financial situation in reality. “She had a part-time job and she and her partner owned their home. Yet she didn’t have any money. Her boyfriend was very controlling and controlled all the money; he kept the chequebooks and didn’t let her have access to the bank account.”

    The injustice of the situation got under Connor’s skin. “I just couldn’t believe that there was no help available to people who did not qualify for public funds but could not afford to pay.

    I just kept feeling that this must be able to be sorted if only someone would address it.”That “someone” turned out to be him.

    In 2002, thanks entirely to Connor’s doggedness, the London Centre for Domestic Violence was formed. It started out with him and a friend, but is now a national organisation, covering 27 counties, and has helped approximately 10,000 victims last year to take out injunctions against their partners.

    NCDV now has nine full-time staff, 12 permanent volunteers and has trained over 5000 law and other students as McKenzie Friends to accompany unrepresented victims into court. We have also trained over 8000 police officers in civil remedies available regarding domestic violence. The National Centre for Domestic Violence (NCDV) has branches in London, Guildford and Manchester and is on track to have branches in 16 areas within the next two years.

    NCDV specialises exclusively in domestic violence work and could be characterised as a cross between McDonald’s and Claims Direct. The high degree of specialisation means that its processes are streamlined: clients can be seen quickly and the work is done speedily and cheaply. “Sometimes, we will have one of our trained McKenzie Friends at a court doing 10 applications in one day,” Connor says.

    Clients are not charged for the service. NCDV staff take an initial statement: clients who qualify for legal aid are referred to a local firm; those that don’t get free help from the centre itself. It runs on a shoestring, heavily reliant on volunteers and capping staff salaries at £18,000 a year.

    Steve expects to qualify as a barrister this summer and hopes that having a formal legal qualification will give the centre added clout. “We are already acknowledged as experts and consulted at a high level, so I thought it would be helpful if I could back that up by being able to say I’m a barrister,” he says. He is just about to complete a one-year full-time BVC course at the City Law School (formerly the Inns of Court Law School) and, all being well, should be called to the Bar in July. Although Connor sees his long-term future as a barrister, he says that he has no immediate plans to practise. “I want to get NCDV running on a fully national level. Then I may take a step back and have a career at the Bar.”