'I can't believe I went through all that'

IT'S been three years since Donna finally left him. The date is etched on her mind. May 20, 2002. It wasn't their first split: she's lost count of the number of times she's walked out, or thrown him out. She knows there are still people waiting for her to go back to him. After all, that's what she's done every other time.

But this time she says it is different. This time she is determined to stay away. She says she doesn't want to spend her 30s the way she spent her 20s. Terrified. Bruised. Running.

"I can't believe I went through all that," she says. "Even though I lived with it all and went through it all, I can't believe it. I could have died. But when you are in it you just don't realise."

Donna met Mick about 15 years ago. She was 19, he was 29, and only her second proper boyfriend. She can only vaguely remember the first time he hit her. It didn't seem important enough at the time.

"He attacked me in the pub, hitting me quite badly. I can't really remember what caused him to lift his hands, but he wasn't provoked or anything like that," she says.

Donna, now 34, didn't know it at the time, but this was the beginning of a pattern that would last for the next 12 years. Mick would hit her, then he would apologise and beg for forgiveness, and she would relent. It was always after he had been drinking.

The number of incidents is almost too many to recall. On one typical occasion, when they were going back to Mick's house, he started slapping her and pulling her around by the hair.

"I tried to go home, but he wouldn't let me go and he started begging me, saying, 'I'm sorry, I will never do it again'. So like a fool, I stayed. It didn't happen again for a while," says Donna, who lives in Newcastle.

THEY had been going out for eight months when Mick was jailed for 21 months for car crimes. On his release from prison, he hit her again.

"I tried to leave and he did the same thing. He was phoning me all the time and following me and begging me and getting his friends to come to the door and say he was sorry and stuff like that," she says.

They had been together for five years when Donna fell pregnant. Again she tried to leave. This time Mick smashed the windows in her mother's house. She left again when she was seven months pregnant. He wrote letters begging her to come back. A day after she had daughter Carly, he turned up at the hospital. This time she went back to him.

"It was ok at first. Then it started again. Carly was about a week old. I wouldn't go into the shop to get him a CD, so he nutted me in the face," Donna says.

"It started to get more regular, but now it wasn't just the violence. He started saying if I didn't come back to him, or if I didn't do what he wanted, he would put my windows in, or put my mam's windows in, or slash my brother's tyres.

"If I said no to anything, if he wanted money, if he was having a bad day or somebody upset him - anything would set him off. If you ignored him or didn't answer him properly, he would just go off it."

Many of the attacks happened while Carly was present. Mick spat in Donna's face. Headbutted her. Stubbed cigarettes out on her face. Carly would cry and scream, enraging Mick all the more. He broke Donna's nose and her chest bone. She had blood clots in her legs. Her hearing was damaged.

When they were apart, he followed Donna around, harassing her and threatening her in the street. She became too scared to take her daughter to nursery. On one occasion, Mick snatched the baby away from her in the street. It was several hours before she was returned.

DONNA'S attempts to get official involvement floundered. She dropped several court cases after she was threatened. When it did come to court, judges told her it was in the child's best interests to see both parents. When she got injunctions, they were ignored. Mick would claim he had witnesses to say he was 100 miles away.

She went to the police. When Mick put twigs and leaves through her letter box, threatening to burn the house down, they advised her to put a dish of water by the door to extinguish the flames. When she went to social services, they told her there were children all over the North-East being abused, what did she want them to do? When she went to her MP, he advised her to move. She moved five times in five years, and lived in seven refugees.

Although they spent more time apart, she did keep going back to him. She fell pregnant again. She had an abortion.

"It was stupid to get in that situation again. Carly has suffered so much during those years, I thought 'Why do it again?'. I couldn't take it any more and I know for a fact I would not have been able to cope," she says.

The last attack was the worst. Mick started punching Donna in the kitchen of her home, breaking her nose and knocking out several of her teeth. He carried on punching her. He would later tell friends that he kept hitting her, but she wouldn't go unconscious. Donna believes she would have died if Carly, then aged six, had not dialled 999.

"I felt scared but that time I just felt different," Donna says. "He just wouldn't stop. I remember thinking, 'He is going to kill me'.

"That was it. I just thought that if he is going to hit me in the street again then let him. He has done everything else in the past. I thought it didn't matter what threats he made, because he has made them year in, year out. I remember thinking, I've had this all the way through my 20s, I'm not going to do it in my 30s."

Donna started going to a Freedom programme, run by Barnardo's SureStart in Newcastle, aimed at supporting victims of domestic violence.

"It was not until people said it wasn't my fault that I started to think a different way. It burst that bubble and made me realise that he was controlling me so much I just believed anything he said. I kept believing he was going to change, and he didn't," she says.

"Everybody said, 'Why do you put up with it? He's never going to change,' but I used to blame myself. I used to think, 'I shouldn't have done that, it's my fault', and I used to say to them, 'You don't know, just keep out'."

CARLY, now ten, has been badly affected by the violence. She has suffered behaviour problems, has been disruptive at school and went through a phase of hitting people in the street. She has hit her mum several times.

She is also clingy, refusing to let her mum leave the room when she's been taken to parties, sleeping in her mum's bed and panicking when she thinks she's seen her dad or his car in the street.

Even though it is three years, Donna is still not free of Mick's harassment. She still gets phone calls and threats in the street. She knows you don't just get out of it like that.

Donna has now started training to run Freedom courses herself. But she still has to catch herself when she realises she's saying the same things people once said to her.

"I found myself saying to one of my friends recently, 'Why do you keep taking him back?'. I thought, 'Why have I just said that?'. Nobody understands until you are there," she says.

"One of my friends was left for dead, hit with a hammer and left in a pool of blood. She took him back. Until somebody is ready to go, it doesn't matter what you say. You live in a cloud, thinking it's not going to happen to you. She might leave one day, but sometimes it is one day too late."

* Barnardo's SureStart is on 0191-234 5563

* All the names in this article have been changed.