Helpful Links (UK based) and advice

The bravest man of my acquaintance, an ex-soldier, warned me that I would need counselling or the above experiences would poison me. He was right. Should you need them, here are some links that may be useful.

http://www.victimsupport.org/
http://www.thehavens.co.uk/
http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/centres.php.
http://www.survivorsuk.org/
http://www.prisonersfamilies.org.uk/
http://www.prisonersadvice.org.uk/

Just a word re police procedure as I have experienced it from the Metropolitan Police in London.

There are new ways of delivering evidence that can lessen the trauma of it.

Video statements can make up the body of your evidence, so you may not have to spend time in court, or keep retelling what happened. These video statements are not played to the suspect; they aren’t going to see you or hear you speak.. Video line-ups can also be used for ID parades.

If you are called to testify in court, arrangements can be made, screens can be used, so that you will not see the defendant and they will not see you.

It is never easy, but attitudes towards sexual assault are changing. If you don’t have facilities to these services where you live, campaign to get them. They should be your right.

Here’s to respect for all of us.

The End

Journal Entry March 26th 2012

They had come out in support of their boy; a bunch of demi-carnies who hadn't seen a fresh vegetable in generations.* Pockmarked and a bit huge, they lumbered into the public gallery. It was hard to think he might be the good looking one of the family. They looked at me. Their expressions were blank, but it's fair to say I could not be their favourite person.

'If they try anything,' said one police officer encouragingly, 'I'll arrest the lot, the whole blimmin' family, for witness intimidation, and they can spend the night in the cells and think about it.' But they didn't. They may not even have thought bad things about me. One man with short white hair watched me a long time, blue eyes blinking now and then.

Counsel for the prosecution was a beautiful woman, vivacious black eyes, silver earings and high heels to die for. I took one look at her face, so smart and glowing, and knew we would be all right.

'Before we start,' she said, 'I want to tell you how much I admire you...' and she went on to say lovely things that no-one needs to hear except me. Then came the words I dreaded.

'I must warn you,' she said, 'Though this is not a trial, I will be graphic, to give a clear indication of what has happened.' I told her it would be all right, if I needed to cry I would cry. Haven't I written the story many times, to get over it, to make it just a thing I tell? But it is not the same. It is not just a thing I tell.

Oh, but when they brought him into the dock! I felt faint and sick the moment I recognised his face. He is bigger in real life than in my head's retelling. There he stood, not the junkie ratman I had fought, skin and bone and covered in my blood. Three months of prison fare, as opposed to his preferred intake of heroin, crack cocaine and methadone, have done him good. Filled out a little, his face broadened, he looked stronger, clean cut and respectful, in a pale shirt and dark trousers. How the hell did I wrestle a knife off this man? He never looked towards us, and after a while, I had to pay close attention to all that was being said.

[Details of perpetrator, cut for privacy] He had not committed burglary in a domicile since the mid '90s. He had no past record of violence, and no past record of sexual offending. Like the lucky girl I am, I was his first stab at that.

Months ago, when told about his lack of prior sexual offences. I had burst into tears in front of the detective. 'What's wrong with me then?' I blubbered, envisaging a jury eyeballing me and wondering the same. 'There's nothing wrong with you,' He said. 'You were naked and he took a chance.'

But it seemed strange to me that the defendant had done this, knowing the law so much better than I did. 'I've been inside for certain...offences...before,' he had told me that night, 'But never for anything sexual, never for anything like this.' As though he was confiding to a friend over a pint in a pub, 'I've got to have that knife, it's covered with my DNA. I'm looking at 10 years without it. So I've nothing to lose...'

How could one so lucid suddenly lose the plot, blow his lifetime modus operandi of nick-and-bolt, break into a house for the first time in over a decade and attack a woman with a knife, trying to make her perform sexual acts for him? No wonder his family looked at me.

It was mentioned that this case was unusual in many ways, the most being my readiness to fight, but also, the strange periods of conversation between attacks, his seemingly fulsome remorse and the validations of character that had been written for him by a series of women who knew him and described him as a calm man. These references had gone to the court, and the judge had read them. The defendant had wanted to write a letter to me! To get that in the post! It would have been like peeking through the letterbox and seeing his eyes staring back at me. He had been told it was not to be, and thus his own letter had gone to the court.

His defence counsel did not attempt to deny the charges. They were respectful towards me, and ready to accept all I had said in my statements. He apparently could not remember much of that night; he had been recovering from heroin addiction for years, and together with his brother, had been nursing his dying father for 18 months. His father died in the summer at which point he turned to alcohol. He had never been a drinker before. (Defence didn't quite say 'It wuz the boooooze wot did it, yer 'onner!' But it was close...) The night he broke in, he had taken nearly an entire packet of temazepan plus a wellie's worth of brew. This, argued the Defence, transformed him into the maniac who did all this damage and couldn't remember any of it.

I had been very close to this guy, and my sense of smell is good, almost acute. I didn't get a whiff of alcohol off him that night. He smelled of nothing at all. And for a man so puzzled, he had been very swift to plead guilty to crimes contrary to his nature and his memory; possibly because he and his counsel must have recognised that nothing good could come of having my 999 call being played out to a jury.

I wanted to get all those women who knew him so well, and were confident enough of his character to write to the judge, yes and his daughter and his stepdaughter and his mother, and his sister, and let them hear that tape, me screaming for my life down the phone, him kicking the door in as he yelled obscenities, and see them write then. 'Women!' He had spat at me. They might think him a decent man, that night he thought nothing of them. And neither do I.

The Defence agreed that he should do a substantial amount of time for his crimes; what they wanted to argue against was the IPP** that the police wanted as part of his sentence, and the conclusions arrived at by the pre-sentencing report. In that report, the recorder felt that the defendant blamed me for being naked in my bed, inflaming him. The Defence insisted that this was not at all what the defendant intended to say; he was searching for reasons in his own mind as to why he might have done it, and could arrive at none. This had clearly come across badly in the videolink interview.

The judge felt that there was not enough proof of ongoing danger to the public for an IPP; but he also felt that current prescribed sentence lengths for what had happened were insufficient. The defendant had not raped me, nor had he even reached my erogenous zones, but he tried repeatedly, and he also tried to arm himself three times, once with a carving knife, once with a steak knife and once with a Live Action Role-Playing sword***. The sentence for both aggravated burglary and sexual assault was 18 years, knocked down to 12 for an early guilty plea, saving us all the trauma of a trial. He will serve half of that, and then be let out. If he is arrested after that, he goes back in and serves the rest.

This was accounted steep; Prosecution told me that he might appeal, but that even if he did, it would not go down by more than a year. 'He will go on the sex offenders list for life,' she said, 'And he will not have a pleasant time. He knows how other prisoners treat sex offenders.' She also had one final message for me from the Defence; in the estimation of her learned colleague, the defendant's remorse was genuine. Again it was said that the depth and sincerity of his contrition seemed unusual. 'Make of that what you will,' said the Prosecution.

For the first time, I wanted to go over to the Defence Counsel and crack her head out of her wig.

Stop it! I wanted to scream at her, What, is this bloke some ladykiller, haha, that every woman around him wants to tell me what a nice guy he is? Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and I believe there is no-one who hears me in the whole world. I thought I was going to die that night. I practice with carving knives, and I cry for no reason. Sorry? Of course he's sorry. He's sorry he's in the dock, he's sorry his life is in this mess, he'll say anything and of course you want to believe him cos that's your job! Well, all right, do your job and be paid well, but don't come to me trying to feel good about it!


There, that's the shrill truth of me. I felt faint at the sentencing, and even now am dizzy when I think about it. For a man who broke in, threatened me with a knife, stole stuff and tried to rape me, this sentence seems just and fair. For a man who has never harmed a woman before, went off on the biggest bender of his life, is genuinely disgusted at himself and sorry for the pain he has caused, this seems like hell, deserved according to his actions if not his motives, but still hell. And I feel it.

I feel for him.

I don't know the truth of what or who this man really is. It is good that no other person faces what I have faced, for 5 or 6 years at least. After all this, I am going to be all right, I know it. But I am so sorry we ever met, and not just because it hurt me.

Oh Mr. Try to be well.

THE END

* It is just possible that his family were not all entirely hideous carnies. I was a little angry at the time...

** An IPP means imprisonment for public protection. These sentences have to be served in full, but that doesn’t mean automatic release afterwards; the prisoner must prove that he is not a public danger and this can take years to ascertain. There is a lot of controversy about these sentences.

****A replica of a weapon made from latex based around a fibre-glass tube.

**** As we see, I was no kinder to the Defence than to his family. Still, at least I didn't actually say these things.

The Beginning

Journal Entry November 27th 2011:

Friday night I came home after seeing some chums in North London. I left [partner] with them, and came home early because I was due in the office on Saturday morning. After some faffing about, I went to bed.

I woke when the bedroom light was switched on. The man was a stranger; I kept expecting him to somehow become my brother or my partner, as if my eyes had to be deceiving me. They weren't, not about him, not about the carving knife in his hand.

I started to scream, begging my neighbours to hear me, crying out for help and he came towards me telling me to stop it. 'I JUST WANT MONEY!' He yelled and threatened to cut me if I shouted. So I stopped. I pointed him at the money box. He tipped it out, found no money, started shouting and came at me with the knife, moving the blade towards my face.

As the knife came I tried to grab it. I aimed for the handle and got the bottom end of the blade, and he pressed that into my thumb to get my hand off. My thumb bled a lot and I got faint. Big picture still in my head: the palm of my hand and all the little creases filling up with blood. But I didn't let go. I didn't let go for the rest of the night.

We wrestled and pulled, sometimes he let go in a kind of wild remorseful mood swing, then he would tell me that he had to have the knife as it was evidence, he would attack me for the knife and try to touch me, he would push my hand down and try to prize my fingers apart for the knife, but from the moment I grabbed it, I never ever let it go. I was covered in blood, all out of my thumb.

He pulled his pants a bit down, took out his penis and told me that I was going to suck his cock or he would cut my throat. I told him NO, I screamed at him not to touch me, and I knew there were a few things that would never happen, not while I had the knife and I would never give up the knife. He went for the knife again, trying to pin me down on the bed, trying to get himself between my thighs, I lifted my knees, planted my feet in his chest and kicked him back onto the dresser. He howled and claimed I cut him, as if he, and I and the bedsheets weren't covered in what he called my 'claret' already!

He sat on the bed, tried to make me sit by him. I coaxed him to talk and I listened, tried to build a bond. I explained to him that while my head wanted to believe he didn't mean me harm, my body was terrified and I was going to vomit. I stood there, naked, covered in blood in front of him, and I puked straight onto the floor. I told him, that I needed the toilet, and at the time I truly believed I was going to defecate. He walked onto the landing, and my guts just stopped, I slammed the door behind him, pushed a suitcase in front of it, grabbed my phone from off the laundry basket and phoned 999. He roared outside the door, crashing around, threats and fury. Upstairs, downstairs rummaging through the house, the kitchen, my fear he would find a bigger, better knife. The WPC at the other end of the phone warned me not to tell him I was talking to her; too late, he was shouting and screaming at the door again. 'Crowbar!' He yelled. It went quiet.

Suddenly it started again, solid heavy blows/kicks against the door, the whole thing feeling as if it was going to come off on its hinges, I felt it crack behind me horizontally across the centre, just as the WPC told me that the police had arrived at the wrong address. The bottom of the door burst open, he pushed it forward, the case and I followed and he came into the room.

'Now you're fucked!' He said, pulling one of [partner’s]’ LARP swords out of a scabbard. He couldn't quite believe it didn't hurt me. I could finally get out the bedroom door and I did, he ran down the stairs behind me, I tried the front door, fumbled, ran into the front room, ran out into the hall, got the door right this time, out into the streets, they were empty. I don't know what I was expecting, a swat team in the bushes perhaps or a man with a megaphone? He followed me too, and ran off. I ran back inside and bolted the door. The police were there in less than 2 minutes. I heard them at the door and knew it had to be them, but I was afraid it was him. I opened the door, and stood there naked, covered in blood, crying, knife in hands. They told me to drop the knife, and I did, the knife and the phone on the floor. They came in and covered me up.

The police were fantastic. They took me to hospital, where my thumb got stitched up. [Partner] was so supportive in every way. Our neighbours let us sleep in their brand new bedroom; we couldn't come back in, even to collect my phone because it was part of the crime scene. Seeing the house next day with that tape they use across the entrance, cats very confused.

We thought he had taken a lot of money, but he hadn't. I had been telling him the truth about the jewellery box; there was £600 cash there. He had missed it because it was in white envelopes; clearly he expected it to be marked 'SWAG' or something.

Me, I am OK. I know, I know I was very lucky, but I feel light headed. I keep waking up. I smell a bit more intense...I have had two baths, but it's just slightly more sweat than I am used to, don't know what that is.

This is garbled, but I can't write much more for now.

When these stitches heal, I will have a tiny tattoo on this thumb to always remember; I may not have the valour of a soldier, I may be too silly for a hero. But when nightmares come - and they do come and they are not movies - I must always remember that I have it in me to grab the knife and keep hold.