Domestic abuse surged in pandemic. Britain pushing back with legal reform.
Maria Castillo still recalls the stigma attached to the concept of “domestic abuse” in early 2000, when she fled her partner with their then-3-year-old son.
He had knocked on the front door “looking for an excuse to come in,” before violently attacking her for hours in front of his friends. She recalls her face had swelled to the point of numbness. “I didn’t even look in the mirror. ... I just grabbed whatever I needed to grab and left.”
But finding safety and sympathy wasn’t easy. When she sought help at a local police station, she says, an officer referred to her case as “just a domestic.” “The word ‘domestic’ was used as an insult,” she recalls. “It was all still very hush-hush. Domestic violence wasn’t
The pandemic and domestic abuseSarah Everard and misogynistic crime
