Happy New Year - Or is it!?

Firstly, I would like to wish all my subscribers a very Happy New Year. Certainly, for me personally, I am hoping for a very healthy and happy 2025. But I am acutely aware that we are coming up to the time, when statistically, more women leave their partners/ex partners, because of domestic abuse and violence. I have tried to find the stats online and can’t but it has always been known (in the domestic abuse world anyway), that around the 4th January, women will flee. I have always found this to be true - working in a refuge for many years and then as an IDVA in London and now at NCDV - referrals rise significantly around that date. Indeed, I left my abuser on the 4th January!

Why is this, I wonder?

Well, I can certainly not speak for the hundreds of thousands of women that have done this at this time, but for me personally, Christmas and New Year were over. The decorations had come down. No more twinkly lights to mesmerise my small daughter. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t plan it. Nothing had happened in the last few days prior to January 4th. But it had been a truly awful Christmas and I knew then, I had to get out, before he killed me. On the morning of January 4th when I woke up, I just instinctively, knew it was time. It is so hard to explain. Anyone that has done it, will know what it feels like. Of course, my abuser stabbed me amongst other things after I had left but that is just classic really as we know that victims/survivors of domestic abuse and violence are most at risk once they have left.

As usual, I am going off on a tangent! I guess my point is that we should all spare a thought for the many, many women (I don’t know the stats for men leaving), who will be waking up today and the next few days, knowing that this is the day! If everyone of us did something - no matter how small, to raise awareness or to support a domestic abuse organisation, we will have helped those who find that it is not a very Happy New Year.