David Challen: the torment that drove my mother to kill my father

Photograph by Sophia Evans

I don’t remember anything after that. Not the silence, not the dark congealing truth edging into frame. Just a dull, emotionless haze, then soon, a realisation: my mother killed him.

What I came to understand much later was that this act didn’t start here. It grew within the bowels of my home, seeping into an atmosphere I would dedicate my life to naming. This wasn’t the story of a woman who wielded power and control, but of a woman victim to it, ultimately suffering a loss of control in an unthinkable act of violence. In the years that followed, my brother and I fought to appeal her murder conviction. Using new language, alongside new psychiatric evidence, we exposed the life of abuse she endured at the hands of our father. And, in 2019, we won a landmark case that freed her and brought national awareness to this insidious form of abuse.

This year marks 10 years since coercive and controlling behaviour became a criminal offence in England and Wales. It was a landmark piece of legislation that set out to recognise the patterns that sit at the heart of domestic abuse, and remain a key predictor of fatal violence. Yet, I can’t help but wonder: if my mother suffered this abuse again today, would we be any better at stopping it?

When I think back to my childhood, I see the pristine frontage of our middle-class home and my mother moving effortlessly through the local parade of shops. Smiling, chatting, laughing with anyone who’d listen. There was a brightness to her, but it never followed us home.

My memories of my father come separately. Charismatic, charming, he’d dote on me when I was small, calling me “Little David”. But even then, I knew something about him was bad. I felt it in my stomach from the age of five.

As I reached my adolescence I’d study my parents. My mother came to life at dinner parties, only to fold into a silence the moment she caught my father’s glare.

He had a way of handing out humiliations under the guise of humour. “Thunder thighs,” he’d call her, goading everyone to join in. “You don’t want to see her naked!”

Nobody else laughed. A once boundless boy full of life, I slowly disappeared and became quiet.

Eventually, my mother started to find her voice. She confronted him about cheating. He’d deny it, saying she was “making it all up”. She’d confide in me. “I found tickets in his coat pocket. He said I must have put them there?” Her voice was brittle, shaken. Then one evening she caught him coming out of a brothel near her work. Still he denied it. “You’re going mad, Sally. You’re making it up,” he’d say. It was a mantra that echoed throughout my home for years.

If she fell asleep on the sofa, he’d call me over and whisper, “Look, Mum’s not well, she’s drinking all the time.” He tried to use me as a pawn to isolate her further.

One afternoon I saw him place a framed photograph of himself between two naked women on the mantelpiece. She pleaded with him to take it down. He refused with a grin. Standing beside Mum I could feel her panic. “Why are you doing this, Richard?” she said.

Not long after, I found her on the floor, phone bills spread out in front of her proving the scale of his cheating, affirming a reality from which to leave him. “I’d really started to believe it was all in my head,” she said. An alarm began to sound within me. But still, I didn’t know what to do about it.

When my mother finally left, I went with her. But she struggled to survive without the identity he’d built her and finally she asked if he’d take her back. He demanded she sign a contract: not to speak to strangers and not to interrupt him. She agreed. The weeks before she killed my father it felt like something was snowballing.

When my mother was convicted of his murder in 2011, she was painted as a jealous woman. Years later Harriet Wistrich, her new lawyer, emailed us saying my father’s acts amounted to “coercive control”. When I searched the term online, my world collapsed. All the acts I witnessed fell under it: gaslighting, manipulation, isolation. Finally, a language.

I discovered more of my parents’ past. Mum had been only 15 to Dad’s 21 when they met. A couple of years later there was the first act of violence. He dragged her down the stairs after she dared to confront him, which led to my mother’s first suicide attempt. Sexual violence was routine, too. When she finally walked free from prison in 2019, I felt relief. But bringing my mother home wasn’t just about her freedom, it was about naming the violence. It not only gave me language, but a deep responsibility to ensure future families knew it, too.

Today, in Surrey, where I grew up, the charge rate for coercive control sits at 7%. Nationally, convictions remain rare, hovering around 1%. And a decade after coercive control became a crime, some police forces still haven’t been trained to recognise it, despite evidence it increases arrests by 41%. Coercive control training remains specialist knowledge, even though it is the bedrock of domestic abuse from which all acts escalate and remains the single most common call-out for the police. Social workers are on the frontline of safeguarding, too, yet more than a third of accredited university courses in England offer no specific training on coercive control.

This abuse doesn’t always end in domestic homicide. My mother’s suicide attempt earlier in her life could easily have buried the acts that led her to it. Coercive control doesn’t just erode identities, it breeds dependency and drives victims into a psychological crisis. Between April 2022 and March 2023, 93 people are suspected to have taken their own lives after being abused, more than were murdered by a partner. Campaigners estimate that as many as 10 women a week take their own lives to escape domestic abuse. These deaths are not isolated incidents, as so often reported by police. It’s a form of domestic terrorism our systems routinely separate out from the violence that came before.

In June, Labour MP Kirith Entwistle, acting on behalf of Southall Black Sisters, tabled an amendment under the Crime and Policing Bill to ensure that when a victim takes their own life after a sustained campaign of coercive control, the law recognises it as a form of murder. The amendment reflects its severe psychological toll, enhances deterrence and would compel judges, juries, coroners and police to treat these cases with the seriousness they deserve. Society has a role to play in helping stop coercive control, too. My mother reached out to friends, family, colleagues, her employer, her GP and a therapist. Everyone had the moment to recognise this abuse, but no one had the language.

This is the failure we collectively still live with today. And it’s not just the primary victims’ risk, but the co-victims. More than 800,000 children live in homes impacted by domestic abuse. They are not just witnesses, they are shaped by this violence. These children are more likely to face higher risks of depression, PTSD, emotional dysregulation, addiction and long-term struggles with trust, identity and self-worth. They’re also more likely to be re-victimised themselves.

I know this because I found myself in a coercively controlling relationship, too. I normalised it. “Your friends aren’t your friends,” he would tell me. “They don’t care about you.” He’d make me question everything. My mum once said, “You don’t want a relationship like mine.” And I said, “Well if it’s good enough for you…” And on the cycle went.

Tackling coercive control has to be about prevention, and it has to start earlier. If this is the foundation of domestic abuse, then education must be the foundation of its prevention. There are huge gaps in relationship and sex education for teenagers. Without the tools to recognise the harm or seek help, the patterns will repeat. We can’t keep reacting only once the damage is done.

Ten years on from coercive control being made an offence, we’ve named the violence but haven’t yet built the systems to stop it. So often are we drawn to these stories at the end, after the unthinkable act. But we rarely stop to consider what came before.

The Unthinkable by David Challen (Octopus Publishing Group, £20). Order a copy at observershop.co.uk for £20. Delivery charges may apply