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A rude awakening by John Bolch

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March 28, 2024

It is early on Tuesday morning two days ago and I’m in bed, asleep.

My slumber is interrupted by a loud noise. In my sleepy state, it takes me a few moments to recognise it. Then I realise – it’s a helicopter. I glance at the clock and curse when I see it’s 3am.

I roll over and try to get back to sleep, but the helicopter returns. It seems to be close, circling around.

I pull the covers over my ears, but can still hear the helicopter. I curse again and wonder what is going on.

Eventually the helicopter leaves. I drift off to sleep again.

When I awake I dimly remember the helicopter. I look at the local news to see if there are any clues as to why it was here. Nothing.

Later in the day, however, some news trickles down. Could it be related? Surely not – nothing like that happens around here. Does it?

Yes it does.

The news tells me that at about 2.40am an air ambulance was called to an incident. It landed in a local field, but in the event it was not needed.

What was the incident?

A local woman has been stabbed multiple times, allegedly by her husband. She has suffered head, thorax, abdomen and lower leg injuries. She has been taken to King’s College Hospital in London. Thankfully, her condition is not thought to be life-threatening.

Yesterday her husband was charged with attempted murder.

Domestic violence happens anywhere and everywhere. As the above proves, it can happen near you.

You may think that you live in a ‘good’ area and that it only happens in ‘bad’ areas. It does not. It happens in all areas.

You may think that perpetrators of domestic violence are all from a certain ‘class’. They are not. They come from all walks of life.

I don’t know the details of the above incident. Obviously, it was very serious. It may have been a ‘one-off’, but the chances are that it was just the latest and most serious incident in a long-running history of abuse.

If you are the victim of domestic violence then you need not endure it. There are things that you can do, hopefully preventing an incident as serious as the one above. I have written about this here before, setting out in this post some of the courses of action available to you.

We must all be aware of domestic violence, and how to stop it when it occurs.

John Bolch often wonders how he ever became a family lawyer. He no longer practises, but has instead earned a reputation as one of the UK's best-known family law bloggers, with his content now supporting our divorce lawyers and child custody lawyers

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Comment(1)

  1. Andrew says:

    I see you’ve convicted the man toot-sweet, John. Perhaps when lawyers were banned from juries it was the right thing for the wrong reason.

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