Domestic violence: NSW mum discovers abusive husband sexually assaulted daughters

Late one night, while *Eva’s husband was on his way home from work, their then-teenage daughter crept into her mum’s room and revealed the unthinkable – her dad had sexually abused her.

Aware that her husband would arrive any minute, a horrified Eva instructed her daughter to barricade herself in her bedroom until morning, when they would deal with it properly.

“I then went to my eldest daughter and asked if it had ever happened to her. She whispered ‘no it hadn’t’ while looking at the floor… I assumed she was in shock,” the NSW mum-of-nine mum tells Kidspot.

“My husband arrived home soon after and I had to pretend everything was normal – I couldn’t say anything to let him know that I knew because I was scared he would kill us.”

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Eva’s daughter revealed her dad sexually abused her in a three-page handwritten note. Source: Supplied to Kidspot

“My husband would wake me up to accuse me of cheating”

By that point, Eva and her husband had been together for nearly 20 years and had nine children together.

From the very beginning of their relationship, Eva’s husband had controlled her behaviour – she couldn’t so much as walk down the street in her small town without his permission.

He was especially focused on any men Eva interacted with, violently accusing her of cheating if she even spoke to a man.

“I would get woken up in the middle of the night to be told that I was having an affair… he would yell at me, would say I was cheating, would call me a slut,” Eva disturbingly recalls.

“If I didn’t give him sex, he would say it was because I had already been with someone – despite the fact I was home or with him all day.”

RELATED: ‘This photo was taken the night before I escaped my abuser’ 

My abusive husband told me: ‘I’ll end up killing you’

But Eva’s husband’s behaviour went beyond control – on one occasion he grabbed her by the neck and strangled her before smashing a hole in the door while screaming “at least I didn’t punch you”.

On another occasion, he menacingly announced: “I’ll end up killing you one day” after arriving home drunk.

“He screamed out ‘do you want me to hit you? Do you want the kids to see what you made me do?’” Eva vividly retells.

“I hadn’t noticed my son run out of the house and 20 minutes later the police arrived at the door. He had run to the payphone and called them.”

Eva’s husband was removed by police, who instructed her to file an AVO – which she felt unable to do.

“I had nine children and nowhere to go, no way of supporting my children financially or emotionally,” Eva explains, adding that she now deeply regrets her decision to stay.

“I felt that kids deserved to have two parents and as long as he was good with them and only abusing me, then that was the least I could do to keep my family together.”

“My daughters revealed their dad sexually abused them”

But all of that changed in an instant when one of Eva’s teenage daughter’s revealed her father had been sexually assaulting her.

The next morning, Eva called the police and the Department of Child Services to report the assault and file an intervention order against her husband.

“The next few weeks were crazy, 100 phone calls a day from him, begging me to make this right, saying that it wasn’t true, begging for me to let him see the younger girls,” she recalls.

“Then my eldest daughter wrote me a note… it was three pages long – something told me what I was about to read before I even read the first word.

“She revealed her dad had abused her first and that she felt to blame for what had happened to her sister.

“She said that when her sister told me what happened, she didn’t want to hurt me or break my heart anymore by saying anything about what happened to her.

“On the last page of her letter, she ended it with ‘I hope that you still love me’ – it broke my heart.”

RELATED: How babies and kids are affected by domestic violence

“Show your children that life isn’t just abuse”

Eva immediately went back to the police with this evidence – and her husband was charged with child sexual abuse.

In court, as he was sentenced to jail, he jumped up and screamed at Eva, accusing her of “getting what she wanted”.

“He couldn’t have been further from the truth, as all I ever wanted was someone who was a good man, a good husband, a good dad,” she says.

“A couple of weeks later, my kids and I were sitting in our lounge room, laughing and singing.

“I realised that it was the first time in about 10 years that I had laughed… that I had smiled. We were safe, we were happy, we were still a family.

“You owe it to your children to give them a chance to see that life is not about yelling, it’s not about abuse – it’s not about someone having absolute power over your decisions, your choices, your friendships, what you wear, or what you eat or  who you talk to when walking down a street.

“I want people to know that sometimes one parent can be amazing, can be happy, can teach your kids about how good life is… and that is enough.”

*Name has been changed

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