Locked naked in the yard and treated like a dog - Domestic abuse victim urged others to be brave

Eve Donnelly, 39, from Kensington in Liverpool, was repeatedly beaten up, locked in the yard like a dog and left feeling suicidal.

She told LBC: “I had a social media invite on Snapchat, and he just said, “Oh, do you fancy meeting me in the park?”, as the African Oye festival was on in Sefton Park, so I met up with him.

“Within a week, he ‘d smashed my head off a coffee table.

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“He was knocking me unconscious on a daily basis. He brought my self-esteem to the pits of despair. There was lots of sexual violence, although I was unconscious for a lot of it. I lost the ability to speak in some ways and lost myself in the process.

“I suffered with something called Stockholm Syndrome, basically missing your abuser, and even if they’re vile to you, which he was despicable – he locked me out in the backyard, naked, for 45 minutes at a time and treated me like a dog.

"But, although sometimes I have moments of feeling super, super embarrassed about it, it's important that people like myself speak up, especially about the sexual violence, because it stops women feeling as though things are their fault, and it stops the embarrassment.”

Latest figures show more than 1.2 million women and over 550,000 men in the UK, between the ages of 16 and 59, have been victims of domestic abuse during their lives.

Eve added: "I was still going to work as a support worker at the time, I was threatened by my bosses that I was going to be sacked if I didn't turn up to work.

"But when I turn up to work and my head was like (huge), or I had numerous black eyes, or he did my ribs and all my legs, the service users would be upset, which I can understand, and they were saying I was causing the service users distress, so I felt pulled from pillar to post. I didn't know where to turn.

“Family had no clue whatsoever. My friends were threatening to tell my family, so I was being horrible to my friends. Then, of course, my family then wanted to see me, and I wouldn't see them for weeks on end because of the state of me.

"So, you feel, really, it's a mixture of feeling super embarrassed, you're on the floor with your self-esteem, my body was hurting me, I was in a really, really bad way.

"When he would knock me unconscious, I'd wake up in the corner of the room, and he'd be cooking under the grill, and he'd say, 'D’ya want some chicken?”' So, then I'd go, “Yeah”, because if you’ve ever been knocked unconscious, it's extremely painful, and you wake up with delirium, you don't know where you are.

"Then I would then think, well, has it even happened. It was completely gaslighting and real psychological abuse. I didn't realize it was happening. I thought, I'm losing my mind.”

In July 2024, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing said that violence against women and girls is a “national emergency”. A year on from that, the government says it intends to set out how it will halve VAWG in a new strategy being published this summer.

Eve told LBC: “What really made me leave eventually was one night I thought he was going to kill me. I'd had a message on my social media, and he read the message, and his eyes flipped back in his head, almost like a great white shark when it's biting its prey.

"He ran out into the kitchen and was rummaging through the knife drawer, and I managed to run out, and one of my friends who I worked with on shift, she literally lived over the road, and a I just got to her front door. She saved my life.

"He got sentenced to 23 years, but it took me until quite recently, really, to build my life back up.

"I don't involuntarily shake now, I don't have night terrors anymore, but this is very, very recent, like I completed a criminology degree only a few years ago, and even during my criminology degree, I was having night terrors and flashbacks."

Having experienced such depraved levels of abuse, Eve is now running specialised sessions for young people to make them aware of the issues around domestic abuse, and what to look out for, she said: "I set up the Reverse North West CIC in 2023 and it helps women and children that are fleeing male violence. We're going to be offering teaching schemes here, really confronting domestic violence workshops."