Young girl, Daisy Kneer, remembers how her toy box had been covered with blood and broken glass from her father’s rage.

He had trashed the house entirely and the four-year-old could not comprehend what was going on at such a young age.

The father insinuated the fight because her mother, who had been enduring all of the violence and abuse from him, mustered up the courage to ask him for a divorce and leave him behind. He didn’t take it to well, resulting in more domestic violence to ensue.

There is at least one in five children in the UK to be exposed to domestic violence, the scene is not rare.

“You have to constantly walk on eggshells,” says Daisy, now 21.

Domestic abuse has affected families throughout the nation, being one in five offences that have been recorded after the first lockdown from COVID19. There are concerns that the lockdown will have even more repercussions in relations to domestic abuse.

Daisy had grown up witnessing the physical and emotional abuse of her father against her mother, Charlotte, who now works as a domestic violence refuge and campaigner. When she was young, her parents split up yet he had a lingering presence in their family as she grew up.

A memory she remembers vividly is when Wayne Prior, father of Daisy, “got a knife out in front of my little sister and told my mum she should stab him. He was very emotionally manipulative and he would text me threatening to kill himself or use us to make contact with my mum.

He would make us feel bad and guilty if we didn’t see him and call me thick. I thought what I had was normal until I went round friends’ houses and saw what their dads were like.”

Daisy’s dad had not been arrested until she was the age of 11, being convicted to seven counts of bodily harm. Not only was he convicted of those crimes, he had made threats to kill and had common assault under his belt, sentencing him to seven years.

Police report that there had always been calls about domestic abuse from kids, but “being at home now, young people were witnessing or being involved much more than usual, and also the pandemic and all its pressures [has] triggered abuse between parents.”

Another incident, a mother of three had endured 20 years of abuse before leaving during lockdown, only for her daughter, 6, witness her mother being strangled by her father.

The mother states: “I didn’t want my daughter to think his behavior was okay.” She also adds that her children was always aware, even if she tried to hide the abuse.

Witnessing their parents in domestic abuse causes them to be afraid, and “sometimes a child doesn’t want to tell anyone because they don’t want to get their parent in trouble.” Saying that is the real dilemma if they both love the parents but feel trapped.

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