In their small home “May’s” children saw their mother headbutted, choked, slapped, kicked, pushed, shoved and verbally abused.

It would happen in the morning, at night and on holiday, perhaps because she’d made too much noise doing the dishes, or he thought she’d laughed at him, or she’d given the wrong answer.

May calmly tells how in November last year she was preparing for major surgery and explained to her partner that she didn’t want him in the house for the six weeks during her recovery. Secretly she hoped he would leave for good.

The next morning her partner got up while she was watching TV with their three-year-old daughter.

He started slapping May’s head and she cowered with her arms to protect her face. He put his hands in her mouth and tried to rip her mouth apart.

Eventually one of May’s teenage sons, who has an intellectual disability, came to see what was happening. She took him to his room to comfort him and tell him it was ok.

Her partner then verbally abused her and began strangling her in her son’s bedroom.

“I seriously thought that this is it,” she said.

“I honestly can’t breathe here, I was losing it.

“My head was in my son’s lap while he was choking me to hell, I just thought ‘just smile, just die smiling’.” 

Eventually he stopped choking her, but the beating didn’t end there.

“If I was asked how many times did he hit you on that Sunday I would say more than 50,” she said.

“More than 50 times I was hit or slapped around the head.”

Her partner’s mother came and picked him up. May said his parents were shocked when they saw the damage he’d done to her.

“My face had already bruised up pretty badly, my lips were all cut up and ripped apart,” she said.

“I had blood coming out of my mouth and all this dried blood everywhere.”

For this incident her partner was placed on a 15-month community corrections order, to do 150 hours of community work.

May, a mother of four teenage boys, two with intellectual disabilities, said she fell pregnant in the first couple of months of the relationship.

Early on there were “pushes and shoves” and her partner always had to be right. But it was after the birth of their daughter that the violence escalated.

One morning in 2013 May was making coffee and doing the dishes.

“He got up and started going off because I must be trying to be a bitch,” she said.

May was pushed on to a clotheshorse, suffering a deep cut to her arm that needed stitches and left a 15cm scar.

“He pushed me and I fell, then he tried to console me and I told him to piss off and then it all started again,” she said.

“Why would I want you to console me?”

For that and another occasion when he choked and headbutted her, he was convicted and fined $1300.

There are countless other incidents that were never reported to police, including when he threw a full one-litre milk container at her, and when he smashed a Winnie the Pooh plywood poster over her head.

Once she hid under their bed after he’d beaten her. When he eventually found her he pulled the mattress off the bed and began jumping on the slats while she tried to escape.

“I quickly got out and he’s grabbed me by the hair and pulled me out from under the bed,” she said.

On another occasion the assault was so bad she suffered a perforated ear drum which he would later blame on two of her boys.

When the violence would happen May would never run from him because it would only make him madder.

“Sometimes I’d get so much guts that I’d just walk away from him and he’d be behind me just pushing me and I’d just keep walking,” she said.

“Sometimes I’d get a little bit smart-arsey because I’d just be like ‘what else can you do to me’? While he’s angry I’m best sitting, because if I move I think of where I’m going to land and hit.”

May said she could never imagine she would be in a violent relationship and that she felt like a fool.

“I’ve been a single mother for so long and then this man wants to be the everyday dad and I can’t pull my socks up and be a geisha,” she said.

“All I’ve got to do is ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full. Everything’s good’.”

She feels let down by the justice system and believes her partner was dealt with less severely because it was domestic, not public, violence.

She said he had a history of violence towards other men and if those incidents had been reported to police he would have had a long list of priors.

“He’s not on ice, it’s not alcohol-driven,” she said.

“His actions are that of a psychopath who would attack at any given moment. If he did what he’d done to a man down the street or to a woman who wasn’t his partner he would have been jailed for sure.

“Oh my God, he would have been thrown away.”

-Anyone experiencing domestic violence should call Emma House on 5561 1934, the Women’s Domestic Violence Crisis Service on 1800 015 188 or, if in immediate danger, the police on 000.