Jenni Kerswell-Frost

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

Right… it’s a bit like film – um, rather drastic. I had three young children, I was living with an abusive husband… he had already set fire to my daughter… and… one night when he’s gone out drinking, I lifted the children out of their beds, put them in a van -somebody else drove- and left. And came to Exeter from Shropshire. And slept on somebodies’ floor for 9 or 10 months. I went to the council and they said, ‘go back where you came from’. I saw a solicitor, but I also battled onto a housing place called Guinness Trust at the end of 9 months. But because I didn’t have any help through that 13 years of terrible abuse, I was determined at some point that I was going to help women. So, in the 90’s I thought, ‘I’ll go back, I’ll do some work at college and I’ll aim to be a psychotherapist and help women’ – and that’s what I did. I was already working for women’s aid in West Devon on their phones helping women, and I asked Exeter if I could volunteer as a therapist, and I did that for nearly a year then they found me some funding – so I created my own job and from then on… was it 2003… that’s what I’ve been doing since. I don’t think anything will shock me anymore what people will do to others to control them but it’s very complicated and it isn’t a matter of saying ‘well why don’t you leave?’ – it’s what keeps them there. 

I don’t know how… I must have seen thousands of people altogether- last year I had more men than women. And they’re not small men- they’re pretty big, I would say most of them are over 6ft tall but if they are abused maybe psychologically or whatever by their partner – she can threaten ‘oh I’ll call the police, they won’t believe that I’m hurting you because you’re big’, so in years gone by they were… you know, it was questioned – wow, you know, which way round is it – but now police have got much better at training, you know, they are wise to these situations and I think they get called out all the time, over and over again. And it’ll probably take 7 attempts for a woman to get out and sadly in this area they’ve closed the refuge, they closed the outreach, and I was made redundant because of that. So, there was less help for women and not more, as you might hear from governments.