Coronation Street

I've mentioned before about how the Kirsty/Tyrone storyline really gets me because of how it so accurately portrays a violent relationship. Tonight was no different.

In case (shock! horror!) you don't watch, Crazy Kirstie tonight fell downstairs whilst trying to hit Tyrone. She then told the Police that he pushed her, and had been abusing her. Almost immediately on twitter there was a slew of tweets saying how unrealistic it was, that Corrie had gone too far now, that this wouldn't happen.

Oh yes it would.

I experienced this the first few times I phoned the Police when Steve attacked me. The thing is, Tyrone has NEVER phoned the Police. You don't, not at first. And the way it works is that you suffer a really bad attack, but then it is over, so you don't call them then. But the next time the abuser kicks off, you are so scared that it is then that you call - when they haven't actually done anything much. So the Police would arrive, and I would be there, with no marks on me, yet hysterical and crying, whilst Steve would be there really calm and pretendy-uncomprehending. He would always kick off after drinking and when my Son was at his Dad's, so it would be a Friday or Saturday night and I would have been drinking too. He'd say we had been rowing, and then I'd drunkenly lost the plot.  The more I protested, the more crazy I looked. Those first few times, they believed him.

Then one Friday night he attacked me when I was sober. When I phoned the Police, he knew the game would be up, cos I hadn't drunk a thing - so he took my only set of housekeys and ran. I told the Police this when they arrived. Eventually they told me they had questioned him and searched his B and B room and he didn't have the keys. I could tell they didn't believe me - I found out later exactly why.

He'd told the Police that I was his EX girlfriend, and was obsessed with him, and had made the whole thing up to frame him.

You'd be surprised how commonly abusers can blame their victims. When I was attending the Freedom Programme, one of the women had been successfully prosecuted by her abuser for attacking him. They are so very plausible - if they weren't we would never have believed they loved us.

So once again, Corrie has got it right. But it doesn't stop me from being disappointed in one aspect of the story. In Corrie, Tyrone stays even when the beatings get bad because of his daughter. I would really have liked for him to stay for the real reasons people stay - out of love for the person they met (the illusion), out of the perpetual hope that the abuser will change, out of trauma bonding. That's a storyline that has yet to be done by the soaps - it's one I'd like to see. Or maybe not.