Face to Face With My Rapist

She was stalked, emotionally abused and raped. Yet Emma Riggs, 32, took back control by confronting her attacker head-on.

Reaching for the door handle, I could see my hands were trembling. My heart was hammering furiously in my chest and beads of sweat had started to pool around the hairs on the back of my neck like drops of warm dew. I was about to see Steve* for the first time in four-and-a-half years. This was a man who I had once loved, but also a man who had violently raped me. I needed a moment to catch my breath.

It’s funny, but as I opened the door and saw him sitting there, a strange sense of familiarity washed over me. It wasn’t the way he had kept me captive in his car as he repeatedly attacked me. Instead, it was the happy times we had once shared as a couple that came to mind.

I looked down at my hands, clenched in my lap, and realised I held them so tightly that my nails had made little crescent-moon shaped scars in my palms. I had to tell him what he had done to me.

I’d met Steve two years earlier in the pub where I worked – he was a regular and constantly flirted with me across the bar. Eventually, we started dating; our relationship got serious very quickly and we moved in together. But things soon started to sour. He’d tell me what to wear, and refuse to let me go out with my friends. He drank a lot and would become aggressive when he came back from the pub in a fug of booze, belittling me with snide comments. Even when I fell pregnant after eight months, his drinking continued. He would lash out violently in his sleep – his arms and legs flailing, forcing me to sleep on the sofa to avoid getting hit.

When our son Harry* was born, I’d hoped Steve would change. He didn’t. Eventually, after two years together, I thought, ‘Enough is enough’. So I packed my bags, took Harry and moved into my mum and dad’s house.