Maybe He Doesn't Hit You... - When Does Control Become A Crime ?

A woman dies every week in Australia from domestic violence. Yet while the UK has introduced laws to prosecute the emotional and psychological abuse that invariably come before physical assault, nothing is being done here. Why not, asks Alexandra Carlton

- Alexandra Carlton

When Joanne Beverley last saw her sister Natalie on April 17, 2016, the younger woman was glowing with hope, having finally found the strength to leave her partner, Paul Hemming. “We were here, having Sunday lunch,” Joanne tells Marie Claire from her family home in Yorkshire, England. “She had a new job. She was still living in the house with Paul, but she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring and had plans to rent her own place. We were so relieved she’d split with Paul. Their relationship was so turbulent. This was the happiest I’d seen her in a long time.”

Joanne believed this was start of a whole new life for Natalie, 31, and her three kids – her 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship and her two children with Paul, a boy and a girl. What Joanne couldn’t have known was that exactly two weeks later Hemming, who had a history of extreme control and domination, would, while their children slept upstairs, beat Natalie to death in a jealous rage, incensed by her decision to leave him and start afresh.

The couple’s son, six at the time, woke to find his mummy “lying down” and wrapped in a rug. “We took the red rug to Daddy’s work so it could have a wash,” the little boy later told police, in what was to become a crucial piece of evidence in Paul Hemming’s conviction.