A British mum remembers the horrifying moment her ex-partner asked her to stab him with a knife.

Claire Hulbert has decided to share her experience with domestic violence to help inspire other women suffering in silence after her abuser was jailed.

She met Stephen Parker on Facebook three years ago, Wales Online reports.

“He would paint himself out to be lovely,” she says. “But I should have picked up on signs in the first months really.” 

The mum was “scared” to be left alone and hoped he would change while she tried to “look at the good side”.

She said Parker would “start to put me down, and make me question things, and he’d make me feel like I wasn’t good enough and compare me to other people in his past.” 

But following a terrifying incident, Claire knew that something had to change. 

“I knew I couldn’t go on when he got a knife out and tried to get me to stab him with it. He also dangled the knife over his mouth and I just thought, if he drops it then I am at risk of going to prison myself and I can’t have that for my children.”

Claire, from Brackla, Bridgend, started recording Parker’s behaviour on her phone and managed to gather enough evidence to report him to the police. 

She said: “I told him I would record him and report him to the police but that didn’t stop him. If you haven’t got evidence and it is your word against theirs, that’s hard because you start to question yourself.”

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She added: “You think maybe you are wrong but because I got the videos I could give them straight to the police. One of them made me cry at the time because I hadn’t seen it or listened to it when I gave it to them and I thought ‘That’s me, if that was my daughter I’d be going mad’. 

“Because I’ve got kids as well it does make you see things differently.”

Parker, 43, of no fixed address, has now been jailed for four years for three counts of assault resulting in bodily harm, one count of sexual assault and one count of controlling and coercive behaviour.

Now that Stephen has been sentenced, Claire has waived her anonymity and spoke out so that other people know they can also do it. 

“People need to know that they don’t have to stay with the person they are with. They can be free from it all but it can be hard to get that courage to leave them. I’m learning to love myself again. I had to force myself to look at those videos to actually send them to the police,” she said.

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“A lot of them were actually a first time for me seeing them and experiencing it. I just couldn’t believe it. It was kind of scary but a relief as well and I didn’t actually think it was that bad until I’d seen the videos and heard them. Unless people have experienced or seen it themselves you can’t believe it and I definitely wasn’t going back after that.”

Since his sentencing, Claire has been able to start moving on. She is now in a new relationship and has enquired about counselling. 

She said: “It’s hard, and I’m reliving it even now. Even though he’s in prison, a knock on the door will make me think it’s him. I’m in a new relationship now, it’s been about four months and we’re not arguing, we haven’t shouted, it is kind of like I’m waiting for something to happen, but it’s nice. To me, three years felt like a long time.”

Going forward, she wants other people to know they are not alone, noting: “I don’t want to be quiet. I want to talk about what I went through and raise that awareness, and tell people what he’s done to me.”

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