Boy sees mother beaten

The barrister, 39, says she and her children live in fear.

A barrister who suffered severe head injuries after she was attacked by her ex-husband has spoken out about the devastating effects of domestic violence.

The 39-year-old lawyer was bashed five times around the head with a large rock in front of her terrified 5-year-old son and suffered "horrendous" facial injuries including a broken nose, bruising and cuts to her head and face.

Her former husband, Kevin Hume, was jailed for 16 months at the North Shore District Court on Thursday for injuring with intent to injure and breaching a protection order.

The court was told Hume sent text messages saying "I will never hurt you" and "this is the final text" just a few hours before he crept into her home north of Auckland in the early hours of January 8.

When she woke up at about 2.45am, Hume chased her into her bedroom, pinning her down before beating her over the head with a large river stone.

Hume only stopped the attack when their young son, who was sleeping in the same bed, was woken by his mother's screams and switched on the bedroom light.

The former groundsman fled the house and was captured three days later.

In sentencing, Judge Lawrence Hinton said: "Domestic violence is an insidious problem and I'm obliged to denounce your conduct and generally deter others."

The victim hopes to start a new life with her three children aged 19, 8 and 5, and did not want to be named.

But she wrote a harrowing account of the assault and posted it on the internet, and updated her 1500 Twitter followers on the case.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, she said: "It feels like a nightmare that I will never awake from ... that I am effectively one of those battered women who will spend the rest of their life looking over their shoulder.

"I found myself jumping at any shadow or noise in the night. I will never feel safe while he was out there." She also said her legal career had been left in tatters after being unable to return to work due to concussion.

"For the first two months after the attack, I was unable to read and understand any complex material at all and this frightened me deeply.

"I am quite passionate about my career, as I need intellectual stimulation and interesting discussion the way other people need food and water."

Despite the physical and emotional trauma, she said the hardest part of the ordeal had been witnessing the effects on her children.

"Worse than the physical pain was watching my children looking fearfully at my injuries. I am having to watch them struggling with trying to reconcile the image of their Daddy, who they loved ... is also the monster who broke into our house and injured me seriously in front of them.

"Instead of saying 'it might be a monster', they are saying 'it might be Daddy'."

Hume's lawyer said his client had been receiving chemotherapy treatment for cancer and was extremely remorseful.

Latest crime figures released this month showed an increase of 18.6 per cent in reported domestic violence last year.

"I never thought I would be one of those women that this happened to," the lawyer said after the hearing. "I kept saying to my friends, 'I'm not a battered woman, that's not me'. Even though I know it wasn't my fault, I started blaming myself."

She said sharing the experience with others helped her to get through it: "It's given other people the opportunity to come to me with their stories."