KEY POINTS:
Six years after being granted a protection order against her violent ex-husband, Wellington woman Jess is still battling him through the courts in an attempt to get him punished for hounding her by phone and email.
Jess (not her real name), one of 43 case studies in the Waikato University report Living at the Cutting Edge, says getting the protection order was still "the best thing that ever happened in my life".
"I never would have taken any of the steps that I have taken to have a better life if I never got it," she said.
But her ex-husband, a computer expert, has yet to receive any punishment either for his original violence towards Jess or for repeated breaches of the protection order, including reading her personal emails for a year and taking over one of her email addresses and pretending to be her.
Jess, 36, worked as an investment specialist before she had a baby seven years ago, one year after beginning the relationship with her husband.
Her husband was "charming" at first.
"I thought, 'Wow, this is incredible'," she said. "Then the cracks started showing."
It was "little things" at first - unexpected sudden nasty comments, which he always explained away later.
Things came to a head when she became pregnant.
"I said, 'I'm pregnant and I'm not sure what to do about it because there are some things that haven't been quite right'," she said.
"His response was to punch me as hard as he could in the stomach to try to make me lose the baby. He said, 'Until you got pregnant you were not questioning the relationship, everything was fine, so it's better that we don't have a baby'."
Jess got him to go to an anger management counsellor, and for the rest of her pregnancy he was "on his best behaviour". But when she went into labour, "he said, 'Go away, I'm on the computer, I don't want to talk to you'."
In the end, he went with her to hospital for the birth of their daughter. But a month later, when Jess was badly ill, her husband started "kicking and punching" because "he wanted everything his way".
Her husband was an adopted child. When he and Jess took their baby to visit his adoptive parents' home overseas, his mother "didn't say hello and just started ordering him around".
"It was a really odd and creepy place," said Jess. "So I do believe he was abused as a child."
Back home, his behaviour got "crazier". Once he barged in when Jess was having a bath with the baby and poured cold water over them, scaring the baby off having a bath for months.
The night before the child's first birthday, Jess was driving when she asked her husband what present he had bought. "He put his thumb in my eye and pushed as hard as he could." She had to slam on the brakes and jumped out of the car.
A week later, he kicked her across a room, knocking her unconscious when her head slammed into a door frame. Then, and many other times, he smashed the phone to stop her ringing for help.
Finally, with a friend's help, she took the child and went to her parents' house, and saw a lawyer. A protection order was granted without notice.
Her husband left town, but rang her repeatedly.
He created an email address that was almost identical to one he had shared with Jess, and sent emails to her friends with the new address. Some of her friends emailed him, thinking he was her.
He came back to Wellington and got a job with her internet service provider. A year later, she found out that within three days of starting the job he had monitored all her emails from then on.
She started getting "a billion and one hang-up calls". She started seeing him in her neighbourhood - never close enough to her home to breach the protection order, but close enough to be "terrifying".
He was convicted of breaching the protection order when he rang her, but was merely ordered to come up for sentence if called upon with 12 months.
The police also charged him with breaching the order by using psychological violence in the form of reading and censoring her email. That charge made new case law and is still being appealed against through the courts.
Jess wishes she had been told more when the protection order was first issued.
"If I had known then what I do now and had an advocate from the Women's Refuge to help push my case, I might have got a different result," she said. She suggests a booklet explaining what a protection order is and what to do if it is breached and giving contact details for support agencies.
