Some people still downplay the domestic abuse of men because men, being men, are much stronger and more capable of doing damage. Yet, the statistics are all over the place, but most of them seem to show that woman beat men almost as often as men beat women. We also place men being beaten in a Catch 22 situation.
Man assaults woman: Police take man to jail.
Woman assaults man: Police don’t take it seriously.
Woman assaults man: Man fights back: Police take man to jail.
Sometimes, that damage done by a woman in that situation can be extreme.
This is the dramatic moment police rescued a 21-year-old man who was ‘days from death’ following months of violent attacks from his abusive girlfriend.
Officers from Bedfordshire Police found Alex Skeel, from Stewartby, cowering on the stairs after receiving a call from concerned neighbours who had heard him screaming following his latest attack at the hands of Jordan Worth.
Worth regularly attacked him with ‘weapons’ including a hammer, a screwdriver, bread knives and a broken hairbrush in a nine-month campaign of domestic abuse that left him ‘ten days away from death’ according to medics.
Now 22, Alex – a football coach – has revealed the extent of his horrific injuries for the first time in a BBC documentary that charts how he was violently assaulted, stabbed, starved and burnt by the mother of his two children, who was jailed in April 2018.
…A kettle full of boiling water became Jordan’s weapon of choice, leaving her boyfriend screaming in pain as the skin hung off his arms and back.
‘She would wait up all night with a kettle of boiling water and if it went cold she would just wait and reboil it,’ he recalls.
A few days after one such attack, Jordan slashed her boyfriend’s hand with a breadknife and police were called, not for the first time, by their worried neighbours who heard Alex shouting, ‘Leave me alone, stop hurting me’.
Sgt. Ed Finn of Bedfordshire Police was on the scene and remembers how, despite there being ‘blood everywhere’, the couple both insisted that Alex’s numerous injuries were self-inflicted.
…When they managed to get Alex to hospital, doctors said he was just ‘ten days from death’ in his physical state, by which point his burns had become infected.