Following the successful appeal in February to have her murder conviction quashed, my mother Sally Challen last Friday had her plea to manslaughter accepted for the killing of my father Richard Challen in August 2010. What was heard at the original trial as a “textbook case” of a jealous housewife killing her husband has become a landmark case on coercive control that has not only helped display the devastating affects of psychological violence to a nation but has led us to an understanding of her actions.

For almost a decade my brother and I have been forced to accept a false narrative of our father’s death that depicted our mother as a controlling lover who planned to kill our father. Sentencing our mother to life imprisonment at the original trial, Judge Christopher Critchlow told her that she had been “eaten up with jealousy” at our father’s “friendships” with other women. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Our mother was only 15 when she met our father, 21. At first he was charming, but gradually the abuse began. He bullied and humiliated her, isolated her from her friends and family, controlled who she could socialise with, controlled her money, restricted her movement and created a culture of fear and dependency. Our father fed into our mother’s mind that the abuse she was suffering over 40 years was normal.

While he forced strict restrictions on her behaviour, he would have numerous affairs and visit brothels. If she challenged him, he would gaslight her, make her question her sanity and seek to control us as sons to believe our mother was mad.

When coercive control became an offence in 2015 it crucially helped enshrine in law a deeper understanding of abuse and helped provide a language for not only what my brother and I witnessed but also for neighbours, friends and family, as well as our father’s family and his oldest friend, all of whose original statements were given context to describe one of the worst cases of coercive control to be heard.

Since that moment, as brothers we have campaigned to bring to light a true understanding of the events that led to our father’s death and raise awareness of this form of abuse. Our mother’s actions, we argued, were not led by the emotions of jealousy nor rage but stemmed from a lifelong campaign of fear and psychological abuse waged by our father for more than 40 years through his coercive controlling behaviour.

How has our mother’s case come to be so inaccurately portrayed by the criminal justice system? Why do we continue to label women who kill as jealous, cold murderers and refuse to explore evidence of abuse?

Simple narratives heard at the original trial of our mother counting our father’s Viagra pills and tracking his movements to prove his continuous cheating suddenly became narratives of her control and jealousy that ultimately led to calculated murder. These stories continued for nine years to last February when her case was heard at the Court of Appeal. With so much public interest, the court overflowed, forcing the case to be moved to a larger court. Many of the supporters who attended were there to see justice finally come for our mother, many personally affected by abuse themselves. The prosecution argued our mother could not have been struggling with a mental disorder as she was functioning to a high standard at the time of the killing. This caused an audible uproar in the gallery – victims of abuse present there were outraged. Dangerous myths about victims of domestic violence who appear well put together and judged to be unaffected are continuously played out in open court.

Such was the case in November, when after a court heard how Paul Measor, 35, spat on his partner Lauren Smith, 24, tracked her movements via a phone app he forced her to install and isolated her from friends, the judge ruled his actions did not have a “serious effect” on Smith’s life. Measor was only sentenced on two charges of common assault and jailed for five months.

If you’re a woman, these are the narratives of such cases, where abuse is often not explored or even understood and women who kill are painted as cold-blooded murderers.

Farieissia Martin was 22 when she was convicted of the murder of Kyle Farrell in 2015, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Martin, who at the time had two small children with Farrell, grabbed a knife when he tried to strangle her. Farrell’s violence often left Martin in fear of her life, but she was too frightened to call the police in case social services became involved and removed her children. Farrell’s history of violence was not adequately explored during the trial. Justice for Women is campaigning for the case to go to appeal, on the grounds that the evidence of domestic violence was not afforded enough significance during the trial.

The overwhelming support my brother and I have received from the public from the very moment we chose to speak out about the abuse our mother suffered shows that as a society we are now starting to understand coercive control. The fact that society is ahead of the CPS in understanding domestic violence is a damaging indictment of the criminal justice system. This is at a time when the Domestic Abuse Bill seeks to bring about real change yet we are cutting legal aid for victims of abuse. When the criminal justice system fails to recognise abuse in these cases, it is failing to protect both victims of abuse and the perpetrators they kill. Another child will go through what my brother and I have endured, suffering the death of one parent and the failure to recognise the abuse of the other.

It is best perhaps put by my mother, who upon being recognised as a victim of abuse and set free last week said: “Many other women who are victims of abuse and violence are in prison today serving life sentences, and I know this because I have met them. They have suffered abuse and other miscarriages of justice and should be serving sentences for manslaughter and not murder.”

justiceforwomen.org.uk