Finally breathing out

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Budimir Šobat held his breath for 24 minutes and 37 seconds, but I’m letting out the breath I’ve been holding for a whole eighteen years and no one’s here to give me a medal.  

Half my lifetime.  That’s what it’s taken, along with so much more than I ever thought I could bear.

I was 17.  Naive and nice.  A good Christian girl making her way in the early noughties.  As the year turned 2002 I met him, at a friend’s New Year’s Eve party.  I never celebrate new years now.  It’s only just dawned on me that might be why.

I’m forty in August.  He’s forty in June.  He was finally sentenced, and it’s likely he will die in prison, as an assessment has found he is “a very high risk of causing sexual harm to both adult women and younger females.”

Incidentally, eighteen years is how old my son is.  He is ever so funny, and incredibly kind.

It’s not incidental really.  My son’s premature birth was caused by the man who is now likely to die in prison.  That man is my ex-husband and my children’s biological father.

I endured four and a half years of his abuse and sexual violence.  When his sexual violence led to my second child’s premature birth, when I was 28 weeks pregnant, those circumstances gave me a way to (almost) escape him.  Living fifty miles from our home in a neonatal intensive care unit with my toddler daughter meant he was unable to manipulate me back into living with him.  

Months after I (almost) escaped, at York Crown Court, this man was found not guilty of raping me.  This man’s dangerousness is not just that he raped every woman and girl he possibly could, but that after raping us, we would still do whatever he wanted.  

Remarkably, this is the first time, in twenty years, that I have been able to write in the past tense about his rape of women and girls.  To do so while he was still alive is something I never in my wildest dreams thought possible.

A few months ago, I did a police Subject Access Request to gain copies of my police statements from that time.  I was unsure whether the sentencing assessments for his Scottish rape conviction in late 2023 would have easy access to English police records, and wanted to ensure that mine would be easily accessible.

The not guilty verdict in my case hinged on the fact he had coerced me into sexual activity while on bail for raping me.  The stressors in my life at the time, when I was 21-years-old, included:

• Husband a convicted sex offender.
• Husband’s ongoing abuse of a teenager girl.
• Husband raped me.
• Baby son in intensive care, hospitalised for five months.
• Toddler daughter’s trauma around all this.

It was in this context that my statement about his sexual contact with me while on bail was written: “The sex was with my full consent and I did not feel under any pressure. I did however feel due to the stress I am under, think I was not in a very good frame of mind.”

In good conscience, a police officer accepted this narrative and encouraged me to sign.  No further questions were asked about whether I could meaningfully consent.  They did not consider the rapist’s motives in coercing his victim into further sexual activity.  No one in the case considereed this a breach of the rapist’s bail.  To them, his further sexual abuse of me did not make him a more dangerous offender, it just made me a less credible witness.  

Years later, I’ve heard various women describe tactics he had practiced on girls at school (starting when he was 13-years-old), perfected on me and then used with ease for two decades.  Gaslighting women into believing they had wanted whatever he did to them; that it was them who had corrupted him into being a rapist.  How does she know she’s been raped when he shames her for betraying her best friend by sleeping with him? 

For eighteen years, I lived with the threat of him wielding the family court as a weapon against me.  His last name burned my eyes every time we needed the kids’ passports or dealt with the kids’ bank accounts.  I had to be resigned to this, to avoid him ever knowing he had any rights, or most terrifyingly, that he might seek to exercise his rights.

Once I remarried, as a family we sought to avoid some big Eastenders moment of “he’s not really your dad”, by having a regular conversation with the kids.  “Who helped me to make you both?”  “…And who does the job of being your daddy?”  I never liked my husband being described as their step-dad, because the man who helped me make these precious and magnificent tiny humans was not their dad. They were all mine (except for a few vaguely relevant biological facts).

I once sat in a women’s church gathering where the female pastor stated that a child’s personality was related to where they were conceived.  In a presentation that fell into the dictionary definition of TMI, she used her own children’s personalities to prove this point. I am sure it was naivety that led her to assume the “Personality Conception” concept (try saying that while drunk!) was a lovely idea and not an absolute trauma horror show for some of us.  

Theodicy, how an all-powerful and good God can exist in an evil world, is a paradox that most theologians struggle to explain.  But the embodied reality for women like me is that out of the most evil harm an abuser perpetrates can emerge the most pure love we have ever known; between us and our babies.  We don’t get to wish the abuse had never been perpetrated because we can’t wish away the greatest gifts we ever got; tiny majestic humans. But such complexity can only be spoken in very hushed whispers, for we want our babies to know only love and goodness.

For the mothers of my babies’ siblings, the sentencing is absolutely life-changing.  They are safe from him forever.  He cannot wield the family court against them, he cannot control them in anyway.  And I weep with relief to know that no woman or girl will ever be put through what we have.  

But as I let out the breath I’ve been holding for twenty years, I wasn’t prepared to be weeping in grief.  Two decades of feelings I couldn’t allow myself to feel, because the ongoing threat of his dangerousness meant living in survival mode, carried mostly in faith that God would protect my babies and me.  

For now, I will fiercely feel love and joy for the women and babies who are free of him, with such relief that he can no longer hurt any other women or girls.  In time, I know the grief will subside. And as my lungs recover, I shall learn what it is to breathe unencumbered.

You can read more about my story HERE.