The first time Nick’s* wife punched him in the face was because he hadn’t cleaned the bathtub properly.

“At the time I felt that it was my job to fix it,” Nick says, “the male mentality is often that you fix things.”

It was the year after they married and looking back, 45-year-old Nick can see the violence didn’t come out of the blue. His wife — we’ll call her Imogen — was continually picking aggressive verbal arguments with him over minor domestic things, such as how he’d pegged out the clothes on the clothesline.

“One minute she’s lying in a foetal position on the floor and the next, she’s screaming at you that you don’t pay enough attention or you’ve done something wrong,” he says.

Right from the outset, Nick says Imogen worked towards isolating him from his close-knit family.

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