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This is a true story.

A true story, thirty years in the making.

Chapter 1 begins on Christmas Eve, in a churchyard, where a mother hides with her two children and pretends they are playing hide and seek.

This podcast combines storytelling, personal reflection and lived experience of domestic abuse, family court and survival after leaving.

It is not perfect. It is not polished. But it is true.

Christmas Eve. A churchyard. Two small girls who think they are playing a game.

This is where the story begins — not with a dramatic escape or a single decisive moment, but with a mother crouching behind a gravestone in the dark, whispering to her daughters that Father Christmas won't come unless they are very, very quiet.

Episode One introduces Vanessa, her daughters Charlotte and Molly, and the man who made hiding feel like the safest option. It takes you inside the moment abuse becomes impossible to ignore — and the Christmas Day that showed her, with terrible clarity, that no one was coming to help.

Four voices this episode:

The story of Christmas Eve and what came after.

The law on the Children Act 1989 and what the family court system was — and wasn't — designed to do.

Author's reflection on writing the hardest chapter of her life.

The stage — what hope looks like when you are still inside the danger.

Because the hardest thing about abuse is not the violence. It is the silence around it.

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And if it helps one woman, one family member, one friend, or one professional recognise what is happening sooner, then it is worth sharing the steps to safety and a new way of being.#ImplacablyHostile #HideAndSeek #TrueStoryPodcast #DomesticAbuseAwareness #DomesticViolenceAwareness #CoerciveControl #FamilyCourt #FamilyCourtReform #PostSeparationAbuse #SurvivorStory #WomenSupportingWomen #MothersAndChildren #TraumaRecovery #LeavingAbuse #LivedExperience #PodcastLaunch #MemoirPodcast #TrueStory #AbuseRecovery #BelieveWomen#realcrime

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