Claire Orndal for Fair Hearing with David Challen and Charlie Wheeler of #NotJustMum 1 of 2
"So my own story is I'm 39 years old now. And I was impacted by domestic abuse from the home that led to a permutation of harm."
Claire Orndal:
And. Thank you. OK, well, I thought the plan for today might be that I just leave it quite open-ended to you and I want to know what sort of things you would like fair hearing to hear or indeed anybody to hear. Because as you say, you’ve not had the family court experience necessarily. Is that right?
David Challen and Charlie Wheeler:
I haven’t, no.
Claire Orndal:
No. OK, so. Shall we start with David? David, you go ahead with whatever you would like to share with us.
David Challen:
Sure. So my own story is I’m 39 years old now. And I was impacted by domestic abuse from the home that led to a permutation of harm. That in 2010, my mother killed my father. She was then convicted a year later for my father’s murder. And then for the next seven years, I visited her in prison. I have an older brother who’s about 3 years older than me and there was always something about the environment in that home. We all stood in the stand and said, in the stand, the original trial and said, control, there was control in that home. So this was predating coercive control legislation in 2015. But we all knew there was something there and even discovering court documents afterwards that showed sexual violence that my mother had endured and that she expressed [to] both the crown psychologist and the defense psychologist that was not used in the original trial because the trial only looked to the last seven or 10 years of their life of 40 years of marriage, 40 years together, 30 years of marriage. My mother met my father at the age of, she was 15, he was 21. And so my mother, my brother and I started campaigning once we learned about coercive control as legislation. And my mother had exhibited bipolar disorder dependent personality disorder whilst on the prison estate, which is a rarity to exist early on the estate and not previously to that life before it. That was new evidence to mount an appeal because you need new evidence, but it was under the framework of coercive controlling behaviour, which my mother had not known she was impacted by. So very much it was me and my brother carrying the harms of what we witnessed in our home into the public to express the idea that my mother, our mother was not a murderer, not as a justification, but for understanding of acts that have followed to a permutation of harm. Because my mother’s story, I mean, I wrote a book that came out last year about it where her her life could have ended at the age of 21 when she took an overdose of aspirin. And so there were so many, basically, I was very much carrying the life events of my mother’s life and reconciling with the idea that it was coerced controlling the home. And it had impacted me. And I think a lot of my campaigning was actually rooted in the voice of myself as a child because I found my own reality and the difficult nuance to that. And so within that home, which is the home I grew up in, I was probably, I knew what was going on probably from the age, my stomach at the age of five, something bad about my father. And then maybe from 13, that horrific sexual violence event that was in those court files happened. And I knew something had happened in the home. And it mounted from there. So there was gaslighting, psychological abuse, coercive control, my father using me and my brother as a pawn to isolate us from my mother to make her feel that she was going mad when she was attempting to understand the dearth or depth of his adultery. My mother was painted as a jealous, cold, vengeful woman. In reality, she was a woman trying to affirm her own reality from which to leave him after 40 years of marriage. This is very complex. Anyway, so after my mother was freed and we campaigned to free her, there was a real remonstrating with my own traumatic story because my mother was then shoved back into our lives, gratefully so, but not having that awareness or support around us for how to reconnect to one another from a traumatic event and affirm our own life experiences. I mean, a la Giselle Pellico and the affirming of a child’s experiences beyond your own harm, which has a complexity to that, how you join up those survivors post [the] traumatic event, certainly left a further permutation of harm where you couldn’t connect with one another. But I had not really gone back to my own childhood and I didn’t want to because there are many nice things in the face of it of a model of a middle class home. But I knew there was always a discontent and an isolation that I felt as a child. psychological abuse, the name calling, witnessing it, the archetypal image of sitting atop the stairs, probably around the age of 15, 16, 17, 18, hearing my mother being gaslighted to say that she was going mad and making it all up and having that real psychological contortion that really cements, I guess, in myself, a toxic soil from which I guess I’ve been born from that has led me to have depression, to have a huge psychological harm. I mean, the harms are basically the death of what you would attribute to child victims in their own right in the home, witnessing or hearing this abuse, economic harm, career stagnation, the ability, inability to socialise, connect with one another people. I got into gambling related harm when my mother was then having a relationship with another man when she came out and it was a rush to the altar. Sorry, this sounds dramatic because it is. And then I’ll just get to the end of it. And so a lot of that trauma response and not being able to share with one another what we thought we had a telepathic understanding of one another’s harm was an actual realisation that she had not attested to understanding my home where I’d understood hers. So I started to do what I had in my hands and control over, which was the money in my bank account. And I gambled away my life savings and had a gambling addiction and probably the best service sponsor I had in my life. And I met similar people who had similar background stories of the homes that they came from. So I walked myself out of it after two years. And so after writing a book and really kind of facing the wall of trauma again and speaking to that child or sitting in that environment, I managed to express what it meant to be coercively controlled in a home or in the atmosphere because there are very, very, very limited published experiences of adult child survivors who have spoken about coercion control and the impact of them. So there’s a real lack of affirming of that. So I think in terms of my own pathway, I speak to, I was obviously campaign spoke for many years and immediately also heard about the family courts. In correlation to what you’re doing here, it might be helpful to share that I’ve met many women who’ve had their own survivorship and are unable to share their own stories with their own children because they would have, the moment where I would have been poisoned or isolated or used as a pawn by my father, I could have been taken over and made to think that my mother was going mad and it wasn’t that bad. And so that separation of a mother who is a victim to a child that she has to keep a connection with but can’t share that she’s a victim in her own right is a form of abuse herself and a form of isolation that will definitely mount itself into elder abuse. And it’s something especially, I won’t get ahead of what Charlie will say or might not say, but in terms of my own experiences of my mother remarrying another man, Each survivor has their own pathway. I think it’s difficult, especially for children, to find that link of coming together. I’m trying to find, I can’t think of a word right now, but some kind of therapeutic resolve to allow the family unit to have a coexistence to one another without that harm being negated between mother and son or whoever the abused parent is. I think that’s everything.
Claire Orndal:
Thank you so much for sharing that. It seems to me like you’ve shared that before, but it must be so difficult to share that each time, no matter how many times you’ve shared it. So thank you so much.
David Challen:
No problem. I appreciate it.
Claire Orndal:
Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about that?
David Challen:
Sure, sure, sure.
Claire Orndal:
I am curious about your relationship with the key members in that story so far. So before your father’s death, did you feel like you had a good relationship with your father at all?
David Challen:
No, I pined for his love probably up until the year before my mother separated from that pre was the act of killing him. I’d always tried to share a relationship with him. I’ve always had wanted to, but it never was reciprocated. Lost an interest, probably the age of five, where I had a feeling the acute stage was going to pass and almost pre forgave him in a way, in almost an adult sense of knowing the atmosphere in my home. before it being normalised, I think it’s really important to say, I always say children are tuning forks of homes and I definitely knew there was something wrong about him, but I’d always tried to keep a relationship, but he controlled it in a very archetypal course of controlling manner, finances, when people have to be home. I mean, the further research to it is not a self-promotion of my book, but I’m happy to send you one for free. So to kind of give you that detail, because obviously I want to give Charlie time as well.
Claire Orndal:
Yeah. Do you feel like, or do you know why you were able to resist your dad’s trying to make you believe that your mum was mad.
David Challen:
Yeah, I think we were too long in the tooth, to be honest. I think maybe we would have been 17, 18 at that age. My brother might be 19, 20. We’d already cottoned on to the kind of character who our father was. He was very charismatic, outgoing, how he’d I was almost anthropologically kind of sit at, was at adult dinners and watch how he would kind of cajole other people into verbally fat shaming my mother. And so there was always a kind of moral discontent around him. But in the reality of when he came to kind of, you know, our mother was really trying to take him to task about his adultery to know the depth of it from which to leave the home whilst her children were at a young adolescent stage, very much I see a confluence of when veils tend to fall down in these homes is when children are able to stand on their own 2 feet. And so you don’t need to stick together for the family unit anymore. And so very much we had his card, a number clocked by that air at that time. I mean, there was police call outs and you know, she would sound like the imperfect victim on the phone call. The police were calling his play in the original trial. And then he would jump on in a weeding voice of which we all knew was play acting. but sounded very different to the services that were responding to it and the original trial of which it happened in the first instance where there was no context around that event or a child-centred response to that event from the children at home which were not captured at the time.
Claire Orndal:
Okay, and when you say that she was an imperfect victim, do you mean that she presented in a way that she seemed, oh, she couldn’t possibly be an abuse victim?
David Challen:
Sure. Upper middle class, women walking around, gregarious, engaging with other people, doesn’t look the battered and bruised person that you would see on East Enders or Coronation Street during the time, we’re talking 2008, 2007, predating that. My mother sounding drunk on the phone, she had a bit of Dutch courage to take him to task about his adultery because he is such a spectre of a man that he’s almost sat in the dais of our house where you would not ask him for a fiver, let alone anything else, you know, in the family. If you wanted anything, you would have to go through my mother who was a messenger. So very much when she jumped on that phone call, she sounded drunk and she was quite terse and short with the operator. You know, time again, we obviously always see these things. I have seen these things subsequently and there’s many caseloads of files like that and how routinely it can be used as a, you know, obviously we see in the family court accusation upon accusation. If I was younger at the time, who’s to say in not too similar dissimilar case that could have been used against her, but in the nuance of these homes and looking past it and actually exploring the children who heard that phone call is a very missed moment that I would probably say is debatable whether it is still captured in full.
Claire Orndal:
If you feel you can, this might be too hard, but do you feel like you’re able to speak to your feelings towards your mother, maybe as a child or afterwards? I’m trying to get an understanding of whether you felt in your childhood any resentment towards her or anything such as that.
David Challen:
It’s interesting. Did I? I always felt an immense love towards my mother. I would imagine obviously because I am her son, but also because largely the flow went towards me. I am a gay male in a traditional household, and she was very accepting of that. My father, I’d later learned, had said that I’m gay because her eldest brother is, and I brought that into the family. And she obviously bore a brunt that I saw her being the engine [at the] time. She was the cook, cleaner. My father’s accountant, my father was a free sole trader, sold second hand cars by himself and she was the accountant. She would pick up cars late at night. She was the engine at home whilst also giving us the love and attention. I guess probably from the age of 16 and 17 when she was trying to take my father to task, I did feel that love disappear because she was almost taking back a reality of her own self and it felt difficult that I wasn’t seen or heard as much as I could have I hoped to have been but I still had I think a greater adult awareness or maturity that was given to me by what was going on in my home not through just who I am. in that she was tackling and taking something on. And then subsequently with the post-, freeing her and post[-], her remarrying, it took me to dark places where everything I had kind of mapped out in this kind of homeland corkboard of madness, where you’ve suddenly got it all fixed, started to shift. And that’s when, you know, when moments that you don’t have a repatriation of of a family unit and coming together, you start to question if your harm isn’t spoken to or acknowledged in the same turn as a child affirming their mother or abused parents’ harm. And so I did start to question if she was all about her own happiness and not my own. And that was [a] very disenfranchising and rejecting and abandoning feeling as a child that was a definite upturn of my life because I had certainly left, lived it in the spectre of the whole home and trying to take, do everything that we did to free her. So yeah, and then so obviously then writing the book was a real kind of confronting of that and then getting myself to a therapeutic point at the end of it.
Claire Orndal:
Thank you. So at the age of 16, 17, that was when your mum left your dad?
David Challen:
So my mum left my dad actually when I was 22. She had tried to divorce many times before. A divorce lawyer said he’d never experienced as many times in his life as in his career, which showed the push and pull, but she had the financial ability to buy a home when her mother had passed. And there was some seminal moments of capturing going to a brothel and then some years later that brothel was raided and she would never affirm how far the rabbit hole had gone. Then he physically assaulted her on one holiday. I think a year left, then he would never attest to why he did these things. And finally she, I wouldn’t say found a backbone, found her own strength to leave. And that’s when post-separation abuse happened where she had lack of support. She spoke to friends, colleagues, her employer. GP, a therapist, all the people we’d hope anyone would speak to in just one moment in time today, but they lacked the language of coercive control. She lacked the proper therapeutic response needed. I think it was… I think it was a hypnosis that she did it through work. She didn’t get the right therapy. And so very much friends and family around her, some close family friends at the time said, if you keep speaking about him, I will wash my hands of you. So very much the wider support that could have lended [landed] her to a safety or buoyancy in life post-my father was very much then sort of become a tunnel vision back to him. Family cat who my father was looking after suddenly died. She drove over. I sat in the car. She’s in that house for a bit too long. She asks for him to take him back. He sees how desperate she is. He then proposes a post-nuptial agreement. So to carry out the divorce, but only on the terms of not interrupting him when he speaks, stop smoking, stop speaking to strangers, to sell the home for the far less than she was legally entitled to, which is economic abuse. And the post-separation was based on promises of getting back together, which she then found that he was lying and pre… to succinctly get across how it takes for someone to have a loss of control to take a weapon to the scene of the crime, to kill my father, whether that factually happened or not, whether she took the weapon to the scene of the crime or if it was present there, we can’t attest to that, but I believe that she did and I have to make my own affirming reality in response to that. But yeah.
Claire Orndal:
Thank you. Thank you. I know it must be really hard to share that.
David Challen:
It’s alright.
Claire Orndal:
Thank you, Charlie. I really appreciate your patience with this.
Charlie Wheeler:
No, don’t worry.
David Challen:
Thanks.
Claire Orndal:
And David, your mum remarrying that happened after your dad had died?
David Challen:
Yeah, after she came out of prison within two years, she served about 8 year prison sentence and her conviction was overturned. And then the CPS dropped a re-indictment of murder and accepted her manslaughter plea.
Claire Orndal:
And because it was a manslaughter plea, they believed that the time she’d spent already was the sentence for that. Is that correct? Okay.
David Challen:
Yeah.
Claire Orndal:
And the eight years that she was in prison, that was simply the time it took for the appeal to go through or there was a delay before the appeal got…?
David Challen:
Many years, probably year seven was when they found sufficient evidence. Coercive control legislation came in in 2015. They did forensic psychology support around that time. So in confluence with her, some new appeal statements from within the prison system and she went on the Freedom Programme, which is the domestic abuse support course, she was very much wide-eyed and couldn’t believe the things that they were speaking about were her. She had normalised all of it because she only had friends with my father. There were no friends separate. You know, there’s a dearth of her life experience that I’ve excavated through friends and family and her writing the book. And yeah, it’s very interesting.
Claire Orndal:
Did you say earlier that she developed an adjustment disorder afterwards and that was rare. Is that what you said?
David Challen:
Yeah, adjustment disorder, codependency disorder or dependency disorder. She most definitely, I believe, has that. And bipolar disorder. Some forensic psychologists put that down to her father being, well, having a heart attack at the age of five. It’s always theory based. I mean, she was coercive controlled by an adult much older than herself from the age of 15. So she was never an adult woman to affirm her own reality. So I would say there’s a large part of that too, but that’s my own non-clinical diagnosis.
Claire Orndal:
Thank you. And your mother, I’m sorry, if this is a rude question: is your mother still alive today?
David Challen:
Yes, she is. She’s still alive. She’s still going. And so she’s still kind of dorm. I see it every few months. I have a fictitious [fractious?] relationship with her new husband, you know, rejoining that has premiered to the harm. And I do not discount that as probably not to talk too much in the greater context of what you’re doing, but is very much a theme. And so it doesn’t allow that coming together. And I definitely feel as if I’ve been robbed of the later years of her life by another man.
Claire Orndal:
Yes, that must be really hard. So, but for the new relationship, you feel like you would have a good, for want of a better word, relationship with your mother?
David Challen:
Good. I completely agree. Whether that be enough for her is also a two-way street and she would be alone and she hated being alone. So this was someone that she met who introduced her to my father as another twist in the tale when she was younger. So it’s not someone that we don’t know and it’s someone we’re always keeping attached. And my brother lives close by and I see her every few months.
Claire Orndal:
And so in the experience as your mum became aware of her abuse and went to finish the relationship with your father, your key feelings of harm was that you felt that she was leaving thinking about her own narrative and not really thinking about the impact of [on] you and your brother or she wasn’t able to?
David Challen:
I think she wasn’t able to and I think my father, my brother had certainly left the home and I was about to move to university. So it was almost like a green light for her to live her life in the way I was talking when the veil comes down and adult children. So I think she, I felt those feelings towards her maybe in the years before where she was wrestling with the reality that was going on in the home and questioning her insanity before me. So it felt like I definitely felt the gaslighting that was happening to her was an attack on me because I was the person that “we loved”. And then obviously the work I’ve done in the years remonstrating my past, it’s definitely impact[ed] who I am and casting off a child a version of myself that I feel doesn’t belong to me because he has happy memories on the face of it. But actually the atmosphere in that home certainly creeped within the adult self of me and why I don’t connect so easily in the world.
Claire Orndal:
Yeah. You can understand that. Thank you. It’s my understanding that your brother supported you and your mum in the appeal process.
David Challen:
Yes.
Claire Orndal:
Do you still have a good relationship with your brother?
David Challen:
I do not, no. Difficulty, trauma was transient. My brother is three years older than me. I think it was an easier thing for, that’s rude to say, not easier. I think it was a difficult thing I had been on a different life path to him when I was campaigning very much in women’s groups and who had supported the campaign out there speaking and he was always supporting and we were signing off all the media interviews that we did. So we were always lockstep in our belief of what we saw together, what we said together, how we believed it was coercive control, what we saw in that home, very much in tandem all the way through. And then afterwards, I think it was me pursuing a life path of this has relevance, this has story, this impacts other people. I don’t believe -you know, he has a family, he wants to move on with his life. So the lack of ability to connect has grown over the years and me writing a book, you know, I tried to share it with him, but I don’t think he was ready for that and doesn’t have to ever be ready for it. And trauma moves its own space [at its own pace] for each one of us, but it’s also the factions of where we’ve moved as a family, where me and my brother have been joined against our mother and her behaviour post-release, where she might be a bit erratic and we’re trying to understand if she is psychologically impacted or unsound mind and spirit and just being a mean person is very difficult and challenging to handle post-abuse, I would say, for adult children, whether someone has a traumatic reaction and is reacting to that and to not take it personally whilst also having space in your own self as an adult to have that feel that it takes personally, but also juggle that she also is a victim and impacted. So you have to kind of, there’s no easy space to, yeah.
Claire Orndal:
Absolutely. So you and your brother just have a different perspective on whether to put the past behind him and the amount of fault to lay at the door of your mum.
David Challen:
A hundred per cent. I’ve definitely been in the place where I’ve had people from my mother’s side of the family. It’s like, Sally, my mother would rather, if there’s room for the men in the other room, she would rather spend time there. Which is revealing when you want to say that she’s not looking out for you as a child and pursuing another man, but also revealing to her life experiences of seeking the attention or cohabitation and dependency of older men, or men.
Claire Orndal:
And as you say, your mum’s first significant relationship was a marriage at age or a relationship that turned into a marriage at age 15. So it’s a large section of her life. Thank you. Thank you very much. Charlie, thank you so much for listening. And I’m sure there’s a lot of crossover in some of the things you would like to say anyway. But please feel free. Go ahead. What would you like to share?
Charlie Wheeler:
Yeah, so it’s hard to know where to start, but there are a lot of similarities between David and my particularly childhoods and growing up. But I really came into this space a couple of years ago because my brother decided to go to the police about my dad and his abuse. So my dad was targeting my mum, but for some reason picked on my brother growing up and…
Claire Orndal:
An older brother? Sorry to interrupt. An older brother?
Charlie Wheeler:
So I’ve got an older brother and an older sister. My sister’s the eldest, seven years older, and my brother’s five years older. And he picked on my brother and there was physical violence assaulting And so my brother was able to go to the police and is now the case has been taken on by the CPS and it’s going to trial next January. So January 2028. And I kind of felt like I want to kind of have my own route to justice. And so I also spoke to the police and said, you know, is there an opportunity for me to kind of make my own claim? And because there wasn’t physical or sexual violence targeted at me, I didn’t have they said there wasn’t really anywhere for me to go. Shortly after my brother started his proceedings, my parents were still together. And then my mum revealed to my dad what my brother was doing and shortly after that she had to leave because my dad got so abusive. So it took about six months after her leaving and he tried all the ways to get her back, including putting down one of their dogs that was well to try and get her back and it nearly worked. But about six months later, when she received a letter to say that he wanted to essentially go after her for financial abuse in the business that they owned and ran together, which had a criminal element to it. And she, suddenly penny seemed to drop for her and she thought, well, I spent all this time protecting him. That’s over. And so she finally went to the police and spoke about their nearly 50 years together. They met similarly when they were both 14 or 15 when they met and just basically went to the police and told them absolutely everything, sexual abuse, coercive control, financial or everything you can think of physical. And it’s been two years since that, since she did that. And the case still hasn’t gone to the CPS. We’re just waiting and waiting and waiting. But Yeah. So for me, I wanted my opportunity to also go to the police and also have my route to justice and it just doesn’t seem to exist. And I’ve spoken to civil lawyers as well who said essentially until you get your brother or mum’s case as a guilty, they’re not really going to take it on. So it’s all dependent on other people’s situations. My sister and I both have had significant issues, mental health issues. I was bulimic. I have anxiety, depression, complex PTSD. My sister has the PTSD and anxiety and depression, but she’s also, since my mum left, my dad has developed seizures. So FND seizures, which are trauma, related seizures where she kind of disassociates and she wakes up in the middle of the night, doesn’t know where she is, doesn’t know who she is, attacked her husband, like it’s really scary. So I’m kind of doing this for me and for her and my brother, but he’s obviously got his day in court coming up. And so I guess I want that for us as well. There were circumstances growing up. We called the police in 2004 when he attacked my brother. They came, they kicked my brother out of the house. I was 11. I remember the police officer, I was crying and the police officer looked me up and down and went, Why are you crying?
Claire Orndal:
Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry.
Charlie Wheeler:
My dad’s diabetic, so he barricaded himself in his room and said that he wasn’t going to take his insulin. And the police completely sided with him. And we never heard anything. I never got a check in from child services. I told my school everything. Nothing happened. You know, there were opportunities. throughout my childhood. My dad pushed my mum, she fell and not broke, but damaged her elbow. And we went to hospital and the person, the nurse at the hospital asked if I was present when my dad pushed her and she said yes, nothing happened. So yeah, it wasn’t really until 2019 That’s when I stopped talking to my dad and my siblings did. My mum left him for the penultimate time. We nearly got her out and then he did all his usual tactics and managed to get her back just before COVID hit. And then obviously COVID enabled him to kind of get his claws in back even deeper. So yeah, I called the police in 2019, made a statement. My dad had guns and he would regularly say that if my mum cheated on him, he would shoot her and the person. He said that if we ever called the police, he’d shoot the police. So in 2019, we called them and just said, look, we’re worried about our mum. They tried to take a statement from her. She didn’t want to give one. because she wanted to protect him. And they said to us, there’s nothing they can do. But we did say he had guns. And at that point, they did confiscate them off him. But that was really all they did.
Claire Orndal:
Yeah. It doesn’t seem proportionate, does it, to all the danger that you’re raising.
Charlie Wheeler:
Well, for all three of us coming together and saying enough, enough, called the police and they say, we can’t do anything. It just feels wrong. And it wasn’t until my mum was able to leave the final time that then she was able to take a statement that they took her seriously. So throughout all of this, I felt that my story, my voice, my experience doesn’t matter.
Claire Orndal:
Yeah.
