David’s story highlights how domestic abuse affects entire families. It shows the devastating effects of coercive control, and how important it is to give victim-survivors the language to talk about and make sense of their experiences. Trigger warning: this story contains graphic accounts of domestic abuse, rape, and suicide.
In 2010, David Challen was at work waiting tables when he was pulled aside by his manager - who told him that his dad had been killed. Meanwhile, his mum, Sally Challen, was standing on Beachy Head cliff in Sussex, an infamous suicide spot. David’s cousin alerted the police and picked David up from work. David sat in the car unable to comprehend what was happening. The police arrived at Beachy Head and arrested his mother for the murder of his father.
David’s parents met when his mother was 15 and his father 21. They were together for 40 years. Sally Challen experienced a string of infidelities, gaslighting, and economic control from David’s father. His father was charismatic and outgoing, but also committed insurance fraud and received speeding tickets, both of which he tried to blame on Sally. When she tried pushing back, he would tell her “you’re going mad, Sally” to convince her the abuse was all her imagination. His father’s friends always said arguing with him was impossible, “like nailing jelly to the wall”. When Sally finally gathered the courage to leave him, he subjected her to escalating post-separation abuse. He put the family cat down, and threatened to accompany the divorce with a post-nuptial agreement that would make her homeless.
David’s parents had been separated for a year in 2010. David watched Sally slipping away mentally; she became vacant and lost. On the day Sally dropped David off at work, she went to see his father and attacked him with a hammer.
The murder trial took place in Guildford in 2011. David describes it as an event from the Dark Ages. The trial only considered evidence from the last six years of his parents’ marriage. Witnesses were “not allowed to speak ill of the dead” and Sally being in employment at the time was used as evidence of her not being affected by severe depression. The jury’s judgment paid no heed to the mental suffering Sally Challen endured for years at the hands of her abuser.
Sally was sentenced to 22 years in prison, which was then brought down to 18 on appeal. David spent the next 6-7 years in an emotional abyss, unable to cope with what had happened. He struggled to develop relationships of his own and had to fund his own therapy as no other support was available to him. He moved to Brighton for university and visited his mother in prison.
The turning point for David occurred when he met Harriet Wistrich in 2014, the founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice. She contacted the Challens, citing the grounds for a new appeal which would centre around coercive control. She arranged a psychiatric assessment of Sally, which concluded that she suffered from bipolar disorder and dependent personality disorder that had developed during her marriage. Their request for appeal was denied in 2017, but David set out on a fact-finding mission to find out what had truly happened to his mother.
What he found was astonishing and devastating. A psychiatric report – which was not mentioned in the trial – revealed that Sally had reported being raped by her husband in 1997 when David was 13, and on multiple occasions after. He remembered the incident. David’s father stopped Sally from speaking to her friends and family, he fat-shamed her body, he threw her down the stairs and dragged her out of the house. He forced her to have an abortion. She had tried to kill herself when she was 21 after he threatened to leave her for another woman. He made her pay more than she could manage of household expenses, she helped him with his work and did all the domestic work as well. He cut the cables in her car to stop her from leaving. These incidents seen together, rather than in isolation, paint a starkly different picture of Sally Challen as a victim-survivor of extreme coercive control who was not allowed to have any life outside of her relationship with her abuser.
It was a revelation for David too. He recounts, “Before, I saw domestic abuse as something that happened on TV. I first learned the term “gaslighting” in a media interview. I thought gaslighting had to do with utilities!” He became convinced that had his father’s behaviour over the past 40 years been shared in court, rather than solely the lead-up to his killing, Sally’s verdict would have been very different.
David and his brother campaigned tirelessly to highlight the devastating effects of 40 years of coercive control on his mother. He underlines that their campaigning was not about giving victims of domestic abuse a licence to kill, but to contest the murder trial’s narrative of Sally as a jealous, vengeful wife, and to give a voice to survivors.
Sally Challen was given permission to appeal in 2018. Her landmark case laid out the scale and psychological effects of coercive control, pushing back against the idea of it being a “lesser crime” than physical violence. Her murder conviction was quashed on grounds of new evidence. She was released in April 2019.
“What set my mother free was a lawyer who asked her the right questions. For me to learn what had truly happened felt light a lightbulb moment. Finally, there was language to explain these events, it was like someone had lit a torch to lead me out of the fog of despair. Had I known about coercive control before, I would have reported my father to the police.”
It was only two years after the trial that David recognised that he was a survivor of domestic abuse too. He grew up with the economic niceties of a middle-class home, but the home was not a happy one. His house was a breeding ground for his father’s control and lack of nurture for his sons. David recalls having a sinking feeling in his stomach about his father’s behaviour since the age of seven.
“He took no interest in my life. He shamed me for letting my mother pay for my therapy even though I was suicidally depressed. Spending a childhood under coercive control doesn’t teach you what a loving relationship is.”
Indeed, David found himself in a relationship with an abusive partner when he was 21. He recalls his mother telling him “you don’t want a relationship like mine”. David underlines that there are many adults out there who don’t recognise themselves as victim-survivors of domestic abuse, who don’t make the link between the childhood trauma they’ve experienced and the harmful behaviour they exhibit as adults.
As well as being an EIDA Ambassador, David is now an Ambassador for Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT), one of the oldest prison charities in the UK, and advisor to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales. He shares his family’s story to raise awareness and give a voice to others.
“Our campaign gave us a voice, and others too. As a society, we seem far more willing to accept that victims of domestic abuse are killed by their abuser, than we are willing to understand that victims can kill their abusers too. You cannot understand domestic abuse without understanding coercive control, the escalating pattern of control that is a precursor to physical harm. That is why I speak out now. When I look back, there were so many opportunities that should have been seized. My mother had an employer. What would her story have looked like if someone had helped her?”