'Can we have an ambulance please, my daddy has just attacked my mammy' The sickening domestic abuse epidemic gripping Wales by those who survived

The phone cuts off. The emergency responder calls back and a woman answers. "It's just my ankle, I'll be fine. I don't want to waste an ambulance."

In 2022, 58 men were jailed in Wales for attacks on their partners or estranged partners, including two for murder. Four of the victims were pregnant at the time of being attacked, and two had recently given birth.

In March of that year, Pensioner David Maggs, 74, was jailed for brutally murdering his wife of 28 years in her own bed. He stabbed Linda Maggs 15 times at their home in Sebastopol, Pontypool -a month before divorce proceedings were finalised.

The following month, an estranged husband was sentenced to 25 years in jail after he took the life of a young mum-of-four because he was jealous she was moving on with her life. Russell Marsh, 29, snuck into Jade Ward's home in Flintshire before stabbing and strangling her. Jade was just 27.

Read more: Knife crime in Cardiff: The scourge of the city as told by those who have lost everything

2022 is not an anomaly. In the first three months of 2023 alone we have seen a man jailed for life for murdering his wife of 32 years after wrongly believing she was having an affair and another husband killed his wife in the home they shared together before going to say goodbye to another woman and handing himself in.

While unfathomable and horrific, these callous attacks at the hands of men those women trusted are the tip of the iceberg. We only know about them because these horrific crimes were brought to justice.

Tens of thousands more attacks happen every day to women in Wales -and the UK -by men they know. Physical attacks, emotional attacks, financial abuse, coercive control, parental abuse, post-separation abuse, and the rest. Most of these are not reported, and if they are, many rarely meet the evidential threshold for prosecution.

Between April 2021 and May 2022 police in Wales attended 47,354 domestic abuse-related incidents, according to the Office for National Statistics. This equates to around 130 call-outs a day.

Abuse charity Refuge says it is estimated that less than 24% of domestic abuse crimes are reported to the police. And while it is universally acknowledged that men are affected by such abuse too, the vast majority of abuse is still wagered at women, around two-thirds according to most recent statistics. Which in itself are difficult to define and compile.

But while these figures are staggering, there are survivors of this epidemic. The epidemic that is increasingly blighting people's lives behind doors on nearly every street in the country.

"My daddy has just attacked my mammy"

The agonising words uttered by Emma's eight-year-old daughter to an emergency responder the first time her mother was attacked by her partner still haunt her. Emma -whose real name we have changed for legal reasons and to protect her - heard the call for the first time in family court while battling for custody of her children. Over six years on and she says the clip still takes her breath away.

"He's really hurt her ankle, she can't move". More than hurt, he had in fact broken her ankle in two places, requiring her to use a wheelchair for months. She was in the early stages of pregnancy at the time. He knew this.

This was the first time her partner had been violent towards her but the emotional abuse wagered at her was already taking its toll. A few months into the relationship, the façade of the 'perfect man' he had presented himself as at the start had started to crumble as he called Emma names, and quarrels would lead to him screaming just inches away from her face. Any disagreement would turn into a battle.

"It [the relationship] started off quite very fast moving. He liked everything I liked, it was like he was the perfect man. And then he started saying he couldn't live without me, love bombing. We moved in together, we got engaged, I was quite keen to get married, but I wasn't in a rush to get married. And then we bought a bigger house. In this time, there was a lot of coercive behaviour." By this point he was buying her clothes he wanted her to wear, starting to limit aspects of her social life.

Despite the obvious emotional abuse, the first violent incident came in early 2017, after the pair were watching rugby in the pub with their prospective groups of friends. Emma had just found out she was pregnant with her second child, her first with her partner.

"We went to the rugby, and had a lovely time. I’d just found out I was pregnant. But before that, I'd had numerous miscarriages. Absolutely numerous, to the point of having to be hospitalised for one of them. So I was just ecstatic. I was ecstatic." As the pair arrived home Emma said there was a supermarket food delivery waiting for them which she asked him to help her take in.

"Obviously I didn’t want to do anything to risk the pregnancy because well my miscarriages were in the double figures by that point probably so I asked if he could help me carry it in and he told me to “F off you stupid c”. He was screaming and shouting abuse, it was constant verbal attacks."

The mum from Swansea says to this day she still doesn't know what triggered him to make this night different to any others. It wasn't the fact he had been drinking, "He was equally nasty sober as he was as he was drunk," she said.

"I had my phone in my hands, he grabbed the phone and flung it, it bounced off the wall and completely smashed. He charged in and grabbed me. His hands were on my neck, on my shoulders, and he was just shaking me like a rag doll. He was violently shaking me, to the point where I felt like my teeth rattling. My daughter jumped on his back to get him off and he sent her flying.

"He was shaking me so violently that I lost my footing and my ankle snapped. As I yelped in pain it didn’t scare him to stop, he just carried on. It snapped up the bone and across the bone. And then he just went back into the bedroom, our bedroom, as if nothing had happened.

"I was on the floor in agony, absolute agony. My daughter got my phone and rang for an ambulance and that’s when he started again as you can hear on the call."

The 999 call handler sent police to the home and he was arrested and released the following day as Emma decided not to press charges against him. "The police officer did ask me to press charges and...