Murdered by My Boyfriend BBC 1 10.35, written by Regina Moriarty and directed by Paul Andrew Williams.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b047zl98

I meant to watch this when it was recently on BBC 3, but the World Cup was on. There’s a joke there about some folk finding that murder, but we’ll skate over that. I won’t be giving any plots points away if I tell you Reece (played by Royce Pierreson)  ends up killing Ashley (Georgina Campbell) and it’s based on a true story. I doubt the couple were so glamourous looking and well-heeled, but that’s Hollywood or BBC 3 for you.  So it’s a countdown, how did we get to that point? Well, I missed the first twenty minutes, but I can guess, they were young and in love. By that time Ashley was pregnant with Reece’s child and he’d hit her for the first time. She flees and stands outside. We get a voice over of what she’s thinking - she’ll go back. It’ll work out. Nobody loves her like Reece.

Reece loves Ashley so much he doesn’t want to share her with anyone else. They have a daughter. Life is sweet.  He buys her the latest phone, but it’s a monitoring device. He wants up-to-date photos of who she’s with. He interrogates her about what she’s done when he’s at work. Nothing she can tell him convinces him that she’s not having sex with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. The levels of violence escalates.

He brutally beats her in public, in a shop owned by Ashley’s friend. She leaves him, but he doesn’t leave her. He turns up at the door with presents for his daughter. Presents and promises for her. She’s strong, but bends and is eventually broken. Ashley returns to Reece.

Reece needs to know what she’d been doing in their time apart. It’s a cruel game,  Ashley can only lose. She admits it. She had sex with someone else. He beats her and stabs her with an ironing board. The young victim, on whom this play was based, was taken to hospital but died of her internal injuries.

There are Helplines at the end of the programme. What they don’t tell you is with a sharp decrease in funding there are fewer places for the Ashley’s of this world to go to. A report in The Observer suggests that London gangs are using rape and sexual assault on women as trading currency to punish other gang’s members. It’s less risky than carrying a knife and its a soft crime with less chance of prosecution. Let’s face it, the working-class Ashley’s of this world are fucked and there is nowhere to run.     

http://unbound.co.uk/books/lily-poole