The most poignant detail, I think, about the story of Penelope Jackson – jailed for 18 years for stabbing her husband to death – was the reaction of her late husband’s younger brother Alan. He said he intended to visit her in prison:
‘I want to say to her, ‘What you’ve gone through I can quite imagine. I know what he was like towards me and my wife. You’re not on your own’.’
Alan Jackson was estranged from his brother – whom he described as an ‘arrogant bully’ – and said:
‘No one deserves to die the way he did but I can believe Penny would have been pushed to her limits.’
Did she stab him out of cold rage, out of frustration, or out of a sense that her life had become so tiny that there was nothing else she could do?
That has the ring of truth. I absolutely believe coercive control is a real thing; that it can traumatise its victims and wreck their lives and their sense of selfhood.
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