‘Buying the wrong cheese made him explode’: Inside the 24/7 national domestic abuse helpline
Domestic abuse helpline manager tells Maya Oppenheim she has heard women being assaulted, terrified whispers and also, ominously, the phone going dead
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Your support makes all the difference.Something as innocuous as buying the wrong piece of cheese can cause a perpetrator to explode in anger, prompting their domestic abuse victim to make a desperate call for help.
For Maria, listening on the other end of the phone, this is not an unusual conversation. Helping to run the UK’s national domestic abuse helpline, she comes across all kinds of women, petrified in their homes.
Some talk in terrified whispers, some are crying and hyperventilating, while others are mid-conversation when their assailant attacks. In the most uncomfortable instances, the phone simply goes dead.
“They may well be scared,” Maria says. “They may well be confused, uncertain, desperate for help. They might be furious at being let down by services. They may be really focused on getting out of the situation.”
The Refuge helpline, which is open 24/7, offers a live chat function which means people can talk in code or via text if that is the only safe option. The Independent is working with Refuge to raise £300,000 to build a safe house for survivors of domestic abuse.
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Such is the horror of what Maria hears, that when she gets home from work she changes out of her clothes before taking her dog for a walk. This is not prompted by a desire to wear something more comfortable, but rather a conscious effort to try to draw a boundary between work and home life.
“Vicarious trauma is very real,” she tells The Independent, “which is why I put so many things in place so that I have managed to survive in the charity sector for so many years.”
Maria – who did not want her surname used - has worked in the domestic abuse sector for around 30 years and has been a manager on the UK’s national domestic abuse helpline for three years.
Maria says some victims are ringing the helpline to make their first report of domestic abuse, with these calls taking longer as staff “gently work with them to unpick the dynamics”.
She cites “eerie” times when she has suddenly heard a man shouting in the background of a phone call.
“And on occasion, you can literally hear an assault taking place,” she says.
She explains that when people first contact the helpline, they are always asked whether they are in a place where their perpetrator cannot overhear and a code word is agreed upon in case the call needs to end suddenly. However, this is by no means foolproof and sometimes an abusive partner can walk into the room mid-call.
“Sometimes, it can be really sudden, and particularly if there is tech stalking going on and somebody knows they are on the call, they will come in,” Maria says. “The call will probably just stop.”
Her comments come as exclusive data from Refuge shows increasing numbers of calls to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline which it runs are seeking referrals to refuges to escape abusers, rising from 5,450 to 6,086 between 2020 and 2024.
In this year so far, the helpline has already supported 49,787 calls for help, with three-quarters of those being from survivors of domestic abuse.
Maria is eager to emphasise the fact that victims are under no obligation to provide any identifiable or contactable details such as their name or phone number. “If they are thinking that we are going to instantly escalate, that is not the case,” Maria says.
Many callers are “overwhelmed by the situation” their abuser has catapulted them into, she says. Sometimes callers disclose they are self-harming, having suicidal thoughts, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and eating disorders as a result of the domestic abuse.
They may well be street homeless with their children at Asda. They will be contacting us because they literally have nowhere to go.
Maria says the cases which remain firmly lodged in her mind are those where they are unable to get the woman to safety. The domestic abuse sector is “in crisis” with local services closing and long waiting lists, she warns.
“They may well be street homeless with their children at Asda,” Maria says. “They will be contacting us because they literally have nowhere to go.”
She says they receive calls from women who have fled hundreds of miles away from their abuser to remain safe – from Manchester to Scotland for instance – only for their local authority to tell them to go back to their local area to get help despite them having a statutory duty to support them.
Often calls to the helpline are triggered by a change in life events. She cites women falling pregnant, issues with children, deteriorating health problems and disputes about contact with children as issues which can prompt a call.
“It could be anything that can cause an escalation of abuse because the reason why abuse escalates is not really about the survivor,” she adds. “It's actually about the perpetrator and what the perpetrator wants and chooses to do. They are the person in control of the trigger.”
For Emma Pickering, head of the helpline, the hardest part of the job is handling the cases where there are very limited options.
“If there are immigration concerns, if someone is stuck in an abusive relationship and their options to leave are very limited... they are the situations that you feel like, it just is really disheartening,” she says.
Helpline workers have access to free counselling services and programmes where colleagues can lean on each other for emotional support, she explains.
“The helpline has a really difficult job because they are a 24/7 service,” Ms Pickering adds. “We are seeing an increase in demand for support and we need to see that the funding matches the demand year on year.
“Sadly, we are not seeing that, so I think that we really need that and a commitment from the new government to make sure that they are funding domestic abuse services adequately.”
Please donate now to the Brick by Brick campaign, launched by The Independent and charity Refuge, to help raise £300,000 to build a safe space for women where they can escape domestic abuse, rebuild their lives and make a new future.