Anybody with personal experience of wife-beating or child-beating?

As a publisher, I am in the middle of co-editing Alice And I (a compilation of graphic-art and literary contributions on the theme "What Alice has meant to me" http://la-granota.com/comp.htm). If you're REALLY quick (and I mean today or tomorrow), we'll stretch that deadline.

As a writer, I am hoping for inspiration to rewrite a children's story on how violence can escalate. (https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/profile/jimmy-hollis-i-dickson/work on which page I'd appreciate any of your comments.)

And I'm also throwing together ideas for a children's book dealing with masculine domestic violence. The basic tenet is that a wife endures wife-beating for years, but leaves her husband when she notices that he's starting to beat their children. I want their daughter (at what age? Advice, please.) to confront her with the questions: "But aren't YOU worth protecting, too? Why didn't you leave him when he was 'just' beating you?" Perhaps leading to a devastating: "How can you teach me to respect myself and defend myself, when you haven't been doing that yourself?"

But would a child (or adolescent) in this situation ever say anything like this?

As I wrote on another Q&A, "What the [aborted] reading of that novel taught me - and it's a lesson that I've never forgotten, so "Thank you, Virginia!" - is that even novelists with great reputations are capable of dropping clangers (ESPECIALLY if they're showing off by writing on a subject about which they haven't the foggiest)... and that some readers (e.g. myself) are real pedants, slow to forgive shoddy research."

As usual with me, a helluva lot of prologue to get to my point: I'm looking for [articulate, if possible] people with first-hand (or VERY close 2nd-hand) experience of domestic violence to help me create these characters.

Strict confidentiality or public acknowledgement and [a part of] the dedication of the book: the choice is entirely yours.

You may either send me a "connect" request on this web-site and trade private messages, or you can send an e-mail to granota@... (see 2nd-last [and last] paragraphs at http://la-granota.com/press.htm )