I called them myself. Twice. Crying. Begging for help.
I want you to understand this because every report they wrote afterwards makes it sound like I was the threat. I was the one who picked up the phone, looked up the number, dialed it, and said: "I need help. My family is falling apart and I don't know what to do anymore."
They came. They assessed. They told me to leave my own house for ten days.
What they didn't write in their report: she had thrown a potty at my face that day. She had pulled my hair. She had destroyed my laptop. What they wrote was that I had a DV record from abroad. Which is true. I hit her once, years earlier, drunk, in a different country. I owned that the day it happened and I've owned it every day since. I stopped drinking. I went to therapy. I changed.
But the record doesn't change. The record follows you. The record IS you, forever, in their system.
So when I call for help, what they hear is: the perpetrator is calling. And when she calls, what they hear is: the victim needs protection. No one asks what actually happened today. No one checks the context. The file says what the file says.
I stopped calling after that.