A piece in yesterday’s Times. I spoke to Julia Hartley-Brewer on her Talk Radio show this morning, about this case, and domestic violence more generally. The file will be on our YouTube channel shortly.

A fine art graduate has been jailed for seven and a half years after admitting that she had stabbed her boyfriend, poured boiling water over him and banned him from their bed.

Jordan Worth, 22, had controlled every aspect of her boyfriend’s life since they met at college at the age of 16. Luton crown court was told that she had isolated him from his friends and taken over his Facebook account.

Maryam Syed, prosecuting, said that Worth had exercised control over him after they moved in together in the village of Stewartby, Bedfordshire. She became violent and used blunt objects to hurt him, wounded him with a knife and did not help him to get hospital treatment. For nine months the man, who has hydrocephalus, a potentially fatal buildup of fluid in the brain, had not been allowed to sleep in the same bed as her. Last week Worth pleaded guilty to controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate relationship, wounding with intent and causing grievous bodily harm with intent between April 2016 and June last year.

Worth, a former gymnastics coach, who graduated last year with a degree in fine art from the University of Hertfordshire, had been involved in caring and voluntary work for unwanted animals and had raised money for children in Africa, the court was told. [J4MB: What earthly relevance does this have to the case? Would such details be related to courts when the accused is a man, the victim a woman? We doubt it.]

One neighbour heard her boyfriend shouting: “Get off me, you are hurting me.” Another heard him shouting: “Get off my head. Don’t keep doing that to my head.”

He was seen several times with black eyes, a limp and with his arm in sling. Worth was seen at a window by a neighbour “armed” with a screwdriver or hammer, the court was told.

Last June neighbours called the police to the couple’s home in the early hours because they heard shouting. An ambulance crew noted injuries to the man’s hand and burns to his arms and legs that he had covered with cling film. Worth had thrown boiling water over him, causing second and third degree burns to 5 per cent of his body. He will have scars for life.

The court heard that Worth has a new boyfriend.

Judge Nic Madge jailed her for seven and a half years and told her that as well as the violence she had inflicted on her partner she had refused him adequate bedding and food. He said that she would belittle him and discourage him from contacting his friends and family. “She accepts that she has in the past, on a number of occasions, used blunt objects and implements to strike him and that he suffered injuries as a result of her doing so,” he said. “She accepts using boiling or hot water to cause injury to him. She accepts that she has in the past used a knife to cause injury to her partner.”

Worth was made the subject of a restraining order that prevents her from contacting the man for an indefinite period.

According to the Office for National Statistics 14 per cent of men have experienced domestic abuse since the age of 16, equivalent to 2.2 million victims.

In the year to March 2017 the police recorded 1.1 million incidents of domestic abuse.

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