Amy's story.

I'm Amy.

I'm studying hairdressing at college,

and a few months ago on my 17th birthday,

I moved in with my boyfriend Dean, who's 20.

At first, living with Dean felt like the best birthday present I'd ever got.

For one thing, it meant that I no longer had to put up with living in a house with my mom and her new boyfriend, Malcolm, who's been on the scene for a couple of months now.

He's short and skinny with a face like a rat, and all he does is lay on the sofa all day, smoking and drinking beer.

The two of them seem to be madly in love, one minute and then five minutes later, they're shouting so loudly at each other that you can hear them halfway down the street.

If Malcolm isn't getting his way during one of their fights, he wraps his bony hands around my mum's throat until she can barely breathe.

Mum never fights back when he does this, and if I try to talk to her about it after he's calmed down when her voice is still raspy and sore, she just pretends it never happened.

I think she's too scared of being on her own to tell him how out of order he's being.

Anyway, when I first moved in with Dean, he'd treat us to takeaways and meals out all the time.

He'd bring me flowers or chocolates home with him from work and tell me I didn't need to lift a finger around the flat.

Nowadays he gets annoyed if he comes back, and I haven't been to the shops to get our dinner yet.

I suppose we couldn't live on takeaways forever, but it does feel like things have changed all of a sudden.

I was doing everything right before.

Now I seem to be doing everything wrong.

I used to stop off at Costa for a coffee with my friends after college, but Dean always wants me to come straight home now, and he's even started to get suspicious of me texting them.

Sometimes I catch him checking my phone when I'm out the room.

It's like he doesn't want anyone else to get attention from me.

To be honest, I've never been the type of girl to put up with things like this.

I know you're only supposed to be with people who treat you right, who have respect for you and never cause you any pain or suffering.

I suppose I'm just scared of annoying Dean and having to go back and live with Malcolm.

I don't want to find out if Dean has a violent side, like Malcolm's.

I don't want to know if what Malcolm says to me is true, that I'm just like my mum, lazy and stupid, and I should feel lucky to have a boyfriend at all.

So I bite my tongue and I let him get his own way.

Even when it makes me feel like crap, it's probably my own fault.

Maybe everybody gets sick of me after a while.

Sometimes I feel angry at Mum for even letting Malcolm into our lives in the first place.

She should have chucked him out the door the first time he ever got that angry look in his eyes.

Long before he ever laid a finger on her or said anything bad about her.

Does she not want to protect her child from him?

What was wrong with things being just the two of us?

But then I feel awful because it's not her fault, it's Malcolm's fault.

Malcolm knows exactly what he's doing and that we're both scared of him, so we just carries on.

I can't go back home when Malcolm's there.

I just can't, but I can't stay with Dean either when he is acting like this.

Everything is so messed up.

Who knows what either of them might do to me if I tell somebody what's happening.