Woman jailed after four decades of spouse abuse
A 72-year-old woman has been sentenced to three years in jail after a court found that she had made her husband’s life a living hell for at least 41 years.
In a unanimous ruling, Salten district court in northern Norway said the woman had subjected her now deceased husband to mental and physical abuse from 1969 to 2010. With no apparent provocation from the husband, the woman had often assaulted him in front of the couple’s children, newspaper Avisa Nordland reports.
In a curious twist, the case only came to the attention of the authorities after the woman reported her husband for alleged harassment. But when police began looking into the matter the case was quickly turned on its head.
The man died last year, but his children have spoken out about abuses they say stretch back to the end of the 1960s.
”For 41 years the man lived under an almost constant terror regime characterized by continuous uncertainty and fear of violence and other forms of harassment,” said the court.
Prosecutors accused the woman of forcing her husband to live in the cellar, hitting him with an iron bar, denying him access to the kitchen, bathroom and toilet, cutting up his clothes and throwing them out the window, discarding his mail, taking away his medications, spitting at him, and preventing him from using the telephone.
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In a unanimous ruling, Salten district court in northern Norway said the woman had subjected her now deceased husband to mental and physical abuse from 1969 to 2010. With no apparent provocation from the husband, the woman had often assaulted him in front of the couple’s children, newspaper Avisa Nordland reports.
In a curious twist, the case only came to the attention of the authorities after the woman reported her husband for alleged harassment. But when police began looking into the matter the case was quickly turned on its head.
The man died last year, but his children have spoken out about abuses they say stretch back to the end of the 1960s.
”For 41 years the man lived under an almost constant terror regime characterized by continuous uncertainty and fear of violence and other forms of harassment,” said the court.
Prosecutors accused the woman of forcing her husband to live in the cellar, hitting him with an iron bar, denying him access to the kitchen, bathroom and toilet, cutting up his clothes and throwing them out the window, discarding his mail, taking away his medications, spitting at him, and preventing him from using the telephone.
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