'He seemed to take pleasure in beating me when I was at my weakest.

Angela, like an alarming number of women, is the victim of a law which allows even the most violent of men to use their right of access to their children as a means to stalk, harass and assault ex- partners

ANGELA'S little two-year-old boy, Liam, runs up to his mother, his face full of rage. He hits her, sharp on her knees. She tries to calm him, putting her arms around his waist, stroking his hair, but to no avail. He strikes out again. This time he hits her face, knocking off her glasses.

Little Liam learned his way with women by watching his father, Daniel. Watching him kick, headbutt, punch and slap his mother, call her a whore, a black bitch, worthless. Watching her degraded and controlled.

If it weren't for the Scottish legal system, Liam would be free from his father's influence. But the Scottish courts say Daniel must have access to Liam and his brother Phillip, despite a series of criminal charges against him for attacks on Angela. If it weren't for her children, Angela would be free from the man who battered her for two years.

Daniel, like so many abusive men, is using the laws surrounding the rights of fathers to get access to their children as a stalkers' charter to harass, hound and victimise.

After Angela finally fled to a women's refuge, Daniel traced her and abducted her, tortured her and threatened to kill her. It took more than a year from the date Angela was abducted and tortured by Daniel for the courts finally to rule he could no longer have any contact with her. In that time, he hunted her down a dozen times, finding each of her new addresses and attacking her again. On one occasion he almost choked her to death in front of her older son Phillip, only calling a halt to the attack when the four-year-old picked up a cricket bat and beat his father over the legs.

Yet even with a court ruling banning him from approaching her, access to the children still gives Daniel power over Angela's life. If he, like so many other abusive partners, is granted the right to see his children, Angela, like so many battered women, will never be free from him. He will know where she lives. And Angela is quite clear that she fears this man will one day kill her.

Angela's story begins in spring 1997 when she was 18 and living in Cumbernauld. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, a friend of Daniel. "Daniel started to come around to my house. I needed the company. I was a young mum stuck in the house and I was flattered by his attention," she says. "He phoned all the time and he was just the perfect gentleman - charming, polite and caring. We eventually moved in together and I fell pregnant with Liam. That's when things started to go wrong," says Angela.

It's a cruel fact of life, but to most people, even Women's Aid, the group that sheltered her during the worst periods of abuse, Angela is "the perfect victim". Of mixed race - her father is African - she is strikingly attractive and, at just under five foot and weighing only six stone, instantly vulnerable. It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.

Brutalised by nearly two years of sustained abuse - an experience so psychologically destructive that her psychologist, Dr Mairead Tagg of Scottish Women's Aid, says Angela has one of the most severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder she's ever seen - Angela finds it impossible to recount her experiences without losing the thread of her recollections.

She constantly rises from her seat and looks out of the window. A delivery man who looks vaguely like Daniel sends her into a flurry of panic. She smokes continually. At the most painful parts of her story, she deliberately breaks off the conversation to carry out the most mundane chores - washing a cup, brushing her son's hair. The sound of the phone makes her literally jump from her seat. She's a trembling, terrified wreck.

"He slapped me all the time," she says. "The first time he hit me, we were just in the middle of an ordinary tiff when he just drew back his fist and punched me in the mouth. I didn't understand why or how I should react.

"He'd come in and ask for his dinner. Then when I gave it to him, he'd sit it down on the table, say: 'What the f*** is this?,' and then punch me. There was nothing I could do to avoid being hit.

"After I had Liam, I had stitches in. On the first day out of hospital, I can't even remember how this started, but I probably looked at him wrong or handed him his cup of tea wrong or gave him toast that wasn't buttered right. It ended with him dragging me on to the carpet by my hair and just kicking me in the head. I thought it was never going to stop. He burst my stitches. I was in my nightdress and covered in blood.

"I ran out into the rain with the boys in my arms to my friend's house down the road. We called the police and when they came they just took me back to him."

Daniel comes from a notorious family. Both his mother and father have criminal records for violence and his brother is serving time in prison for a series of knifings. Daniel himself is a petty criminal and drug user.

According to Angela, he took equal delight in psychological as well as physical torture. Returning from visiting his brother in jail, he stopped the car along a lonely road and ordered Angela out. She says: "It was another rainy night and we were halfway home. He said: 'You didn't say goodbye to my brother properly, so f*** off.' Then he drove off leaving me holding the boys. I was waiting by a bus stop to get home when he drove back. When the bus pulled up, he called me over to the car. I went over and he told me to get in. When the bus drove off, he said: 'Oh f*** off. I didn't want you for anything,' and threw me out again.

"He seemed to take pleasure in beating me when I was at my weakest. His violence was actually worse when I was pregnant with Liam. I thought I would miscarry."

Daniel never let her out of his sight. She wasn't allowed to go to the doctor without him. Even his mother began to get involved in the abuse, siding with her son in domestic rows. He got his family to spy on her if he was out of the house.

After one punch too many, Angela gathered up her children and left for a women's refuge. It was December 9, 1998 - her 20th birthday. Angela can't bring herself to say if the abuse came with rape, but her mother and Dr Tagg believe she was subjected to degrading sexual attacks. Tagg also believes her older boy is suffering from post- traumatic stress disorder after seeing his mother so badly beaten and degraded.

When she left, Daniel told her, as so many stalkers and abusers do, that if he couldn't have her, nobody would. He tracked her from one refuge to another, each time persuading her to return home with him and each time beating her again. Finally, in April, when Angela was returning to a refuge, he abducted her off a train.

Daniel bundled her two children into his car and ordered her inside. He drove her to a flat in the east end of Glasgow and told her to go inside. The flat belonged to his cousin - a woman on the fringes of the underworld. "He told me to go inside, saying that there was nobody else there. When we got inside his cousin and mother appeared behind me. They put my boys in the bedroom and they all began beating me," Angela says. The events that followed are staggering in their cruelty.

Angela was stripped. A knife was held to her throat and her captors threatened to throw boiling water over her. They put a glass in her face and told her they would grind it into her cheek. They burned her hair. They told her they were going to get a junkie to infect her with HIV.

The abduction was planned perfectly. There were nappies and powdered milk for the children. Angela was tortured for over 12 hours. Then, in the early hours of the following morning, Daniel and his mother left the flat to get petrol. They told Angela it was to burn her alive.

While the pair were out, in a brief moment of humanity, Daniel's cousin freed Angela. After a cursory police investigation, it took a year for the courts finally to bar Daniel from contacting Angela as a condition of his bail.

But in those 12 months, he attacked her many times and began to harass her family - his campaign of intimidation culminating in a machete attack on Angela's father in the street.

"Daniel was like an evil spirit. Everywhere I went, he would be there. I was lying on the couch one day and the phone rang and it was him. He said: 'Are you sick? Why are you on the couch?' He had been watching me somehow," she says. Daniel is now facing charges for abduction, two assaults, three breaches of the peace and racial harassment. He has already beaten one charge of assault, and is free to walk the streets and continue to fight for access to the children.

She continues: "Every time I went to the police, he was always allowed to come back after me. Even if I ran away to a refuge, he could find me. He knew people I knew and he'd eventually find out where I was.

"Then when they finally did put bail conditions on banning him from contacting me, the courts still allowed him to seek access to the children. That means he knows where I live, he can come near my children. I'm still not free from him. And I know he will kill me. He's told me that."

At the door of her home, in a highland village where she is in hiding from Daniel, her mother waits until Angela is out of earshot and says: "She is not exaggerating. He gets his rocks off torturing and hounding a defenceless little girl. He's a bastard, and the law as it stands has abandoned my daughter to his mercy.

"Do you want to know why she agreed to an interview? Because she thought if he killed her, then the fact that she'd spoken to the press might help prove he was her murderer and he'd go to prison. At least that way she'd know her children hadn't ended up with him. It's a nice life for a wee girl, isn't it?"

The names in this article have been changed This Wednesday, the Scottish parliament's justice and home affairs committee meets to consider improving laws against stalkers.

Research shows the public myth of the obsessional stranger is misleading and ex-partners are behind half of all "stalking" cases.

In March, the Executive announced #5m of spending to help support victims of domestic violence.

But campaigners on behalf of abused women say that all too often the criminal justice system is aiding, not punishing, the abuser.

http://www.womensaid.org.uk/ http://www.dvsheltertour.org/links. html http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/cpd/cpsu/domviol98.htm

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