I feel so helpless as a mother. A few years ago, my daughter became involved with a very nasty and violent boyfriend. He was beating her up so savagely the police had to be involved. To be safe, she let go of her apartment and moved in with me.

Is there any plausible reason why a supposed best friend sleeps with her friend’s partner? When Jennifer found herself in what she termed an ‘embarrassing’ betrayal of her best friend, she justified her action by trying to convince friends she never planned to seduce Chris, her friend’s fiance of two years. “Timi and I had been best friends when we were both in secondary school,” explained Jennifer. “But after we went to different universities, we’d lost touch only to link up over ten years later through a mutual friend.

A lot of medical research into sleep habits over the past 12 years suggests that couples who share a bed tend to live longer and stay healthier than those who sleep alone. That women in long-term relationships fell asleep faster and woke up less often than single women, leading to them having lower levels of cortisol, the stress hormone that has been linked to heart disease and depression.

Violence against women has been described as gender-based crime impacting on women’s physical, emotional and psychological health. Because most of these crimes are perpetuated against women by the people known to them and/or are related to them, most recorded violence against women is called domestic violence.

The golden advice is when you spot any sign of violence in a potential partner, you should run …. “It’s not as cut and dried as that,” confessed Gloria, a 36-year-old tax consultant who recently escaped from the controlling clutches of a partner she referred to as a ‘nasty piece of work.’