WITH shaky hands and a feeling of dread in her stomach, Mia Boardman left her girlfriends at the bar and went to the toilets to listen to the voice note she’d just received.
Pressing play, she felt a pang of fear as the familiar voice came through the phone. It was her then-boyfriend, Christopher Brooks.
He’d seen a picture of her girls’ night out on Instagram and was furious.
In a frightening voice he demanded she return home as he wasn’t happy with what she was wearing.
Without thinking twice, Mia got her coat, quickly said her goodbyes and hurried back to her abuser.
Fast forward four years and similar voice notes from abusive young men have gone viral on TikTok, in a worrying new trend which sees their victims lip sync along to the messages.
Women play the audio on camera, exposing chilling threats from former partners such as: “Go crash your car and die in a ditch”, and “You’re worthless, you’re fat, you’re ugly.”
One young man told his partner to“F*ck off you little trollop. Go to my door and see what my mum does to you, you little c**t”.
Another raged, “I’ll brick your brother, brick your dad and take your dogs”.
One even vowed to go to jail if it meant harming his partner.
“Call me within thirty seconds or I swear on my life I’ll go to prison and yous lot will be the fucking victim”, he screamed.
With tens of millions of combined views, these videos are accompanied by hashtags, and comments range from laughter emojis to concerned strangers empathising with the girls who are exposing their exes.
The worrying trend is indicative of how a growing number of young men are treating women.
Horrifying new statistics show that violence against women and girls (VAWG) has risen by 37 per cent in five years, with an estimated two million females suffering domestic abuse.
In fact, 20 per cent of all police recorded crimes are counted as VAWG and perpetrators are getting younger too.
Teen Mom UK star Mia, who has an eight year-old daughter, Marliya, from a different relationship, is all too familiar with the growing problem and has spoken about her experience of abuse in a harrowing documentary, Domestic Violence and Me.
After months of controlling behaviour and physical abuse that included shoving her, Mia finally escaped her situation when, ten months after meeting Brooks on Tinder in January 2019, he tried to strangle her for refusing sex with him, weeks after she’d dumped him.
Women's Aid has this advice for victims and their families:
If you are a victim of domestic abuse, SupportLine is open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 6pm to 8pm on 01708 765200. The charity’s email support service is open weekdays and weekends during the crisis – messageinfo@supportline.org.uk.
Women’s Aid provides a live chat service – available weekdays from 8am-6pm and weekends 10am-6pm.
You can also call the freephone 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247.
Ironically, it was a series of voice notes that saved her life.
She sent several to her friend while the attack was happening, begging her to send help as Brooks screamed at her in the background.
“I was so scared,” Mia says. “I knew if I tried to call her, he’d see me on the phone and go mad. So I’d send short clips of him screaming and me crying.
“He told me I looked like a mess when I cried, I told him I was crying because he was hurting me. He told me it was my fault.”
Her pal, who was in a different county at the time, called the police who rushed to the scene.
“It’s awful to say but I felt so guilty and I actually wanted to drop the charges,” Mia recalls.
“Because that’s part of the pattern. You can’t explain how someone gets in your head, but you start believing they’re treating you this way because they love you.
“I see it clearly now that I’m out of it, but at the time you’re blinded in a lot of ways.
“It was only when social services told me of the very real threat he’d pose to my daughter if I didn’t press charges, that I realised what I stood to lose.”
Sophie Francis-Cansfield, Head of External Affairs at Women’s Aid, says:
“In the last few years, we’ve seen a number of toxic trends on TikTok and other social media platforms, including the recent ‘voice notes trend’.
While it is important for survivor voices to be heard, the trivialisation of these videos by viewers who find this content entertaining is problematic and harmful as it minimises the abuse that’s been experienced.
The statistics released by the National Police Chief’s Council and College (NPCC) show the horrors that women are facing on a daily basis, but we know this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The scale of violence against women and girls in this country is much larger than the NPCC data shows, as many women choose not to report abuse to the police.
Violence against women and girls is a product of the misogynistic society we live in, and so it’s important that we don’t normalise it by only seeing it as amusing social media content.”
Mia believes social media has a massive part to play in the rise in violence, especially when out and proud misogynists like Andrew Tate have the platform to continue to influence young men.
With 84 per cent of UK boys aged 13-15 having heard of Tate and his vile views on women being “the property of men,” it’s no wonder police chief Maggie Blyth said that this sort of radicalising is “quite terrifying.”
Mia couldn’t agree more.
“Some of the stuff that man says, it’s just scary,” she says .
“I actually have men close in my life who have never abused anybody, but yet they agree with things that Tate says about women.
“I’ve heard men agree with him when he said it was ‘a woman’s fault if their children’s dad is abusive, because they chose that man.
“It’s like he’s got this army of minions all loving the fact that he’s giving them power. But he’s raising men up by bringing women down.
“It’s terrifying that young men are accepting that as truth.”
Mia believes familial patterns have a huge part to play in why so many angry young men are violent towards their partners.
“I’m not a psychologist but from my experience most abusive men are narcissists,” she says. “And it stems from a lot of boys seeing violence in the home. It’s like a disorder.
“They don’t have any respect for women and they don’t love you in the way you should be loved, they don’t know how. They love you for what you can do for them.
“And that leads to control and abuse, it leads to them hurting you. If children are seeing it more and they then grow up to become the abuser, maybe that’s the pattern. And how on earth do you stop that?”
Thanks to Brooks’ conviction for assaulting her, which saw him land a 12 month prison sentence, Mia is able to speak about the violence without fear of repercussions, but she stresses women sharing their voice notes on TikTok have no safeguarding in place to protect them from revenge attacks.
“Everything that I said in my documentary had been proven in court,” she explains.
“Which is why I was able to speak about it on TV. Production laws wouldn’t allow me to otherwise. Whereas on TikTok, it’s free reign.
“The chance of these men coming and doing something back to the women for sharing their messages is quite high, but they haven’t got any measures from above that are helping them and protecting them.”
Now an advocate for victims of domestic violence, Mia has spoken to many young women about their abusive relationships and the feedback is worrying.
“A girl I know told me she “just loved toxic men,” Mia says.
“I couldn’t believe it. But I think more women think like that than we realise. Love should be like a gentle rollercoaster, slow paced, no bumps.
“But some women compare an abusive relationship to the most thrilling rollercoaster you could go on.
“The highs are so high and the lows are so low, but you’re always chasing that high, which is why you stay in the relationship.”
How will Mia protect her own daughter, Marliya, when rising cases paint such a bleak picture for her future?
“I know I won’t be able to stop it, but in an ideal world I wouldn’t want her on any social media,” she says. “No TikTok, no Insta. And I plan to be completely open about my experience, so she knows everything and can make her own informed choices about men.”
Marliya was always with her dad when Mia was with Brooks and they lived in a separate town to him, meaning the little one never witnessed any violence.
“I want to show her the early signs to look out for, the red flags, because once you’ve fallen in love, it’s too late.”
For Mia, who now has an indefinite restraining order against Brooks, the trend is a worrying insight into how blasé social media has become in dealing with domestic violence.
“It is definitely difficult watching things like this go viral,” she says. “TikTok is quite a jokey platform, and when you see stuff like this you think, what on earth is going on? Why is this a thing?
“For one, it’s really triggering for people, but mainly it’s normalising it as if it’s funny and it’s obviously not.
“I’ve been on the other end of terrifying voice notes, it’s not something we should be laughing at.”
But Mia is quick to point out that she doesn’t blame victims for sharing the videos.
“It’s an individual choice,” she says. “Maybe for some women this is their way of dealing with their trauma, by trying to find the humour in it.
“It’s not their fault. It’s a societal thing – I think the majority of viewers just browsing TikTok don’t realise just how serious abuse and misogyny is.”
