08/05/2017 Points West

Good evening from BBC Points West. for the news where you are.

The face of domestic abuse - a woman from Somerset wants to help

I was on the floor and he pinned my arms to my side and sat on me

The first West of England Mayor is sworn in and says tackling

Drive for the next couple of days, but showers and thunderstorms later

in the week. Details at the end of the programme.

A Somerset woman has released a series of graphic photos

of herself after she was attacked by a former partner.

Caroline Way, from Axbridge, needed to have much of her face rebuilt.

She hopes posting her pictures online will help other women.

Here is our Somerset correspondent, Clinton Rogers.

And here was exactly where it happened.

It's not easy for Caroline Way to relive what happened in this

I was on the floor and he pinned my arms to my side and sat on me

so that I couldn't fight back, strangled me and then,

Then said he was going to take me upstairs

She did survive, but her injuries were horrific -

broken jaw, cracked eye socket, blurred vision.

In the days that followed she took selfies -

Three years on, she's decided to post those pictures online

as a warning to other women in potentially abusive

I think enough time had passed for me to have dealt with a lot

of the raw emotional side of things and I just wanted to make sure that

if I can help anyone to not get themselves into this situation,

Caroline's boyfriend at the time was given a two-year

She says that in the eight years they were together this

was the first time he had physically assaulted her, yet with hindsight,

she should have seen the warning signs.

Sarah Telford runs an organisation called Survive which helps women

I asked her, a few moments, ago whether Caroline had made a very

brave decision to go public with her injuries.

We certainly feel that Caroline was very brave to speak out

on behalf of both herself, what she experienced, but also

to try and prevent other victims from experiencing domestic abuse.

We really recognise how difficult that was for Caroline

to photograph her injuries every day, and that very much

dealt with her physical and emotional recovery,

and now she has decided this is the right time to speak up

about it and try and encourage other people to leave if they are in

It got to that very violent stage with Caroline after several

What do you think people need to watch out for?

What we identify with, predominantly the woman that we work with,

is that the warning signs can be incredibly subtle.

What we find nationally is individuals will have experienced

over 35 incidents on average before they seek help and generally it can

be about three to five years before they actually are able to seek help.

So those warning signs are really hidden in the early stage

Is your partner using the children against you?

Are they trying to blame your parenting styles?

Are they using quite a coercive or controlling manner with you?

Are they using emotional abuse - name-callingv, putting you down?

Is it economic abuse, so where they are controlling your finances,

you are not able to go out to work and earn your money?

Are they minimising some of the abuse and trying to sweep it

under the carpet or blame you for that abuse, as well?

Maybe trying to use their position in the family home -

the fact that they may be working and you are not, and they are maybe

in a more powerful job than you are and trying to influence

Or are they intimidating you or isolating you?

Intimidating can be very much threatening behaviour or doing

things that can be quite scary and quite intimidating.

Isolating can be isolating you from your friends,

There are different things that we can become aware

of and we use something called the Freedom Programme

to enable women to go on this programme and,

really, week by week start to see some of the abuse

Are you seeing numbers of people coming forward going up, going down?

Also, are the police forces getting involved?

Survive South Gloucestershire has been established now since 1974.

We are one of the longest-running specialist domestic abuse

What we have seen is year-on-year the numbers

In one given year, when I started two years ago, we'd had 1,700 calls

When you think those 1,700 calls are taken by just one staff

member on a helpline, that really puts into context

the specialist work that the team do and the high volume of numbers

What we saw when we had The Archers story recently is a real

increase of callers, particularly from an older

age group, who hadn't experienced physical abuse,

but had experienced emotional abuse - the coercive,

controlling behaviour that was identified

in that radio programme - and they were really able to come

forward and now start to identify that's what they'd

A councillor in Bath has been jailed for 33 months

Donal Hassett, who represented Newbridge, was found guilty

of acting as the property fixer , using fake paperwork to rent four

homes which were turned in to cannabis factories.

The family of a British rider seriously injured in a fall

at the Badminton Horse Trials says she has started to

Emily Gilruth fell during the cross-country course.

She is being treated at Southmead Hospital in Bristol.

The newly-elected Mayor for the West of England has pledged to sort out

traffic congestion as his first priority for the region,

He will lead a new combined authority, covering Bath

and North-East Somerset, Bristol and South Gloucestershire.

Conservative Tim Bowles was sworn in this morning.

Our political reporter Robin Markwell reports.

On your first day in the office, it's always good to have

councillor Tim Bowles, from Winterbourne, officially became

His challenge, to bring together the three council leaders

of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and Bath and North East Somerset,

finding solutions to the housing crisis and traffic gridlock.

His fellow Conservatives were delighted on hearing

But for the sole Labour member of our new combined authority,

I think Tim will be reasonable and we've had a conversation

already, and also Tim and Matthew know him already and have assured me

Tim is a decent guy and everything that I've seen suggests

that we will be able to work together very constructively.

Tim Bowles was brought up in West Pennard, his father worked

He's currently a manager of an events company in Yate.

He's been a South Gloucestershire councillor since 2010,

though he says he'll resign his seat to focus on his mayoral duties.

I'm going to be going out straightaway talking

to people around the region, really identifying the really

specific transport challenges, the specific areas that we need

to be developing housing, and talking to businesses about how

we make real differences in skills for everybody across the region.

And we are starting doing that today.

More advice today came from a man used to being mayor.

George Ferguson was once Mayor of Bristol.

He thinks Mayor Boles should make a beeline for Downing Street.

I think this job is the starter for ten.

I absolutely think that the main the job that the metro mayor has

If you look and see what has happened in Manchester,

they are really on their third or fourth round in terms

of the powers that go to the city region.

We are on our first round and the prime job of the mayor

is to see what those extra powers are that we need and what the extra

funding is that we need, because I'm sure there will be

Simple it isn't - solve the housing crisis,

sort out the transport and grab more power from Westminster.

Plenty to ponder, then, for of our new leader

Four men from the West are aiming to break the world record for rowing

The team call themselves The Common Oars and they are doing

The group have never rowed before and have to beat

More people have walked on the moon then completed this feat. That's it

from us tonight. There is more news on the website and on the local BBC

radios stations. We are back at you tomorrow morning from 6:30 a.m.. I

will leave you with the forecast. We have two distinct phases through

the course of the week with the weather. The first part will be dry

and settled, then an increasing risk of showers and potentially

thunderstorms from the south from Thursday onwards. Tomorrow will be a

dry unsettled day. The key forecasting issue will be the cloud

cover and how that comes and goes. The general trend will be with dry

and sunny spells developing. Through the course of tonight, a fair amount

of cloud of ride. Clear skies tending to get squeezed further

towards the west, the south-west. Temperatures could get down to about

four Celsius in the countryside. Tomorrow, we will start the day with

some early sunshine, others will see some cloud. It will be a mix and

match of cloud compete in the sunshine throughout the day. Into

the evening, the trend will be the cloud starting to disperse.

Temperatures tomorrow getting up to the mid-teens. Plenty of sunshine

around on weather they after a cold start.

with some sunshine and showers, it will become drier and feel warm. Now

the National forecast. Good evening. A quiet day on the

weather front but we still managed to have some huge contrasts in the

weather. This was a beautiful picture from Cumbria, blue skies and

crystal clear blue skies in Argyll and Bute but closer to the north

coast, it sends shivers down your spine! Chilly and cloudy all along

that cost this bank of cloud that sliced the country in half, cool and

cloudy to the east and to the West had sunshine. But it still been dry

and it will stay that way for most of the week. As we get into Friday,

there is some rain on the way. In the short-term, not much happening

in the next few hours, quite a bit of cloud in most of England and

Wales but many northern and western parts, the stars are out.

Temperatures not