When Liv Shelby posted a video on TikTok about her mother’s death, she never expected it to be seen by so many people.
Sitting in her car and speaking to the camera, it was the first time she opened up publicly about what happened to her mother, Lisa, in 2005.
That year Liv turned 3 years old and it was at her birthday party where her father attacked and killed her mother.
She grew up knowing that her mother was gone and that her father was responsible for that absence, but Liv said that her family never talked about her mother’s death, so she didn’t know exactly what had happened.
Everything changed eight years later when, in a computer class at school, He decided to write his mother’s name in an internet search engine..
A decade later, at 21 years old, Liv decided to share her story with the world.
In her seven-minute video, which has been viewed more than 4 million times, the young woman speaks openly and emotionally about the impact the crime has had on her life.
Liv, who posts regularly on her TikTok channel for her 270,000 followers, explains that one of the reasons that led her to tell her story was seeing and hearing people “romanticize domestic abuse relationships,” which made her feel the need to show the devastating consequences that those relationships can have.
In addition, he also wanted to highlight the impact that losing one of his parents (or both, if applicable) can have on a child.
Keep the feelings inside
On the day of the attack, Liv was in Canada, the country where she was born.
He had to wait until he was 8 years old to be able to move to the United Kingdom with his maternal grandmother, after a long and hard legal battle for custody between both sides of his family.
His father, Bradley Benham, was convicted of second-degree murder in November 2008 and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 12 years in prison.
According to Liv on the podcast Reliable Willow from the BBC, his father has already been released from prison, but he has not had contact with him.
He said that during all this time he kept what he felt and she had never talked about what happened to her grandmother or her boyfriend.
“I just had it inside me, forever, and I didn’t talk about it with people who know me in real life,” he said.
Although she eventually saw a school counselor, she admitted that she was “pretty stubborn” and “didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
“Because above all, without meaning to offend, she was not a specialist, she was a very generic counselor with whom you had an hour or half an hour to sit down and talk,” he explained.
“I don’t think I was prepared for what I was going to say if I had gotten right into it.”
“It is very sad”
Based on her experiences, Liv believes there should be greater recognition of the needs of children who have lost a parent to domestic violence.
According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom, almost half (45%) of the 70 adult women victims of homicide in England and Wales until March 2023 died from domestic violence.
According to the figures, in all but one case the person suspected of having committed the murder was a man.
The report also notes that only 8% of male homicide victims died in domestic-related murders, a total of 30 deaths, with a woman being the suspect in 11 of those cases.
Violence against women and girls and efforts to combat it often make the news, but There is less talk about grieving children and less research on the matter..
John Devaney, professor of social work at the University of Edinburgh, says that the data is not officially recorded, but it predicts that between 100 and 250 children a year grieve the loss of a parent to domestic homicide in the UK.
“When a parent is murdered by a current or former partner, in many cases it is the child’s other parent,” she says, agreeing that more support should be offered to affected children.
One possible solution, Liv thinks, would be to appoint a specialized counselor for each child, something that would have helped her when she was little.
“They assign you someone who is going to go through all that with you or who already knows your story; “You don’t have to sit there and explain it.”
Liv says the reaction to her video, with other people sharing their own experiences of domestic homicide, helped her feel less alone.
“There were a lot of people,” he says, “many of them knew someone to whom it had happenedso everyone felt identified.”
“It’s very sad,” but he acknowledges that in this way he was able to realize “that there are other people who have gone through the same thing.”
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