Refuges save families fleeing terror… so join heroic Danielle and help kids worried Santa won’t find them by donating to our Smiles at Christmas campaign

OUR Smiles At Christmas appeal urges readers to donate money and toys, which will be divided between four charities helping families – SCOTTY’S LITTLE SOLDIERS, CHILDREN WITH CANCER, WOMEN’S AID and the AMAR FOUNDATION.

Today, we focus on Women’s Aid.

For most of her childhood Danielle believed extreme violence and anger were as much a part of Christmas as turkey and mistletoe.

Over eight years her brutal father, Wayne Prior, repeatedly punched, kicked, verbally abused and bit her mum, Charlotte Kneer. He once attempted to suffocate her with a plastic bag.

Although Charlotte threw him out, Prior would force himself into the family home every Christmas morning, telling Danielle and her sister Daisy, 17: “I’m your dad, we’re family, I’m supposed to be here.”

Charlotte would be too terrified to send him away.

Danielle, 16, says: “I would be confused to see him but happy my dad was home. But by 11am the anger would brew and we’d be walking on eggshells around him.

“He’d start drinking before noon and that was when the day changed. If we made a noise, if things didn’t turn out exactly how he expected, he’d get angry.

“Mum protected us, she would send us up to bed if there was the slightest sign he was going to kick off. I grew up thinking that was normal.”

Even after he left, Prior, a carpenter, would terrify the girls and Charlotte’s son Jake, now 22.

Danielle recalls: “At my nan’s house, when I was nine, he had a shouting match with my nan. His girlfriend at the time locked herself in the bathroom, scared. I was in another room but could see everything through a glass door.

“He was screaming in her face. He rang my mum and said, ‘If you don’t f***ing take the girls home now I’m leaving them’. I got taken home in a police car that day.”

Charlotte says: “I escaped to a refuge with the kids on Danielle’s first birthday but I was so weak I came back. It took a final serious assault for me to act. He tried to strangle and stab me so I got a non-molestation order. He breached it straight away and was arrested.”

In 2011, at Lewes Crown Court, Prior admitted various crimes against the three women from 1993 to 2010, including seven counts of actual bodily harm. He was sentenced to seven years.

Charlotte now runs a refuge in Surrey to help women and children escape brutal partners and rebuild their lives.

Danielle and Daisy volunteer there, adamant they will turn their horrifying experiences into something positive.

Only during Prior’s trial did Danielle realise that the brutality she saw was not her or her mum’s fault — or “normal”.