Woman fights off sex assaulter
Ms. Barber, a 29-year-old mother, was interviewed Monday morning on the ITV program This Morning, and described to hosts Phillip Schofield and Christine Bleakley the terrible ordeal she suffered at the hands of her attacker in Dunstable last year. And how she fought back and won.
“It was only five o’clock in the afternoon,” she said. “I was just coming back from a Doctor’s appointment. I mean you don’t assume anything is going to happen that early. It was getting dark, it was January but yes a guy coming out of an alley way just brushed past me.
“I didn’t think anything of it. He caught my eye and I thought he was just trying to be a bit flirtatious or something. But he carried on walking so I didn’t think anything more of it. Then as I carried on into the alley I heard footsteps running up behind me. I thought OK, maybe he wants to catch my number or something like that. And I turned around and he pushed me up against a wall and that’s when the attack started.”
He was physically holding her up against the wall as he groped and grabbed at her. She had experienced an assault 10 years prior and her attacker got away with it due to lack of evidence. Ms.Barber was not about to allow that to happen again. While being attacked, she was actually thinking of ways to gather evidence.
“As soon as he pushed me up against the fence he tried to kiss me and forced his tongue into my mouth,” she told her hosts. “I thought (doing so) left him vulnerable (and) I was just going to bite down as hard as I can.”
She said she wanted to show that it was “not consensual in anyway, shape or form” and to “get as much DNA as I can and try and cause enough pain to get this guy off me. I didn’t know I would get to bite a bit off the end of his tongue but I knew I would try and get some DNA in my teeth.”
DNA sample given to police
But bite off the end of his tongue she did, though she became more worried because the man liked the pain. “Then I knew something was not quite right,” she said. “Most people would have backed off.”
She redoubled her efforts to get DNA samples, even scratching his face with her hands, and all the while kept trying to get away. She managed to escape him and ran off; he didn’t follow.
She ran home and though her husband was there at first she didn’t tell him what had occurred. Instead, she dialed the police straight away. She had her piece of evidence and asked what to do with it and they told her to place it into a sterile pot and the woman did so.
Two months later the man committed a similar offence and he was captured. Her DNA evidence helped convict him on three counts of sexual assault. Her attacker, Ferdinand Manila, has been placed into the custody of a psychiatric unit indefinitely. And as it turns out, Ms. Barber is not only courageous and quick-thinking, she’s also compassionate.
“Hopefully he can get the treatment he needs,” she told ITV about her attacker. “I mean if he can be treated, brilliant, then he can hopefully get out and start his life again. If not then hopefully the treatment he can get can calm his tendencies.”
