I've never been thrown down any stairs in my life.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, my soon-to-be daughter's father at the time threatened to throw me down the stairs once when he was drunk, but he never acted on it. It was just an empty threat.
As for punching him in the face... That happened a couple of months after I left him, after he tried to strangle me. I moved away and let him visit our daughter every second weekend. You may think I was crazy for letting him visit our daughter after he tried to kill me, but I wasn't afraid of him. I warned him that if he ever tried to hurt me again, I would kill him in his sleep one night and I meant it, and he knew I meant it.
I punched him in the face on my daughter's first birthday, during an argument over the fact that he had gambled away all of the money that was intended for her birthday. He raised his voice at me and threw something that accidently hit my daughter, who I was holding at the time. That really pissed me off, so I put her aside, got up and punched him in the face for being such a fucking prick. Then he lost all contact with his daughter because I told him to fuck off for good.