A MAN who tried to stab his partner with a knife has been jailed for two years.

Brent Smith, 40, was forbidden to go near the woman by a non-molestation order, said Brooke Morrison, prosecuting.

But when he was released from a 20-week prison sentence for assaulting her, he went to live with her in Malton.

“The defendant was volatile and aggressive,” she said.

On May 19, he started shouting at her, fetched a kitchen knife and tried to stab her three times with it.

“We will sort this ..... problem out, we will end it,” he said.

“A court order is a court order. You flouted it and you reverted to type,” Judge Sean Morris said at York Crown Court.

“The type I am talking about is the sort of person who beats women.

“The next time you breach this order the sentence will be in the region of four years.”

Smith, of no fixed address, pleaded guilty to breach of a non-molestation order and assault.

He was jailed for two years and made subject to a five-year restraining order aimed at protecting the woman.

For him, James Fox-McGowan said he had been taken back to the house by police, but Smith accepted he could have told officers he was barred from the address.

The couple had resumed their relationship, but then they argued and the relationship had broken down again.

The defence solicitor said the woman’s mother had removed or blunted all the knives in the house by bending their tips because the woman had self-harmed herself in the past.

Mr Fox-McGowan said Smith was jailed in November 2018 for criminal damage and breaching the non-molestation order but didn’t spend enough time in prison for any work on the underlying issues of his offending.

Miss Morrison said Smith had a previous conviction for assaulting the woman.

The knife didn’t injure her because it couldn’t get through the puffer jacket and other layers of clothing she was wearing.

The couple had been married for some years and separated in 2018.