When we heard of police treating victims of domestic violence as criminals, one survivor came to us with her story. Years on, she explains the experience still haunts her: ‘it never leaves you’.
There is nothing I feel more passionate about than raising awareness of domestic abuse. Someone very close to me has been affected by it and, while their story is not mine to tell, I have made a vow to bring attention to the issue wherever I can.
In May, I covered the launch of a report by the Centre for Women’s Justice. The research exposes a ‘culture of disbelief’ within the criminal justice system, where women reporting abuse are often treated as offenders instead of victims.
Its contents were deeply unsettling and brought to mind the play Prima Facie. Written by Suzie Miller, it follows Tessa – a working-class woman from Liverpool who works her way up to become a barrister – before her view of the justice system is thrown into disarray when she becomes a victim of sexual assault.
I saw the production four years ago and I remember the final scene vividly. Tessa walked to the front of the stage and said: ‘One in three women. Look to your left, look to your right, it’s one of us.’
Natalie (not her real name), sadly for her, was the ‘one’. She got in touch with us after reading the Centre for Women’s Justice report and chose to share her experience of domestic abuse. She reflects on how she was failed by the justice system and the vitality of mental health support.
Natalie’s story
‘If you had spoken to me about this two years ago, I wouldn’t have remembered going to the police station and being questioned,’ Natalie says at the beginning of our call. ‘When you’re coming out of a violent domestic relationship, you don’t have much awareness of yourself, and it probably won’t ever fully dawn on you what you’ve actually experienced.’
For more than two decades Natalie endured what she described as sustained domestic abuse. Trapped in a relationship marked by coercive control, threats to kill, strangulation and sexual violence.
Ten years later, these memories came flooding back to her when she was watching one of her favourite films and a woman was being strangled by a robot. ‘I must have overlooked this scene previously, because all of a sudden, I got triggered.’
‘It never leaves you,’ Natalie explains. ‘You’ll always be roped back into that place, you’ll have a cry about it, and you will try, the next day, to get up and move forward.’
While the abuse Natalie suffered was extremely harrowing, she says it was her treatment within the justice system that pushed her to breaking point. When police officers knocked on her door in 2021, she assumed they had come to arrest her ex-partner. Instead, they were looking for her.
‘I’ll need to give you a bit of background for this next part, but I promise it’s relevant to the story,’ Natalie says, with a look of determination in her eyes.
‘Around five years ago, my son and I were in witness protection, as my ex-abuser was up in court again for stalking. Outside the door, which had a glass frame, he and his partner were laughing and hurling abuse at me. I went ballistic, I put my hands up to it, but his girlfriend made a claim that I said: ‘I’m going to kill you’, which never happened.’
After this, Natalie explains the police came to her house a week later and kicked through her door. ‘I was only in my dressing gown because I was recovering from having surgery on my appendix. They pushed me into my front room and treated me like a criminal.’
Natalie continues: ‘At first, I thought they had come to my house to give me news about my ex, but they said they were arresting me and weren’t prepared to listen to my side of the story. I had to explain that I needed to go to the hospital the next day to have my stitches removed. I even showed them my wound, but it wasn’t until I phoned my doctor that they were prepared to listen. They put me under house arrest.’
Afterwards, at Charing Cross police station, Natalie says she was assigned a duty defence lawyer, whom she described as ‘amazing’. During the interview, she broke down in tears about how she had treated by the police and how the case had been handled.
‘The fact is, my abuser was harassing me and they were still doing it, yet the police stepped in without any understanding, and I was being treated like the criminal. I am furious and stressed about how this can happen.
‘As a society, we’re conditioned to think the police are always right and we should rely on them when something bad happens. But now, I do not trust them at all, and I probably wouldn’t call them even if my life depended on it. As far as I’m concerned there is no justice for women who get punched, beaten, bullied. There isn’t.’
The help of Woman’s Trust
Natalie says real support came when she reached Woman’s Trust, a specialist mental health charity that provides free counselling and therapy for women who have experienced domestic abuse.
‘They have given me my identity back,’ Natalie remarks. ‘Woman’s Trust help you on a more personal level, rather than a legal one, and that’s exactly what I needed. The worst had happened and I felt valued again. When I first started using the service, they had to put a pie chart on the wall to explain what had happened to me.’
By the time Natalie had confided in the charity, a restraining order was in place against her abuser, and she had started to change parts of herself in order to re-build her life. She explains: ‘I saw my abuser last May, for the first time in years, and at first, he didn’t recognise me. He had to double take about three times, but when he finally looked at me, I stared him square in the eye and that’s when I knew I was more powerful than he would ever be in his lifetime.
‘The moment only lasted around 30 seconds, but I was basically saying to him ‘reopen a case, see what happens’. The strength I felt from the support I received made this possible.’
‘You’re so strong,’ I said to Natalie, before asking her how we can help other women who have gone through similar experiences rebuild their confidence.
‘Education,’ Natalie says. ‘People don’t know anywhere near enough about domestic abuse, so how can we expect the police, judges or even the general public to try and help. We’re talking about someone’s life being in constant threat every single day in their own home.
‘When I would try and explain my situation to someone, they would just say: ‘Why don’t you just leave’, but where was I supposed to go? The abuser should leave and the onus should be lifted from the victim. That is what needs to be interpreted through these legal systems.’
Against this backdrop, the government are currently trying to pass legislation that will make it easier for victims of domestic abuse to stay in their homes while perpetrators are evicted.
While talking about this, Natalie exclaimed it is ‘insane’ people have to talk about such a rule, that is should already be in effect. She also suggested that it would be useful to ‘actually take informational data from women who have survived domestic abuse and process it in a way where it can be fed back to the institutes that need to learn. The only information you’re going to get correct is from the horse’s mouth.’
Upsettingly, Natalie isn’t confident we’re on the right path: ‘It’s been going on for years – this idea of criminalising victims, it’s really damaging,’ she says.
She points to the Henry Nowak case – the 18-year-old killed in Southampton by Vickrum Digwa, who falsely claimed he had been racially abused and was acting in self-defence.
‘This case has highlighted how extreme the problem is,’ Natalie explains. ‘He was just a baby. They put a victim in handcuffs, what for? For being attacked by their abuser.’
As our conversation drew to a close, Natalie reflected on what she believes needs to change: ‘I don’t know how we can rectify such behaviour, but I think we need to start with a complete overhaul of the justice system.’
Despite everything she has been through, she speaks with quiet resolve about rebuilding her life: ‘These kind of experiences never leave you, but I wasn’t going to allow him to destroy me completely. I still have my home, my son still went to school, we managed.
‘You just have to take each day as it comes.’
Images: Shutterstock
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Staff room: talking health and social care with Tameside Council
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