Robert Rawson, 62, appeared at Liverpool crown court last month to plead guilty to charges of controlling and coercive behaviour and perverting the course of justice.
In a harrowing impact statement, his victim, “Michelle” told the court that during their seven-year relationship, Rawson had put a tracking app on her car and phone, sending her dozens of texts and messages daily.
Rawson, who formerly worked in police support, including as a senior crime scene investigator for West Yorkshire police, would regularly humiliate Michelle by “arresting” her outside supermarkets in uniform, twisting her arm behind her back. He would also pull down her underwear and undo her bra in public.
Rawson “made me feel like a slave”, Michelle told the court. “I have lost my ability to make decisions and I don’t trust anyone.”
Rawson had originally pleaded not guilty to both charges and another one of rape. On a plea bargain, the latter charge was dropped. He was sentenced to 30 months in custody for coercive control and eight months to run concurrently for perverting the course of justice.
He had “bombarded” Michelle with messages while on bail, demanding that she retract her statement.
Michelle, 61, whose name has been changed to protect her identity, is a housing manager in charge of a team of 14. She began a relationship with Rawson in 2017 when she had been divorced for 10 years.
“I was happily leading a good life with my two daughters,” she said.
The day before Rawson appeared in court, she emailed me to ask if I would write about what had happened to her. She eloquently detailed his micromanagement of her everyday life. Without her consent, and to her horror, Rawson confessed that he had sent intimate photographs of her to a swingers’ website in which she was identifiable.
Unknown to Michelle, he had then arranged an encounter with a stranger while they were on holiday, during which she said that he abused her on a beach while the stranger masturbated on her. “I froze. It was Robert’s fantasy. He viewed me as a prop.”
If she challenged him on this or any of his constantly changing rules, he would punish her. She says he urinated on her in the bath, left excrement smeared on sheets and in the bathroom, and he would urinate into a saucepan and leave it on top of the cooker. “When I cleared up, I had to do it very quietly, otherwise he would say I was degrading him. Robert was always the victim, the poor broken child.”
Rawson’s career with the police began in 2000. He spent 17 years at West Yorkshire police, becoming a senior serious crime investigator. As a member of police support staff, his responsibilities included photographing victims of crime and crime scenes. He then spent a brief time working for the Border Force at Manchester airport and later moved to the British Transport Police.
He resigned the day before he was due to appear at a gross misconduct proceeding for his treatment of Michelle.
“Robert drove a police vehicle and wore uniform. He loved the power of it,” said Michelle. “His police position wasn’t mentioned in court and it should have been. It was a betrayal of trust.”
Rawson boasted to Michelle that he had been married four times, had two common law partners and that he had been involved in at least 14 affairs during his marriages. “I am sure there are more of his victims out there,” Michelle said. “He could be free in months. Women need to know.”
When we met, she was warm and composed but constantly close to tears. Michelle said she was grieving. “My daughters tell me it’s called a ‘trauma bond’… when he was nice, he could be adorable.”
She questions how she, an independent, capable woman, surrendered so much of herself for years. “He never told me: ‘Don’t go and see your family.’ He didn’t have to. It just resulted in too much trouble if I did. On occasions, I was suicidal because I thought it was me. I would ask myself: ‘What can I change? How can I be a better person?’”
This year is the 10th anniversary of section 76 of the Serious Crime Act that came into force in England and Wales in 2015. For the first time, the then government tried to translate controlling or coercive behaviour (CCB), a pattern of subjugation and domination, into law.
It was wrongly classed as a low-level crime with a tariff that includes a community order (unpaid work or a curfew), a fine or up to five years in prison. A decade on, CCB is still a little understood and hugely under-reported crime.
Yet, as a report last month revealed, domestic abuse, which is about coercive control, has led to an increasing number of women taking their own lives. In January, Ryan Wellings, 30, was jailed for six and a half years for the assault and CCB of Kiena Dawes, 23, who had taken her own life. A suicide note on her phone said: “I was murdered. Slowly … Ryan Wellings killed me.”
In England and Wales in 2017-18, 960 cases of CCB were charged, a rate of 11%. In 2023, 43,774 CCB offences were recorded by the police and the charge rate had dropped to 5.2%. What is going wrong?
Cassandra Wiener, an international expert on coercive control, points out that the law in England and Wales views CCB as a form of domestic abuse separate from sexual, financial, psychological and physical abuse. Sexual abuse is often a weapon used in CCB – an aspect not properly understood by some police and prosecutors.
In Scotland, she said: “They are all treated as instruments in the perpetrator’s toolbox. It makes the crime easier to prove in court.”
Academics Charlotte Barlow and Sandra Walklate have followed three police forces over the last decade. In the last of three studies, “more positive developments” are noted but “there is still some way to go”.
Among the difficulties is that police lack clarity in what the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is looking for in CCB cases – even though the CPS has issued updated guidelines – and the risk assessment of potential victims is still based on specific incidents of abuse, not a pattern of behaviour.
One police officer said: “It’s not like an assault, where you have a black eye. It generally happens behind closed doors.” Another officer said: “It’s easy to rebut. If you accuse someone of putting a tracker on a vehicle, for example, all they have to say is: ‘I was concerned for her safety.’”
Michelle said that, if she visited her parents, “Robert would say: ‘You won’t want to cook when you get back so I’ve ordered a takeaway.’ After that, it would be constant texts – ‘it’s nearly here, why aren’t you back?’ It was another way of controlling me. To someone else, it looked like: ‘How nice – he’s ordered a takeaway.’”
The late US sociologist Evan Stark, author of a seminal book on coercive control, said this kind of entrapment is inflicted on both men and women, but it is a gendered crime in which men use “social norms of masculinity and femininity … to impose their will”.
Michelle would cook every day. “Robert was always critical. He’d sit on the sofa, hand me the empty plate and say: ‘Six out of 10’. He’d say to our dog: ‘No, Trixie, it’s not night-time yet, it’s just your mum standing near the window blocking out the light.’
“I wasn’t allowed to visit my GP because Robert said in a conversation about my menopause symptoms that I had implied he was no good in bed. If I reacted, he’d say I was a bunny boiler, mad or had no sense of humour.
“He love-bombed me when we first met. I couldn’t believe that this good thing was happening. Within two months, he had proposed. In three months, he had moved in. His ability to switch from a loving partner to a monster kept me in a permanent state of stress. My team [at work] could see me disappearing into a shell, but I kept defending him and normalising his behaviour.”
Criminologist Prof Katrin Hohl is the government’s independent adviser on criminal justice responses to sexual violence and an expert on the police’s response to CCB.
“Policing is not set out to deal with CCB at all,” she said.
“It’s still called ‘the new offence’, even though it’s 10 years old. Coercive control is so personalised in the way it’s conducted; an officer needs knowledge of the crime, experience and time to understand the pattern of what’s going on. The typical frontline officer has none of those assets.
“When the victim looks a mess and the abuser charming, the police may not even correctly identify the primary perpetrator. People, including the police, who inadvertently cooperate with the abuser in this way are sometimes known as ‘flying monkeys’ – after the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, who ordered her flying monkeys to attack Dorothy.”
Hohl added: “We almost always also see a tech-facilitated element in CCB but police are often poor at detecting its role in case-building. They might check for a tracking device, for example, but not see if a perpetrator has installed an app on the victim’s phone that mirrors all its content to his phone without the victim’s knowledge. So she thinks she is going mad.”
Furthermore, according to Hohl, a victim herself might not seek help or support an investigation: “She is in the middle of the labyrinth. She doesn’t have a bird’s-eye view to see how trapped she is. And she’s isolated from the people who could give her a reality check.”
What finally prompted Michelle to report Rawson to the police was fear. Last year, she discovered that he was making online searches for swingers’ clubs in their next foreign holiday location.
“I was terrified,” she said.
She emailed Merseyside police, who arrested Rawson that evening. “Robert said: ‘Do you know anything about this, love?’ when they arrived. He’d never called me ‘love’ in seven years.”
What made the case easier to build were the thousands of screenshot messages from Rawson, backed up on Michelle’s iCloud and never deleted.
Like many victims in similar situations – as well as academics, prosecutors and police – Michelle does not believe the punishment (30 months in custody) fits Rawson’s crime.
The government is said to be considering raising the top tariff for CCB to 10 years. In Scotland, the highest tariff is 14 years. An increased tariff could also prompt improved resources for police and specialist training. Hohl said that education of the public, from whom juries are drawn, is also vital.
Michelle is now trying to rebuild her life. She is paying Rawson’s half of the “massive” mortgage as well as her own. “He wants me to sell [the house]. I see that as more control.”
The couple had jointly contributed to everything else, including two cars and a caravan, all in Rawson’s name, so money is now tight.
“I have mental scars that I don’t think will ever heal,” Michelle said. “But I do have the support of my team and a wonderful family, so I hope so.”
