A Metropolitan police officer who was assaulted and raped by an ex-partner has channelled her ordeal into targeting domestic abusers.
The trainee detective constable, who works in a safeguarding unit in east London, was a student when the abusive relationship left her feeling suicidal. The woman, 24, who is not being named for legal reasons, hopes that speaking out about her experience will give victims the confidence to report abusers to the police.
She said she now realised that her former partner’s behaviour bore all the hallmarks of every form of domestic abuse she investigates as a police officer.
She said: “I didn’t really have my own money, my money was his money, so he was controlling my finances. He used to physically assault me in front of our friends. He would hold me against the wall by my throat. He sexually assaulted me on more occasions than I can remember and he raped me twice during our relationship.”
The woman said she had decided to become a police officer before she met the man but her experience had an influence on the sector of policing she went into. “I didn’t know I wanted to investigate domestic abuse until after I escaped my personal situation and I realised I wanted to help people who were going through and had been through things like I had.”
She said the ordeal had enabled her to empathise with victims and help other officers on her team to understand domestic abuse. “The nature of domestic abuse is very different to any other form of crime, the not being able to report it and the trauma linked to it. I think having that personal experience does help to identify that within victims and I think help them trust the police a bit more sometimes.”
The woman reported the man to the police one month after she ended the relationship. It followed a suicide attempt in which she was taken to hospital. The case was closed due to a lack of evidence.
“It was my word against his,” she said. “Apart from my account, there was no evidence. I had not received any injuries severe enough to go to hospital. I had spoken to a few people about it, but none of whom I was still in touch with who’d be able to corroborate that.”
The relationship pre-dated the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which introduced non-fatal strangulation as an offence. The act also amended the definition of domestic abuse to include coercive and controlling behaviour.
The woman believes that the change in the law has allowed police to provide greater protection to victims. “When I reported it, coercive and controlling behaviour wasn’t an offence, neither was non-fatal strangulation, so it was taken as the individual offences of the assault and the rape,” she said.
“Domestic abuse is so much more than the individual incidents, it’s the long-term effects of it and coercive control does take into account everything that happens throughout the relationship that individual offences like rape and assault don’t because they only look at one particular time. When you can incorporate coercive control and have the bigger picture, I think it really helps to understand why it’s gotten to the point it has and also the long-term effects that has on victims as well.”
She said she hoped that the convictions of the former officers Wayne Couzens and David Carrick demonstrated that the police were not above the law.
“Previously, a lot of victims didn’t want to report if the perpetrator was a police officer because they thought: ‘Well, I can’t report my police officer partner to the police for abusing me because I’m not going to be believed,’” she said.
“You now can report, you’re going to be believed and these people, they’re not being protected as such that may have been seen 20, 30, 40 years ago. They’re being found out, reported and convicted and they’re not hiding within their profession.”
