\n<\/p>\n
Every suicide in which the deceased has been a victim of domestic violence should be investigated as a potential homicide, according to calls by campaigners who want see abusers held to account for the devastating affect of their actions.<\/p>\n
The move is necessary because police and prosecutors are not doing enough to bring perpetrators to justice in cases of suicide after domestic abuse.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn case after case, there is systemic and structural failure, especially within the criminal justice system, to scrutinise these deaths with the seriousness that they deserve,\u201d Pragna Patel, co-director of the campaign group Project Resist said, at a landmark meeting in Westminster earlier this week.<\/p>\n
The meeting, organised by Project Resist, which runs a \u201cSuicide is Homicide\u201d campaign to fight for change in the criminal justice system, brought together families who had lost loved ones to suicide after domestic abuse.<\/p>\n
Sharon Holland lost her daughter Chloe Holland, 23, in March 2023. Before her death, Chloe had reported her former partner, Marc Masterton to police, giving a two-hour video interview as evidence against him.<\/p>\n
After her death, Masterton was convicted of coercive and controlling behaviour and jailed for 41 months. He was later jailed for three years and seven months after a second woman came forward to report that she had been in a violent and abusive relationship with him.<\/p>\n
After Chloe\u2019s death, Holland decided to campaign for a new law to bring perpetrators to justice; however she then realised that laws were already in place, they just weren\u2019t often being used to secure prosecutions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI decided it wasn\u2019t a new law I needed as existing laws were already there, and after finding out how much my daughter had been failed previous to her taking her life by the police and many other agencies, they needed to do their job properly, and things needed to change,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver 47 families have found me and only four of us have had a conviction,\u201d she added. \u201cI was so shocked to see so many families who have been fighting the police and CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] for years and getting no justice for their child or sibling and didn\u2019t have a voice and couldn\u2019t speak out in case it affected investigations that weren\u2019t possibly going anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Saskia Lightburn Richie\u2019s daughter Hannah died on the in May 2017 at the age of 30, in what she described as \u201cthe final act of violence\u201d in a campaign of abuse.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Hannah] was vibrant, she was loving,\u201d she said. \u201cShe was full of promise, and she was an amazing, really loving mum to her two children, and she died by suicide after two years in a relationship where she was systematically destroyed by her partner,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was physically beaten, she was psychologically tortured, she was controlled and broken down piece by piece until she could not see a way forward. The man who did this to her walked free, because we call it suicide, we close the file and we move on.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I could not move on,\u201d she said, \u201cand I haven\u2019t been able to move on. In truth, Hannah didn\u2019t just die by suicide. She was killed. She was killed slowly and deliberately over a two year period, and when I went to the police, when I begged them to investigate what he had done to her, I was told that there was nothing that they could do.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no investigation into her death. The domestic homicide review, which I had to fight for, took five years and changed nothing. A four day inquest found death by suicide, despite huge evidence over a very traumatic four day period of domestic abuse and failings by multiple services.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lightburn Richie told the meeting that for eight years she has \u201cbeen fighting a system that refuses to see what is right in front of it\u201d.<\/p>\n
She said the suicide is homicide campaign was critical \u201cbecause when someone dies by suicide after they\u2019ve endured domestic abuse, we have to investigate it for what it really is, which is homicide.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to use the legislation we currently have effectively and it really isn\u2019t happening at the moment, and we need to hold abusers accountable for driving their victims to death.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have the laws. We need the will, we need police to investigate properly. We need the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute. We need judges to understand that words and control can kill just as much as hands and weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n
At a second meeting in the House of Commons, chaired by Labour MP Kirith Entwistle, and attended by safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, the bereaved relatives again told their stories.<\/p>\n
Alex Davies-Jones, parliamentary under-secretary of state for victims, told the meeting: \u201cThese deaths are often written off as if they were their decision, they chose to do this, when, in truth, these were the culmination of actually, somebody else\u2019s violence, and these aren\u2019t isolated stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur law is broken, we know that,\u201d she said. \u201cParticularly around homicide, around murder or manslaughter, it is piecemeal. It\u2019s not written in statute anyway, it has been developed with common law practices for centuries, and it is no longer fit for purpose, quite frankly, it\u2019s the world that we currently live in.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not going to pretend that it\u2019s going to be easy to fix. It is incredibly complex and difficult, especially when you look at the issue of homicide, but we recognise that it needs to be looked at.\u201d<\/p>\n
A CPS spokesperson said: \u201cDomestic abuse is a heinous crime and our prosecutors are actively advised to consider murder and manslaughter charges in suicide cases where there is a known context of domestic abuse or other controlling or coercive behaviour.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have previously charged a number of defendants for causing the death of a partner they abused, including in proceedings which are currently active.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are also working with police and other stakeholders to ensure these kinds of offences are well-understood \u2013 so that we can bring perpetrators to justice for the full extent of their crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every suicide in which the deceased has been a victim of domestic violence should be investigated as a potential homicide, according to calls by campaigners who want see abusers held to account for the devastating affect of their actions. The move is necessary because police and prosecutors are not doing enough to bring perpetrators to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[682,1386,2932,17879,10210,154,434,8010,1388],"class_list":{"0":"post-30508","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-abuse","9":"tag-domestic","10":"tag-families","11":"tag-homicides","12":"tag-investigated","13":"tag-linked","14":"tag-potential","15":"tag-suicides","16":"tag-violence"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/30509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}