When a domestic abuser is also a fellow police officer, victims have been subjected to further trauma as forces close ranks against them. Now survivors are banding together and pushing for reform
It was in the front seat of a riot van that Anna* finally broke down. As a response police officer, she had apprehended dangerous offenders hundreds of times and was used to threats of violence, trained to respond calmly and defuse them.
But on this day, when the suspect walked directly towards her, locked eyes with her, and began describing in chilling detail how he would chop her into pieces and put her in the boot of his car, something changed.
“I flew out of the van and I went right up to him and said: ‘Go on then – cut me up, I don’t care’,” she recalls. “I got back in and my colleagues were laughing – but I was just devastated, because I had never, ever been reckless with myself in that way. I knew something was really wrong with me.”
To outsiders it might have seemed like the grinding violence of the job had worn her down. But Anna’s breaking point didn’t come from her treatment on the streets but from her treatment at home.
Some years before, fresh into her policing career, Anna had met a new, older partner. She was in her early 20s, not long free from a string of abusive relationships, and can see now that he reeled her in with a facade of kindness. They married fast, going on to have children together.
But things quickly deteriorated. He demanded Anna’s wages be paid directly to him, confiscating her debit card and allocating a meagre amount of “pocket money” each month. Anna regularly went hungry, unable to afford food, but debts still mounted up – a sense of constant oppression punctuated by over-the-top grand gestures. On occasion the abuse turned physical. And when Anna tried to end the relationship, he refused to leave.
“You just think: ‘My world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller all the time’,” she says. “I was in hell. I started fantasising about killing myself just to be able to rest.”
Throughout her decade-long ordeal, Anna repeatedly reached out for help, turning not to friends, family or support services but to her own police force. The man who was controlling, isolating and assaulting her was not only her husband – he was also a fellow serving officer, her first supervisor from her first police station.
Anna did everything the system told her to, reporting her husband’s behaviour on several occasions to several police chiefs and the professional standards department (PSD), responsible for investigating officers. He assaulted one of their children but returned to work when the child refused to testify against him. He assaulted Anna using a restraint learned in police training, but there were no consequences after he claimed to have acted in self-defence.
Anna’s career, however, did suffer. A senior officer listened to her account of the years-long abuse and told her she had mental health problems and would be put on a performance management plan.
In the aftermath of Sarah Everard’s murder at the hands of a serving Met officer in 2021, Anna was told there would be a force-wide review of all police-perpetrator cases. Rather than their looking at her ex-partner’s abuse, Anna was informed she would be investigated due to historic malicious counter-complaints by her abuser.
To this day, Anna considers her treatment by her force to be as traumatic as her original abuse. The help she begged for never came, and she was left isolated and broken. But in 2022 she finally found some solace – not from within the police but through a WhatsApp group.
Anna first met Taylor* and Jennifer*, both former or current police staff in their 30s and 40s, in a larger support network. The trio was quickly drawn to each other, their common interests both mundane – a love of animals and pop music – and horrifying: all were abused by serving officers and let down by their force. They formed their own group, later adding a few friends of friends, and have spoken daily ever since, despite having only met a handful of times.
Their experiences, spanning three different police forces, began at different times – but all of them have suffered abuse in the last five years.
“It’s like a form of abuse in itself, the way you’re treated by your own,” says Anna. “But us girls have been absolute bonfires for each other. I don’t know what I’d do without them.”
Every day the chat lights up: pet photos, parenting advice, help with job applications and birthday wishes. There are jokes, a particular brand of gallows humour forged from shared trauma. And there are links to relevant questions asked in parliament and recently published reports on domestic violence.
The group is a lifeline. For three years, the women have supported each other through labyrinthine police investigations and court cases, through what they describe as “institutional gaslighting”, and through mental health setbacks and the breakdown of relationships. They are determined that, out of the pain that brought them together, something positive should come. Recently they have been shaping their own kind of manifesto about the changes they want to see in how police forces treat victims and perpetrators in their ranks.
Taylor, a misconduct investigator, became involved with a serving officer active in the Police Federation, the representative body for rank and file officers, after the difficult breakdown of a previous relationship. He was a “master manipulator”, she says. “At the time he felt like my rescuer.”
‘It’s like a form of abuse in itself, the way you’re treated by your own. But us girls have been absolute bonfires for each other’
Anna, response police officer
Before long, he began controlling her. Taylor never knew what to expect; he could switch in an instant from loving and affectionate to aggressive and distant, isolating her from family and friends, and saying she was “crazy”, “mental” and “made stuff up”.
“I was always on edge, walking on broken glass and suffering from high levels of anxiety,” she says. “Slowly but surely I became smaller, more powerless, more helpless and more trapped.”
When she tried to end the relationship, the officer stalked her and attempted to enter her home, forcing her to call 999 in fear for her safety.
Her partner’s status – his web of influence and connections – left Taylor feeling unable to escalate his behaviour. Instead she downplayed it, keeping quiet and pleading with anyone who suspected to do the same.
When she did eventually report him for assaulting her, it was under duress from a senior officer. Her ex was arrested. But after reluctantly handing over evidence demanded by investigators, Taylor was served with a misconduct notice for not having challenged his behaviour more strongly.
“It was unbelievable,” she says. “My actions as a victim of abuse were being judged with the same scrutiny as my abuser’s. That was what really broke me.”
Taylor turned to an online support group set up within the force for domestic abuse victims. But in hours, her ex-partner had quoted something she had written to the group on his social media account – her messages clearly leaked.
“There’s nowhere to turn,” she says. “I was really let down by the support that was available – I just couldn’t trust it. And none of the routes to justice seem to exist for us: you just get shut down everywhere you go.”
There is no national process for how forces handle domestic abuse in their ranks. Protocols differ by force and are shaped variously by legislation, regulations and policies.
Victims can report crimes which should, in theory, be handled exactly as they would for accused members of the public. They can report internally to the professional standards department or to anti-corruption, which assesses reputational damage and recommends disciplinary action.
Reports can also trigger re-vetting, but police chiefs have historically retained a large degree of discretion; the women all knew cases where senior officers had stepped in to back up others who failed vetting, though recent reforms now require background checks by law.
Data on the prevalence of police domestic violence is limited, but an investigation by the Bureau Of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) found that officers and staff were reported for domestic abuse more than four times a week, on average, in the three years to April 2018. Some research from the US suggests officers could be four times more likely than the general public to engage in domestic violence.
In 2020, the Centre for Women’s Justice submitted a super-complaint into forces’ failure to address the issue of police-perpetrated domestic violence after freedom of information requests by TBIJ found a conviction rate of 3.9% – two-thirds of domestic violence convictions for the general public. Only 7.5% of cases were referred to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), responsible for investigating police complaints, with more than three-quarters resulting in no case to answer or no sanction.
Jennifer is one of the tiny minority to secure justice against her police-officer abuser, who was ultimately convicted of battery against her and her children after a decade of violence and control.
“When I first met him, he actually made me very uncomfortable,” she says. Her abuser was her manager. “I tried to move stations to get away from him, but he blocked the transfer. He changed his shift patterns to reflect mine so we were together all the time. He just slowly, slowly, slowly seeped in.”
The officer used physical techniques he learned in police training and, Jennifer believes, from perpetrators in domestic abuse calls he attended – using his body mass and height to force her around, saying she had tripped when he pushed her. He regularly hit her while shouting: “You’re just a PCSO [police community support officer] and I’m an officer – who are they going to believe?”
Jennifer finally left the relationship, remaining single for some years as she tried to recover from the trauma. But her next relationship, with a man who also had connections to the police, was again violently and psychologically abusive.
After managing to escape her latest relationship, Jennifer made many reports about her ex-partner: he had been standing outside her house and car, shouting profanities at her and sometimes holding a chainsaw. No action was ever taken. One day, fearing for her life, she messaged an officer directly. Nobody responded, and two days later, her ex broke into her home and attacked her.
Jennifer’s ex went on to make several malicious reports against her to her own force. She was ultimately investigated for three years, officers even arriving unannounced at her domestic abuse refuge in an attempt to search her accommodation.
‘Policewomen are incredibly brave, knowledgeable and compassionate – and we know exactly what needs to change’
Anna
Of the three officers involved in Anna, Taylor and Jennifer’s cases, one is currently suspended and another resigned while under investigation for abusing another woman. The third was promoted after being reported for his abuse. He is still serving today.
Speaking out is frightening. The women who are still working know it could cost them their job, and some perpetrators have threatened to hack their communications. But, they say, staying silent no longer feels like an option.
They are full of ideas about potential reforms, from the procedural – police perpetrators should be investigated by an external force and specialist domestic abuse departments set up to support victims – to policy change: gagging orders should be abolished, and officers and staff should be able to report directly to the IOPC. All three were all prevented from doing so because of regulations which bar those in the same force from making complaints against one another.
“We’re more than a survivor group,” says Anna. “We’re protesters and reformers. A police victim is an informed victim: policewomen are incredibly brave, knowledgeable and compassionate – and we know exactly what needs to change.”
The Police Federation said it could not comment on individual cases. A spokesperson for the National Police Chiefs’ Council said police-perpetrated domestic violence required the strongest possible response and robust disciplinary action. Improvements have been made to root out those “not fit to wear the uniform” and “[embed] a culture … that empowers colleagues to call out and report wrongdoing”, the spokesperson said.
Reflecting back, Taylor says she was drawn to the police because she wanted to support people in their darkest moments. She never imagined those people would be her fellow policewomen. “We all went into policing because we wanted to help people and make things better,” she says. “That’s why we feel we have to speak out now. We’re not the ones who should be ashamed.”
*Names have been changed
Photograph by Hannah McKay, WPA Pool/Getty
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