Suicides linked to domestic abuse should be investigated as potential homicides, say UK families | Domestic violence
Every suicide where the deceased was the victim of domestic violence should be investigated as a potential murder, according to calls from campaigners who want abusers to be held accountable for the devastating impact of their actions.
This step is necessary because police and prosecutors are not doing enough to bring perpetrators to justice in cases of suicide following domestic violence.
“In every case, there is a systemic and structural failure, particularly within the criminal justice system, to examine these deaths with the seriousness they deserve,” Pragna Patel, co-director of campaign group Project Resist, told a landmark meeting in Westminster earlier this week.
The meeting organized by Project Resist, which runs the “Suicide is Murder” campaign to fight for change in the criminal justice system, brought together families who lost loved ones to suicide due to domestic violence.
Sharon Holland lost her 23-year-old daughter, Chloe Holland, in March 2023. Before her death, Chloe had reported her ex-partner Marc Masterton to the police and given a two-hour video interview as evidence against him.
Masterton was posthumously found guilty of coercive and controlling behavior and sentenced to 41 months in prison. He was later sentenced to three years and seven months in prison after a second woman reported that he was in a violent and abusive relationship with her.
Following Chloe’s death, the Netherlands decided to campaign for a new law that would bring the perpetrators to justice; only later did he realize that laws were already in place, but that they were not often used to secure prosecutions.
“I decided that a new law was not what I needed as the existing laws were already in place, and after learning how badly my daughter was failed by the police and many other agencies before she took her life, I decided that they needed to do their job properly and things needed to change,” he said.
“More than 47 families found me and only four of us were convicted,” he added. “I was shocked to see so many families clashing with the police and CPS. [Crown Prosecution Service] “For years there was no justice for their children or their siblings, they could not speak out and they could not speak out in case it affected investigations that would probably lead nowhere.”
Saskia Lightburn Richie’s daughter Hannah died in May 2017, aged 30, in what she described as the “latest act of violence” in a campaign of harassment.
“[Hannah] “She was energetic, full of love,” he said. “The future was full of promise and she was an incredible, truly loving mother to her two children, and she died by suicide after a two-year relationship in which she was systematically destroyed by her partner.”
“He was physically beaten, psychologically tortured, taken under control, torn apart until he could not see a way out. The man who did this to him was released, we call it suicide, we close the case and move on.
“But I couldn’t go on,” he said, “and I couldn’t go on. In reality, Hannah didn’t just die by suicide. She was murdered. She was killed slowly and deliberately over a two-year period, and when I went to the police, begging them to investigate what she had done to her, I was told there was nothing they could do.”
“There was no inquest into his death. The domestic homicide investigation I had to fight for lasted five years and changed nothing. A four-day inquest found death by suicide, despite a wealth of evidence relating to a very traumatic period of domestic violence and the failure of many services.”
Lightburn Richie told the meeting that he has been “fighting a system that refuses to see what’s in front of him” for eight years.
He said the Suicide is Murder campaign was critical: “Because when someone dies by suicide after being subjected to domestic violence, we need to investigate what it actually is, which is murder.
“We need to use the legislation we currently have effectively and that is not actually happening at the moment and we need to hold abusers accountable for driving their victims to death.
“We have laws. We need a will, we need the police for a proper investigation. We need the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute. We need judges to understand that words and control can kill as much as hands and guns.”
At the second meeting in the House of Commons, chaired by Labor MP Kirith Entwistle and attended by Security Minister Jess Phillips, the grieving relatives once again told their stories.
Alex Davies-Jones, parliamentary under-secretary of state for victims, told the meeting: “These deaths are often brushed aside as if it was their decision, they chose to do it, when in reality they were the culmination of violence committed by someone else and these are not isolated stories.”
“Our laws were broken, we know that,” he said. “It’s falling apart, especially when it comes to murder, murder or manslaughter. It’s not written into law anyway, it’s been developed over centuries through common law practice and it’s no longer fit for purpose, frankly that’s the world we live in now.”
“I’m not going to pretend it’s going to be easy to fix. It’s incredibly complex and difficult, especially when you look at the issue of murder, but we recognize that that needs to be addressed as well.”
A CPS spokesman said: “Domestic abuse is a heinous crime and our prosecutors are advised to actively consider murder and manslaughter charges in suicide cases where there is a known context of domestic abuse or other controlling or coercive behaviour.
“We have previously accused some defendants of causing the death of their abusive partners, including in currently active cases.
“We are also working with the police and other stakeholders to ensure that such crimes are well understood so that we can bring perpetrators to justice for the full scope of their crimes.”
