Jane Monckton Smith - In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder

DR JANE MONCKTON SMITH is Professor of Public Protection at the University of Gloucestershire. She has an international reputation as an expert in her field and has published a number of academic books focused on homicide and criminal investigation. She has authored a new model for understanding and assessing risk of homicide in cases where there is domestic abuse. Her work is used widely in developing specialist practice for police and many other professionals. In addition to research she is also involved in homicide case work, reviewing cases for the Home Office, and advising police and review panels on complex and high- profile murders. She trains professionals in understanding risk escalation and homicide in cases of coercive control, stalking and domestic abuse.

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Relating Rape and Murder: Narratives of Sex, Death and Gender
Murder, Gender and the Media: Narratives of Dangerous Love
Introducing Forensic and Criminal Investigation
Domestic Abuse, Homicide and Gender: Strategies for Policy and
Practice

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First published in Great Britain 2021

This edition published 2022

Copyright Jane Monckton Smith, 2021

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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-1321-9; TPB: 978-1-5266-1320-2; eBook: 978-1-5266-1319-6; PB: 978-1-5266-1322-6; EPDF: 978-1-5266-4292-9

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I am so lucky to be able to hold my children. Not everyone has that privilege.

Minnie Aoife Westby

26th January 201821st January 2020

Contents

Why wont she get in the ambulance?

It was eight oclock in the evening and already dark when we arrived at the address, a Victorian building that had been split into flats. The flashing blue lights of the ambulance sparkled through the misty night rain, lighting up the open front door of the house and creating an uncomfortable eeriness in the quiet suburban street.

I was a newly qualified police officer, still in the first weeks of patrol duties, attending a 999 call with my supervising sergeant. We were coming towards the end of a long, hard shift and were due to finish around ten that evening. All we knew as we walked into that building was that there had been reports of an assault. I remember very clearly being warned by an experienced detective that the most dangerous calls Id attend would be so-called domestics. The detective had suffered a serious injury at one of these calls and I was thinking about this as I peered into the dim stairwell.

We climbed to the first floor and entered the living room of a cold, tidy apartment. The furniture and decor were a blur to me in comparison to the blank, staring face of the young red-haired woman, who was probably no more than eighteen years old, sitting calmly on a chair surrounded by ambulance staff. She had been hit on the head with a lump hammer. Her boyfriend her assailant had fled the scene before any of us arrived. The woman was simply gazing at the floor, quiet and very still. There was blood trickling down the back of her neck and onto the carpet. The paramedics were trying to convince her to go to hospital with them, but she soundlessly refused and nothing would persuade her.

As a young woman myself barely twenty years old and fresh out of police training school I stood perplexed, listening. I could not understand why any human being would refuse medical care, especially if their life was in danger.

The static crackling voices on our radios intruded on the pretence that we could stand there all night trying to convince her to do something. We could see that there was no way she was going to help us prosecute her assailant. And so we left her there, sitting alone, staring at the blood-spattered floor and went about our increasingly pressing business me, my sergeant and the paramedics powerless and frustrated.

Why? I remember asking my sergeant. Why wont she get in the ambulance? I dont understand.

Get used to it, he replied, sighing. Its what theyre like.

By they , he meant victims of domestic abuse. He was not an unkind or an uncaring man: this belief that victims of abuse behave differently to normal people arose not out of a lack of sympathy; it was just his experience of domestic violence calls. He was used to seeing victims refuse help, often time and again. He, like many others before and after him, made the assumption that as an adult woman, she had the ability and the choice to just get up and leave. He likely also assumed that getting up and leaving would free her from the abuse and from the abuser, leaving her emancipated safe. So he thought that this person, and others like her, were not acting as any normal person would or should.

I didnt see the young woman again after that night, but I never forgot her. The question I asked my sergeant which I felt was left unanswered has haunted me ever since. I knew in my heart I hoped that as soon as we left she would tend to herself, stop the bleeding, take painkillers. Maybe cry, eventually.

I wanted an answer to the question of why she had refused help. I knew she did care about herself; she was normal. On this particular night, the young woman had been very lucky to have survived. I dont just mean the blow with the lump hammer could have killed her clearly it could have. I mean that her boyfriend could have made sure that she died that night.

*

I joined the police service in the early 1980s, in the wake of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. This was a time of great change. Until then, female police officers had been segregated from their male counterparts with separate rank structure, duties and departments. Female officers like myself began to operate side by side with men. Sexism remained deeply embedded, however, and individual forces could still make rules around what their female officers could and could not do. For example, my force did not allow me to be involved in public order policing; neither was I allowed to join the dog section (my long-held dream) or the firearms unit. But I did patrol alone and there were two female officers on every shift. It was a time when tradition and modernisation clashed and I simultaneously enjoyed the benefits of (slowly emerging) equal opportunities, and the frustrations of enduring discriminatory attitudes.