All the suicides where the sufferer is a victim of domestic violence must be treated as possible homicide, which is the demand of the campaigners who wish to see the culprits held accountable for the devastating consequences of their deeds.
The shift was required since the law enforcers and prosecutors were not trying hard enough to prosecute the offenders in cases of suicide following domestic violence, they said.
“The failure of the criminal justice system and the wider system to investigate these deaths with the seriousness that they attract has become the order of the day in case after case, Pragna Patel, co-director of the campaign group Project Resist”, said at a landmark meeting in Westminster this week.
Having been organised by Project Resist, which organises a campaign called “Suicide is Homicide” in a fight to change the criminal justice system, the meeting was attended by families that had lost their loved ones to suicide due to domestic abuse.
Sharon Holland lost her 23-year-old daughter Chloe Holland in March 2023. Chloe had been interviewed on video, giving a two-hour video stating against her ex-partner, Marc Masterton, as evidence before her death, which she had given to the police before her death.
Masterton was found guilty of coercive and controlling behaviour after her demise and sentenced to 41 months in prison. A second woman finally approached the police, and he served three years and seven months in jail after she alleged that she had had a violent and abusive relationship with him.
Holland chose to pursue another law after the death of Chloe, which would take offenders to justice, only to find out that there were already laws, but they were simply not applied frequently to achieve prosecutions.
“I chose not to have a new law, she said, as there were already laws in place, and since I discovered how my daughter had failed so much before she took her life, the police and the various other agencies had to perform their duty diligently, and something had to change.”
“Almost 47 families have located me, and we four have been convicted”, she added. “I was astonished to witness so many households who have been battling the police and CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] the whole last couple of years and not finding justice regarding their child or sibling, and lacked a voice and could not speak up, in the event it could jeopardize investigations that could in no way appear to be going anywhere.”
The son of Saskia Lightburn-Ritchie, Hannah, died in May 2017 at 30 years old, in what she referred to as the last violence in a campaign of abuse.
Lightburn-Ritchie said, “[Hannah] was loving, she was vibrant. She was promising and she was a fantastic and very loving mum to her two children, and she committed suicide two years into a relationship where she was being systematically broken by her partner.”
“She was beaten up, she was mentally tortured, she was manipulated, and torn into bits until she could not see the way out. It is that the man who had done this to her got off with it because we call it suicide, we close the file, and we pass on.”
Lightburn-Ritchie was not able to go on, she said. “The fact is that Hannah did not simply commit suicide. She was killed. It was done with pain and agonizing steps over two years, and when I visited the police, when I implored them to find out what he had done to her, I was informed that they could do nothing.”
“Nor was her death investigated. The domestic homicide review that I had to struggle to have was a 5-year undertaking that did not alter anything. The four-day inquest also found death by suicide despite overwhelming evidence within an exceedingly traumatic four days of domestic abuse and deficiencies by various services.”
Lightburn-Ritchie told the meeting that she had been fighting a system that failed to see what was in plain view for over eight years.
According to her, the Suicide is Homicide campaign was imperative due to the fact that when an individual commits suicide after having been subjected to domestic abuse, we have to look into the issue to see what it really is, which is homicide.
“We should utilize the law that is in place at present, which is not happening at all, and we must bring abusers to task who kill their victims.”
“We have the laws. We must have the will, and we must have police investigating in a proper manner. We require the prosecution in the form of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute. We must have judges who will know that words and control are as deadly as hands and weapons.”
The bereaved relatives repeated their stories at a second sitting in the House of Commons, chaired by the Labour MP Kirith Entwistle, and attended by the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips.
The minister of victims, Alex Davies-Jones, addressed the meeting and said, ”These deaths are treated like they were their decision, it was their choice to do this, when in fact, these were the culmination of what was actually the violence of somebody, and these are not isolated cases.”
“We know we are breaking the law,” she said. “Especially in homicide, about murder or manslaughter, it is piecemeal. It is not codified in law anyway; it has been created over centuries of common law practice, and it has long since outlived its purpose. Quite frankly, it is the world that we are now in.”
“I am not just going to act like it will be easy to fix. It is unbelievably elaborate and hard to see, more so when you consider the problem of homicide, but we understand it must be looked at.”
A spokesperson of CPS added, “Domestic abuse is an atrocious crime and our prosecutors are being urged to contemplate murder and manslaughter charges in suicide instances where there is a known background of domestic abuse or other controlling or coercive behaviour.”
“We have already brought charges against multiple defendants in the case of murdering a partner due to abuse of him or her, and one of the cases is ongoing.”
“We are also collaborating with police and other stakeholders to make sure that such types of offences are well-known to us so that we can take criminals to the justice table to receive the complete justice they deserve.”
