🔗 Share this article

Every suicide where the deceased had experienced domestic violence must be treated as a potential murder case, according to calls from campaigners who seek to make perpetrators responsible for the catastrophic consequences of their actions.

This step is essential because police and prosecutors are not doing enough to hold offenders to justice in cases of self-inflicted death following domestic abuse.

“In case after case, there is systemic and structural failure, especially within the legal system, to scrutinise these fatalities with the gravity they warrant,” stated a co-director of a campaign group during a landmark gathering in London recently.

The meeting, organized by a group running a “Suicide is Homicide” initiative to advocate for reform in the legal framework, brought together relatives who had suffered bereavement to self-inflicted death following domestic abuse.

Individual Accounts of Loss

Sharon Holland lost her daughter her 23-year-old daughter in March 2023. Before her death, the young woman had informed her ex-boyfriend to authorities, providing a two-hour video interview as proof against him.

Following her passing, the perpetrator was convicted of coercive and controlling behavior and imprisoned for 41 months. He was later sentenced for an additional term after a second woman stepped up to report that she had been in a harmful partnership with him.

After Chloe’s death, the parent chose to advocate for a legal change to bring perpetrators accountable; however she then discovered that laws were already in place, they just weren’t often being used to secure prosecutions.

“I decided it was not a fresh legislation I needed as current statutes were in place, and after finding out how much my daughter had been let down previous to her death by the authorities and numerous services, they had to do their job properly, and practices needed to change,” she explained.

“Over 47 families have contacted me and only four of us have had a guilty verdict,” she added. “I was so shocked to see so many families who have been fighting the police and CPS for years and getting no justice for their child or sibling and didn’t have a voice in case it impacted investigations that weren’t possibly going anywhere.”

Further Heartbreaking Account

Saskia Lightburn Richie’s daughter her 30-year-old daughter passed away in May 2017, in what she called “the ultimate abusive action” in a campaign of abuse.

“She was vibrant, she was loving,” she stated. “She was full of promise, and she was an exceptional, deeply devoted mother to her two children, and she died by suicide after 24 months in a partnership where she was methodically broken down by her companion,” she explained.

“She was physically beaten, she was psychologically tortured, she was dominated and broken down piece by piece until she could not see a path ahead. The individual who did this to her went unpunished, because we call it self-inflicted death, we conclude the case and we move on.

“Yet I was unable to continue,” she said, “and I have not managed to move on. Honestly, she did not merely take her own life. She was murdered. 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 inflicted upon her, I was told that there was no action that they could do.

“There was no investigation into her passing. The domestic violence fatality analysis, which I had to fight for, took five years and had no impact. A lengthy coroner’s hearing determined death by suicide, despite huge evidence over a very traumatic multi-day session of domestic abuse and failings by multiple services.”

The mother told the meeting that for eight years she has “been fighting a establishment that refuses to see what is right in front of it”.

She said the self-inflicted death is murder movement was vital “since when someone takes their own life after they’ve suffered family violence, we have to investigate it for what it truly represents, which is murder.

“We must apply the laws we currently have properly and it is not occurring at the moment, and we need to hold abusers accountable for driving their victims to death.

“We have the laws. We require determination, we need police to investigate properly. We need the prosecution authority to prosecute. We need judges to recognize that verbal abuse and manipulation can kill just as much as hands and weapons.”

Political Response

At a second meeting in the House of Commons, led by a Labour MP, and including the safeguarding minister, the grieving families again told their stories.

A junior minister told the meeting: “Such fatalities are often written off as if they were their decision, they opted for this, when, reality, these were the result of in fact, somebody else’s violence, and these are not rare incidents.”

“Our law is broken, we know that,” she said. “Especially around murder or unlawful killing, it is piecemeal. It’s not written in statute regardless, it has been developed with common law practices for centuries, and it is no longer fit for purpose, quite frankly, it’s the world we currently live in.

“I’m not going to pretend that it’s going to be simple to resolve. It is extremely complicated and difficult, especially when you look at the matter of homicide, but we recognize that it needs to be looked at.”

Prosecution Service Statement

A representative for the legal body commented: “Domestic abuse is a terrible offense and our legal officers are actively advised to consider murder and manslaughter charges in self-inflicted death instances where there is a established background of family violence or other controlling or coercive behavior.

“We have previously charged a number of defendants for causing the death of a companion they abused, encompassing in proceedings which are currently active.

“We are also working with police and other parties to guarantee these types of crimes are well-understood – so that we can hold offenders accountable for the full extent of their crimes.”