‘I called 999 when I was attacked by my partner – but it was me they arrested’

When the police arrived, Michelle thought her ordeal was finally over.

She sat shellshocked on the sofa, squinting through a black eye with blood seeping from a cut lip after the latest violent assault at the hands of her abusive partner.

But it was Michelle who ended up in a cell that night after he told officers she hit him first.

Her ex had used the counter-allegation tactic.

It’s one that perpetrators often employ, according to Nadia Hughes, head of criminal justice services at Advance, a charity that helps women who’ve experienced harm through domestic abuse and the criminal justice system.

The ploy is particularly effective when a woman has acted in self-defence or retaliated, so the perpetrator himself has injuries. These are then misunderstood by the police as signs of aggression, rather than the culmination of years of abuse.

Nadia says that besides deflecting the blame from the abuser, the tactic also serves another purpose: ‘It’s a really manipulative way to deter a survivor from calling 999 in the future’.

Once the counter-allegation strategy has been used once, the police have a record that this woman might be violent or abusive. Nadia explains that ‘she’s then less likely to report the abuse she’s been subjected to because there is a distrust of statutory services like the police’.

‘Counter allegations actually become a sort of weaponised way of controlling that survivor. It is something we hear a lot unfortunately.’

Around half of recent referrals to Advance, which works at the intersection of domestic abuse and criminal justice, have stemmed from women being arrested as a result of counter allegations.

Research shows that women are three times more likely to be arrested than their male partners at a domestic abuse incident involving them.

Michelle tells Metro she suffered years of abuse prior to her wrongful arrest, beginning when she was pregnant.

‘The second time he hit me was after my son was born and he was in my arms,’ she says. ‘That was horrific.

‘My son had a white baby grow on and there was blood all over him where he broke my nose.’

Michelle suffered appalling injuries, including a broken leg and fractured collarbone, when her ex pushed her from a fourth-floor window.

‘When you’re in it you don’t see how serious it is,’ she says. ‘You just know that you survived it.’

She describes how her homelife hinged on her ex’s moods.

‘He would phone me during the day and let me know how good or bad his day was going,’ she says.

‘That would determine what my evening was going to be like. If it was a bad day, I would be walking on eggshells waiting for him to flip at me.

‘It’s like dying a slow death waiting for that snap to happen.’

Looking back, Michelle can’t even remember what that final argument was about.

When her ex started hitting her again, she instinctively threw her arms up to try and defend herself.

But she caught his face with her elbow while doing so, giving him a bloodied nose.

Despite being the one who called the police, she found herself being arrested alongside him.

She lost her job as a family support worker after missing a key court hearing while in custody.

‘I sent myself to university when I was 30 trying to better my life,’ Michelle says. ‘I got the job of my dreams, and it was taken.’

Beyond the physical and emotional toll, counter allegations can cost women their homes, their children and their jobs.

In the case of Bethany Rae Fields, her killer used counter allegations in the lead up to, and on the day he killed her.

After 21-year-old Bethany reported her ex Paul Crowther to the police following threats he had made against her, her friends and family, Paul turned his finger at her multiple times.

Pauline, Bethany’s mum, calls his actions ‘despicable. She was tiny; 21 to his 35 years.’

Staffing issues meant that Paul’s complaint progressed slowly – as did Bethany’s against him – and a week after filing his ‘case’ with the police, he chased it, and then again four days later.

Despite Paul being reported to the police seven times, despite being known to services after having had two former partners complain about harassment – with one resulting in a conviction, and despite Paul telling mental health services that he wanted to take revenge against Bethany, he was still invited to make a statement after reporting her to the police.

He went into the station on September 12, 2019, to make a statement against her. That same day he killed her.

Pauline now urges police to think of Bethany’s initials – BRF – and to ‘Believe. React. Fast’. That means considering whether the counter-allegation tactic is in play.

For Jessica, the experience of being disbelieved by the police has eroded her faith in the force completely.

‘I don’t believe they have listened to me once, or made me feel safe,’ she tells Metro.

Jessica was abused for years by two of her children and ended up having to leave the family home after being arrested and charged when one of them claimed she was the perpetrator.

She says her son would hold a knife to her throat and her daughter would kick and spit at her.

‘It got to the point where I couldn’t go to the rest of the house really. I was living in a bedroom. It was marked cell number five with my name.’

Jessica adds: ‘I don’t think I could even admit to myself how bad it was until now, when I look at the pictures of the injuries and the pictures of my bedroom door – I thought that was normal.

On the day of her arrest, Jessica says her daughter ‘started on’ her again as she was going into her bedroom.

Like Michelle, she put her hand out to signal she’d had enough – but that was not how it was subsequently reported to the police: ‘Apparently that was attempting to push her down the stairs.’

‘We are finding that women are not speaking up – they are not feeling confident or safe to report.’

Jessica is still haunted by the traumatic experience of being arrested.

‘I was in the bedroom with my other daughter,’ she recalls. ‘We were just laying there. There was a bang on the door.

‘My bedroom door regularly banged from the children anyway, but as I went to open it, I was literally pulled out by force onto the little landing.

‘I didn’t have a clue what was happening – there was no reason for the police to be there. I was put in handcuffs.

‘I was crying, and the two children that did this were sat there filming the whole thing and laughing.

‘It was so daunting, and the way they treat you when you’re going to the cells is just horrendous. I’d never been in one before.’

Jessica adds: ‘Everyone always joked and called me Wonder Woman because I had six children. I was a nursery manager. I was a trusted person.

‘They’ve taken all of that away.’

She spent a year under investigation only for the common assault charge to be dropped at the crown court.

Being made to feel like a criminal has now changed how she views the police.

‘They just don’t seem to understand domestic abuse. They definitely don’t understand child-to-parent violence.’

In addition to being less likely to call the police, a woman subject to counter allegations is also less likely to be referred by them on to specialist support because she is seen as a perpetrator.

Nadia says: ‘If you’ve got perpetrators who are recording a woman using resistance – someone who has been subjected to abuse for a long period of time and gets to the point where she retaliates as a response to that – that becomes an isolated incident away from the long-term abuse and can be used as evidence against her.

‘We are finding that women are not speaking up – they are not feeling confident or safe to report.’

Research shows nearly 70% of women in prison or under community supervision are victims of domestic abuse. For many, that is directly linked to their offending and can take the form of counter allegations, coerced offending or criminalisation by association.

‘I’ve seen quite a number of cases where very coercively controlling men – very manipulative men – are able to set these situations up. It can all be quite Machiavellian and horrendous.’

The Centre for Women’s Justice is campaigning for a new defence in criminal law that will recognise coercive control as the driver of the offence.

Currently, victims can only rely on the defence of duress – when you are coerced into acting under the use or threat of violence – which has been found to be ineffective in cases of domestic abuse.

Instead, they often depend on the police or Crown Prosecution Service deciding it is not in the public interest to prosecute them.

Harriet Wistrich, founder and CEO of the Centre for Women’s Justice, tells Metro: ‘In a lot of domestic abuse situations, by the time the police have arrived the victim could be very traumatised or hysterical and he’s appearing very calm.

‘If he’s saying, “she’s just a bit mentally unwell and she’s just thrown something at me”, how do the police deal with that situation?

‘And we have seen a lot of situations where the woman has been arrested and she’s really the victim and the police aren’t necessarily able to make a very careful assessment of what’s going on.

‘I’ve seen quite a number of cases where very coercively controlling men – very manipulative men – are able to set these situations up.

‘It can all be quite Machiavellian and horrendous.’

She adds: ‘Our proposed model is based on what we have for victims of trafficking, where it’s recognised that if you’re forced to commit criminal offences that essentially you have a defence if you can show that it’s directly linked with your exploitation.

‘What we’re arguing is that where somebody is in a coercively controlling relationship where they are under control of somebody and they are essentially forced to handle stolen goods or drugs or commit mortgage fraud or whatever it is, they can show circumstances which lead them to commit those acts.

‘Obviously, it’s not necessarily having a gun held to you, but if it’s in that context of the relationship then they should have a defence and be able to argue they are not culpable rather than potentially argue it as mitigation but still be convicted of a crime.’

*Names have been changed

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