Now I am 36 years old. Now I know I was a victim because I grew up thinking that the man who lived in our house would kill my mother. And the legacy of that knowledge, the myriad of ways it has shaped the person I have become, is a dark haunting shadow, a faceless ghoul that I will never completely escape from.

Finally, my mother woke up one morning, went to the police station and reported him. After two decades. She left him that day. She stayed in my apartment in London. What about the police? They took him away for questioning. But they did not tell him that they had released him without charge. And that’s how he came down. But he’s also got a head start. After all, this is the most dangerous time for victims: the abuser has lost control and can become extremely dangerous as a result. The consequences of an attempted escape by an abuser arise when most domestic homicides take place. And so, after 20 years, the police did exactly what we always knew they would do – make her less secure, allow her to walk freely, let us down.

It wasn’t until she called them to find out what was going on that they told her there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.

But we are the proof, I remember thinking. Everything about us, and who we were, and how we lived. We were the proof. But we weren’t enough. And our entire existence, years of deeply transformative, identity-based, violent and sadistically cruel experience was undermined, just wasn’t convincing enough.

Countless others

Yet my story is not remarkable. There are countless others like us. In 2021, Channel 4 News reported that at least 129 women had contacted the Center for Women’s Justice (CWJ) since 2019 to claim they were raped, beaten and coerced by their spouses and law enforcement partners. A few months later, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism discovered that there had been almost 700 reports of domestic violence by police in the three years leading up to 2018, an average of more than four per week.

I feel torn telling my story. The effort of having to cut out a piece of the darker corners of your inner life and post it on the internet for others to doubt and judge looks like the opposite of empowerment. Work done by victims of abuse; the conflict involved in continuing while seeking justice is, I think, inconceivable to others.

But here I am. And I’m here because I want to shout from the rooftops that there is an exceptionally dangerous culture within the police, one that attracts, protects and promotes abuse and violence against women. My stepfather was not a loner, or as Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick suggested, just a ‘bad’ one.

At least for a moment, the world paid attention to the kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard by a Met police officer. The new police bill will now include domestic violence as a serious crime, and groups like Sisters Uncut have stormed police stations to protest police violence against women.

But it’s not enough. First things first: Cressida Dick needs to be replaced by someone who prioritizes eradicating institutional misogyny, someone who makes violence against women unacceptable, even by one of the force members. The police are defined by a culture of hierarchy. The only way to change this culture is to force change at the top.

Specifically, it was always my mother’s responsibility to leave the house to be safe. But it was our home; it was close to our school, our lives. We hadn’t done anything wrong. In the United States, abusers are immediately evicted from their homes and have temporary restraining orders imposed on them. On the rare occasion that the police were called to our home, the violent criminal in our house should have been kicked out. No questions. No diploma.

Along with the details, we must also ask ourselves bigger questions: what is it about the police that attracts violent men and allows this violence to go unchecked? It is an existential question for the police as an institution: who it recruits, how it recruits and the internal culture it engenders. The answers must come from the Home Office, the College of Policing, or even society at large. I don’t know how we get there, because even after Sarah Everard change doesn’t come fast enough. I just know it’s desperately needed. And I know this fits into a much bigger question, which we see across society: How do you control the powerful when they continue to avoid accountability?

Finally, as I and countless other victims and advocates call on the government, authorities and the criminal justice system to do better, I also ask them to remember this:

Somewhere in these violent and angry homes, somewhere hidden behind a door, or up the stairs, somewhere in the dark, is a nine-year-old girl who discovers that the very ones who are supposed to keep her safe are the very ones who hurt her the most profoundly in her life.

From that moment the nightmares will begin. The haunting will begin. Shame and pain will take hold and start to run through her, wrapping around her life.

And she won’t have anyone to call for help.

Some names have been changed to protect the author’s family