#082

Gemma from FiLiA and Yes Matters in conversation with Laura Richards co-author of the Domestic Homicide Review 

Gemma: Good afternoon everyone. If you're listening to this in the afternoon. I'm Gemma from Yes Matters and from FiLiA. And today I'm talking to Laura who's going to be telling us all about her amazing campaign. I first came across Laura on Twitter where we had the pleasure of the men on Twitter, and we came across each other.

So first of all, I want to ask you, Laura, how are you doing in this Covid situation in isolation?  And Lockdown.

Laura: Well, I guess Gemma, I'm like everybody else. It's a very bizarre time and I think we're all trying to get our heads around the fact that we seem to be in some kind of movie that we're not waking up from.

And of course when the government say you need to stay at home because home is safe, well, particularly with my work home isn't a safe space for most of the people and women in particular that I'm interacting with. So I'm doing good and I'm keeping myself healthy and fit. I work out every day. I'm working very hard because unfortunately the sector where domestic violence and child abuse and stalking and sexual harm is happening, means that we're all super busy and I'm running lots of training sessions and I'm grounded in London.

So I'm here in the UK and I'm meant to be doing a lot of training sessions, so I'm still carrying on with those training sessions on the Dash Risk model and stalking and coercive control. I've put the courses in a virtual world and online and they seem to be working well. But I am missing LA I'm missing my savage little beast, Queen Bee, my golden doodle puppy.

I'm just trying to stay mentally positive and buoyant and keep my family positive as well. So I think this is really a time when we need to, although we are apart from each other physically, we need to do more check-ins with each other and actually connect more. And I hope that people are doing that.

And that's, I think, a very positive thing that's coming out of this for, for some, but not all. Of course. 

Gemma: Yes, definitely. And those affected with their mental health, they'll tend to feel like they're a burden and don't want to be reaching out as much. So, as you say, checking in is really important because it is a crazy situation and as you say, home isn't necessarily the safest place and the government is, as the majority of governments around the world are, are typically male dominated and therefore they don't really think about that sort of stuff. It doesn't occur to them until someone pointed it out. Here's all these signs to this problem that was obvious to us. So it it's an extra scary time as well. Really. 

Laura: It is, it is. And I hope you are doing okay as well. Because it's tough on everyone and so I'm really happy to connect with you today and to talk on your podcast. So thank you for having me. 

Gemma: It is good for women to hear not only the voices of other women, to hear what they're doing so  the world feels a little less hopeless because there is that feeling at the moment, and it is the beginning of every zombie movie we've ever watched.

So let's be honest, there's a definite feeling of we are living in historical times. It's quite strange. 

What I wanted to do the podcast with you about is your amazing campaign. Obviously I've come across it, but many people might not have done so tell us all about your utterly brilliant and very important campaign.

Laura: Thank you. Yes. I mean, it's a campaign that actually I started writing about in 2004 in a report called Getting Away with It: A Profile of the Domestic Violence, Sexual and Serious Offenders. And I published when I was at New Scotland Yard on these very dangerous men. They were all men in the cases that I analysed.

 There were 252 domestic violence sexual offenders that I profiled specifically. And I looked at their histories and what they were doing in the home, and I found that one in 12 of them were offending sexually in the home and also outside the home. So they weren't just being violent and sexually abusive to their partner. They were also being violent and sexually abusive to other women that they didn't know. 

At the time, this is now 2001, I started the research, but published in 2004, led me to make the recommendation that domestic violence offenders, a cohort of them, are very dangerous and they offend in the home and outside the home and against multiple women.

And so I made a recommendation to ensure that serial perpetrators were proactively identified by police. I was at New Scotland Yard, so by police and by probation that they were flagged and that they were risk assessed and they were risk managed, and that they were put through the violent and sexual offenders register. They were put on that database and that they were managed by a public forum called MAPPA, a Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement for violent and sexual offenders. 

Now, unfortunately, Gemma, I've been making this recommendation for some time, because when I changed the stalking law in the all-party parliamentary inquiry, the recommendation was also made that serial stalkers should be on that register. And that was in 2012. And the Association of Chief Police Officers in 2009 made the same recommendation. 

And again I've had multiple recommendations from Paladin, the National Stalking Advocacy Service from all of our casework, seeing how many are serial perpetrators, and from all the murder reviews that I've been involved with.

And so I continue to give evidence, for example, at the Home Affairs Select Committee that happened, which was an inquiry into domestic violence in 2019, and made the recommendation there and they accepted it. And the London Assembly also said there needs to be inclusion of serial domestic violence offenders and stalkers on a mainframe database like VISOR and manage them under MAPPA. And unfortunately, I'm still counting dead women. 

And it's an incredibly worrying situation that we have, that we've got women who will go to the police and they're saying, and they won't use the word stalking, but they describe behaviours like Shana Grice did in Sussex.

She reported multiple times. And in fact, he had stalked and abused other girls before Shana, and she was given a fixed penalty notice and then she was murdered. And he was a serial perpetrator and had this register come in, he would've been on it and it would've pinged. But I'm still making these recommendations now.

Zoe Dronfield, who I know you know, and your organisation knows, was victim number 16 at the hands of someone called Jason Smith, who a police officer before Zoe had said, had had a relationship with him and said that he was abusive. And that the next person he would kill, and that was Zoe, and he did in fact try and kill her.

I'm still in 2020 making the same recommendation using the evidence base and using women's voices. And sadly, the hundreds of cases of women who have been failed. And as you know, Gemma, they're not here to tell their stories anymore. So we have to tell their stories for them. And I know your sister was also murdered. So this is something that is very close for you. 

But I seriously do not understand why I have to keep making this recommendation when, for example, the police will identify repeat and serial robbers, repeat and serial burglars, repeat and serial terrorists, and yet the most dangerous men, and I am talking about men of violence here who are serial and repeat are the stalkers and the coercive controllers, and they're not doing anything.

No agency is doing anything, and yet we still have women being murdered. 

Gemma: Do you think that the fact that it's continuously being ignored, this is evidence based, you're giving these places and recommendations, it's backed by multiple evidence that you can't repute. It's not just your experience, your individual ideas. Do you think that it has that link with the sexual objectification of women, that we’re seen as collateral damage rather than people?

 Do you think that that's because we have that in society, that that is impacting on why it's not being listened to? 

Laura: Well, now I'm 25 years on in my career. I'm going to give a different answer to what I would've said even 10 years ago.

10 years ago, I wouldn't have said that that was an issue, that it just came down to the fact that various people weren't trained and therefore they didn't understand the risks of coercive control and stalking. But now, really there's no excuse. And what I've seen in the murders in particular is that misogyny and gender bias, that when girls and women report, they are screened out as being troublemakers, as being hysterical and that they're not to be believed.

And for example, with Shana Grice which is a case that I paid very close attention to, and I've spoken with her family, how is it right that a young girl is terrified for her life and is reporting to the police, and an officer decides to give her a fixed penalty notice because she didn't tell him that she'd had sex with him. And how is it right that when he interviewed the perpetrator, that he didn't even bother to search any of the intelligence databases that would've shown him that there were other girls and that he spent seven minutes interviewing him. Just seven minutes. That for me comes down to nothing more than not just incompetence, but misogyny and a gender bias.

And I'm seeing that in so many cases, and it's a very hard thing to pinpoint, but there's no other explanation for why women and girls are not being believed. And Shana isn't, as I said, not the only case. 

And I just want to just highlight a couple of other cases that people may not be familiar with. But just to the point that it is an evidence base and I really am fed up with counting dead women and I'm really fed up with hearing people saying we will learn the lessons.

I wrote the DHR (Domestic Homicide Review) statutory guidance and legislation with Harriet Harmon. I was part of bringing it in. And we said that we did it for lessons to be learned. That was in 2004. And these lessons are not being learned and I am just sick and tired of people just paying lip service to women and girls lives.

We really need change. So I'm just going to highlight a couple of cases. One of them is Cherylee Shennan. Now Cherylee was stabbed to death outside her home in Lancashire by a convicted killer Paul O'Hara in March 2014, in front of police officers. So he'd already killed before another woman, and he had a previous life sentence for her murder in 1998. She was called Janine Waterworth, and I'm making a point of naming women because unless we see them as people and humanise them, they just become statistics and footnotes in their own murders. Another thing that I get really fed up with seeing and reading about.

So he murdered Janine Waterworth, his previous partner. He came out of prison in 2012. He also had previous convictions for violence against other women, and in prison he was assessed as being a psychopath. He had traits of psychopathy. And at the time of his release, he was assessed as posing a risk, a serious risk to women. But despite his history, he wasn't required to be managed by any multi-agency arrangement. So he wasn't required to be managed under MAPPA, the multi-agency public protection arrangement.

 Now, he came into contact with Cherylee, started a relationship and she kept turning up and her family kept seeing her with injuries ranging from serious facial injuries. She had a fractured jaw, and on one occasion she did tell her sister that he had held her hostage at knife point.

And she'd also said to her sister that he had a history of offending and abusing other women. And so her sister called the police. So the police turn up and they attend the home address. They don't know anything about O’Hara’s history.  They haven't bothered to do the checks. Later on, they discover on police national computer that he has a history and they write it up as being historic, so they see that there's no need for them to take any positive action or to arrest him. They didn't even take a statement from Cherylee. They didn't speak to her family, even though she was terrified and her family knew and could corroborate, and then he murdered her.

 Coroner James Newman published a prevention of death report. So it's quite rare when a coroner does that, by the way. But he raised alarms saying that there was a lack of interagency communication between probation and the police service, and he questioned the role of MAPPA saying that MAPPA should have been the multi-agency panel that was managing this dangerous man, who was already deemed to be a high risk of serious harm to women, and he said this:

‘Following O’Hara’s release, there were no local MAPPA meetings, no interagency meetings, no significant interagency communications regarding the perpetrator, no details of his license conditions, and no information regarding his offending behaviour. My concern is, despite this, the findings of the report, there is still no mandatory process for sharing information between agencies where the offender, despite a known extensive history of domestic abuse and identified trigger factors, is then managed at MAPPA. And it was also known that before the murder, Cherylee had suffered a broken nose, repeated facial bruising, a broken jaw, and was held hostage at knife point on multiple occasions’.

So there you have a Coroner saying, why isn't there a process to identify that he's a serial and dangerous perpetrator and to manage him? Her family were absolutely devastated by her murder. And again, it's not a case that many people know about despite the fact she was actually murdered in front of the police officers who went there to, in essence, protect her.

So why wasn't she believed? Why wasn't she taken seriously? 

So, I don’t know if you want to make comment on Cherylee before I tell you a little bit about Kerri McAuley. 

Gemma: Well, I just think, again, it seems to be over and over again this case of women not being taken seriously. And we see this in other institutions.

We see it, you know, when we go to the doctor, we're just being a bit hysterical or less likely to be believed. And there's also the issue with police in particular, that they have had in their own reports, a consistent issue with police officers sexually exploiting women as well.

And you just have to wonder if, when you are in a situation like that, that there's no trust in the police to go to them, that they are going to listen to you anyway. You sort of wonder what. Where do we go? You know, what do we do? And that family must just be incredibly beyond frustrated.

Laura: Very. And I do think this is a leadership issue because I do work with a number of senior officers who show true leadership, in this area, specifically coercive control and stalking and trying to make real changes. But it's a postcode lottery who you get, and that's the problem. And without having proper leadership where you've got an attitude and aptitude problem, and that's what this is, I think you need to have supervisors and leaders holding officers to account.

I want to share with you Kerri McAuley's case, which is equally as shocking, but it's not an anomaly. And I'm holding these cases and painting the picture not because they're standout cases, but because I really want listeners to understand what we are talking about here. 

Kerri McAuley was brutally murdered by Joe Storey in Norwich in January 2017. Now, Kerri had suffered 19 injuries to her head and her face following an attack by Storey who also smeared blood all over his face. And he took a selfie of her and left her to die effectively. So she was bloodied, bruising, and he took a selfie with her in the background. Now Storey had violently attacked five previous girlfriends dating back to 2008. And at the time of the murder, there were three restraining orders to protect former partners. Now, Kerri, who was a mum of two, in one of the attacks endured four hours of being assaulted by him and then he locked her up and wouldn't let her out. He took her hostage, but she escaped, bloodied and beaten, wearing just her underwear, through the window of her home. She managed to called 999. For 22 minutes she was begging and pleading the call handler to take her seriously and to send someone to help her. And she also told the call handler about the previous assaults she'd never disclosed before, but she talked about the history and she said she was terrified for her life and that he would kill her. They were her words. 

And in July 2016, after that call and after police attended Storey received a restraining order for that attack. That was the upshot and the outcome. It was six months later that he then brutally murdered her, and the DHR (Domestic Homicide Review) said that had he have been charged and convicted when he attacked her in July, 2016, he may have received a prison sentence and it may have prevented the murder. And in addition, they also queried why he hadn't been under the scrutiny of a MAPPA meeting. And they said that had information had been shared and had he have been under a MAPPA process, it may have meant better cross-agency resources and it may well have prevented the murder. 

So again, you've got another area, Norfolk, making the same recommendation about a serial domestic violence offender.

And the, the last case I want to mention to you, although I have to say I have hundreds of these cases, is Anne-Marie Nield and Anne-Marie suffered multiple fatal injuries in an assault at the hands of her jealous and controlling ex-partner Richard Howarth at her home in Manchester in 2019. Now, bear in mind, that's 2019 we've still got cases happening now, but Howarth had been on police bail at the time of her murder pending trial for an alleged assault against her a couple of months beforehand.

Now, she had reported him multiple times to police and she had told police that he was controlling. He'd smashed her mobile phone, he'd damaged her front door, he'd assaulted her multiple times and he'd strangled her. Strangulation is a high risk factor to serious harm and homicide, and it actually increases the risk sevenfold to murder. So she reported all of that. Now, Howarth was also known already to Greater Manchester Police as having a history of violence, and he was categorised as a serial perpetrator having committed multiple offences of violence towards previous women. However, each time Anne-Marie reported him, it was treated as an isolated incident, and she was not told about his history under the Domestic Violence Disclosure scheme.

So a lot of people say the disclosure scheme is there for this very reason. We don't need a register. But I'm seeing cases where that scheme doesn't work. And Annemarie's case is a case in point, although not the only one. And I have to say that that Domestic Violence Disclosure scheme, which I also pushed to bring in, doesn't work because no one's identifying serial offenders nationally.

So it means that, let's say he had a history in Devon and Cornwell, where Devon and Cornwell have no duty to share information or to put it onto VISOR or MAPPA. So Manchester wouldn't have known. But even the fact that Manchester Police knew he was a serial perpetrator, and they chose not to say anything to her, not to tell her, why? because maybe they didn't think it was a priority. Maybe they didn't think it was serious. Maybe maybe, maybe, maybe. But our systems and processes are not working because the people in them are not working hard enough to understand women who are at risk of serial perpetrators. 

Gemma: Absolutely. And as you say that there's a pattern, there's the question of the accountability, including like the state accountability here, as if they see that they're dangerous and there is evidence of a pattern, but they're allowing that person to carry on and do as they want to do, is there accountability for the state in that murder that's happened since multiple of other incidents.

We see within terrorism; they tend to have domestic abuse in their histories. And we see when it comes to the murder of women, they tend to have a pattern, as you rightly say. So you sort of think, well, why is it being ignored over and over again, whatever explanation could there be?

One thing that I wanted to ask your opinion on, as you mentioned the strangulation, as strangulation has become part of pornography and we're seeing that being used as an excuse for murdering women, that they were copying porn. Do you feel that that is making the situation worse?

And also, the fact that pornography is highly consumed, it's quite typical for men to watch porn, unfortunately. So how would that affect a woman telling a police officer that she's been strangled and that she's crying and hitting him if that's his entertainment that he's watching at home, is he going to see that as a problem? Is that going to influence the very people that are going to if abuse and entertainment are the same thing?

Laura: Yes. I mean, there are multiple issues there, and one is about healthy relationships and obviously educating young boys and young girls age appropriately about what's healthy and if they're just watching porn for that education. I do have a big problem with the fact that we teach how to have sex and mechanics of sex in school. But we don't talk about healthy relationships, and we don't talk about sexism, misogyny and what's appropriate and what's not, what's healthy and what's not. So I think it starts at a very young age where we need to educate.

Certainly the ‘sex game gone wrong’ defence has been creeping in relatively, I won't say it's common, but we've seen it in multiple cases and We Can’t Consent to That have been doing some stellar work, identifying the cases, and I've sadly weighed into a number of them.

You may recall the case of Natalie Connolly who was left with a fractured eye socket at the bottom of the stairs. She had 40 plus separate injuries. She had a bottle of bleach inserted into her vagina, and he left her there to die at the bottom of the stairs. And the next morning he called the police and I quote, he said, ‘she's at the bottom of the stairs, she's as dead as a donut’. He showed no remorse, no empathy, no responsibility taking. He was arrested, he was charged, and he was convicted, but he pled guilty to manslaughter, and effectively he got a three-and-a-half-year sentence. 

So why I'm painting that picture is because it's not just attitudes in the police, it's actually across every organisation, including judges, magistrates, probation officers. It's across the whole board where we need to educate people. 

And as I wrote to the Attorney General to review that unduly lenient sentence, in my report, and I asked other people to write to the Attorney General and Harriet Harmon did the same, I wrote, she could not have consented to that you do not consent to your own murder, plus the fact that her toxicology was through the roof. She had drunk a lot of alcohol. So therefore you have to be of the right mind. If you are over the limit, you cannot consent to sex anyway. So it was most likely rape and murder. And we also know that she had a twin sister, that he had been physically abusive to her and she had become more and more fearful of him, and certainly the sex interactions too, and that he was angry at her because she had sent some pictures to another guy and he was jealous and angry. And to me it looked much more like a punishment related revenge attack than anything else. 

So I think we are seeing more cases of murder being explained away as consensual sex. There was the Grace Millane case over in New Zealand as well. And fortunately he did get a life sentence. 

But I think it is important we have to keep raising the profile and challenging cases and in particular, strangulation is a high risk factor and it's included on the domestic abuse and stalking and harassment and honour based violence risk model, and just this week I've been training professionals on it and making it clear. They know when hands go round the neck and it's non-consensual, there is a sevenfold increase to homicide. And that it must be taken seriously because once somebody does that, they never deescalate. They only ever escalate their behaviour. 

So I think there's a lot in that. And I think the young boys or anyone watching pornography and thinking that they sexually healthy interactions rather than stage managed and cosmetically produced pornography for a purpose, it doesn't teach you how to be intimate with a woman in any way, shape or form.

So I would certainly be very concerned about any police officers thinking otherwise about that. And it just shows how important it is to have advocates, to have specialist domestic violence advocates who get it, and independent stalking, advocacy case workers who get it and independent sexual violence advocates who get it. Because unfortunately, right now too many people do not understand. 

And of course, men don't have lived-in experience of being a woman. So, and I always say it's, it is like with stalking, people only really get it when it's happened to them. You know, you never really want that to happen to them. But when I'm in LA I can't imagine what it's like to be a black person put on the ground by LAPD because they're black. I will never experience that. But just because I don't experience it, it doesn't mean to say it doesn't happen. And I think too often people think, Well, because it hasn't happened to them then it's just not possible. 

But we see women being failed all the time, whether it's Asma Mahmood, who was stalked, threatened that she would be killed. And five times she went to the police and said she would be killed and she was terrified. And then sure enough, weeks later she became a missing person. 

So I can keep standing in classrooms and training people and I've trained thousands of people across my time. But I think there's one thing about training where you can educate and get into people's hearts and minds and give them knowledge. There's something else about misogyny that just needs to be rooted out. And when there's a gender bias against women, there are some people that just need to be held to account or to find a new job because they're doing a job that puts women more at risk. 

There's obviously other ways we can educate and influence like changing laws, and I think that there needs to be a big cultural shift, which brings me full circle back to identifying serial perpetrators because I think that too often, Women are told that they should move or they should change their mobile phone, or they should do X, Y, and Z as if that's going to stop the perpetrator.

And too often we let the perpetrator who are primarily men, let's face it, we are talking in the round and particularly when people are killed, it's men killing women. Lethal violence is about men showing their power and control and their total domination by killing a woman. And too often we don't look at that perpetrator and look at their history and place those conditions to change their behaviour and that responsibility-taking on them.

A clear example is in lockdown right now: I'm fed up with hearing people keep saying ‘we need more refuge space, we need to get women out and, and put them in refuge space’. My view is remove the bloody perpetrator. They are the problem. If we keep moving women and disappearing them, what is the message that we are sending? Why should a mum and her two children go to a hotel room? Why should she lose her family and her network and people around her? The perpetrator is the person perpetrating the abuse, remove them to a safe place. It's called prison. And we can use this situation in lockdown right now for the good, and for the good being, put the focus on the right person and the register, putting these serial perpetrators on a violent and sexual offender register and managing them under MAPPA means we hold them responsible for their behaviour. And that's the cultural shift that we need to change. And no amount of training is going to make a difference because it has to be a law change and the onus has to be placed on police officers, on probation, on agencies that they must manage that dangerous person and stop telling women to change their phone, change their behaviour.

And in some cases it's telling them to put gasoline on the fire and expecting the fire to go out, and then they end up dead. And people scratch their heads and they say they'll learn the lessons, but they never bloody do Gemma. They never do. 

Gemma: It’s a sort of victim blaming in my opinion, it's, well, why doesn't she leave? Well, why was she wearing that? Well, why didn't she change her phone? And it's, again, putting the accountability and the responsibility where it belongs. In Yes Matters, I do work with young people and I see the worrying trend of when it comes to CSE, child sexual abuse, that we have this long list of things that we should be telling children to do and not to do.

And it's like, we can't just talk about the fact that it's men. And it's this whole metric about being man hating. And yet, every single century in every single country, in every religion or race or class. It's the same problem. And it's that reinforcing of the gender stereotype of being in control, of being dominant and all that stuff that is profitable, but very damaging.

And we just constantly seem to be putting the blame on the victim all the time. And the onus and the responsibility on the victim. And I couldn't agree with you more, it needs to change. 

Do you think some sort of professional accountability would be helpful? So if there were sort of like, I guess, incentive, if this police officer didn't learn these lessons over like two cases, then you get in some sort of stick for it. 

Laura: Well, I mean, in essence there is accountability. I've collected over 130 cases where the Independent Police Complaints Commission has been asked to investigate where police have had contact and where things have gone on and someone's died. But I can tell you I only know two or three cases where there's been a serious reprimand. No one loses their job, until we see officers being held to account where there's a real fear of consequences and true leadership in this area, it's not going to change. But in essence, that is already in existence. 

But like I said, I have been involved in many cases. I've also been an advisor to the Independent Police Complaints Commission and now called the IOPC. They're the toothless tiger. They write reports, the same old recommendations just keep being churned out and nothing happens. And like I said, there are some good police leaders, so it's not saying everything is diabolical, but it is a postcode lottery. And of course, a police force is only as good as the leaders at the top saying that this matters and the buck has to stop with them. They have to be the ones that are held to account, not the junior PC who's had no training, no support, no supervision. I don't hold them as the key problem. I hold the police leaders or whoever are the leaders in whichever organisation. And like I said, it's not just police, it's the CPS, Crown Prosecution Service, probation, it's judges, it's magistrates, it's judges handing out unduly lenient sentences. 

How's it possible Levi Ogden is murdered and he gets a sentence of, I think it's three years, because he claimed that he threw a phone at her and it was kind of an accident. And yet there were 20 call outs to her home address.

And a judge gives such a trite sentence that the message it sends out to the family is that's what her life was worth. And it's wholly unacceptable. So I think there has to be accountability at each stage. The same as when I'm involved with the case, there's accountability there. I have to keep a policy log or decision log of what I did or didn't do, or what I said or didn't say. And I think that needs to be taken much more seriously. 

And I do think that there's very few people, and I am one of them who has a 25-year history of cases and having been involved, for example, I went into Bridgend after the suicide and homicides were happening there many at one time.

When Daniel Pelka was murdered in Coventry, I went in to re-train the social workers. When Natalie Esack was murdered in Kent, I went in to help with police training. When 12 women were murdered in Essex, I went in to deliver training and help Essex police restructure. I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

I talk from experience and I would really still like to know, why is it that there isn't a priority given and a focus on serial domestic violence and stalking perpetrators? No one has given me a good enough answer as to why that process, VISOR and MAPPA haven't been widened to include perpetrators that are terrorising and terrifying, multiple women up and down the country and children, and then some who were murdering, not just one woman, two women.

Janet [Scott] was murdered after Simon Mellors was released from prison after he murdered Pearl Black. Now, this was a case that I was asked to go in and help re-train Nottingham Probation. I've gone into all these places and they expect that if you do one or two training sessions, it makes a difference. But it doesn't because you've got to have systems and process change and it's got to be a, ‘you must’ we have to change the culture and the only way you change culture is by law. That's the only way.

 I've changed law six times. It's the reason why coercive control is talked about now, and it wouldn't have even been mentioned five years ago in the UK. Now it's a crime across the UK. We're talking about it in America. I helped bring the show, Dirty John, out in the documentary, a serial perpetrator, coercive control, and we've got coercive control on the law books in New York and also in California. We're now discussing it in Australia. 

That would not be a conversation had law changed, not have happened in England and Wales in 2015. And this register is needed here in the UK, it's needed in America. And no one can give me a good enough reason, even when people say, well, we don't want to standalone register. And I say, No, I agree. It has to be joined up. Because these dangerous people offend across different ages and different categories, and therefore it should be the violent and sexual offenders register and the clues in the title. And people say to me, ‘Well, what about the money, Laura, what about the resources?’ And I say, but it's too expensive not to do it. Every murder costs 2 million to investigate. domestic violence right now costs 66 billion every year, 66 billion. Just think about that. And when these murders happen to attend one call out, it costs a thousand pounds. So if they brought this register in, we would effectively, we estimate there's about 25,000 perpetrators that this would apply to in the UK.

Probably register about 20% of them, right? That would be about 1.4 million to do that. Now, if you think one murder is 2 million, if you prevent one murder, you've already made your money back. So within just one case, you would make the money back. And if you look in the first year, if you prevent 119 other women from being victimised, and then in the next year, another 119, and the next year, you make your money back too.

So I think it's a real false fallacy for people to say it will cost money. It costs money to keep reviewing domestic violence murders and to keep investigating them. It's the lives that are lost. It's the ripple on the pond. It's too expensive not to do it, not to join up, and there's no reason why we shouldn't be doing this.

Gemma: And it will have impact I imagine on the problem in Family Courts as well where we're seeing issues where women are saying, you know, there's been domestic abuse and coercive control and red flag, red flag, red flag that's being ignored and a lot of children are turning up there as well. It has impact in a lot of different areas. 

Laura: It does, and children being murdered. And of course people think that children are witnesses in domestic violence cases. They are not witnesses, they are victims. And Hilary Saunders wrote a report in 2004 I think it was called 34 Child Deaths. And they had all been granted contact to abusers and then they were killed. So again, it's multiple people. 

 Right now with Covid, Covid doesn't create more abusers, it means that they're more visible. Isolation is the tool of an abuser. And so this is why we are seeing right now, we've had currently 20 murders, 20 murders since lockdown. That's about five women a week.

Where normally it would be two, at least two women a week, and it's 18 women and two children. You think about the money that that costs to investigate each of those cases. It's 2 million. And so you think about that cost and Priti Patel has put 2 million in the pot to deal with domestic abuse. The numbers are just ridiculous.

If you understand the subject and you understand how many people are impacted and the damage, you know, when children are victimised, they will suffer from complex PTSD. They will need treatment. That will stay with them for the rest of their lives. And unless there's an effective intervention and really it's a family intervention, then it's just the next generation of unfortunately problems.

Either some will continue to make bad choices and they'll continue to be victimised. Some will go on to be the perpetrators because they learn violence works. And then you get a subset with an intervention who would go on and do fantastic things. But we have to think about the whole family. And I still think that if we understand who are the problems, ie 80% of crimes committed by the 20%.

And I've always said that working in intelligence at New Scotland Yard, you go after the people who create the biggest problems. And as you said, and I've been tracking a lot of the mass shooters in America and this Nova Scotia case that's just happened, there was a high chance he had a history of domestic violence.

And as I said on Twitter that it would be motivated due to some issue to do with domestic violence, a partner and it would be she that he was targeting. And of course, that's exactly what was going on. His former partner. Now, people who knew him said that he, and I'm not naming him intentionally, he was obsessed with the police, but he was also obsessive about the girlfriends that he dated and the women that were in his life. So again, it's not no surprise to me that he has a domestic violence history. 

So we've got the ability to pick up very dangerous people here. It's not just violence in the home, it's also violence and abuse outside the home. And we should, as a society, say that domestic violence and stalking is unacceptable.

And it should be that we bring in a process that is national, that everybody signs up to, to identify proactively the most dangerous domestic violence offenders and stalkers those who are the serial perpetrators. Because even now, Save Lives have reported that in their drive program they found that one in four are serial perpetrators and they have as many, in some cases as six victims.

Well, I've been saying that since 2004, so we're now in 2020. So I'm glad Safe Lives have now found that. And I challenge anybody who's worked and still working in this area, if they're listening to this, to do something about it in their area to actually think, how are we going to problem solve this?

Because actually that makes sense that if you keep getting away with something, you just keep doing it. And if you have no fear of consequence to stop and no one held you to account, you're just going to keep doing it. And that's why we're clocking up just hundreds and hundreds of victims at the hands of some prolific and very dangerous men.

And the problem is male violence, and we have to name it. And we have to start talking sensibly about why some men decide that they are going to, at times not just kill one woman, but two and sometimes a whole family. And it's only when you have those real conversations that are evidence based, that are not just opinion based because I'm told by men all the time that I'm wrong, where they say that I'm wrong is if their opinion is equal to mine. I've been working this area for 25 years and I'm afraid their opinion is not equal to mine. 

I have a huge amount of evidence base behind what I say from working in the police, from running a national charity for victims of stalking. It's called Paladin. We're in National Stalking Awareness Week, so I should make mention of that. And everything I talk about is experience based and evidence based working with families bereaved through murder, working with women who were almost killed by a serial perpetrator who feel outraged like Zoe does, of why was she victim number 16? Why didn't the police do anything? And that has got to change. That is unacceptable and unconscionable. 

Gemma: It absolutely is. And we hear that statistic all the time, don't we? Two to three women a week. And what strikes me is that it's been that statistic for a long time, and it's almost like this unsaid thing of that's an acceptable state of affairs. It's an acceptable collateral damage that it we're okay with saying that rather than, Well, why is it still that? Why hasn't that improved? And you know, as you say, like my personal thing with my sister is that her perpetrator had raped and attempted to rape two women before my sister. And for me, my question as sort of a family member was, well, why was it allowed? And from my perspective, the people in charge have some accountability, not just her perpetrator, because, you know, why weren't these dots connected? In in any other profession that you have: If you were a doctor or a surgeon, you weren't up to date on things and you know someone lost their life and lives were at risk because you weren't up to date, you would be in a lot of trouble for that and wouldn't be allowed to practice. So it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that this is allowed to go on.

And from years of thinking about it and thinking about it, the only conclusion I can come to is. Well, it seems to be okay because it's women. 

Laura: Mm. And unfortunately, I agree with that Gemma because 25 years on and we're not really seeing any real change that a lot of the change has to come from setting law of what's acceptable and what's not, but also having that accountability and bringing in processes that force the change.

You know, you got to force the change around attitude and aptitude and those who aren't fit to work in these areas need to go. And I do think you need violence against women and girl’s courts as well as specialist teams. And I think specialist teams means that they really understand what stalking is about, they really understand what rapes about, that someone doesn't just start raping in their second or third decade of life. They would've been doing it before. They would've been practicing. Rape is about power and control, therefore power and control dynamics will be seen in other parts of their life.

You've got to understand the psychology. And I think more and more now where I am in my career, I am a feminist, but my background's in forensic and legal psychology, and you have to blend the two together. You can't understand crime just through a lens of feminism. You have to put the two things together, the psychology and the psychopathology, understanding why men are violent.

Why do we have this problem of male violence? And I don't think it's as simple as just power and control. I think there is something about entitlement and shame. And when these two things come together in violent men, it's a deadly combination. And sometimes violence can be used as a lash out to mask shame that sits underneath.

This is why it goes back to young boys and young girls being educated and socialised because the patriarchy impacts both. It impacts little boys of ‘man up’. Don't cry like a pussy. Don't be a girl. As if being a girl is a negative thing. And it impacts little girls of don't talk too loudly. Don't sit like that. It's not ladylike. Don't walk down this dark alley. Don't do this and don't do that. But yet we don't tell the boys to treat women respectfully or treat girls respectfully. And so misogyny creeps in from a very young age that boys are told that girls are worthless and girls are told that they're second class citizens. And it's like the weather. It's all around us. 

And they're the things that we need to challenge and educate at that age, because that's where violent men come from. And so I think that you do need to have specialist police officers in this area. More women. It doesn't mean just being a woman means that you get it, because I've actually worked with quite a few women who haven't got a clue and they haven't got a clue because they're part of the patriarchy, the institutionalised mind-set. And therefore it doesn't just mean because of your sex and gender, you get it. But I think you've got to have more people who are specialists in this area, within those key teams. 

And my overall conclusion is we need violence against women and girl’s courts. We need judges that are ticketed. We need lawyers who get it.

You know, I think Donna Rottuno and what she said about the victims is absolutely unacceptable in the Weinstein case. And women being discredited in that way, in the media in 2020, is unacceptable. That's currently where we're at, that people like her, she's making a living out of being the antithesis of the Me Too movement.

Well, that may make her some money and a few bucks, but really the bottom line is you can defend your client, but don't go on the attack of credibility of somebody and deal with everything around the assault and take their character apart and not actually question them about the assault itself, as if the former is more important.

If you report burglary, you don't have to be the best person in the world, and it shouldn't be that with rape, domestic violence, stalking, you have to have a squeaky clean CV before you're taken seriously, or you have to have a penis. It's got to change. 

And I'm being as candid because I am working so many cases and I commented all throughout the Weinstein case and on the Cosby case where even now Cosby is talked about as the disgraced comedian and Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul. Bullshit. They are convicted rapists, give them the label that they have earned through their own choice and through their own behaviour. They did that all by themselves. No one did it to them. These women didn't do it to them. Those men chose to rape and abuse and to exploit and to do all of those things all on their own. They are the ones who destroyed their own legacies. And again, these are the narratives that we have to correct. So, I'm sorry. I'm really going for it. It really gets my goat.

Gemma: I find it interesting when the media describe a man's ruined reputation when actually, I think it's not a ruined reputation, it's an accurate reputation, and that's two different things. How these things reported and I've seen some ridiculous headlines in the way these murders are reported sometimes. I think they perpetuate a lot of victim blaming myths at times. And, and also rehabilitation. We talk about like rehabilitation of the offenders wherever the guidelines on that. Like, is there not some training around sexual objectification and all these issues that these men have and how they view women. Well, surely they've failed to be rehabilitated by the state if they're coming out and continuing that. 

Laura: Well, I mean, I think there's one thing about the media, first of all, and the way media reports, they do need to be held to account because we do see cases where even with the Kelly Fitzgibbons case and her daughters, Ava and Lexi were murdered by her husband with a media went to eulogize him, first of all, and she became a footnote. Now that keeps happening. 

You remember the case of Hannah and her daughters out in Australia where he threw petrol all over them and set them on fire and they all died sadly, it was absolutely horrific, but the media eulogized him as being some amazing, played in a sports team, and he was this and that, and she, Hannah wasn't even mentioned. Utterly outrageous given that again, this was 2020, we're not talking about 10 years ago and even the police officer who came out and gave a press conference. Now bearing in mind this crime had just happened. So what I would've expected from a male police officer investigating was: this is a horrific case. We are investigating. We cannot tell you anything more at present time, but we are taking it very seriously. And just to reassure you, we are trying to investigate and we will let you know once we have progressed our inquiry. But he didn't say that. He went on for 15 minutes and right in the middle, I think it was on the seventh minute, he said this, he said, 

‘We are investigating. We need to keep an open mind, but we need to consider whether this was a man who was driven to commit this murder because of terrible things that had happened. And pressures to him, or is it that she was a victim of domestic violence of he the perpetrator.’

 And I could not believe that I was listening to this male officer say, Give him a pass, basically.

Is it that he was driven to commit this murder, ie. external pressures made him. But all along and what I found out, and when I took to social media, even though I was in my sick bed, I felt I had to say something about it. But all along the police knew that she had reported multiple times domestic violence and also stalking. They knew that that was on their database. She had a protective order and yet they were trying to make out this was some kind of mystery rather than that the motive was known and he stalked them and he said he was going to kill them and he killed them. And they put a different narrative. 

And the media were the ones that promulgated a completely forced narrative, and that police officer did the same. Now he was removed from his position. But the point I'm making is that misogyny is deeply internalised. And some people might think they're not misogynistic, they're saying the right things. But anyone who's saying present day that this man was driven to do this because his wife wouldn't let him see the kids. His wife had the audacity to break up with him, and therefore this guy had no other option but to kill. What utter nonsense. No one's driven to murder. That's your free choice. Your decision to take that decision and to take someone else's life. 

I always put it in this context, like with that case and all the hundreds of murders I've reviewed, I can honestly say, I heard a son talk about his mother and his father murdering his mother and he said to me, and it, it chimes across these cases. 

I don’t know if he thought it was right, but he thought it was his. Right. 

Wow. That was very powerful hearing from the son because that to me sums up the entitlement that we don't see in women, and I think entitlement is given to boys at a very young age and therefore any mums or parents, dads listening to this in particular, if you have boys and girls, just think about how you socialise them because that entitlement, if you're always given the boy a pass, where boys will be boys or these kinds of things being said and things being given as a privilege to them over and above the daughter. Right away you are seeing that the girl is being taught she's second place to the boy. You know, mums would always tell me, my friends included, I have very special relationship with my boy. And so the boy gets the pass, not having to do the dishes, not having to do the cleaning up, the all the things that is expected of the girl. And right there you're putting in a rigid and prescribed gender role and you are telling the girl her worth in society. 

And so that's why I think it's a much bigger picture that we need to think about. It's not just the man who commits the violent murder of his wife and or children. It's his entitlement to feel that he is entitled to do that. And society who give him a pass and eulogize him and excuse his behaviour. And on the opposite end, when someone like Sally Challen kills the man who's abused her from the age of 15 to 56, that the headline ran ‘hammer killer’ Sally Challen hammer killer’. She had no pass being given to her and she ended up having a 22-year sentence, which is extraordinary when I have reviewed so many cases and men who kill women may get a five-year tariff, a seven-year tariff, and out in three, and yet Sally was given 22 years.

So again, it's not just the simple case of this violent man, it's what allows him to do that. What allows him to abuse multiple women and for it to be reported to police and nothing happens. What message does that tell him? That tells him it's okay to do this. He carries on, he escalates to murder, then he gets a short sentence, he comes out, he does it again. And society, the media, no one really cares about it.

And I care. I've been counting dead women for far too long now without seeing a change. And I think with training, you can do so much and you can change some hearts and minds. Even podcasts are a great way of reaching millions of people. But ultimately you need law change to create real cultural shift to say, we need to focus on male violence and why is that a problem?

We need to look at other countries who don't have the problem of male violence that America, the UK and Australia are experiencing right now in particular. 

Gemma: Yeah. And it reinforces the idea that he was right to hold those views and with the entitlement thing, I mean, I think Bridget Jones would've been a very different movie if women reacted the way to rejecting and cheating in the same way with that entitlement.

We’re just completely socialised differently, and you're right, it has to come from young people and that education and things like that. It absolutely does. 

Laura: Young people, but also the movies and things, you know, Disney always used to be the feeble princess being rescued by the man on the white horse with the shining armour. Now I'm starting to see a change like with the Aladdin, she rescues herself and then she becomes the leader. And thank goodness we're starting to slowly see it in movies and films and women being more represented, women of all walks of lives and all shapes and colour.

And that's what we need to see too, because if you can't see her, you can't be her. So there is something about the female empowerment happening at a young age as well as the key messaging to boys. And there are things that do give me hope, but I'm afraid if we don't talk about male violence and if we don't talk about serial perpetrators who are predominantly men, and we keep being side-tracked by other things because when we see men being victimised, it's much more, when we think about domestic abuse in a situational sense, it's not a repeat pattern.

There are some cases that are repeat pattern, but not to the degree that we see women being victimised and therefore we have to get real and have real conversations and not be afraid to call it as it is, not be afraid to call it as it is. And I'm a very plain speaker and I say it as I see it because too many women are, and I'm not going to use the word losing their lives because it makes it sound like it's passive. They are being brutally murdered and wiped off the face of this planet by entitled men who felt it was their right to do that. Until we get into that psychology and we change the processes where the police say, Okay, Levi Jones, you've done this to two women, three women, we're going to take this seriously now you will be going on the register and there will be a serious sentence handed out to you. Until that perpetrator feels there's a real consequence, a real life consequence that they fear, they will not change their behaviour. And that's what we have to get real about. Otherwise, we're going to be counting more and more women, some who are murdered, yes, sadly, others who have their lives ruined. Ruined in every sense. And you know, we have to get real about that. Dirty John, fortunately with Debra Newell and Terra Newell and all the other women that he victimised, fortunately the right outcome happened, in my opinion. But that's an anomaly. I don’t know if you've seen Dirty John, but there's a twist in the tail and that's an anomaly rather than what we see as a rule. 

So if people do want to help just regarding the change, there's lots of things they can do, which is one, you can sign a petition to ensure that serial perpetrators are proactively identified and assessed and managed, which is online. And I presume we can put that in the show notes or somewhere.  

Gemma: yeah, we, we will do that and if it's okay with you, do links to your Twitter and websites and things so that then we can get involved.

Laura: That would be ace, so you can sign the petition. It's reached just under 175,000. You can write to your MP we do have a template letter on the Paladin website, but write to your MP and also write to Priti Patel who's the home secretary who knows all about serial perpetrators.

The petition is for the Prime Minister, but it's Priti Patel, Jess Phillips, who's working also with shadow on domestic violence and who has a very keen interest in this area. And you can also show your support if you have any listeners in America, please write to your senator as well because it's something that I'm pushing over there that's an important part.

 You can write to your senator and also if you're in the UK, write to your police and crime commissioner about it. We're talking to numerous police and crime commissioners right now.  Someone like Katy Bourne in Sussex gets it.

Sadly, she was stalked, but Shana Grice was murdered under her watch. And so Sussex police have been going through a lot of change, but please write to your police and crime commissioner and ask what they're doing about stalking and domestic violence and ensuring that serial perpetrators are identified. That would, that would be fantastic if you can do that.

Gemma: Absolutely.  I think one quite recent case where a lot of women that I was in contacted, noticed a big difference was there was a serial rapist of men in Manchester, and there were many men who, because it was recorded, they didn't know that they had been raped and the police were going around to let them know that they had been raped, but not to worry that they had dealt with him.

And I was struck by the huge difference in how it was dealt with and how it was reported. There was no headline saying, Well, these silly men shouldn’t have gone back to the flat of a man they didn't know. That there was none of that. And I think we need to get to the point where that police response and judge response and legal response is for any victim of rape and as you say, the dots are connected, it's so vital that that there is a register because these dots need to be connected because you can save so many lives doing that. 

It's been a really important podcast and so thank you so much for the work that you're doing. It is really important and absolutely brilliant.