Rachel is a victim of domestic violence. Why won’t West Midlands Police help her?
Over five years she made 33 complaints of domestic abuse. No action was taken
Dear Patchers — between 2016 and 2021 Rachel* submitted 33 complaints of domestic abuse to West Midland Police (WMP) against her now ex-husband. The Dispatch has also read through a 200-page dossier she submitted to WMP documenting what she describes as an ongoing campaign of abuse, including harassment, threats to kill with or without weapons, damaging her property, physical assaults on her and her children, and occasional bodily harm. She believes she was never taken seriously.
In one incident, after she had been in hospital with cuts and a black eye, an officer told her to stop being erratic. Elsewhere she was told her extensive testimonies of financial abuse did not meet the threshold for coercive control. In today’s edition, we speak to Rachel, who still wants to know why her complaints were never acted upon. Meanwhile, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has asked for a review of a case after WMP failed to act on a separate allegation: that one of their officers attempted to interfere with Rachel’s witness during a trial. In a statement, the IOPC have said that WMP’s initial response to the allegations “was not reasonable or proportionate”.
In response to detailed questions from The Dispatch, a spokesperson for West Midlands Police said:
“We are currently reviewing a complaint from a woman about our handling of domestic abuse allegations. As part of this, we are reviewing a number of incidents which have happened over a number of years and it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time. We remain committed to supporting all victims and survivors of domestic abuse in whatever form it takes, and would encourage anyone suffering to get in touch with us.”
That’s the topic of today’s Dispatch. While we usually paywall our Friday editions, we felt as though this story — which contains serious allegations of failure to seriously domestic abuse against West Midlands Police — should be available to read for all of our readers. That said, this type of journalism isn’t free to produce. It takes time to listen to the testimonies of the relevant parties, comb through the documentary evidence and cross-reference accounts. If you appreciate the work we do and are able to support us please do consider subscribing.
Things to do
🍝 Swish new Italian restaurant La Bellezza, which has taken over former wine bar Vinotecha on Chamberlain Square, is open to diners from today. The classy trattoria is a member of the international Big Mamma chain and serves dishes made from Italian-sourced produce in a grand, 150-seat setting. The Dispatch went along to the launch party on Wednesday and we can confirm the burrata is delectable. Book here.
🌟 Experience the Botanical Gardens illuminated at the Christmas Winter Light Trail which opens this evening and runs until 1 January. Ticket prices start from £10 but vary depending on the day and you must book in advance. The tour takes between 60-90 minutes and hot drinks, mulled wine and toasted marshmallows are provided.
🟩 Brats assemble — there are still some tickets available to see Charli XCX play at the BP Pulse Arena at the NEC tonight. The catch is you’ll have to sit down but hardcore fans won’t mind. Buy them here from £53.80.
🎅 The Everything Digbeth Christmas Market kicks off on Saturday between 12 and 5 pm. Head to the Zellig building for artisanal products, live music, art exhibitions and even a Santa’s grotto. Entry is free or, for £2, you’ll get a mince pie and mulled wine or a hot chocolate. Glad tidings.
Rachel is a victim of domestic violence. Why won’t West Midlands Police help her?
By Rhi Storer
Funny and full of affection was how Rachel* first described her new romance. She met her new partner, Steve*, in 2005 at work and a year later began a relationship. She says he was an inveterate teller of jokes. “He was so funny and so quick off the mark,” she said. “I was happy to have met him”.
They married in 2007. Rachel was pregnant with their first son, and believed they had developed a strong bond. Within a year of the marriage, however, the relationship deteriorated. “He started drinking heavily and had become increasingly aggressive and abusive,” she said. “This was behaviour he had never previously exhibited with me.”
It soon became physically violent. One time, she said, she returned from a family holiday to him intoxicated. He pushed her into a door frame, bruised her arm, and threw a hairdryer at her “There was a serious altercation where, whilst intoxicated, Steve pulled a knife on me and threatened to stab me through the heart,” she recalls. She couldn’t leave, she said, because her children felt sorry for him and insisted she should help him, but the abuse only worsened.
All of this, including her statements above, are outlined in a 200-page dossier that she submitted to West Midlands Police (WMP) in April 2021. She believes her complaints of harassment, threats to kill with or without weapons, damaging her property, physical assaults on her and her children, and occasional bodily harm were never taken seriously.
The Dispatch has read through Rachel’s dossier; including several phone calls she recorded with the names of officers, the date, and the crime log number for each incident. She also has transcripts of interviews between police officers and her sons where they describe Steve’s excessive drinking and violent behaviour.
In her own correspondance, Rachel is desperate, pleading contact with police over eight years asking them to pursue charges against Steve. The stalking, harassment, and threats to kill, she says, were completely ignored.
‘I was treading on eggshells all the time’
The first time the police were made aware of domestic violence was not from Rachel, but from Steve, in 2016. Rachel says he had called the police on her after she retaliated by kicking Steve’s leg (lightly, in her telling) after five hours of continual abuse, which included him pushing her into a door frame bruising her arm, spitting at her and throwing a hairdryer at her while intoxicated. He even, she claims, dragged her children out of bed stating they were ‘dirty’ and needed bathing. In a police log on the day of the incident, seen by the Dispatch, the officer described Rachel as intoxicated —something she staunchly denies — as well as “very uncooperative and argumentative.” However, no action was taken.
From there, Rachel began to complain to WMP about her treatment by Steve. The Dispatch has seen evidence of 33 formal police complaints made by Rachel between 2016 and 2021 as well as numerous 999 and 101 calls. Out of the 33 incidents Rachel recorded, she claims the police inaccurately logged details in at least ten, ranging from no further action taken against Rachel’s claims or police failing to attend her home.
One time, she phoned the police after Steve had beaten her son and smashed his face on the family home’s bannister and left a huge bruise, nearly knocking him out. Rachel says her son, Harry*, was too afraid to tell the police the truth when questioned at home. She says his father “towered over him”. To avoid confrontation Harry said that he fell over him.
She claims Steve pushed her so violently she sustained injuries; that he pulled a knife on her and threatened to stab her through the heart and kill her; that he drilled into all the water pipes in the family home to cause maximum damage and reduce the property value. When she reported the stabbing threat, officers allegedly told Rachel to “sell [her] house, give him half and move on with your life”. Another time, when Rachel was in hospital with cuts and a black eye from Steve’s violence, an officer told her to “stop being erratic”.
“He made me feel worthless since he constantly undermined my self-esteem, always putting down and humiliating me,” Rachel says. “I was treading on eggshells all the time.”
Harry, Rachel’s first son, claims he and his siblings were emotionally manipulated by Steve. In a witness statement to court, he said: “He would always hit me which was virtually every night. He’d always threaten me and say all sorts to me, including ‘Harry, if you don’t say this to the police you will get me sent to prison and betray me’”.
In May 2019, Steve finally left the family home. Social services, according to Rachel, had already tried everything to remove him from the house. He told Rachel he could not be removed from the home because his name was on the deeds.
In one call log seen by The Dispatch, after Rachel told the police she would pursue a complaint of assault against Steve should he return to their home, the log reads: “Caller reporting she is afraid of [Steve] coming back to the property — disclosing further details that have happened in the week. No further police action required. Caller is not reporting anything that has not already been dealt with.”
‘He racked up credit card debt’
Coercive control, referring to an act or a pattern of acts of assault, threats, humiliation and intimidation or other abuse that is used to harm, punish, or frighten a victim, has been illegal in England and Wales since 2015. The Centre for Women’s Justice, a British watchdog group, filed complaints in 2019 and 2020 alleging “systematic failure” on the part of police to safeguard victims. West Midlands police recorded cases of 16,196 attempted or deliberate coercive control between 2019 and 2024. Out of these, only 223 resulted in a charge for the offence or an alternative offence.
Criminalising coercive control, experts say, tackles a common, long-held misperception that an abusive situation is only a violent partner, rather than a slow drip of constricting someone’s life — creeping isolation, entrapment, and financial restrictions.
Rachel says she is a victim of financial abuse. Unlike typical financial abuse, where the victim is forced to become financially dependent on their abuser, Rachel was coerced into debt via a proxy: forced by Steve, who amassed credit card debt, onto the mortgage. The home was entirely Rachel’s before her marriage to Steve.
“Steve moved into my fully renovated, completely refurbished home. One month later, he was asking to invest in my property. A few months after that he asked me to marry him and was insistent on being put on the mortgage,” she says. Rachel says within 18 months of Steve moving into her property he had incurred debts on credit cards amounting to £42,500, and would threaten to declare bankruptcy if she didn’t pay them.
Rachel says she was distraught and not able to sleep at night. “When his indebtedness became evident, I felt afraid to even mention it. I feared he would sell the house from under my feet. That was the fear tactic he used against me to comply.” She says she was forced to sell her own clothes, handbags, mirrors, and furniture to clear his debts and that her family became reliant on food banks. Her children were even refused access to the school bus because she ‘couldn’t afford to pay £140 a month”.
Even after Steve left the family home, two years after he moved in, issues persisted. He failed and continues to fail to pay his portion of the mortgage despite signing the house back to Rachel.
A letter from Rachel’s mortgage advisor, seen by The Dispatch, states that prior to Steve moving in “Rachel’s spending was very much in control”. The mortgage advisor adds that Rachel has repeatedly flagged concerns over “Steve’s spending habits”.
Rachel claims Steve did other things that may not alarm police, but are signs of a financially abusive relationship: he forced her to take out loans to clear an overdraft, he coerced her to sell her jewellery at a huge loss, he changed his address from the family home to his after separating to pocket and benefit from child maintenance payments. Rachel believes the fragmentation of incidents reported to the police means they could not see the whole picture of financial abuse — including her being threatened with violence to repay Steve’s debts.
When Rachel reported Steve for alleged financial impropriety she was told by a case officer it did not meet the threshold for coercive control and that no investigation would be undertaken. An email from West Midlands Police, seen by The Dispatch, reads: “I can appreciate you have had several years of a difficult and strained relationship which has broken down…“However [...] he has racked up debt on credit cards and loans in his own name, which you have ultimately offered to help repay. This is not financial coercive control.”
An arrest and an apology
On 1 January 2023, six police officers and three riot vans showed up at Rachel’s home. Shocked, she was informed that Steve had made an allegation of malicious communication against her. She was handcuffed at her front door in front of her children just as she was about to go to work. Rachel says four officers searched her house and car without a warrant, following which she was taken to a police station where she spent over thirty hours before being released with no charge. A letter from Rachel’s lawyers seen by The Dispatch states Rachel suffered a panic attack in custody and was subsequently taken to hospital.
Indeed, it wasn’t the first time Rachel had found herself under the spotlight throughout her ordeal, despite no action ever being taken against Steve. In 2020, she was arrested for an apparent breach of a non-molestation order, a case which eventually went to trial.
A non-molestation order prevents a person from contacting, approaching, or coming to a victim's home. It can also prohibit them from using threatening, harassing, or violent behaviour. She’d first brought such an order against Steve during the summer of 2019, following which Steve took one out against her in the winter.
Rachel was accused of breaching the non-molestation order after a friend of Steve’s accused her of stalking and dangerous driving, accusations which she strongly denied. She faced court proceedings first in the Magistrates Court and then two years later at Crown Court. “The police just refused to contact me regarding anything. Yet the minute Steve reported anything they were down on me like a tonne of bricks,” she said. The jury found Rachel not guilty by unanimous verdict in twenty minutes.
Worse still, on the day of her trial, in October 2022, Rachel alleges that PC Callaghan had tried to coax her witness away from the courtroom into a tea room to try and stop her giving evidence. After the trial had concluded, in November 2022, she complained to West Midlands police about the Callaghan’s conduct, but the complaint handler concluded it would be ‘difficult’ to approach the officer without evidence, and “no further investigation” was necessary.
Appalled at what she felt was an attempt to meddle in the court proceedings, in March 2023 Rachel decided to refer the PC Callaghan issue to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC). The IOPC ruled that a proper investigation into PC Callaghan’s conduct was required, given that West Midlands Police’s initial response to the allegations “was not reasonable or proportionate”.
A spokesperson told The Dispatch: “From the information provided to us it was apparent that an account had not been obtained from the member of police staff. We suggested that this and other lines of enquiry should be pursued by WMP in order to fully address the complaints.”
In response to detailed questions from Birmingham Dispatch, a spokesperson for West Midlands Police said:
“We are currently reviewing a complaint from a woman about our handling of domestic abuse allegations. As part of this, we are reviewing a number of incidents which have happened over a number of years and it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time. We remain committed to supporting all victims and survivors of domestic abuse in whatever form it takes, and would encourage anyone suffering to get in touch with us.”
For Rachel, she just wants to move on with her life. “The police handling of the case has made matters worse for me. What will it take for them to listen to me? Or will I end up as another statistic?”
*Names have been changed
If you have been affected by issues of domestic violence or coercive control you can call Refuge's 24-Hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline for free. The number is 0808 2000 247.
Change to copy: an earlier version of this article contained a claim by Rachel that her son witnessed Steve disposing of weapons which has been removed.
Little bit concerned about the way this story has been reported so uncritically, especially when several aspects of it make no logical sense. Perhaps this would have been better left until after the investigation shows which elements are true and which are fabrication.