Suicides Through Domestic Abuse

“Too many bereaved families who have lost loved ones to domestic abuse-related suicides are being failed by a criminal justice system that is not fit for purpose.”

These are the words of Pragna Patel who is the CEO of Project Resist. She has spent years bringing bereaved families together to run a campaign to try and make important changes to our criminal justice system. This is because alleged abusers are rarely investigated for violent offences. In the old days it used to be discussed only as a domestic, which the police ignored.

They considered it none of their business. Women suffered badly with this lack of interest. When it comes to suicides by domestic abuse, there is even less interest because the victim has died. The abuser gets away with it and the suicide helps them because the police then will not charge him. There may be a wealth of evidence to incriminate him but, oh well, she has died by her own hand so let’s close the books on this. The Crown Prosecution Service does nothing as there is no case to answer. They are still not calling it homicide. This is the problem and the law has to change. This will take time as the law changes slowly.

There is the actual case of Katie Madden. Her former partner had treated her violently and told her to commit suicide as she was not worth a light. She believed him and killed herself. Still the police have not charged him and he is literally getting away with murder.

Georgia Barter committed suicide after enduring a decade of abuse, being kicked, stamped on and sexually assaulted by her partner. Despite the coroner’s findings, the Crown Prosecution Service has not brought charges as they said that there was insufficient evidence. You wonder what these prosecutors are actually doing, sitting in their offices.

Pragna Patel added that the injustice against women is because there is an absence of “professional curiosity and lack of laws but also a systemic culture of discrimination, arrogance, indifference and apathy.” This is a description of the Crown Prosecution Service, as far as I am concerned.

The campaigners have been struggling to get justice but in all this time there has only been one case which has been taken seriously in UK legal history and it was a criminal conviction for manslaughter where a woman had died by suicide following domestic abuse. Campaigners have called for all suicides due to domestic abuse should be investigated as potential homicides.

However it does boil down to police officers not understanding the impact of domestic abuse and so they do not investigate these cases immediately after death. They do not see it as important as it is only a woman, after all.

Kate Ellis, Head of Litigation at the Centre for Women’s Justice, said, “Sadly , police forces too often miss opportunities to disrupt escalating domestic abuse and protect victims.”

Southall Black Sisters have been campaigning for 40 years about suicide driven by domestic abuse and honour based abuse within the black,minority and immigrant communities.

“Women in these communities have additional barriers to overcome in order to escape abuse caused by intersecting racism and misogyny”, said Hannana Siddiqui, Director of policy , campaigns and research.

The organisation Advocacy after Fatal Domestic Abuse believes that a new law is the only way forward as juries find all the complicated issues difficult to understand and to make pronouncements. Frank Mullane, their spokesperson, said,”A new law, specific to suicide caused by domestic abuse, will make it easier for the jury to identify causation. It will give confidence to the Crown Prosecution Service to bring cases and it will educate the public.”

If we look at statistics on this subject. It is shocking to realise how many women take their own lives for this reason. In 2024 there were 98 suspected such suicides compared to 80 partners killing their wives. However, research by a suicide prevention campaign in Kent found that 33% of all suspects between 2018 to 2024 were caused by domestic abuse. 

This is just Kent. If we extended these numbers around the UK it could be that it might be 10 times as many. It could mean that 900 victims of domestic abuse are committing suicide every year. Tim Woodhouse, from the University of Kent, said, “We need some sort of National task force to get a grip on this.”

Women’s lives have to be properly protected by the State and the people. However, as Germaine Greer has said,”the visionary feminists of the late sixties and early seventies (of which I am one, I am proud to say) knew that women could never find freedom by agreeing to live the lives of unfree men.”

The point she is making is that men are also not free which is why they turned to violence in the home as the wife was the most vulnerable and easier to lash out at caused by frustration due to being “unfree”.

Next year I will be 80 years old but I am proud to say that I have lived a life of my choice. I wanted to be free and travel and have adventures. I did not want children as they would have held me back. I travelled around the world on my own with a rucksack on my back. I will repeat that I am still proud to be a feminist and proud of what I have achieved in my life. I have done exactly as I have pleased. I have not wasted time or money on cosmetics. I have been vilified as not being a real woman because I never had children. I did not need children to justify my existence as a woman. 

I have lived the life that I have chosen to live and feminism has been a huge part of this. Supporting and helping women has also been a part of that too. In my life I have tried to help them become strong, being involved in women’s refuges and with 4 other women setting up the first Rape Crisis Centre in the UK in London. As a woman myself, no woman I have ever known has been invisible to me.