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Every suicide in which the victim had endured domestic violence should be treated as a possible homicide, as per demands from campaigners who aim to hold abusers responsible for the catastrophic consequences of their actions.

This move is essential because law enforcement are failing to bring perpetrators to justice in cases of self-inflicted death after family violence.

“In case after case, there is systemic and structural failure, especially within the legal system, to examine these deaths with the seriousness they warrant,” remarked a co-director of a campaign group at a significant gathering in Westminster earlier this week.

The meeting, arranged by a group running a “Self-Inflicted Death is Murder” campaign to fight for change in the legal framework, brought together relatives who had lost loved ones to suicide following family violence.

Individual Accounts of Loss

Sharon Holland lost her daughter Chloe Holland in spring 2023. Prior to her passing, the young woman had informed her ex-boyfriend to police, providing a lengthy recorded statement as evidence against him.

After her death, the individual was convicted of coercive and controlling behavior and imprisoned for 41 months. He was later jailed for an additional term after a another victim stepped up to disclose that she had been in a harmful partnership with him.

In the wake of her loss, the mother chose to advocate for a legal change to bring perpetrators to justice; yet she then discovered that laws were already in place, they just were rarely applied to achieve convictions.

“I concluded it wasn’t a new law I needed as current statutes were already there, and after finding out how much my daughter had been let down before her taking her life by the authorities and numerous services, they needed to fulfill their duties, and things needed to change,” she explained.

“Over 47 families have contacted me and only four of us have had a guilty verdict,” she continued. “I was astonished to see so many families who have been battling the police and prosecution service for a long time and getting no justice for their offspring or sibling and could not speak out in case it impacted inquiries that were not progressing.”

Another Tragic Case

One mother’s daughter her 30-year-old daughter passed away in spring 2017, in what she called “the final act of violence” in a campaign of abuse.

“Hannah was vibrant, she was loving,” she stated. “She was full of promise, and she was an amazing, deeply devoted mother to her two children, and she died by suicide after two years in a partnership where she was methodically broken down by her partner,” she said.

“She endured physical assaults, she was psychologically tortured, she was dominated and dismantled gradually until she was unable to envision a path ahead. The man who caused this went unpunished, because we label it self-inflicted death, we close the file and we move on.

“Yet I was unable to continue,” she remarked, “and I have not managed to move on. Honestly, Hannah didn’t just die by suicide. She was murdered. She was killed slowly and deliberately over a 24-month span, and when I went to the police, when I begged them to investigate what he had inflicted upon her, I was informed that there was no action that they were able to take.

“No inquiry was conducted into her passing. The domestic violence fatality analysis, which I had to fight for, required five years and had no impact. A four day inquest found death by suicide, despite substantial proof over a very traumatic four day period of domestic abuse and shortcomings by various agencies.”

The mother informed the gathering that for eight years she has “struggled against a establishment that refuses to see what is obvious”.

She said the suicide is homicide campaign was vital “because when an individual takes their own life after they’ve suffered family violence, we have to investigate it for what it really is, which is homicide.

“We must apply the laws we already possess properly and it is not occurring at the present, and we need to make perpetrators responsible for driving their victims to death.

“The statutes exist. We require determination, we need law enforcement to conduct thorough inquiries. We need the prosecution authority to prosecute. We need judges to recognize that words and control can cause death equally to physical force and arms.”

Government Reaction

At a second meeting in the Parliament, led by a Labour MP, and including the government official, the grieving families again told their stories.

A parliamentary under-secretary told the meeting: “Such fatalities are often dismissed as if they were their own choice, they opted for this, when, in truth, these were the culmination of in fact, somebody else’s violence, and these are not isolated stories.”

“Our law is broken, we are aware,” she stated. “Particularly around murder or unlawful killing, it is piecemeal. It’s not written in statute regardless, it has been shaped with traditional legal customs for centuries, and it is outdated, quite frankly, it’s the world we inhabit today.

“I’m not going to pretend that it’s going to be simple to resolve. It is incredibly complex and challenging, particularly when you consider the matter of homicide, but we recognize that it needs to be looked at.”

Legal Authority Comment

A spokesperson for the prosecution service said: “Domestic abuse is a terrible crime and our prosecutors are regularly instructed to consider homicide allegations in self-inflicted death instances where there is a known context of domestic abuse or other manipulative conduct.

“We have previously charged a number of defendants for leading to the fatality of a partner they abused, including in cases which are currently active.

“We are collaborating with law enforcement and other parties to ensure these types of crimes are well-understood – so that we can bring perpetrators to justice for the full extent of their crimes.”