It's a high bar

As a former human rights lawyer, I’m the first person to support the high evidential thresholds and burdens of proof which must be surmounted to successfully criminalise people. Certain crimes and policing policies (including, for example, stop and search policies in relation to suspected drug possession) disproportionately impact minorities who are seen as ‘low hanging fruit’ by police and are too often used as tools for political point scoring.

Still, as a victim-survivor, it’s also the seemingly insurmountable hurdle many of us face from that first call-out when the police tell us: ‘There’s not enough evidence to charge’; or ‘If he’d actually hit you, we could help’ and so on and so forth.

It makes perfect sense to me as a lawyer but it also enrages me as a victim because my abuser knew exactly when to stop. He’d raise his fist or another object over me and bellow at me, then calmly lower the object or his fist, gloating that he ‘didn’t actually hit me’ and smirking while telling me that no one would ever believe me unless I was recording him. He knew the line and he never crossed it. That’s part of coercive control and that, too, is a crime. The trouble is, it’s still very hard for victims to prove. How do we manage the tension between protecting people against false allegations of domestic abuse (which is very important) and making sure coercive controllers face justice?

What are your thoughts?