Olivia* had always wanted to be a police officer. It was, she said, “a dream job. I worked very hard at school and university to get the results and do what I always wanted to do, from being quite young."
Yet in December 2020, she was suspended from her job at a force in England, and later charged with misconduct in public office for an act she committed under immense coercion from a man she said was controlling her.
The seriousness of the offence left Olivia terrified – of prison and, crucially, of losing her daughter Pearl*. “I’d gone from facing a fine and losing my job, to looking at life imprisonment.”
“It was like a nuclear bomb went off in our lives,” said her mother Sarah*. “I saw my daughter being systematically and cruelly dismantled in front of my eyes.”
Now, for the first time, an investigation by openDemocracy can show that Olivia is one of potentially thousands of women in England and Wales arrested for offences driven by domestic abuse and coercive control.
Data obtained via Freedom of Information laws revealed that of more than 4,000 women arrested for three offence types commonly associated with coercive control (carrying or handling drugs, weapons and stolen goods), a fifth had been flagged as at risk of domestic abuse.
Our investigation shows how male violence draws women into the criminal justice system where they are treated as perpetrators, not as victims. Coercive control affects decision-making, risk assessment and perceptions of available choices. Its relationship with women’s arrests challenges the assumption within the criminal justice system that all offending occurs within conditions of genuine freedom.
Coerced offending is not the only way in which victims are criminalised. Another is via counter-allegations: where abusers accuse their victims of domestic abuse-related crimes. Data from 11 police forces revealed the devastating figure that half of women arrested for coercive control were themselves identified as potential victims of domestic abuse.
These are not isolated incidents. Abusers are skilled at presenting their victims as perpetrators. As a result, women are three times more likely to be arrested than their male partners at a domestic abuse incident involving counter-allegations, often where they have used force to protect themselves, such as pushing him away.
Nearly three-quarters of women in prison are survivors of abuse, and 68% of women with convictions report having experienced domestic abuse, compared to 25% of the general population.
Yet the link between domestic abuse and women’s offending has often gone ignored within the criminal justice system.
As Olivia said, “I didn’t realise he was controlling until it was too late.”
Coerced into offending
“I loved my job,” Olivia said. “I really loved it. I worked really hard, everyone would say that.”
“And that’s why he targeted you,” said her mum, Sarah, as the three of us talked over coffee in a hotel bar. “He identified you as someone who the job meant a lot to. And so he was able to manipulate you. He was a known master manipulator.”
Olivia met David*, a fellow police officer, in December 2019. The pair started talking, “and then he went from zero to 100 in his behaviour,” said Olivia. The “love bombing”, she said, “was so subtle but so effective. He did a number on me. It got really intense.”
It didn’t take long, Olivia said, for David’s behaviour to turn angry and controlling. She alleges that he would drive past her house in his police car, and if she had friends visiting, demand to know who they were and what she was doing. He called her “all day, every day; it was truly relentless”.
People noticed what was happening. More than one friend joked that he was her “stalker”. Her dad would ask, “who was constantly calling me non-stop”. At work, David criticised Olivia, saying that she was poor at decision-making. His comments, she said, “undermined my remaining self-confidence.”
As well as bullying Olivia, David criticised her friends and family, isolating her from her support network, a known tactic of coercive control. “I really believed him. Looking back now, I can’t understand it.” She felt, she said, “completely isolated and alone.”
David had warned that if she told anyone, “then he would get to know about it. When you are in that thought process, I genuinely thought that saying anything would compromise my career, my life.” She described living “with constant fear”. Not of arrest, but of him. “He said he knew people in high places in the force, which it really seemed he did, as he appeared to be immune from all accountability.”
For Sarah, it was devastating to see David’s abuse and control change her daughter. “I would think: where has my daughter gone?” She remembered how she would “ask Olivia about this David – who is he? What is his story? I noticed that he was a serious problem in the family dynamic.”
Things came to a head when Olivia learned that David was pursuing relationships with other women. She confronted him, and he responded with an angry and abusive message. It was the final straw; with Sarah’s support, Olivia ended the relationship in September 2020. “My mum managed to make me realise he was dangerous and problematic,” she said.
A month later, another woman reported David to the police for controlling abuse, and he was arrested and suspended from the force.
Olivia started to move on with her life, focusing on her young daughter. It wasn’t easy; the pandemic made life harder, and she became “exceptionally unwell”. But at least, she thought, she was free of David’s control.
Then, in December, police officers arrived at Olivia’s house to suspend her from her role as a police constable.
Olivia learnt that while investigating the allegations against David, officers discovered messages on his phone that indicated she had breached data privacy laws earlier that summer. “I couldn’t even remember it,” she said. The abuse “had really ramped up at that point”, and the pressure to give him this information “was constant, relentless and oppressive”. At first, she told the police it simply couldn’t be accurate. “But they showed me the messages, and it was there.”
On the day Olivia committed the offence, David messaged her more than 150 times, threatening to come to her house to cause problems if she didn’t share her computer login. “I know it sounds strange, but I can’t really remember what happened,” Olivia said. “I was so physically and emotionally exhausted, I had so much terrible guilt about working nights and not being there for my infant daughter, and he was relentless.” She later learnt he used her password to access restricted information, including checking up on ex-partners.
“With coercive and controlling behaviour, someone is purposely going out of their way to remove your ability to make any decisions, to control you and everything you do, in order to keep you there,” said Kris Windsor, a detective superintendent with Avon and Somerset Police. The force has no relationship with Olivia. “Many victims don’t even know what they want to watch on TV because that's not a choice they have, let alone anything else.
“In many cases victims are operating in that survival mode, so how can they possibly make rational or clear decisions? They can't.”
Olivia was suspended and charged alongside David in October 2021 with misconduct in public office. Her biggest concern was for her daughter Pearl. Both her and Sarah’s eyes welled up as she described the extreme fear that her child would be taken away. “It’s just when we talk about Pearl, the idea of being separated from her,” she said.
Fear of losing their child is the “first impact” of an arrest, said Lina Akbar, operations manager of the Diversion Project, an initiative run by the charity Advance to help women who commit low-level offences towards community-based solutions. “It causes a lot of anxiety and depression.”
This was the case for Olivia, who became suicidal. But because she was not identified as a victim of domestic abuse, she was not offered any support. Instead, she was forced to attend court sessions alongside her alleged abuser. “It was like they wanted her to kill herself,” Sarah said darkly.
Olivia’s solicitor said it was one of the worst cases of coercive control he had ever seen. But during the court case, which took place nearly two years later, the prosecution aggressively accused Olivia of lying. The judge described her as “besotted” with David. “They made out they were in it together, like Bonnie and Clyde,” said Sarah. The judge rejected claims that David’s alleged abuse was a factor in Olivia’s actions, and both received equal suspended sentences.
“These women show this dual status of victim and offender, but they are only seen as an offender as the system currently stands,” said Vanessa Bettinson, an academic in criminology at Northumbria University.
Bettinson warned that “almost any offence could be a result of domestic abuse, for example a woman shoplifting because her perpetrator controls the household’s finances.” She said “the criminal justice process is not geared up towards looking for domestic abuse. So abuse does not feature in the court cases.”
Accused of abuse
Alexsandra* was running out of options.
Trapped in a custody battle with her coercively controlling ex-partner Harrison*, Children’s Services spoke to Alexsandra about her daughter Emily*, leaving her “seriously worried.”
“They said they saw me as a weak mother,” she told openDemocracy when we met in her flat over the summer. Anxious that Emily would be taken into care, she filed a police report against her ex in January 2023.
Initially, Alexsandra had attributed Harrison’s controlling behaviour to stress. That started to change when he built a complex surveillance system with cameras to monitor when she left the house. He would quiz her on her movements until going out became too stressful. “I started to see my friends less; I was not able to visit my family as often as I would have liked,” she explained. Then his behaviour started to impact her daughter.
“Emily was unwell and he wouldn’t let me take her to hospital,” Alexsandra said. “He tried to give her medication she was allergic to.” He put temporary tattoos on their infant daughter, causing her distress. “I managed to prevent these things,” she said. “But the consequences of challenging his behaviour were extreme and I was scared.”
Determined to keep Emily safe, Alexsandra left Harrison, eventually filing a complaint with the police alleging coercive control. Harrison was interviewed under caution in summer 2023. But as the police investigating Alexsandra’s allegations built their case, Harrison hit back – making a counter-allegation of coercive control. “His evidence included that I had reported him to the police,” she said, baffled.
Documents reviewed by openDemocracy show that Harrison’s police team initially planned to interview Alexsandra under caution, as he had been. However, the police then changed their approach, with the female officer investigating his allegations putting out an alert across the force, stating “can she please be arrested whenever you get the chance.” This is despite having assessed that Harrison was not in physical danger. When the police asked Harrison what outcome he preferred, he said he wanted Alexsandra arrested.
“I just do not understand why I was treated this way, why I was treated differently to him,” Alexsandra said. “Is it because I am a woman, is it because he is a police officer? I never got an answer to this question.”
The police documents also show that Harrison claimed Alexsandra had harassed him by asking him not to put temporary tattoos on Emily. He urged the police to arrest her, so he could have “respite” from what he termed her “continuous negative actions”.
At no point did the officers in Harrison’s case liaise with their colleagues investigating Alexsandra’s allegations. As a result, her team had no idea that she was under investigation. Nor was Alexsandra aware, telling openDemocracy that “the first I heard of the report was during a family court hearing in December 2023, where he told the judge that I was being investigated for coercive control.” Shocked, she denied it, only to learn later it was true.
In the same month, the police were ready to present their case to the Crown Prosecution Service, with the aim of charging Harrison with coercive control. At the same time, Harrison was contacting his investigating officer, asking when Alexsandra would be arrested. He only had to wait a few days: in the new year, the police arrested Alexsandra in her flat.
“They came to my door, I had just put Emily to bed and my parents were visiting,” she recalled. “I was wearing scruffy clothes because I was doing some DIY, and I asked if I could get changed. I know that might sound strange, but I didn’t want to look a mess.” The police refused, putting her in handcuffs and saying that she “should be grateful they put the handcuffs on at the front rather than behind me.”
The force’s arrest notes, also seen by openDemocracy, corroborate Alexsandra’s account. She later learnt that Harrison had told the police when she would be home, knowing Emily would be there. “I felt so guilty that she would wake up and see this.”
Alexsandra was put in a holding cell, which triggered memories of the surveillance Harrison enforced during their relationship. The arresting officer kept referring to Harrison as “her victim”, something Alexsandra found deeply distressing. “It cuts like a knife through your heart, hearing her say she had to ‘protect her victim’,” she said.
No charges were ever brought against Alexsandra, who maintains her January 2024 arrest was an extension of Harrison’s abuse, aided and abetted by the police. “The purpose of his life is to exclude me from my daughter’s life,” she said.
The case against Harrison was dropped in May 2025, when the Crown Prosecution Service declined to press charges, saying there was no realistic prospect of conviction, which is a common outcome for allegations of coercive control.
The police force has since acknowledged that Alexsandra was “let down” and that “more could have been done” to prevent her arrest. But for Alexsandra, there are still so many unanswered questions about the way she was treated by the police.
“I was treated differently to him,” she said. “They did not see me as human. They considered that he was a police officer but not that I was a victim.”
“Perpetrators do use the system as a tool for controlling coercive behaviour,” said Avon and Somerset’s detective superintendent Kris Windsor, who is training her officers to recognise when “perpetrators groom us.”
“I need officers to see it and to recognise it, and the system needs to support police officers in doing that,” Windsor said. The force has no link to Alexsandra’s case.
Time for change
A coalition of women’s organisations, including Women in Prison, Hibiscus, Advance and the Centre for Women’s Justice, is urging the government to reform sentencing so that women’s experiences of domestic abuse are considered in relation to their offending.
Doing so will help ensure that victims of domestic abuse who have committed crimes are recognised as vulnerable and can get the help they need.
Sentencing reform is just one potential route to improving the criminal justice system’s treatment of victims coerced into offending, or facing counter-allegations.
Other approaches include introducing domestic abuse evidence protocols, modelled on an existing initiative in Western Australia, where the impact of domestic abuse is considered at every stage of the criminal justice process. Right now, “who is even looking for coercive control?” asked Vanessa Bettinson. “These provisions would make it ‘everyone’.”
The coalition is also calling for better training for frontline services, including police officers, to ensure a more trauma-informed approach when responding to domestic abuse call-outs, to reduce the harms of counter-allegations.
Such work is already underway in Avon and Somerset Police, where domestic abuse makes up one-fifth of the force’s demand. Project Bright Light brought together academics with policing to transform the force’s response to domestic abuse, implementing what detective superintendent Kris Windsor terms “a victim-centred, suspect-focused, context-led approach”.
Bright Light, said Windsor, was a “deep dive to understand what are the problems, what are the things that we're seeing, and how can we make it better. We're only going to do that if we think differently.”
Windsor and her team provide training via a continuous improvement plan that will feed into policy and help ensure officers understand the full picture when arriving at a call-out that might involve domestic abuse.
“We need to ensure that when an officer goes out, they can see the full context: who is the victim, who is the perpetrator. We are looking at changes that will enable officers to have access to more information, so they can make context-based decisions.” This approach, she said, could help assess counter-allegations at domestic abuse call-outs, so both allegations are “not weighted the same”.
Such a change will tackle an issue raised by Advance’s Lina Akbar, who said that when it comes to counter-allegations, “if a perpetrator calls the police, they don’t look at the history. They don't look at the impact on the woman. There's actually no one to help her because she's now seen as a perpetrator and not a victim of domestic abuse.”
Windsor offers the force what she describes as “bite-size reflections”, designed to train officers on the complexities of domestic abuse and improve understanding of unhelpful myths about victims and coercive control.
The focus, Windsor said, “is on what victims need from us. The importance of getting there quickly, getting the basics right, listening to people.”
Ultimately, Windsor said, “we know that primary perpetrators will use our system. And the better we get at identifying it, the less the perpetrators will try, because they know it won’t work. I want perpetrators to know there is no point trying to use our system as a lever of controlling and coercive behaviour. I will come after you and stop you, as this is not a space where you can brazenly come in and start to use us. This is a space where victims and survivors are going to be safe.”
Today, both Olivia and Alexsandra are receiving support from the Centre for Women’s Justice as they try to secure answers for their treatment by the criminal justice system.
For Olivia, this means a fight to get her conviction overturned. She and mum Sarah have many questions about how David was permitted to remain in post as a PC at all, when numerous people raised concerns about his behaviour. “He was trained to be a taser officer when he was on a force anti-corruption noted person list at the highest threat level,” said Sarah. “How was that allowed to happen?”
They also want answers on an alleged failure by the Police Federation – a staff association representing police officers, who are banned from joining a union – to pass on to investigating officers a dossier the pair compiled after Olivia’s suspension detailing David’s alleged abuse. “Why wasn’t this passed on?” Sarah demands. “It didn’t suit them for her to have answers.”
The abuse has had lasting effects on Olivia’s daughter, although the good news is that she is a happy, confident child and flourishing at school. “She thinks the police are dangerous,” said Olivia. “She won’t even say ‘police’; she says ‘the p-word.’ Even I – if I see a police officer, or a police van, it’s difficult.”
Alexsandra also continues to pursue justice. She has filed a complaint with the Independent Office for Police Conduct and wants to know why she was arrested while Harrison was not.
But the impact of her arrest means Alexsandra no longer believes she could report abusive behaviour to the police. “I have learned my lesson,” she said.
*Names have been changed