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Every suicide where the deceased had endured domestic violence must be considered a potential homicide, as per demands from campaigners who seek to hold abusers accountable for the catastrophic impact of their actions.

This step is essential because police and prosecutors are failing to hold offenders to justice in cases of self-inflicted death following family violence.

“Time and again, there is systemic and structural failure, especially within the legal system, to scrutinise these fatalities with the gravity they deserve,” stated a leader of a advocacy organization during a landmark meeting in London recently.

The assembly, organized by a organization leading a “Suicide is Homicide” initiative to fight for change in the criminal justice system, united families who had lost loved ones to suicide following family violence.

Personal Stories of Tragedy

One mother lost her daughter Chloe Holland in March 2023. Prior to her passing, Chloe had informed her ex-boyfriend to police, submitting a lengthy recorded statement as evidence against him.

Following her passing, the individual was found guilty of coercive and controlling behavior and jailed for 41 months. He was later sentenced for three years and seven months after a second woman stepped up to disclose that she had been in a harmful partnership with him.

After Chloe’s death, the mother chose to advocate for a new law to bring perpetrators accountable; however she then discovered that laws were already in place, they just weren’t often being used to secure prosecutions.

“I decided it wasn’t a fresh legislation I required as existing laws were in place, and after learning how much my daughter had been let down previous to her taking her life by the police and many other agencies, they had to do their job properly, and things needed to change,” she explained.

“Over 47 families have contacted me and just a handful of us have had a guilty verdict,” she added. “I was astonished to see so many families who have been fighting the police and CPS for a long time and getting no justice for their offspring or brother or sister and didn’t have a voice in case it impacted investigations that weren’t possibly going anywhere.”

Another Tragic Case

Saskia Lightburn Richie’s daughter Hannah passed away in spring 2017, in what she described as “the final act of violence” in a prolonged pattern of mistreatment.

“She was vibrant, she was loving,” she said. “She had great potential, and she was an amazing, really loving mother to her two children, and she died by suicide after two years in a partnership where she was systematically destroyed by her partner,” she said.

“She endured physical assaults, she was mentally tormented, she was dominated and dismantled gradually until she could not see a path ahead. The man who did this to her went unpunished, because we call it self-inflicted death, we conclude the case and we move on.

“Yet I was unable to continue,” she said, “and I haven’t been able to move on. In truth, Hannah didn’t just die by suicide. She was killed. She was killed slowly and intentionally over a two year period, and when I went to the police, when I begged them to look into what he had done to her, I was told that there was no action that they could do.

“There was no investigation into her passing. The domestic homicide review, which I had to struggle to obtain, required five years and had no impact. A four day inquest determined death by suicide, despite huge evidence over a extremely distressing four day period of family violence and shortcomings by multiple services.”

The parent informed the gathering that for eight years she has “been fighting a system that ignores what is right in front of it”.

She said the self-inflicted death is murder campaign was vital “because when someone dies by suicide after they’ve suffered family violence, we have to examine it for what it really is, which is murder.

“We must use the legislation we currently have effectively and it is not occurring at the present, and we need to make perpetrators responsible for pushing their targets to suicide.

“The statutes exist. We require determination, we need police 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 House of Commons, led by a Labour MP, and including the government official, the grieving families again told their stories.

A parliamentary under-secretary told the meeting: “These deaths are often dismissed as if they were their own choice, they chose to do this, when, in truth, these were the culmination of in fact, somebody else’s violence, and these aren’t isolated stories.”

“Our law is broken, we know that,” she stated. “Particularly around homicide or unlawful killing, it is fragmented. It’s not written in statute anyway, it has been shaped with common law practices 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 easy to resolve. It is extremely complicated and difficult, particularly when you look at the issue of homicide, but we acknowledge that it needs to be looked at.”

Prosecution Service Statement

A spokesperson for the prosecution service said: “Domestic abuse is a heinous crime and our prosecutors are actively advised to evaluate murder and manslaughter charges in suicide cases where there is a known context of domestic abuse or other manipulative conduct.

“We have in the past prosecuted a number of defendants for leading to the fatality of a partner they mistreated, including in cases which are ongoing.

“We are collaborating with law enforcement and other parties to guarantee these kinds of offences are clearly recognized – so that we can bring perpetrators accountable for the full extent of their crimes.”