The young woman glanced nervously from side to side.
She didn’t often walk home alone from the station in the dark, and she didn’t like it. She was usually accompanied by a female work colleague who lived just four doors down from her own place, but today, the colleague had decided to go out for an after-work pre-Christmas drink at a wine bar with a few of the other staff from their office. To be honest, the young woman had quite wanted to go with them, but she knew that her boyfriend wouldn’t have liked that, and she didn’t have any means on her to buy a round of drinks anyway.
As she hurried along, the inadequate street lighting left dark shadows beneath every tree and bush, and she trembled slightly with fear that a stranger might be hiding in the darkness, ready to pounce on her as she passed. She even had visions of her body being found on Hampstead Heath by an early-morning dog walker. She shook her head to dispel the notion, and hurried on.
But there was no stranger, no would-be murderer hiding in the darkness, and she made it to her front door unscathed, inserting the key in the lock with shaking fingers, before stepping quickly inside. She leaned back against the door and sighed with relief.
I’m safe now, she thought.
But was she?
*
According to the Femicide Census website, only 10% of female murder victims in the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2023 were killed by strangers, while six times that many were murdered by a current or former intimate partner, and the rest by other family members or friends. And the most dangerous men of all are the controlling boyfriends or husbands who won’t permit their girlfriends or wives to go out with other people, and refuse to allow them to carry any money of their own.
Controlling or Coercive Behavior has been a criminal offense in the United Kingdom since 2015 and the definition of such behavior includes acts designed to make a person feel inferior and/or dependent by keeping them apart from help and support. This might include acts of physical violence or threats of violence to punish or frighten the victim, sexual assault or abuse, directing the victim’s daily activities such as what they wear and when they can eat or sleep, and restricting the victim’s access to finances, social media, friends and family.
Perpetrators often tell lies to the victim’s family to make it seem that their behavior is to protect the victim from some undisclosed threat, or that the victim is mentally ill and does not have the capacity to make their own decisions.
Often the behavior creeps up on a victim over time, such that they aren’t even aware they are being abused. If and when they do realize, getting away from the abuser is fraught with difficulty and danger. They will likely have already been isolated from those who might have helped, and all too often, the situation can spiral downwards into more abuse, more violence, even murder.
In England and Wales there were over 43,000 offenses of controlling and coercive behavior were recorded by police in the year to March 2023. Not all those offenses led to criminal convictions, and thankfully, murder is a rare outcome. Nevertheless, on average two British women are killed each week by a current or former intimate partner.
In the United States the numbers are much more frightening. Whereas there is as yet no countrywide crime of controlling and coercive behavior as there is in the UK, the US Department of Justice figures show that just under five thousand women were victims of murder in the US during 2021, and on average over thirty of those women were killed each week by their intimate partner, predominantly with a firearm. That’s more than four every single day.
One might believe that such incidents would be random and unpredictable—crimes of passion where a ‘red mist’ of anger suddenly descends—but research by Dr Jane Monckton Smith, a criminology expert at the University of Gloucestershire in England shows that there is a distinct and predictable pattern of behavior that leads someone to murder their partner.
Dr Monkton Smith examined 575 murders of women in the UK and found that in 372 cases the following eight-stage progression towards homicide emerged.
- History of prior stalking or abuse by the man before this relationship starts
- The relationship develops quickly
- The man becomes controlling over his partner
- A trigger threatens the man’s control, such as an impending breakup
- The control escalates with stalking or threats of suicide
- The man decides that killing his partner is the only option
- The man buys weapons and makes detailed plans to find the victim alone
- The murder itself is committed.
The only times that the killer did not have a history of prior stalking or abuse was when he had no previous relationships.
Dr Monkton Smith calls for urgent further research into how victims can safely exit controlling relationships, and also into what may cause men to become controlling in the first place, or why they need such control in their lives.
***
