Hours before she hanged herself in 2023, Katie Madden spoke on the telephone with her abusive former partner, Jonathon Russell, who had been banned from contacting her after an alleged assault. After hearing testimony at the inquest into her death, the coroner cited Ms Madden’s long, toxic relationship with Mr Russell as a contributory factor in her suicide. But there has been no criminal investigation into her death.
A man has been convicted of killing his abused wife after she jumped to her death from a motorway bridge, in the first prosecution of its kind in Scotland. Prosecutors said his wife had suffered significant domestic violence at the hands of Lee Milne in the 18-months prior to her death.
Another husband started ‘tsunami’ of domestic abuse which ‘drove his wife to suicide’ after she asked his mother to move out their home, court hears. Christopher Trybus, of Swindon, Wiltshire, is accused of the manslaughter of Tarryn Baird, who took her own life aged 34 in November 2017.
Just three examples in the media in the past few weeks of lives taken by domestic abuse.
Recent figures released show that more women are taking their own lives due to domestic abuse. According to the Domestic Homicide Project, a programme led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), there were 98 suspected suicides in England and Wales following domestic abuse in 2024, compared with 80 intimate partner homicides.
But research by a suicide prevention programme in Kent found that about a third of all suspected suicides in the region between 2018 and 2024 were affected by domestic abuse. If the numbers in Kent reflect the national picture, it could mean as many as 1,500 victims of domestic abuse are taking their own lives every year – up to 15 times as many as previously thought.
Marie Goldman, women and equalities spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats has tabled an amendment to the crime and policing bill to debate whether all suicides linked to domestic abuse should be investigated as homicide. She cites that the system is: “simply not doing enough to protect women’.
Parliament is now to debate whether all suicides in cases involving victims of domestic abuse should be investigated as homicide.
Many agencies and partner of ours have been calling for this amendment for years. Campaigns have been focussing on ensuring that perpetrators are never able to escape the full force of the law.
The main call is the presumption to investigate domestic abuse related suicides as potential homicides and changes introduced to police and CPS procedural policy to include such a presumption.
The Domestic Abuse agency sector believes that any death should be ruled as a homicide until they can prove different. A key concern is that there may be multiple crime scenes to protect.
One of the biggest barriers in any domestic abuse case is the lack of evidence. By treating each suicide case as a homicide case this would guard against the police behaving in ways which have led to the loss or destruction of evidence, for example where police have returned the victims’ phones and laptops to persons who should have been treated as suspects.
We need to turn the shame firmly back onto the perpetrator as too many women who have been subjected to devastating abuse, including coercive and controlling behaviour, by a current or former partner have been denied justice following suicide, because their death was not considered to be directly at the hands of their perpetrator.
Pragna Patel, from Project Resist, said: “We owe these women and their grieving families more,” she added. “More understanding of the insidious nature of domestic abuse, more joined up responses to believe and support women and children; and more justice for those victims who so tragically have their lives taken.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The scale and nature of deaths linked to violence against women and girls is intolerable. That is why we are deploying the full power of the state to halve this issue in a decade.
“We are also improving how these deaths are recorded, and strengthening the police response to victims, as outlined in our Violence against Women and Girls Strategy, published in December.”
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