Anya* had been struggling to escape from her abusive husband since 2012. He had, over the course of their marriage, regularly beat her, raped her, humiliated her, and taken her money. In April 2016, when she was going through the long and traumatic process of testifying in court against him for assault, she tried repeatedly to access counseling and psychological support. After she was told by a women's crisis helpline that they couldn't provide her with free counseling, she tried to jump in front of a train at a busy commuter station in South London.
"Everybody told me that they couldn't help me," Anya said. "So I told them I was going to kill myself, dropped the phone, and went to the train station."
Luckily, the police intervened before it was too late. But Anya's life has been irreparably marked by her protracted ordeals with an abusive husband, the criminal courts, the police, and social services.
Her experience of abuse by a partner and subsequent neglect by the state is shared by hundreds of thousands of women and non-binary people in London. Between 2014 and 2015, the Metropolitan Police recorded around 145,000 incidents of domestic abuse, a staggering increase of 72.8 percent since the equivalent period between 2007 and 2008. Far more incidents of abuse, of course, go unreported: the Office of National Statistics found, in their annual survey of intimate partner violence, that just 21 percent of victims reported the crime to the police. And unlike other violent crimes, which have generally seen decreases across the board, police figures show that rates of domestic violence have been increasing steadily since 2007/2008.
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