My daughter’s murder tore me apart. So does knowing that killings like hers are preventable | Julie Devey
In 2018, my daughter, Poppy Devey Waterhouse, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend just three days before she was going to move to her new flat to start her new life. Her bags were packed.
My world was, of course, torn apart by her murder. It was in the coming years that I realised just how many other lives and families are destroyed each year in the same way – all of us part of a club we wish with all our hearts we weren’t in.
Killed Women – the campaign network for bereaved families of women killed by men, which I co-founded – has, along with Ipsos, surveyed more than 100 families to establish what happened before and after the killings.
The report, the first of its kind, gives voice to the pain of bereaved families like mine and exposes the nature of extreme male violence. It shows how in a fifth of these killings, the children of the women were killed at the same time. It outlines the sheer scale of the violence used, with some victims stabbed hundreds of times and others mutilated. But it’s not just the scale of the pain and brutality that it reveals. It also provides real insight that policymakers have a duty to act on.
There were several key, harrowing findings. One was that the vast majority of these crimes were preventable. In fact, 67% of families said the killing of their family member was either fairly or very preventable – while just 4% said it was not preventable at all.
These aren’t cases of wishful thinking. In many instances, the authorities had been warned. In fact, in 78% of those cases where there was a prior history of violence and abuse towards the victim before her death, at least one service (police, social services and others) knew what was happening. Help was asked for, but they failed to act.
These missed opportunities are not just the fault of individuals making bad judgments, they are the result of a system that sees the killing of women as unavoidable – something to regret and sympathise over, but not crimes that can be stopped. This view itself is based on generations of misogyny; remember it was only in the 1970s that the police started responding to domestic violence as a crime. Even now we often talk about these crimes as something private – behind closed doors. The language used to describe the killings today sustains that viewpoint. We belittle them as “just domestics”, label them as crimes of passion or describe the perpetrator as “having snapped”.
We see these crimes in the same way we see bolts of lightning – something deadly but not something we can prevent. Imagine if we took that approach to other crimes – to terrorism, for example, or organised crime? The public would be outraged if the police waited for a bomb to go off rather than investigating likely plotters to disrupt and prevent the attacks in the first place.
The report also reveals how many families felt justice was denied their loved ones. In fact, 90% of families felt that the sentences handed down to the killers were too short, failing to reflect the cruelty of the murder, the abuse leading up to it or the risk posed to others in the future. The fact that the starting tariff for so many murders committed in the home is 10 years shorter than on the street – when a weapon is taken to the scene of the crime – is just one egregious reflection of a system that doesn’t treat the killing of women seriously.
The voices in the pages of this report, speaking out for our loved daughters, sisters, mothers and aunts, need to be urgently listened to. We have several key requests. First, a shift from an approach that responds to these abhorrent killings, to one that anticipates, intervenes and prevents them. These are not unavoidable tragedies, they are preventable crimes. We also need a sentencing framework and criminal justice response that demonstrates an absolute intolerance of the killing of women, that holds perpetrators to account and protects our communities. Finally, we need a root-and-branch review of the care and support accessible to families, because the devastation left in the aftermath of these crimes is far reaching and doesn’t end.
It took real bravery from the families of the women killed to fill out these in-depth surveys – to relive their pain and suffering. They did so in the knowledge that nothing can bring back their loved one or help with their pain, but in the hope that their experiences could prevent others going through what they have. The government has a responsibility to not only listen to their anguish, but to act urgently on the insights they have provided.
Julie Devey is co-founder and chair of Killed Women
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.