“We’ve also seen really concerning situations where women are either defending themselves from an attack or during an attack, and they call for help, and there are malicious allegations against them of abuse by their abusive partner, and the women have been drawn into the prison system,” Russell adds.
As with so many victims of domestic abuse, Sarah did not recognise the signs in her relationship at first. “When I first met him, I thought he was the most incredible man I’d ever met in my life. He was the life and soul. Everyone who knew him loved him and he used to look at me like I was the only person in the world,” she says.
“But gradually over time he started to control everything I did, monitor everything I did. I thought it was because he loved me that he wanted pictures of where I was, or that he installed a camera in my car because he cared. I was in denial that I was in an abusive relationship.
“He’d make me feel like I was going insane, saying I couldn’t remember things that he’d never said. He’d accuse me of cheating on him. He’d watch me on cameras in the house and send me messages about what I was doing. He’d make me do things sexually that I didn’t consent to.
“If I said ‘no’, he’d beat me. He pressured me to steal to pay for everything, from cars, to parties and nights out, to holidays. I was stealing money from people I loved and respected because I wanted him to love me. Half of me felt sick all the time. The more money I took, the more ashamed I felt.”
Women were sent to prison on 5,164 occasions in the year to March 2023 – either on remand or to serve a sentence. More than half (53%) of the women reported having experienced emotional, physical sexual abuse as a child, accoring to Prison Reform Trust.
Prison causes further trauma. Sarah recalls being arrested, saying: “I was frightened. I was scared. I was absolutely petrified. My mental health was so bad though that I actually thought: ‘I’m not bothered if I get beaten up in prison, because I’ve been beaten up on the outside.’ Or, ‘If someone wants to take my life, it saves me doing it.’ That’s how I felt.”
The government recently announced a women’s justice board tasked with the aim of reducing the number of women in prison. It will bring together senior leaders in the criminal justice system, charities and government departments and publish a new strategy in spring – advocating a tailored approach to keep women out of custody.
It will discuss how to prevent women from committing crimes through tackling the root causes, and prevent reoffending by improving the alternatives to prison like community sentences and residential women’s centres. Research shows that women serving short custodial sentences are significantly more likely to reoffend than those serving community sentences.
“What we see is women who are caught in a cycle of being arrested, released after a very short sentence, back into homelessness, back into substance misuse, back into whatever survival techniques they need to survive,” Russell explains.
“That then leads to being vulnerable to coercive, controlling partners, sexual exploitation , drug substance misuse and not being able to access any housing, again and again. All of those factors would be helped if we had a good strategy addressing domestic abuse.”
Women in Prison is calling on the government to take immediate action to include domestic abuse as an “additional, critical priority” in the women’s justice board strategy. It wants to see sustainable funding, as well as support for women before their release and on their transition into the community.
Sarah’s sentence was short, but she feels she is still being punished after leaving prison.
“I’ve lost everything. Luckily I have family I can stay with but I feel like a burden – I’m effectively homeless,” she says. “I’ve applied for so many jobs but just get rejected. I’m still scared of my abuser even now so I just stay inside. I carry so much shame for what’s happened. In some ways it’s harder than before because in prison I was surviving, now I have to pick up the pieces but with a criminal record.”
People from Black and ethnic minority backgrounds face additional discrimination which deepens their risk of “unjust treatment under the law”, the open letter says, urging the women’s justice board to consider this inequality. It additionally calls for support for women who are criminalised because of sex work and trafficking.
“I don’t think women who’ve gone through domestic abuse should go to prison. I never reported my abuser because when you’re in an abusive relationship, you find it very hard to accept that’s what’s happening,” Sarah says.
“I didn’t report my abuse to anyone and I didn’t know where to get help. I didn’t know who I could tell. So I think women need to know who to go to. There needs to be more awareness about what abuse is, and who to get help from. I lost a lot and now I have to try and pick up the pieces.”
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