An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill could require police to investigate certain suicides as potential homicides where there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the victim had been experiencing domestic abuse. The proposal, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, would mean that, when a suicide follows a history of domestic abuse committed by another person, the relevant police force must investigate the death using the same procedures applied to suspected homicide cases.
The proposal comes amid growing concern about the number of deaths linked to domestic abuse that are recorded as suicides rather than investigated as possible crimes. As previously reported in The Justice Gap, Louisa Rolfe, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for domestic abuse, has said police are ‘determined to do more’ to respond to victims who are driven to suicide by abusive partners.
Data from the National Police Chiefs’ Council Domestic Homicide Project highlights the scale of the issue. The project recorded 263 domestic abuse-related deaths in England and Wales in the year ending March 2024, including 98 suspected suicides following domestic abuse. These figures indicate that suicides now form a significant proportion of domestic abuse-related deaths.
Marie Goldman MP told the Guardian: ‘The current systems and laws are simply not doing enough to protect women’, with too many unreported cases. She claims the new law needs urgent updates, and only by implementing these amendments will they be able to ‘deliver justice for victims and their loved ones’. She then urged ‘colleagues from across the political divide’ for their support so that ‘perpetrators of these horrendous crimes will never be able to escape the full force of the law’.
A Home Office spokesperson commented ‘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.’ He also noted the work being done to improve records of these cases and ‘strengthening the police response to victims, as outlined in our Violence against Women and Girls Strategy, published in December.’
