Women are being forced to pay thousands of pounds to make police investigate stalkers because officers “don’t care”, a top lawyer has warned.
Stalkers are hacking video doorbells, using GPS trackers and spyware on mobile phones but police refuse to investigate, a leading family lawyer told The Times.
Rachel Horman-Brown, head of family for Watson Ramsbottom Solicitors, said the government’s promise of new powers for police to protect victims through stalking protection orders, introduced last January, had been a “complete failure” because police were not using them.
Horman-Brown, who said private costs often ran to £10,000, is also a spokeswoman for the charity Paladin. Demand for Paladin’s free legal services to high-risk victims of stalking was up 50 per cent since the start of the pandemic, she said.
A second charity dedicated to victims of stalking, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, is calling for a taskforce to address a “lack of understanding” of the crime in the justice system which is responsible for the fact that only 0.1 per cent of stalking led to convictions last year when 1.5 million people were stalked in England and Wales.
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Horman-Brown said: “Police are still dealing with this atrociously. They seem to have zero understanding of what stalking is. Victims have to fight to get police to even take a statement. I’ve had clients paying thousands of pounds to prepare documents demonstrating to police that there is a case, and they shouldn’t need to do that. That’s the police’s job.” She added that as well as lawyers’ fees, clients were paying for expert analysis of devices to prove they had been hacked or that they were being monitored or targeted digitally.
On average victims experienced 100 incidents before going to police, she said, and most of her and Paladin’s high-risk cases involved police inaction. She said police treated stalking as a “nuisance” and victims were still being forced to turn to civil measures despite the new police stalking protection orders. These civil orders let police mandate access to devices or send the perpetrator for stalking therapeutic intervention. Only about 400 have been issued. Many judges have refused to grant the orders in cases where the stalker has not been convicted, limiting their protection.
Horman-Brown said she had since told hundreds of clients to request the orders through police but none had been successful. “It’s almost like a wilful refusal to investigate,” she said. “It’s been a complete failure.”
Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills, the NPCC lead for stalking, said police were “committed to doing everything possible to bring offenders to justice and protect victims”.
Case study
Annie, not her real name, met her abuser online and had an on-off relationship over 18 months.
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The former senior public servant she met was soon controlling and violent. “[It] was everything: what I ate, who I spoke to, where I went,” she said, and the violence left her with scars. She reported him and police removed him.
But it took thousands in legal fees and more than three years and three appeals against failed charging decisions to bring her case with evidence she collated herself. “I thought how lucky I am I can afford to do it.”
