NAAVoices was not created from certainty, but from lived experience and professional insight. As I migrate earlier work from the original platform, this post has been reviewed and approved for transfer. It remains true to its original context, with only minor clarity edits where needed. Some moments do not require rewriting to remain honest.
This post forms part of my Two Years Forward series
After a Year of Retelling: Losing the One Who Listened
After twelve months of reliving the abuse to nineteen different police officers, I lost the second one who didn’t lie to my face, send misleading emails, or cause further harm.
Jackie from Professional Standards was that officer.
She was a rare exception in a system that too often fails victims, someone who understood how harm is inflicted, how power is misused, and how easily people are broken by processes that claim to protect them.
I will always be grateful to Jackie for raising concerns and speaking up, even when the organisation around her appeared indifferent to the impact on victims.
It is heartbreaking that officers who genuinely understand coercive control, trauma, and accountability are the exception rather than the norm.
The Exhaustion of Recounting Trauma
When you are living inside trauma, isolation becomes suffocating. The emotions are relentless, the weight unmanageable. Confronting abuse is harrowing enough — but being required to retell it again and again to investigators becomes its own form of harm.
That was my reality.
I explained what had happened to my children and me to nineteen different officers in person. Nineteen retellings. Each one required reopening wounds that had never been allowed to close. It was exhausting, destabilising, and dehumanising.
Very few appeared to understand coercive control. Even fewer understood the legislation designed to protect victims and children.
Those rights were meant to protect me and my three children. If they had been applied properly, my children would have been safeguarded. Instead, protection felt like an afterthought.
Incompetence, Bias, and the Cost of Negligence
When I first sought help, I was met with a disheartening mix of incompetence and personal bias. I was given little more than signposting, while the officer who took my initial report failed to correctly record or act on the crimes I disclosed.
That failure caused further harm.
It compounded the trauma I was already carrying and set in motion a cascade of consequences that never should have occurred.
*21/12/23 – PC R + PC ***********
Competent Officer Number 1 Arrested
Each retelling felt like reopening a fresh wound. After the police caused further harm through inaction, the system turned on the one officer who had tried to repair the damage left by a colleague’s failures. I often think about him now, and wonder whether he, too, has been deeply harmed by the same system.
Finding a Haven — Then Losing It
I endured six gruelling months before finding one other officer out of nineteen I could genuinely trust.
Jackie came from an unexpected place: Professional Standards. She was investigating anonymous claims that I had been groomed; a misconduct-in-public-office inquiry. Her involvement felt like a lifeline at a time when everything else had collapsed.
She didn’t pretend to have all the answers. She listened. She cared not just about the process, but also about the impact on the children and on me. For months, she offered a fragile sense of safety.
But that refuge was never secure.
The last officer who acted on what she and others uncovered now faces serious consequences for doing his job. That reality left me afraid, not just for Jackie, but for anyone within the system who dares to speak up, particularly when power and influence sit on the other side.
I remain profoundly thankful to Jackie. Her integrity and humanity stood in stark contrast to so much of what I experienced elsewhere.
Fear, Systemic Failure, and the Fight to Be Heard
The failures I witnessed and lived through have permanently altered my understanding of safety and justice. The trust I once placed in institutions meant to protect victims has been deeply compromised.
I live with the fear that these patterns continue unchecked.
Some days I wonder whether I will ever feel safe again — in my home, the county I grew up in, or the town where my children attend school. That sense of threat does not fade easily.
And yet, I hold onto this: I met two officers who genuinely cared. Two people within a broken system who tried to do the right thing.
Sharing my story is not about revenge.
It is about survival.
It is an act of defiance against silence; against the systems that rely on victims becoming so exhausted they can no longer continue.
This was never just about me.
It has always been about protecting those who are lost, isolated, and vulnerable.
You Are Not Alone
Your voice matters.
Even in the darkest moments, there are people who care; people who will listen, even when institutions will not. It is okay to seek help. It is okay to trust carefully. It is okay to lean on others when the weight becomes too much.
I will always advocate for my children and for others navigating similar harm. My journey has been shaped by loss, fear, and injustice, but it also carries the possibility of healing, growth, and safety.
If you are reading this and wondering whether anyone will hear you:
you are not alone.
— Sister Laura
