(Names changed where indicated)
Originally written: July 2024
Reviewed & archived: January 2026
Content Warning
This post references police investigations, institutional scrutiny, and the psychological impact of retraumatisation. It may be distressing for survivors of abuse or those affected by professional misconduct.
Two Years On — Archive Note
As part of the Two Years On series, this entry has been reviewed for archival publication. It was written during a period of acute stress, while events were still unfolding and outcomes were unclear.
I am not rewriting history.
The original blogs remain stored and unpublished on my former site.
What follows is a contemporaneous account, shared now with distance and clarity. My understanding has evolved, but the experience itself has not changed.
Two Years On: Before the Questions Began
Two years on, what stays with me is not just what happened, but how clearly I remember it.
For years, I had been made to question my own memory. That doubt followed me long after I left. But the past two years have taught me something I can no longer be argued out of.
My memory is not broken.
I remember the details because I was living in survival mode. Every interaction mattered. Every email, every police attendance, every phone call carried weight. I was not confused. I was documenting because I had already learned that if I did not create the record myself, the record might not exist at all.
Before Jackie arrived, I had barely slept. I was cross-referencing timelines, disclosures and conduct concerns, trying to understand how I had been positioned as the “victim” of a crime I did not believe had occurred, while my rights as an actual victim of domestic abuse had already been stripped away.
That is the part I still come back to.
Integrity had become suspicious.
Professional competence had become questionable.
And the person who had tried to protect my children was being examined in a way that others, whose actions had caused real harm, did not appear to be.
This was not theoretical to me. It was my life. My children’s safety. My credibility. My trust in the system.
Jackie had a clear role that day. She was there as part of the investigation. Ordinarily, that should have made me guarded.
But I remember how she listened.
Not performatively. Not defensively. Not like someone trying to reduce me to a statement or a risk category.
She listened like she understood there was a wider context.
That mattered.
Despite everything that followed, and despite what others later thought or said, I have never moved away from what I witnessed in her actions.
Integrity.
I still stand by that.
📅 29th July 2024
The Day Jackie Arrived
Jackie was calm, professional and kind.
That somehow made the day both grounding and unbearable.
Some of her questions took me back into months I had survived only by not fully feeling them. I had spent so long functioning, documenting, evidencing, explaining, chasing and trying to stay upright that being asked to revisit it all again felt like being dragged back through something I was still inside.
Then, in the middle of all of it, my youngest decided it was time for their surprise.
They appeared in a dress, proud and glowing, waiting for the reaction. Jackie and her colleague covered their eyes, playing along without hesitation. Then came the twist. I was handed an Anna dress from Frozen and informed, with complete certainty, that I had to wear it too.
So there I sat, dressed as Anna, while investigators asked whether I might be a victim of something I could barely comprehend.
The absurdity of it and the weight of it existed in exactly the same moment.
I struggled to understand why ordinary professional conversations about motorbikes, music, safeguarding processes and police procedure suddenly needed to be reinterpreted as something else. The suggestion seemed to be that mutual professional respect was not believable unless it concealed another motive.
That was difficult to process.
Not because safeguarding should not be taken seriously. It absolutely should. But because the contrast was impossible to ignore.
My children and I had already experienced catastrophic failures from the same force. Abuse had continued. Safeguarding had failed. My victim status had been removed. I had been passed from officer to officer. I had genuinely believed my case had been referred to the CPS, only to later discover that was not true.
And now, somehow, the scrutiny appeared to be directed at the one officer who had actually tried to act.
That contrast has never left me.
What I Knew and What I Needed to Know
Before the meeting, I went through every email and message exchanged between Sergeant Smith and me.
Line by line.
I did not believe the allegations against him. But after everything that had already happened, the lies, the failures and the removal of my victim status, I needed to be certain. My trust had been damaged too many times. I needed to know it had not failed me again.
At that point, life felt relentless in a way I still do not have adequate words for.
I had been followed, with no explanation as to why. I was off sick from work with trauma. I could not leave the house without hypervigilance taking over. I felt watched, destabilised and once again exposed by the very systems that were supposed to protect people like me.
Months earlier, two officers had attended my workplace following a complaint about Sergeant Smith’s conduct. It came as a shock to everyone, including my colleagues.
Since fleeing domestic abuse in November 2023, Sergeant Smith had been the only officer who demonstrated competence, consistency and a working understanding of safeguarding in practice. He treated my children’s safety as central, not procedural. He took the evidence seriously. He acted.
That was why I respected him.
Not because I was vulnerable. Not because I was confused. Not because I had misread professional kindness.
Because he did his job when others had not.
What appeared to trigger concern was the time he had invested in my case. The implication seemed to be that attention to a complex safeguarding case was itself suspicious.
That was painful to sit with, because the original harm had not come from too much professional attention.
It had come from the absence of it.
By the time Jackie arrived, I was terrified. Terrified of what would be raised. Terrified of what could be taken out of context. Terrified of being discredited again.
In reality, Jackie and her colleague were professional and respectful. They had access to only two days of email correspondence. Almost immediately after they arrived, I took them upstairs and showed them the files I had compiled documenting the coercive and controlling behaviour I had been through.
Those files were separate from the file I had prepared specifically around my interactions with Sergeant Smith.
The coercive control evidence was comprehensive, categorised and structured around the Home Office framework. The separate Sergeant Smith file contained the correspondence, context and chronology relating to my interactions with him.
Questions followed.
I referred back to the work I had already done. The evidence was thorough, but I could see how parts of it could be misread without context.
So I made one thing clear from the outset.
I had no intention of unfairly implicating anyone.
The Problem With Reframing Humanity as Suspicion
What I heard that day was difficult to absorb.
I felt conflicted throughout. I could have made their job easier. I could have allowed empathy to be reframed as impropriety. I could have let professional respect be turned into something else.
But at what cost?
At the cost of undermining the one person who had tried to protect my children.
One thing I have come to understand is that once the label of “victim” is attached to someone, it can become fixed in the minds of others. It can follow you regardless of context, evidence, intelligence or professional background. It can quietly strip you of credibility while claiming to protect you.
Before I met Sergeant Smith, my victim status had already been removed in a way that destroyed my trust in policing entirely.
After that, I stopped seeing institutions.
I started seeing people.
And the central fact remained unchanged.
Sergeant Smith acted when others did not.
The Original Failure
What continues to be overlooked is the original failure.
PC Rolls’ actions in November 2023 allowed abuse to continue. That failure altered the course of our lives.
He lied to my face in December. Proving that meant starting this investigation myself, independently, with no meaningful support. I had to gather the evidence, organise it, cross-reference it and force the record to exist.
That process consumed everything.
My time.
My mental stability.
My ability to function.
Very nearly my life.
I needed my voice to be heard. I needed the record to exist, even if no one in authority appeared willing to look at it honestly.
That is why the focus on Sergeant Smith felt so impossible to reconcile.
The officer whose actions allowed harm to continue appeared to face no meaningful consequence.
The officer who interrupted that harm became the subject of scrutiny.
That is the part I still cannot make sense of.
What I Told Jackie
Jackie seemed genuinely surprised by the extent of what I shared.
I explained that understanding intent mattered to me. After everything I had endured, I needed to know whether the actions taken against us had stemmed from negligence, misjudgement, systemic failure or something more deliberate.
I could see three possible explanations.
None of them changed the outcome that mattered most.
Those three boys still had their mother.
And that was because he acted.
So yes, I supported his account of events, even where it differed from how I had experienced certain moments. Not out of loyalty. Not out of denial. Not out of naivety.
Because the broader truth remained unchanged.
He acted when others did not.
And sometimes, integrity is punished because it exposes everything around it.
What the Files Revealed
There is one detail I cannot leave unaddressed.
The file Jackie asked for, the one specifically relating to my interactions with Sergeant Smith, was already in police possession.
Separately, the wider evidence of coercive and controlling behaviour had also been provided. I had organised it clearly, using the Home Office framework. My fifth investigating officer had been given every piece.
By that summer, I should have understood what was happening.
I later discovered that the OneDrive evidence link I had been asked to provide had never been fully reviewed.
If anyone had opened the folder marked Impact on Health, they would have found my entire chronology for both PC Rolls and Sergeant Smith, with every piece of correspondence attached and dated.
The moment I realised where those files sat was the moment the truth finally settled.
My domestic abuse case had never been investigated in its entirety.
And it was never going to be.
Four days before Sergeant Smith attended court, my domestic abuse case was dropped.
Make of that what you will.
More to follow. Slowly. When I am ready.
NAAVoices documents the lived experience of those failed by systems designed to protect them. If any part of this resonates with you, you are not alone.
Accountability & Experience: My West Mercia Police Story
