A survivor’s reflection on ABE interviews, police failures, and coercive control — and what the system still needs to understand

The Day I Forgot to Remember

Two years ago today.

Two years ago today, 730 days, I sat through my first ABE interview.

I acknowledged the trigger. I know myself well enough now to name what is happening when it happens. I had taken half a day’s annual leave, but once work had finished, I couldn’t leave. I cleared my room, because that is what my nervous system does when it needs to make order of the physical space while the internal one becomes overwhelming, and I have stopped apologising for it. I turned it outward, the way I always do, because doing something for other people is what keeps me here on the hardest days.

My patients today had no idea what today was. My colleagues had no idea. I held it together, I did my job, I held the mask on through every appointment, and that is something no one will ever take from me. They tried to make sure my life didn’t matter. They did not succeed. I am not the person their failures tried to create. I am the person I built from the wreckage of them.

This is the truth about that day. Two years on, I am ready to tell it properly.

The five months before

Before I tell you about the room, I need to tell you what it took to get there.

For five months, West Mercia Police had effectively denied me the right to give a statement. Not through any formal decision. Through neglect, inaction, and the conduct of individual officers who had failed or refused to do their jobs. Through what I now understand is formally recognised as victim-blaming. Through a pattern of behaviour that did not just fail me in isolation, but created the conditions for everything that followed.

A victim’s right to give a statement is not a courtesy. It is not discretionary. It is a legal right enshrined in the Victims’ Code. And for five months, that right had been withheld from me.

The consequences of that did not stay within the walls of a police investigation. They bled into every other arena of my life. Without a formal record, without a statement, without the investigation being progressed as it should have been, the family court proceedings continued in a vacuum, and in that vacuum, the abuse continued by another means. My children were placed at further risk. And the person responsible deployed what is now well documented in the research as DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. Textbook. Documented. And made significantly easier by five months of institutional inaction that handed him exactly the space he needed to operate in.

I had a retired Detective Sergeant of the same force in my family. He was the one who first opened my eyes, in the weeks after my initial disclosure, to what the police should have done and had failed to do. I felt I had already asked too much of him. I had a separate aunt, also a retired officer from the same force, who guided me in making the formal complaint against the first officer. After January, I stopped asking. I withdrew from all of them. They were cc’d into nothing further. They knew nothing more. They still don’t understand that I am not the niece and goddaughter I once was.

I was completely alone in this. Not because there was no one. Because I could not bear to keep asking people who had already given so much, and because i was already someone who never asked for help, and when pushed to accept i did with guilt of putting on others, so i stopped, that version of me that was pushed to accept any help had been systematically dismantled over four years of being told she didn’t deserve it.

This is not incidental. The failure of West Mercia Police to act was not a process error with no consequences. It was the open door through which the continuation of abuse walked. 

During those five months, my body was failing under the weight of it.

I was going dizzy. Holding on to walls and door frames. Collapsing under my desk when triggers hit without warning, and they were everywhere, in letters, in emails, in the sound of certain words in certain tones. For months, I could not open correspondence from my solicitor, because with every letter came a new accusation, a new document, a new version of my own life authored by the person who had spent years systematically dismantling it. My nervous system had learned that opening those envelopes meant pain, and so it refused. My colleague had to read the Cafcass report to me. I could not do it alone.

I had lost over five stone. Four dress sizes. I had been running on adrenaline and legislation and very little else for months, and it showed in everything: my body, my face, my hair falling out, vomiting every meal, my wardrobe, which by that point consisted of my nursing uniform and hand-me-downs from my teenage son.

I am neurodivergent. I say that here, in this section, because it is directly relevant to what I am about to describe, not as an explanation, and not as an excuse, but because it is the reason the evidence existed in the form that it did. My neurodivergence is not a weakness. In this process, it was the only thing holding it together.

By the time the 10th of April arrived, I had already disclosed the full details of what I had lived through to seven West Mercia officers. In person. From the beginning. Every single time, because the person before had either failed to record it, failed to act on it, or failed to understand it. Seven officers. And beyond the police, I had disclosed to multiple other organisations: Cafcass, social services, legal teams, schools, and domestic abuse services. Each time, a different room. The same wound opened. Starting from scratch.

My children

There is something that sits beneath everything I have described, and I cannot do it full justice here. But I will not omit it.

My children were victims too. They had lived in the same house, breathed the same air, grown up inside the same environment of control and fear. They had been emotionally and psychologically abused. They had been neglected. They had been threatened. They had been physically pushed into walls. And for a significant period, their existence as victims had not been formally recognised, because the officers dealing with my case had not treated it as the serious, separate matter that it was and on initial disclosure, failed to event document it, amongst other things..

According to my records and the subject access records, it took the NSPCC pushing me to chase it before PC Finch passed the crime relating to my children was over to the PVP, after being informed he had done so a month before it was recorded in January 2024. When it was recorded, it happened within minutes of a routine email update, as though it were an administrative afterthought rather than the formal acknowledgement that my children had been living through abuse. Without that external pressure, I do not believe it would have happened at all.

The children’s investigating officer was DC Rhian Davies. When I met with her for the second time at Shrewsbury police station to provide a statement regarding my children, I was referencing events from a document I had taken. This was the start of my own written statement. After asking what I was pulling the information from, I recall her stating, “that’s coercive control”. I can still see her sitting in the chair opposite me, flicking through the pages. According to my records, she asked whether she could share it with her inspector. I agreed. She later confirmed via email that she had done so, and following a chase, confirmed that her supervisor had subsequently made contact with PC Finch’s supervisor.

The officer who eventually came to address my initial complaint surrounding PC Rolls and the lack of action on breaches of my non-molestation order, who arrived on the 9th of March 2024, and subsequently, following our local MP submitting a complaint on my behalf surrounding the coercive control investigation, was unaware of any of this. He had no knowledge of any email, no knowledge of my children’s case, and no knowledge of me, prior to receiving the complaint. He acted on my disclosure. He was the first person to do so.

I want to be clear that I am raising a question, not making an allegation. DC Davies came from the same department to which I was eventually handed over. The information I had provided had been passed up a chain of command within that department. It had reached a supervisor. And yet the officer who ultimately acted, the one who listened, the one who progressed the case, had no idea any of it existed before the complaint landed on his desk.

I don’t have an explanation for that. What I have is a documented record, and a question that has never been adequately answered: if the information reached the department, and the department was already involved through DC Davies, why was nothing done? Why did it take a formal complaint and the involvement of an MP?

My boys gave their own ABE interviews in March 2024. I had been in that building. I knew what those rooms asked of a person. And my children, one of whom is autistic and could not disclose in the way the system recognises as standard, were asked to sit in those rooms and give their own accounts of what they had lived through.

I had sat outside that room while my children did what I was about to do.

That experience is its own specific, devastating thing, and I am still finding the right language for it. What I will say is that by the time I walked into that building for my own interview in April, my body already knew what that place meant. I had already been there as their mother.

The only person who listened

The only officer in this entire process who had treated me with honesty and genuine care was Conrad Smith, who held the rank of Sergeant at the time. 

I will refer to him throughout this post as Sgt Smith, as that was his rank during the events described.

He had come into my life exactly one month before the ABE. One month. He had worked with me to go through the timeline chronologically, the way it had actually happened, from the beginning, and for the first time in five months, I had been allowed to process rather than just perform. 

For the first time, someone in that uniform had sat across from me and actually listened. And for the first time in five months, something that felt like faith was beginning to form, not in the police, not in the institution, not in the uniform, in him. In one person who had chosen to do his job properly, in a case where almost everyone before him had chosen not to.

I had told him plainly, more than once: I cannot be passed over to someone new. I cannot go through this from the beginning again. He knew about the dizziness. The collapsing under my desk. The inability to open letters. He knew what each transfer had cost me, not because I had told him, but because he had seen it, every time I relived a part of what I had been through. And he had heard it from the people around me, family, friends, colleagues, early help workers, who had told him, in person, in short summaries they had emailed to him for gathering statements, in their own words, that I was not the person I had once been. Since disclosure, they had feared for me. More than once. And he knew that too.

He reassured me that the officers taking over would look after me. That he would still oversee the case. That the complaint side would continue to be dealt with, though that had not been a priority up to that point, given the volume of information I had continued to provide.

And then he handed me over. Not because he chose to. Because the system decided his rank meant he shouldn’t be doing that job.

My new officer in charge was PC Jess Davies. Investigating Officer Number 4. She confirmed that he would remain involved in an oversight capacity and that the complaint element would still sit with him. It was something. But it wasn’t the same. And I think anyone who has ever experienced a breakdown in trust, in any context, understands why.

I am a nurse. I understand continuity of care. I understand what it costs a patient when you break it, particularly in complex cases, particularly where trust has been damaged, particularly where the relationship between the professional and the person in their care has taken significant time and significant pain to build. 

We do not reassign a patient mid-treatment simply because of a clinician’s grade. We consider the case’s complexity. We consider the history. We consider what a transfer will cost the person at the centre of it. We ask whether the system’s administrative convenience is worth more than the human being’s ability to continue.

The police made a different calculation. And I was the one who paid for it.

I did not feel comfortable that my new officer in charge fully understood the extent of what I had been through, or what it had cost me to get to this point. And I did not feel reassured with the officer who would be conducting the interview. Two more people. Two more times, sitting in the home where the abuse had taken place, reliving it from the beginning, before I had even set foot in that interview room. 

By that point, it had become something close to autopilot, the history of what I had lived through leaving me at speed, dates and events and details firing out one after another, because I had learned that thinking, truly thinking, while I was doing it was more than my mind could hold. It was safer to list. Safer to recite. Safer to keep moving than to stop and feel what I was saying. Because if I stopped and felt it, I wasn’t sure I would be able to start again.

The day came, and a third officer was present to observe. I hadn’t met her, but something about her felt genuine, and in a room where I was scanning every surface for safety the way people with PTSD do, that mattered. But she wasn’t asking the questions.

I was also walking in fully aware that the officers present were close colleagues of the officers whose failures had denied me this statement for five months, officers about whom I had been forced to file a formal complaint. I am not suggesting that it influenced what happened. I am saying I carried that awareness in through the door, and that it cost energy I did not have.

The emails sent in the early hours

In the days before the ABE, while my children slept, I sat at my kitchen table in the early hours of the morning and wrote to the officer who would be conducting my interview.

Not once. Across multiple nights.

The first email went out at 1:53 in the morning on the 6th of April, four days before the interview. In it, I laid out everything she would need to know about interviewing me. Not because anyone had asked me to. Because I knew, from everything I had already lived through in this process, that if I didn’t do it, it would not be done.

I cited the College of Police guidance on investigative interviewing. I cited Section 20 of the Equality Act 2010, the legal duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and I broke it down, applied it to my situation, and explained what I needed. I told her I sit on one foot and change positions due to an injury from my RAF service, and that if I looked like I was about to stand up or walk out, I was just moving position. I told her I divert from questions in emotionally heightened environments, that I sometimes can’t get words out, that I occasionally create words or mispronounce them and that this is not a sign of instability or inability. I told her to remind me to drink, because my blood pressure had been through the floor for months.

I told her what I needed to help with recall. I asked her to bring me back to where we were if I trailed off. I asked her to confirm whether I was allowed to reference the previous officer’s failures, because those failures were a direct part of the continuation of the abuse and the psychological harm I had suffered.

I wrote: “I NEVER use or even say the word ‘disabled’, because I don’t see having a neurodiversity as a disability, it’s given me an awful lot, however, every piece of legislation seems to class it as one. So given none of it has been followed so far, I am going to follow in line with it.”

I wrote: “I can not risk anyone else being so horrific within their role, and I will no longer expect anyone to have any understanding regarding difference, or anyone reacting to situations.”

And at the end, I wrote: “Tell me what to wear… please.”

I had no clothes. My wardrobe was my uniform and my son’s hand-me-downs. I was asking the officer conducting my ABE what to wear to the interview because I had nothing, was alone, and didn’t know what a person was supposed to look like when they walked into that room.

She did not reply to that question. Or to most of the others.

Then, the following night — at 2:27 in the morning on the 7th of April — I sent a second email. Six attachments. A full 77-page coercive control statement. A document titled “The Beginning and The End.” A document called All Faith Lost, a diary of entries from the time. A breakdown of evidence-based points under the statutory guidance. A timeline, seventy pages long, nowhere near finished, finances not yet touched. Evidence, built by me alone, across months, because no one else was going to build it.

Among the documents across both emails was the police’s own guidance on neurodiversity, sent to the officer preparing to interview a neurodivergent victim, days before she sat across from her.

I ended that second email with this:

“I am trying my best to break down the damage that was done. It has left me with a constant fear that mistakes or just pure incompetence will result in more harm, and I am struggling to step back. I have lived this every day and most nights since the reality that if I didn’t prove what he did, then no one would. I just hope you nor Jess think that I am overstepping, or that I don’t value your time and help.”

At 2:27 in the morning, I was apologising for sending too much evidence.

I was apologising for being thorough. For caring. For doing the work that no one else had done.

In the same email, I felt compelled to write, unprompted: “NO REQUIREMENT FOR A SUPPORT PERSON!! I have full capacity and understanding!! I assess capacity professionally!!” I was asserting my own mind before anyone had questioned it — because enough people already had.

Preparing to walk in

Sgt Smith replied in the morning, after reading what I sent him. The same documents were sent to the officer conducting the interview. He said it was very comprehensive. He said he was concerned about the impact reliving it would have on me. He said, “Do you have someone who can be there with you when you get home? You’ll need time to decompress.”

He was the only person who asked that question. 

The officer who would spend four hours with me did not ask it. There was no IDVA present. There was no trauma-informed debrief arranged. There was no welfare protocol in place after that had all closed due to lack of crime being recorded, despite the MARAC hearing in January, five months on, and all the other services had done all they could to protect and help my children, other than the police.

The morning of my ABE, a letter from PC Finch arrived, dated December 2023. It arrived on the 10th of April 2024, four months late, on the day I was due to walk into that room and give the most important statement of my life. The second officer, who had failed to allow me to give a statement, had the crime record disclosed. Whose failures had been part of the five months of inaction that had cost me everything described in this post. And on that morning, of all mornings, a letter arrived to remind me of exactly that.

The timing was not just inconvenient. It was destabilising. I was already running on nothing, blood pressure through the floor, four years mapped across mind maps built alone in the early hours. And this letter was addressed only to my middle child. Not to my eldest, my autistic son, pushed into walls, threatened, psychologically dismantled in the same house, whose neurodivergence meant he could not disclose in the way the system demands. He had also sat an ABE the month before. He was made invisible again by the same officer who had not recorded what he should have on the morning I was preparing to try to make it all visible.

I responded at 2:32 that afternoon, less than three hours before the ABE, questioning the timing, questioning Jonathan’s exclusion, and attaching the NAS Police Guide on neurodiversity, a guide to trauma bonds, and the Justice Guide to SpLDs. The following morning, the officer replied, acknowledging the delay, noting his familiarity with neurodiversity, and that he found the guides useful. A victim had sent an officer his own organisation’s neurodiversity guidance on the day of her ABE. He was reading it the morning after.

I had spent the nights before building mind maps. Not notes, mind maps, the way my neurodivergent brain actually retains and recalls information, the way I got through my degree and every qualification since. Each map centred on a different aspect of coercive control, with examples branching from each node, drawn from WhatsApp histories, photographs, diary entries, and specific memories, all organised, evidenced, and mapped back to the statutory guidance.

I had started making video diaries. Not written records, videos of myself talking directly to the camera, because I was so frightened of what I was walking into that I needed a version of me to exist outside of it. Proof, somewhere, that this person was real, and that she had tried.

 I had gone through four years of abuse and broken it down, piece by piece, into each recognised category, because I knew that with both my neurodivergence and the trauma later diagnosed with PTSD, I had developed, I was scared that my recall under pressure would vanish. By that point, I shouldn’t have worried. I remember every date for the four years and now the years following. But after five months of retraumatisation, I feared the impact on my ability to string the sentences together in an emotionally heightened environment. So I did what I always do: I built a system. I had made the chaos navigable.

I had also phoned my grandma earlier. My safety person.

I don’t know exactly what broke in me that day. I had been shutting the world out for months, not because I didn’t need people, but because I had so little capacity left and I was terrified of what it would cost me to let anyone see how bad it had become. My grandma was someone I didn’t want to worry. She didn’t know the full extent of what I had been living through, because I hadn’t told her. I hadn’t wanted to put that on her.

But I phoned her, and I broke down completely.

She was frightened for me. That was the thing I hadn’t expected, not just her sadness, but her fear. She had known something was wrong, but hearing it, hearing me in that state in the days before this interview, frightened her in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I had been carrying it so quietly, so privately, that the people who loved me most had only been seeing the edges of it. And in that phone call, some of the edges came away.

By that point, if I am honest, I barely knew who I was outside of that uniform. The nurse was still intact. The rest of me had been stripped back to something much more fundamental. 

So I went as the only other version of myself I still recognised: a mother. A person who had spent five months fighting to keep her children safe, who had to get through this to show them that you do not give up, that you do not lie down, that abuse does not get to win. 

My children had lived through what I had lived through. They had sat in that same building and given their own accounts. The least I could do was walk into that room and give mine.

I had developed a mask by then. Anyone who has lived through prolonged coercive control understands what I mean: the controlled exterior, the professional composure, the face that tells the world you are coping and reveals nothing of what is underneath. I had worn it for so long it had become automatic. The problem was that I needed to take it off in that room, and I did not feel safe enough with those officers to do it.

I did everything I could to keep from crying. Not to show weakness. Maybe that was wrong. But I was not safe enough to be anything other than armoured, and I think that needs to be said clearly in a world that tells victims they must perform their trauma convincingly enough to be believed.

The room

The ABE suite is a normal house on a normal street. Two sofas. A kitchen. A layout designed to feel domestic, to feel safe. And I mean this genuinely, with the right people, the right training, and the right understanding of what a survivor carries through that door, it could be exactly what it is trying to be. A sanctuary. It deserves to be.

It wasn’t that for me that day.

According to my records, when I arrived in that room on the 10th of April, the interviewing officer confirmed she had not had the chance to read the documents I had sent her. Not the timeline. Not the evidenceable points. Not the breakdown of mandatory statutory criteria. Not the police’s own neurodiversity guidance, sent across two nights in the early hours of the morning to the officer preparing to interview a neurodivergent victim who had spent those nights making sure she had everything she needed.

I sat with my files and paper work as if i was prepared for a clinical meeting, but it softened to points where i held a cushion held against me and my fidget rings turning in my hands. There were cameras, one positioned on me, one on the whole room, and a recording room directly behind me where I knew another officer was watching. I want to say something about that to anyone approaching an ABE who is frightened of being filmed: once I started talking, I stopped noticing the cameras entirely. You are too present in what you are saying to be conscious of the lenses. That part is more manageable than you fear it will be.

What is not manageable — what no one prepares you for — is what it does to your body.

My blood pressure had been critically low for months. We had to stop at times, despite trying to fight through it, because I could see stars at the edges of my vision and felt myself starting to go. I had developed a habit of tapping my shoulder when I was reliving, an automatic response I had found without understanding why. I didn’t learn until much later that it was a recognised form of trauma therapy. My body had found its own way to regulate without anyone guiding it, because no one was guiding it. It was doing everything it could to keep me upright in a room where my mind was being asked to go to the worst places it had ever been.

And then came the moments I still carry.

According to my records, the Home Office guidance on coercive and controlling behaviour was misquoted during the interview, the same guidance I had spent months building my entire case around, cross-referencing, evidencing, and sending to the officer days before. It caused confusion at the exact moment I needed absolute clarity.

Which should be captured on the official ABE recording, I repeated the information I had been told before starting the abe that nothing that happened after I left the relationship was relevant, that post-separation abuse did not count. That is factually and legally wrong. Post-separation coercive control is explicitly recognised in the statutory guidance. I said so at the time. I was told I was incorrect.

I also want to address something I left that room carrying, because I think it matters for anyone trying to understand what coercive control actually looks like.

I was directed to focus on consequences. On what happened when I did or didn’t comply. I understand why that framing exists — it forms part of how coercive control is evidenced. But coercive control is not simply “he will hit you if you do x, y or z.” 

For most victims, and certainly for me, the consequences were not primarily physical. They were profound, sustained, and relentless psychological harm. If I took our child somewhere alone, I would be accused of snatching them. If I questioned anything, he would return drunk, or on drugs, or with hours of silence designed to make me feel responsible for his state, and me, knowing my child was with him in that state, unable to do anything. And by the end, the consequence was threats to take his own life. Every few minutes. Relentlessly. Until the weight of managing that became its own form of imprisonment. That is coercive control. That is what I was trying to evidence in that room. And that is what the framing of consequences, applied too narrowly by someone who had not read the guidance, does not capture.

I left that interview feeling like I had done something wrong. Like the mind maps I had built, the WhatsApp histories broken down by category, the images, the dates, the memories painstakingly mapped against each area of the statutory guidance, because my neurodivergent brain and developing PTSD meant my recall under pressure was not reliable, were somehow the problem. Like the way I had organised, evidenced, and prepared was being viewed as the behaviour of someone difficult, rather than someone who had spent months compensating for everyone else’s failures.

I left feeling like I was the one in the wrong.

I was not the one conducting the interview.

Four hours. Eighteen months of a four-year timeline. And at the end of the first session, I was told no more time was allowed, and that we would have to come back and do it again.

During my second ABE, worse came.

More of the room. More trauma to face.

More than six months after that day, my fifth officer in charge, another reassignment, another person handed my case as though it were a file rather than a life, came to see me with her sergeant. According to my records of that meeting, she told me the footage from that day had been very difficult to watch.

Very difficult to watch.

I want to sit with that. Trained officers found it difficult to watch.

Imagine what it was to live.

After

Sgt Smith had asked that morning whether someone would be there when I got home. I had told him yes.

There was no one.

I didn’t want anyone to worry about me. The people closest to me, including those who had professional knowledge of exactly what had gone wrong in this case, had been kept at a distance since January. I had withdrawn from all of them. They didn’t know what day it was. They didn’t know what I was walking into. They still don’t know the full extent of what happened in those weeks. I couldn’t bear to keep being the person who asked for help from people who had already given everything they could. So I said yes, someone would be there, and I drove home alone.

I sat in my car for a long time before I went inside. The sky had changed colour. I don’t know how long I sat there.

Sgt Smith phoned to check on me. Not the officer who had conducted the interview. Conrad rang at 11 pm. I couldn’t speak about it in depth, I started talking about other things, I think I even spoke about motorbikes, to try and change the subject. According to my records, the message relayed back to him that evening was that I needed to focus on the consequences of the abuse for the next session. That I needed to think about that, to prepare, to come back ready to go through it in those terms.

I was sitting on the sofa when he rang. My middle son was asleep upstairs. I sat down on the sofa, fully dressed, coat still on. And I could not move.

I did not take the coat off. I did not lie down. I sat upright on the side of the sofa, in the dark, through the entire night. Numb. Empty. Hollowed out in a way I still don’t have adequate language for. Not sleeping, but not present either, the kind of state where your body has simply stopped responding to normal instructions because it has nothing left to give. The kind of state that is not dramatic or visible or legible to anyone who hasn’t been there. It just looks like someone sitting still. It is so much more than that.

Sometime in those hours, as the world outside stayed dark and quiet, I wrote this:

As the light began to come through the curtains in the morning, I got up.

I put my uniform on.

And I went to work.

At some point during that day, I needed to speak to one of the GPs about a patient. A small, routine thing. He looked at me and said of course, anything I needed, the words stung, “anything for you, trusted me completely.”

And that was it. That was all it took.

I had to walk out of that room.

Not because of anything terrible. Because of something kind. Because he knew who I was, what I did, and how I showed up for people, and in that moment, his simple, genuine trust in me was more than I could hold. I walked back down the corridor to my room, empty, numb, and beyond any level of traumatised I had ever experienced before. I knew, walking that corridor, that I would never be the same person I had been before the 10th of April 2024. I knew it with a certainty that had settled into my bones overnight on that sofa.

I was right. I wasn’t. But I would not allow what I was living through to touch the people who needed me. Not then. Not ever.

I sat at my desk between patients and wrote an email to myself, from my NHS address to my personal account, at 4:56 in the afternoon. A record. A timestamp. Proof that something was happening to me on this day.

Today I am scared.

I wrote about receiving another letter from him via a solicitor during my shift. I wrote about not being able to see the point of anything. I wrote that the only thing I could think of to spend money on was taking the boys somewhere nice so they would have some happy memories to remember me by. I wrote that I had so little left in me.

My patients had no idea. My colleagues had no idea. The mask was worn through every appointment. And then I sat at my desk and wrote that email to myself because there was nowhere else to put what was happening inside me.

What happened in the days that followed is documented. In diaries, in timestamps, in records that exist as evidence of exactly how close to the edge I was. I am not sharing all of it here; some of it belongs in the book, where it can be held properly. What I will say is that the distance between that sofa on the night of the 10th and where I ended up five days later is not complicated or ambiguous. It is a straight line. It begins in a building, with an officer who had not had the chance to read the documents sent to her across two nights in the early hours of the morning, including the police’s own guidance on neurodiversity, while I sat opposite her trying not to faint, trying not to cry, trying to hold on long enough to give a statement that two other officers had already decided I didn’t deserve to give.

What should have happened

I am a nurse. I understand trauma-informed care. I understand what it means to meet a person where they are, to hold space without re-injuring, to recognise when a body is in physiological crisis and respond accordingly.

A neurodivergent victim presenting for an ABE with documented history, displaying symptoms of PTSD (I was diagnosed less than six months later), history of collapsing under stress, five months of having her statement withheld, and detailed preparation emails sent across two nights in the early hours,  including the police’s own neurodiversity guidance, the College of Police investigative interviewing guidance, and a breakdown of her legal rights under the Equality Act, that person requires an IDVA. A specialist advocate. An officer who has read the case file. An officer who has read the guidance she is applying, including the guidance sent to her by the victim herself. An officer who has not recently been a close colleague of the officers the victim has been forced to formally complain about.

She should not have needed to be handed off to a new officer in the final weeks before the interview, after explicitly stating she cannot manage another transfer.

She should not spend two nights in the early hours preparing the officer for the interview she is about to give.

She should not arrive in that room to be told those documents had not been read.

She should not be told, after four hours, that she needed to not do it the way she had been doing it.

And she should never, not once, not in any version of a system that claims to support victims, have to build her own case file, source her own guidance, and educate her own interviewing officer, to compensate for the failures of the people she is trusting with her life.

That house could be a sanctuary. With the right people, the right preparation, and the basic professional obligation of reading the evidence sent across two nights in the early hours of the morning, it could be exactly what it is trying to be. I hope that one day it is.

What trauma-informed ABE practice should look like:

What came after — and what I will not omit

There is something else from this period that I will not omit, because to omit it would be to tell an incomplete truth.

The one officer in this entire process who had genuinely helped me, who had rung at 11 pm when no one else did, who had read what I sent, read a 77-page statement, hundreds of pages of timelined events, all documents I created due to the trauma I had endured by his colleagues, who had asked if someone would be there when I got home,  later faced criminal allegations of misconduct in public office. Those allegations were connected to his work on my case. They hung over him for fifteen months. A huge part of the proceedings against him had direct links to many involved in my own case.

I fought endlessly to ensure the truth was heard. The criminal allegations were dropped.

He was subsequently dismissed from the police service for gross misconduct. By that point, I understood he no longer had the strength to fight it.

I am not in a position to set out the full account here. That account, documented, evidenced, and told in full, will come in the book. What I will say is that what happened to him, and the timing and context of what was alleged against him, is a profound part of this story. A part that the women who come after me deserve to know.

The system did not just fail me. It then turned on the person who didn’t, and was closely supported by those who did.

Two years on

I sat at my desk. I acknowledged the trigger. I cleared my room. I wrote this blog tonight because writing for other people is what I do when I don’t know what else to do with myself.

My patients today had no idea what today was. My colleagues had no idea. I did my job. I held it together. I did what I have always done.

And something no one will ever take from me, not the officers who failed me, not the system that retraumatised me, not the person who spent years trying to convince me my life didn’t matter, is this: they did not turn me into the person their failures tried to create.

 I am still here. I still care. I still get up every single day and fight for other people, because that is who I am. It is who I was before any of this. It is who I will remain.

I am a different person now. Harder in some ways. More guarded. More certain about what I will and will not accept from the systems I move through, both personally and professionally. I still withdraw. I still have days when it comes back without warning, like today, like this morning, like a CPD log, an anniversary, and a room that needed clearing. But I understand now why I am the way I am, and I have stopped treating my own survival instincts as character flaws.

Things don’t get better with time. They change. You change.

I went through absolute hell. I would do it again to keep my children safe.

The difference now is that I go into that fight as the person I have become, not the person I was. I didn’t know much then.

I know a great deal now. And my drive in life, the thing that gets me out of bed on the days that are hardest, the thing that sat me at that kitchen table in the early hours of the morning building evidence for an officer who would not have the chance to read it, remains exactly what it has always been.

To protect others. In whatever form that takes. For as long as I am here to do it.

I’m not staying quiet. Not about any of it.

I share this because silence protects systems, not survivors. Every woman/man who sits at their kitchen table in the early hours, building evidence that should have been built for them, deserves to know they are not alone, they are not wrong, and the system’s failures are not theirs to carry.

Resources and support

If you are preparing for an ABE interview or experiencing failures in your investigation:

 A note on the memoir

I am slowly working through a full memoir of my experience, with these officers, with this process, with everything the timelines and the diaries and the 2:27am emails represent. It is not easy to write. It is not a comfortable thing to write.

What I have shared in this post covers a handful of days out of years of documented, evidence-based experience. Those handful of days alone have taken me 730 of them to be ready to put into words publicly. Some of it will take longer still. Some of it I am not ready for yet.

But I am working through it, as time allows, because the full account, not the fragments, not the blog posts, but the complete and honest truth of what happened to me, to my children, and to the one officer in this process who actually did his job, deserves to exist properly. For me. For my children. And for every woman sitting at a kitchen table in the early hours of the morning, building a case that someone else should have built for her.

It will come. In the meantime, this is what today gave me.

If you are approaching an ABE interview, you are entitled to an IDVA or specialist advocate. You are entitled to have post-separation abuse included. You are entitled to have neurodivergence accommodated. You do not have to prepare alone.

If you are in crisis right now, please contact Samaritans on 116 123, free, 24 hours a day. You can also text SHOUT to 85258.