WORDS: Punk Food Bandita

A recent domestic homicide review (DHR) for another young woman killed by a perpetrator with a history of abusive behaviour shows that our responses to domestic abuse and stalking needs to move as quickly as our technology does.

Alice Ruggles was 24 years old when she was murdered by her ex-partner, Trimaan Dhillon in October 2016 after she ended her 14 month relationship with him. Dhillon was a Lance Corporal in the British Army at the time of the offense and both the police and his superiors were aware of his behaviour in his relationships, both with Alice and another ex-girlfriend.

Alice ended the relationship after his controlling behaviour worsened and she found out that Dhillon had been using dating sites to contact other women. It was at this point when the stalking element of his abuse of Alice began to escalate. She was bombarded with text messages, calls and unannounced visits, often telling her he would leave her alone before he inevitably contacted her again immediately after. He caused problems with her flat mates and friends and contacted her family after she had left him, as well as threatening to publish intimate pictures of her. Alice would also notice that messages that appeared in her inbox would quickly disappear. After he referred to an issue involving one of her friends, she challenged him on this behaviour, saying ”once you realise I have done nothing to break your trust you can stop hacking into my stuff”. Dhillon replied with ”no”.

A month before her death, Alice heard knocks at the door, but every time she got up and looked through the spyhole there was no one there. Suspecting him, she rang him and he told her he was in Princess Gardens in Edinburgh, the city where the barracks he resided in was. The third knock was on her bedroom window, not the door, and when she opened the curtains she saw Dhillon carrying flowers and chocolates which he put on the windowsill before he backed away with his hands in an upright position.

Just weeks later, Dhillon travelled from Edinburgh to Gateshead, Tyne & Wear where Alice lived and stabbed her. She was found by her flatmate. Dhillon has been sentenced to at least 22 years, and still denies murder, claiming she fell on a knife when she lunged at him.

As someone who works in this field, a few things struck me about the case. How loved Alice was by her friends and family. What a hole her absence has left in their lives that no prison sentence will ever be able to comfort. But also how familiar the events leading up to her death sounded to me. If you are mercifully untouched by domestic abuse, you may read her story and think it sounds shocking. Most of it isn’t. Every day I have people sat in front of me telling me how they have ended a call to the police after being on hold for a long period of time, as she did when trying to use the 101 number to report an incident. How they have been blackmailed with the threat of intimate photographs being published online. How their partner caused conflict with their friends and associates when there had never been any before. How they were subjected to obsessive jealousy around fidelity to find that it was their accuser that was cheating. How they were reluctant to press charges because the perpetrators occupation would mean instant dismissal and they didn’t want to ruin their life- they just wanted to be left alone.

The response she had to the stalking is depressingly familiar in how inconsistent it was. While Alice felt reassured after support given from police the first time she called, this wasn't always the case. Many victims of this crime are not taken seriously, or even believed. Technology that may once have sounded only possible in a James Bond film can now be purchased for pennies on mainstream shopping sites. They can be installed on phones, cars, plugs, children’s toys and more. They can be made to look like almost anything. Too many times have I heard it suggested that someone is stressed or paranoid when they have said they are being followed or tracked, only for their fears to be confirmed at a later date.

Technology moves incredibly fast and legislation and support organisations find they cannot keep up. Writing educational courses to educate survivors on how best to protect themselves are difficult to deliver as they will be outdated within months of them being written. Stalking legislation was improved in 2017 and amended last year to provide better protections, but as police numbers, resources and training is stripped, the understanding of these laws by some frontline officers is still woefully short. As with the police, domestic abuse and health services are expected to give more with far less, which is just not sustainable and leaves those experiencing domestic abuse at more risk.

The army too has key lessons to learn on this case. How it responds to domestic abuse by its soldiers and understand that they need to be part of the safety planning process to protect victims. There is also more that needs to be done in their care of veterans and serving personnel. Dhillon was already known by his employers to be abusive and obsessive with partners, and was once involved with Home Office police due to his behaviour towards an ex. It’s been shown in the domestic homicide review that procedures were not followed correctly which lead to information not being properly recorded.

Improvements need to be made to all frontline services who support those experiencing domestic abuse or stalking, and for that to happen they need to be fully funded, staffed and resourced. Those who are experiencing this type of abuse are experts in body language- they have had to be in order to have survived so far, and if they sense they are a burden to someone’s workload, or feel they are a nuisance, they will pick up on this, feeling they are wasting your time and are much less likely to come forward again. This is not as it should be.

Among the recommendations for the DHR is that the Home Office considers the legal and social impact of the non-regulation of spyware in relation to domestic abuse and stalking victims, for the Ministry Of Defence to review its domestic abuse policy and the Home Office to consider a national definition of stalking in order to ensure consistent understanding and practice.

The job of a DHR is to look at the facts and what lessons we can learn from these in order that we might prevent such deaths in the future. It is now the job of government and services to listen so the world does not have to be stolen of people like Alice anymore.