When more than 10,000 women and children are deemed to be at high risk of being murdered or seriously injured by their current or former partners, today’s report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary on how police forces deal with domestic violence makes for worrying reading. The report finds ‘alarming and unacceptable’ weakness in police responses to domestic abuse.

Theresa May has rightly reacted quickly, creating a national oversight group on how to implement HMIC’s recommendations, but the report conclusions and the reaction seem to have ignored the fact that this report does not exist in a vacuum. It is yet another example of a police force that lets women down time and time again and it is time for a new approach.

The report contained an interesting dichotomy: alongside condemnation of how forces handled domestic abuse, the report acknowledged that nearly all police forces had references to how important tackling it was in their strategies. But with only eight out of 43 forces found to be responding well to domestic abuse, it is clear that for many this is only a paper priority.

So what is the problem? Well the impact of cuts to services and years of government refusal to accept that for women the preferred services are independent and women-run have had a massive impact. As does the lack of prioritisation of the issue by police commissioners. But it is clear from the report and from the testimonies of victims and service professionals that the culture in which these crimes are investigated is rotten.

The report is peppered with testimony from victims who say they felt like domestic violence was treated like a second-class crime, with officers dismissive of their complaints.

Even more worrying were the stories of victims who had been charged with a crime after their abusive partner reported them for assault. Counter accusations are a common tactic used by perpetrators to exert control over their victims, but, despite this, in several cases officers failed to gather or completely ignored evidence of this, effectively supporting ongoing abuse through services designed to support victims.

Is it any wonder that this is the norm when in the last few weeks alone we have seen the Metropolitan police sued by a woman who was preyed upon by an on-duty officer after she reported an assault by her partner and in another force officers are being investigated after leaving a voicemail on a victim’s phone describing her as a slag.

This lack of care for women victims stems from a culture where women are second-class and therefore the crimes committed against them as women become trivialised and acceptable.

This is the culture we live in and this is the culture the police exist in. No number of targets and awareness courses will change that. A radical approach is needed to erase sexism from the system and transform it into a police force that protects all women and works to end violence.

The next Labour government should launch an inquiry on institutional sexism in the police and the criminal justice system, looking not just at the way violence against women is tackled but at the experiences of women employees, the impact of police commissioners and how women offenders are treated.

This report should be lead by women experts in this area, because one of the most shocking things about today’s report was that despite it echoing what the women’s sector has been saying for years it took a report from inside the system to have any impact. And when the system is as broken as this we cannot rely on internal fixes, because women’s lives quite literally depend on it.

Photo: Megan Trace