41 minutes ago
By Malcolm Prior, @NewsMPrior, BBC News, rural affairs correspondent
Victims of domestic abuse in the countryside are still being let down by a “woeful” number of convictions five years after a report criticised the work of several rural police forces, says its author.
Former North Yorkshire police and crime commissioner Julia Mulligan said the latest figures for rural areas obtained by the BBC suggested there had been no “significant improvement in outcomes for victims and survivors”.
The response of seven rural forces was found to be “largely inadequate” in 2019.
Both police and prosecutors said they were now working hard to improve the investigation, prosecution and handling of domestic abuse in rural communities.
In 2019, the landmark “Captive and Controlled” report studied police responses to domestic abuse in Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall, Dorset, Durham, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.
It found the forces’ handling of domestic abuse in the countryside – where victims are often more isolated and abuse can go on 25% longer than in urban areas as a result – was “largely inadequate”.
Five years on and Freedom of Information figures obtained by the BBC show the number of offences reported to the seven forces has gone up by 15% compared with the year of the report.
But, while there were more than 107,900 reports of domestic abuse between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024, the number of successful convictions is significantly lower than the number of offences reported.
Figures for the seven forces could only be provided for the nine months up to December 2023 but they show there were just 3,312 successful
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