UK police fail to protect domestic & sexual abuse victims, says watchdog

"This super-complaint draws together failures by the police to utilize four separate legal protections that exist for the benefit of vulnerable people experiencing domestic abuse, sexual violence, harassment and stalking, the overwhelming majority of whom are women and girls," the report, filed on Tuesday with the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, said.

The super-complaint listed four legal powers that the UK police had failed to use to protect women against the offenders: imposing bail conditions, arresting for breach of non-molestation orders, using domestic violence protection notices and orders, and applying restraining orders.

The CWJ called the UK police's inaction a "systemic failure" to meet the state's duty to protect a highly vulnerable section of the population and blamed an overall lack of training, ineffective supervision and low prioritization of issues of violence against women and girls as the reason why more was not being done to protect the victims.

The complaint was created based on accounts from 11 organizations working with victims of sexual and domestic abuse at the national and local level.

A super-complaint is a complaint made in the United Kingdom by a watchdog organization to a public authority if it appears that certain goods or services in the UK market are significantly harming the interests of consumers.

In 2018, the UK Crime Survey for England and Wales showed that an estimated 3 per cent of women aged 16 to 59 experienced some type of sexual assault in the country. The UK Office for National Statistics showed that an estimated 1.2 million women, almost twice the amount of men, had experienced some form of domestic abuse in 2018.