When Kate and her husband sat down one night to talk, he could never imagine what he was going to say: “I raped you. I’m sitting at you and I’m photographing you for years”.
WARNING: This report contains descriptions of sexual violence
When Kate and her husband sat down one night to speak, she could never imagine what she was going to say.
“I’m raping you. I have been photographing you for years.”
Kate (imaginary name) was speechless. It was sitting there, paralyzed. I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
“He simply told me how something like, ‘We eat spaghetti tomorrow in Bolognese for dinner, can you take bread?”
For years, behind closed doors, her husband had been a controller and violent. He was violent and made an improper use of controlled medicines.
There have also been opportunities, over the years, in which Kate woke up and found him having sex with her, something that could not consent because he was sleeping. That was rape.
He later said he had remorse, that he was sleepy during abuse and did not know what he was doing. The husband said he was sick and that there should be something wrong with him.
Kate supported him to ask for help from health workers.
But at the time he had no idea that he was mixing drugs to sleep in his tea at night so that he could rape it as he slept.
After the confession, he said that if he had gone to the police, his life would end. So it wasn’t.
He was the father of his children. He did not want to believe that someone with whom he had shared his life could be able to hurt her so much.
However, in the following months, the horror of what she said she did with her started having a physical effect.
Kate says she was very sick, she lost a lot of weight and started having panic attacks.
Almost a year after her husband’s confession during a particularly strong panic attack, Kate told her sister everything.
The sister called the mother, who called the police. Kate’s husband was arrested and questioned.
Four days later, however, Kate contacted the Devon and Cornwall police saying that he did not want to continue the case.
“I wasn’t ready,” he says. “There was a mourning. Not only for me, but for children. Their father would never have been what he was.”
However, Kate didn’t want her husband anymore to the house and moved.
After that, he started thinking more clearly about what had happened. Six months later, Kate returned to the police.
An investigation has been opened, led by detective Mike Smith.
Kate says that the detective helped her understand that she had survived a serious crime: “It helped me to recover my power. I was not aware of the fact that it had been taken. He explained that it was rape.”
The medical records of his (now ex) husband have provided crucial evidence. After confirming what he had done to Kate, he paid a private appointment with a psychiatrist.
During the session, his wife said “drugs to have sex with her as she slept.” Admission was recorded in the psychiatrist’s notes.
Kate says that her husband also confessed some people of the Narcotics of Anonymous, as well as friends of the Church who attended both.
The police archives on the case were finally presented at the Crown ProsColution Service (CPS), the British prosecutor, but CPS decided not to open the trial.
Kate could not understand why.
“I thought: if there is not enough evidence in my case to condemn, with the author’s confessions, then how someone else has a possibility?” He says.
Devastated, requested a formal review of CPS decisions. Six months later, CPS reported that her ex -husband would be offending. He also admitted that “the original decision taken by our prosecutor was a failure”.
“Although we got the vast majority of our first accusation decisions, this was not the case here and we apologize to the victim for the anguish that must have caused,” said a spokesman for the CPS, “said the BBC file on 4 investigations.
The case was brought to court in 2022, five years after Kate’s ex -husband confessed to her.
During the trial, he said that Kate had a sexual fantasy of being linked during sleep and being agreed in this position to have consensual sex. He admitted him drugged, but he said he had to be able to bind her without waking it up. He denied him to rape it, but the jury did not believe him.
“I found it totally absurd,” said Detective Smith. “It is the most traumatic thing about his life and have described it as a person totally involved in a sort of sexual fetish.”
After a process that lasted a week, the ex -husband was declared guilty of rape, sexual aggression on the penetration and intentional administration of substance.
In the sentence, it was described by the judge as “a person obsessed with himself, giving priority to his needs incessantly”, who has not shown “no true personal remorse”.
He was sentenced to 11 years in prison and received a permanent restriction order.
Three years later, Kate is trying to reconstruct her life with her children. Since then, post -traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and a neurological disorder caused by the trauma that has suffered has been diagnosed.
Kate sees similarities between her case and that of Gisèle Pelicot, the French one whose ex -husband doped and raped her and recruited dozens of men to abuse her.
“I remember that at the moment I just waited and prayed to receive the support and validation he needed,” says Kate.
“Control or chemical sending” is the term that is now used for domestic abusers who use medicines as a weapon. “It is probably widespread,” warns Marianne Hester, professor at the University of Bristol University Research and Violence Center in the United Kingdom.
“I always think about it in terms of the aggressor tool kit,” he says. “If there are medicines prescribed at home, the author uses them as part of the abuse in some way?”
Crimes like the call Spiking – Act to put a drug in someone’s drink – they are underground, in part due to changes in the way the police recorded crimes, says Nicole Jacobs, commissioner for domestic abuse of England and Wales.
“If the ministers want to ensure that the measures adopted to halve violence against women and girls in the next decade are reducing the damage, we must carefully measure all the crimes related to domestic abuses reported to the police,” he says.
“This is essential not only to ensure that the authors are held responsible, but also for the victims to receive the help necessary to reconstruct after the abuse.”
The British Interior Ministry has informed the report that is developing police software that will be able to identify the accidents of Spiking This happens as part of another crime.
According to a bill on crime and police activities currently being developed in Parliament, the government is creating what is described as a new type of “modern” crime of “administration of harmful substances, also through Spiking” – To encourage the victims to report to the police.
The practice of Spiking It is already a crime throughout the United Kingdom, covered by other laws, including crimes against the person of 1861.
Based on the new legislation, which will be applied in England and Wales, the authors will be able to employ up to 10 years in prison.
The Ministry of Justice states that the creation of a specific crime will help to monitor cases Spiking“And encourage multiple victims … to present and report these crimes”.
Jess Phillips, Minister of Protection and fighting violence against women and girls, ranked the Spiking Like “a cowardly crime that violates the trust and sense of security of the victims”, in a declaration to the file on 4 programs investigates the BBC.
Discussions are underway to extend the law to Northern Ireland.
The Scottish government claims to have no intention of creating a specific crime, but is keeping the situation under analysis.
In the end, justice was made in Kate. But her ex -husband would not have been in prison if he hadn’t had to face the CPS when he did not believe that the case had a realistic conviction.
“I want other people to understand that abuse happens very silent about what you think,” says Kate. “I still understand what happened to me and how it struck me.”
Source: Terra
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