The thing about domestic homicides is that you can always see them coming. There is a pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour consistently adopted by abusive men towards female partners that always begins with love-bombing and, if left unchecked, ends in murder.
A woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every four days in the UK. And the myth persists that these murders are spontaneous — just the result of two people having a fight and one of them ending up dead. But, as renowned criminologist Professor Jane Monckton-Smith makes clear in her new book, In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder: “They are the most predictable homicides, which is why we can and should be preventing them.”
To prove her point, Monckton-Smith has developed a method for detecting and intervening in these relationships. According to her eight-stage time-line, the escalation of risk can be tracked and halted before it reaches a deadly conclusion.
She formulated the model during a research project based on 400 intimate partner homicides. Drilling down into each of these cases, she realised they all played out in the same way — even the four incidences of women killing men. When published, her research was naturally greeted with a frenzy of enthusiasm and attention so she decided to develop it into a book.
In Control is a devastating read. It opens with as powerful and heart-breaking an account of the complexity and deadliness of domestic violence as I can remember reading. It is a story from the author’s early days in the police service, an account of her attending the scene of a “domestic”. Monckton-Smith arrives to help a young woman who had been hit on the head with a lump hammer. “Her boyfriend – her assailant – had fled the scene before any of us arrived. The woman was simply gazing at the floor, quiet and very still. There was blood trickling down the back of her neck and onto the carpet.” Despite her serious injuries, the woman refused to go to hospital.
It left me in tears, keen to know what had pushed Monckton-Smith to submerge herself in the horrifying details of these hundreds of homicides. “Anger,” she tells me.
After joining and leaving the police service, and fronting a heavy metal band for a decade, she then went back to school. “That’s when I started studying criminology,” she tells me. “And that’s when I started getting angry.”
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