Blog

Alex Skeel’s girlfriend stabbed him, burned him and starved him. When he finally got to hospital, he went back home to her.

After they split, his ex-partner spent 18 months harassing him. She was a police inspector.

By Parminder Sahota Independent safeguarding reviewer and founder of PS Safeguarding Ltd A man can be known to several services without anyone fully understanding what is happening in his life. His GP may be treating depression. Mental health services may be responding to a crisis. Police may have attended an incident at home. Each contact creates an opportunity to understand more, but the connections between those experiences can remain unexplored. Through my work as an inde

One man in Cheshire spent six months in a relationship where he wasn't allowed to use the toilet in his own home. He had to go to public buildings instead. His girlfriend controlled what he ate. She made him sleep on the floor with the windows open, searched him whenever he left the house, cut him off from his family and demanded cameras to watch him. She insulted his weight, his hygiene and his intelligence, made him pay for her private treatments, and had him fake illness s

In December 2017, a rape trial at Croydon Crown Court collapsed after less than two hours of the complainant's evidence. It's one of the most significant cases in recent British legal history, not because of what it proved about the complainant, but because of what it exposed about the system meant to protect everyone involved. The defendant was Liam Allan, a criminology student at Greenwich University. He had spent close to two years on police bail, arrested and later charge

In 2020, Shane Paul spent nine months separated from his daughter. By the end of that year, he'd secured a child arrangement order and rebuilt contact with her, and he did it representing himself in family court, without a solicitor, while his ex-partner had legal aid and full representation throughout the whole process. He describes being incensed at how unfair that imbalance felt, one parent with a fully funded barrister, the other working it out alone. What changed things