MODERN FAMILY

IN just 24 hours we have had a police officer given 36 life sentences for a brutal catalogue of sex offending, the suspected gun killing of a mum and her seven-yearold daughter by her husband and another horrific case of a mother who was lured to Scotland with her two-year-old child by a man who murdered them.

The level of detail revealed during police officer David Carrick’s two-day sentencing horrific crimes was made even worse by the fact that he was a serving police officer the entire time he was raping and abusing 12 women over the course of nearly two decades.

Their lives have been devastated by his actions, they have been left struggling in intimate relationships and feeling suicidal as an effect of his abuse. It has been nauseating to read how a man in a position of trust and authority within an institution designed to protect women could spend 20 years abusing and raping them is nothing short of horrendous.

Shockingly, he was reported nine times over the years to the Met and other forces and he had previously been under investigation in 2000 after he refused to accept the end of a relationship with a woman. Despite this, he passed vetting in 2001 and his probation period, although he was accused of assaulting and harassing a partner just a year later.

It is no wonder that trust in the Met is rock bottom. Carrick was nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues and one victim, who still remains at the Met, told Sky News that she had not reported it because her colleagues would have “laughed” and it would have been “the end of my career”.

In a statement, the Assistant Commissioner said that Carrick’s behaviour had been “unprecedented” but there are 800 serving Met officers and staff being investigated for 1,000 serious sexual and domestic allegations.

But the issue of male violence is not just within certain police forces, it is a story that appears to be becoming all too familiar. Last year, Welsh Women’s Aid says that violence against woman and girls in Wales is at “epidemic rates”, with just 1% of rape cases ending with a conviction.

So many of the cases are related to attacks on women by partners or former partners. At least 58 men were jailed for such attacks during 2022 in Wales, including two for murder. Four victims were pregnant at the time of being attacked, and two had recently given birth. Others on the list included a man who stabbed his partner in a row over which pizza they should have, and another who punched his girlfriend in the face just weeks after she had given birth. Several of the attackers poured boiling water on their victims, and another ran over his ex-girlfriend with a car.

We have a male violence problem in this country that is utterly sickening. A problem that needs to be urgently addressed.