Natalie* looks defiant on screen, pushing strands of blonde hair behind her ear as she recalls the night she tracked down her own abuser.
She suffered more than two decades of sustained abuse from her former partner: strangulation, rape and the stalking of her teenaged son outside his school gates. The police had been looking for him for four months. The Probation Service, meanwhile, made no contact with Natalie at all, and failed to act on repeated breaches of her abuser’s licence conditions.
The police already knew who he was. They knew Natalie’s ex-partner was stalking her 15-year-old son. When Natalie reported it, four months before, they assured her they would find him. “Nobody got back to me,” she said. “They said they couldn’t get in touch with him. They couldn’t find him. It was about a five-week turnaround before they got back to me.” Her restraining orders, she said, were “not worth the weight of the paper”. She grew tired of waiting.
So when she spotted him through the glass front of a restaurant, where his friend had quietly given him work, she decided to do the police’s work for them. She parked where she couldn’t be seen, in a London street, and watched him. She called 999. “I took it upon myself. I said, you’re looking for this guy. I know where he is. He’s here now. I’m going to stay where I am until you turn up.
Forty minutes later, two police cars and a van arrived. When officers entered the restaurant he ran, tables overturning, customers scattering. He was handcuffed and taken away screaming. “I was relieved,” she says, quietly. “But the panic and the fear thinking he was going to know it was me.” But he was released days later. Natalie says she was only told afterwards. No one from the police or probation ever acknowledged that she had done their job for them.
The Probation Service’s collapse has been documented in parliamentary committees and coroners’ courts, but the women affected remain largely invisible. The men the service is meant to supervise are not passive. They are, as Natalie knew better than anyone, strategic. They are experienced at performing compliance, at attending the courses, passing the assessments and walking out to harass all over again. Natalie’s former partner was required to attend an anger management course as part of his probation supervision. He attended, passed, and then he breached the restraining order protecting Natalie approximately 20 times. Each breach was reported. Each time, nothing happened.
In early February, a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report found that probation officers adequately assessed risk in just 28 per cent of cases in 2024, down from 60 per cent in 2018-19. Serious further offences committed by people under probation supervision, those categorised as rape or murder, rose 55 per cent between 2020-21 and 2023-24. Despite this, the report concluded that both the Ministry of Justice and HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) had been “reluctant to accept responsibility for the service’s poor performance”.
A Ministry of Justice source told the New Statesman: “The Tories’ failed experiment with privatising probation caused lasting damage across the service. Given that the 55 per cent increase in Serious Further Offences categorised as rape or murder between 2020-21 and 2023-24 occurred when the Conservatives were in office, it is for them to explain the circumstances which led to it.”
The government’s answer to a probation service that cannot find the people it is meant to supervise is to tag 22,000 more of them. The announcement, made by the Ministry of Justice and the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in September 2025 under the government’s plan for change, is claimed to be the biggest expansion of tagging since the introduction of curfew tags in 1999.
The government maintains a list of accredited programmes for dealing with reoffending, including three domestic violence interventions. Structured around cognitive-behavioural techniques, they aim to make men understand why they are violent, reduce the risk factors linked to that violence and develop what the government’s own documentation calls “pro-social relationship skills”. Two of the three national programmes for domestic violence programmes are marked “no longer delivered”. The government’s own page has not been updated since May 2022.
These programmes operate on the assumption that men who abuse can be made to confront what they have done, to understand it and to change. In many cases, the programmes work. An evaluation of domestic abuse perpetrator programmes in England and Wales found significant reductions in physical and sexual violence reported by women 12 months after the men began the programme. One statistic stands out: the proportion of women who said they had been slapped, punched or had something thrown at them fell from 87 per cent at baseline to 7 per cent at follow-up.
But aggregate success obscures a harder truth: some men attend purely instrumentally, particularly those motivated by child contact rather than genuine change. Everyday coercive behaviours, such as intimidation, humiliation, belittling, financial control, were more persistent and harder to change. Natalie saw this. “He knew the system,” she says of her former partner. “He knew how to work his anger management course. He knew how to get people on side.”
A probation officer employed by HMPPS, speaking on condition of anonymity, describes a service so overwhelmed that meaningful supervision had become almost impossible. “You simply don’t have the time to do anything other than very brief contacts and almost superficial check-ins with people.”
When Natalie’s ex-partner breached his licence conditions, the process of returning him to prison did not begin and end with a probation officer. A worker would first need to flag the breach to a line manager, who would agree to a potential recall, which would then pass to a senior manager, and then to the Ministry of Justice, which held the power to authorise it.
“That’s part of the frustration for probation staff,” the officer says. “In many of those situations we are in contact with people who have been recalled, and we’re feeding information to the police about where the person is, but there are also pressures on the police to pick them up.”
Gwen Robinson, part of the Rehabilitating Probation Project Team, traces the damage to 2014, when Chris Grayling, then the Conservative justice secretary, split the service between privatised Community Rehabilitation Companies and the public sector. “It was summed up really well by a practitioner who described it as an unwanted divorce,” Robinson said. “Literally nobody wanted that reform.”
When the government renationalised the service in 2021, it did so without reliable data on staffing levels or workload. The PAC report found that HMPPS had been operating with just half the number of sentence management staff required – a deficit nobody had noticed until 2024.
The PAC report published in February does not mention victims once as a category of people the probation service exists to protect. Its metrics measure timeliness of appointments, employment rates of offenders at six months post-release, recall numbers. Nowhere in its 27 performance targets is there a measure for whether women like Natalie were kept safe.
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Every victim deserves to feel safe, and we are determined to put them at the heart of a justice system that for too long has let them down. We have committed to a £700m uplift in annual probation funding, are recruiting 1,300 probation officers and investing in new technology that will cut a quarter of a million days’ worth of admin – ensuring staff can focus on reducing reoffending and protecting the public.”
Today, Natalie lives differently. The Ring doorbell is sometimes switched off. She does not answer calls from numbers she doesn’t recognise. She hesitates and checks before she opens her front door. She looks over her shoulder on the street. “This is how I live,” she says. “I really believe probation services are under the delusion that these people change, and they don’t. For these types of people, abusers, it doesn’t work. They don’t change.”
*Names have been changed
[Further reading: Gisèle Pelicot shows no victim is safe from being shamed]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment