‘My childhood stopped’: woman sues CPS after taking stepfather to abuse trial

A sketch by Annie. View image in fullscreen A sketch by Annie. ‘My childhood stopped’: woman sues CPS after taking stepfather to abuse trial Annie’s lawyers argue that prosecution was so badly executed it breached her human rights A t her kitchen table, in a village in southern England, Annie* sits with a blue folder stuffed with court documents, witness statements and correspondence relating to the trial of her stepfather, whom she had reported to police for alleged childhood abuse. As she prepared to tell her story for the first time, she was flooded with emotion when a photograph fell from the folder. The square Polaroid showed a young girl standing in a field beside a pony, dressed in jodhpurs and a riding hat. The young girl was Annie, who at the time was 12. “That’s what I was like when the abuse started,” she said. “I was just a developing young girl. And that’s when my childhood stopped. ” Annie reported her childhood stepfather to the police in 2017. She had previously disclosed the alleged abuse, when she was 18, in front of her mother, stepfather and a friend, but no action was taken. By 2017 it had been some time since she had last disclosed the alleged abuse, but she had learned that her stepfather was babysitting young extended family members, and felt that unless she came forward “this was never going to stop”. Annie resolved that she was “going to do something about this”. It marked the start of an almost decade-long fight. And one which continues. A picture by Annie. When Annie’s case against her alleged abuser finally came to trial in 2021, after multiple abandoned court dates, the case resulted in not guilty verdicts and a hung jury. In a rare case, she is now suing the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Her lawyers, at the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ), argue that the prosecution was so badly executed it amounted to a breach of her human rights. One of Annie’s key complaints is that prosecutors did not apply to introduce bad character evidence about her stepfather, and so all references to the domestic abuse and cruelty and neglect she also alleged she had suffered as a child were edited out of her police interview. A photograph she had provided to the police, which she says was taken of her mother just after she had been assaulted by her stepfather, in which her injuries were clearly visible, was not shown to the jury; a solicitor’s letter that mentioned a violent assault on another family member was not referred to, and reports of police speaking to him about allegations of domestic abuse were also not introduced in court. It meant Annie could not put her allegations, and her difficulty in reporting them, into the context in which she says they had happened. “How can I not talk about the fact that these enormous fights are going on?” she said. “And that fear: that’s the main thing that is around this family, fear. “We walk on eggshells, it’s more like broken glass, all of our lives since they got married. That’s what it was