Like many abused women, Lakeesha Sexton had known for some time that her life was at risk. The last time her estranged husband Kenneth attacked her, his assault began at a petrol station. He bundled her into her car and then forced her to drive to the San Diego freeway, where he made her pull up on the hard shoulder and beat her mercilessly for 25 minutes.
'Finally a woman stopped,' says Lakeesha. 'He threw me out the door and drove away in my car. The cops found it a week later, the seats and the carpet stained with my blood. All the time he was beating me, he was telling me that this was the day I was going to die. But he made one mistake. The beating started in the gas station, so they got it on video.'
Now in jail awaiting trial for the attack, Kenneth Sexton faces a sentence of life without parole under California's 'three strikes and you're out' law. This charming, intelligent, well-groomed older man - he was 37 when they met, she was 26 - wooed Lakeesha for three years before their wedding with gifts, attention and passionate declarations of love. One thing he didn't share was that he had already spent many years in prison, after being convicted, as a teenager, of rape and murder.
Sexton's relationship with Lakeesha followed a pattern all too familiar to domestic violence victims, and those who support them, on both sides of the Atlantic. Once their honeymoon was over, 'the physical abuse came in right away,' says Lakeesha, while the escalating violence was accompanied by a range of controlling behaviours.
'In some ways, the psychological abuse was worse,' she says. 'He wanted control over what I wore, how I spoke, what I cooked and ate, and how I presented myself. At first it seemed flattering. What he was actually doing was undermining my self-esteem to the point where I felt totally helpless. After he beat me, he would beg my forgiveness and promise he would change. The result of it all was that when I thought about getting out of the relationship, it seemed totally hopeless.'
Research has shown that the most dangerous time of all for domestic violence victims is after they leave, as Lakeesha finally did after six years. In common with many perpetrators, Sexton responded by stalking her: 'He started coming to the place where I work [as a healthcare instructor], making threats, calling me and sending texts.'
In April, less than two years after she fled her luxurious marital home, leaving most of her possessions behind, her life is back on track. Immaculately styled and palpably proud of her achievements, Lakeesha does not look or sound like a recent victim: 'I'm succeeding in my job, my children are doing great and I've rebuilt my confidence.'
For this, she says, she has the San Diego Family Justice Center to thank, a radical and innovative project housed on four floors of a spacious downtown office block that gives domestic violence victims immediate access to professionals from every service they might possibly need under one roof: from more than 30 police officers, teams of prosecutors and family civil lawyers to housing officials, doctors, nurses and psychotherapists. There is also a well-equipped creche with qualified staff to keep children occupied while their mothers see staff elsewhere, and a cafe supplied with free food by Starbucks.
For the first time, women - and the small minority of men - who want to leave an abusive relationship can access legal protection and diverse kinds of support almost instantaneously, from organisations now housed no more than a floor or two apart, and which are able to share information with ease. Previously in San Diego, as remains the case in most of Britain, victims who needed help would often have little idea of what might be available; they would traipse from office to office and wait for appointments, a process that could easily take weeks. Co-ordination and information sharing between different official bodies was at best sluggish and ineffective. If victims also had young children, the task often seemed impossibly daunting.
Anyone who knows a domestic violence victim will recognise the consequences of this failure to gain adequate support. Even women who had been badly hurt, had taken shelter at a refuge and apparently had every intention of going through with a prosecution at the time they called the police, often withdrew their testimony and went back home to be abused again - and in some cases murdered.
'The Family Justice Center gave me a strategy and the means to leave him,' says Lakeesha. 'They got my restraining order, they found me a place to live and gave me the support of other women who'd had similar experiences, and counsellors who knew how to deal with them. They got my husband arrested and they gave me the strength to testify against him: the hope that justice will prevail. I've kept his last name because I don't want him to forget me. Every time he hears it while he rots in prison I want him to remember what he did to me and my children.'
Before the centre opened in 2002, about 12 women a year were murdered by their current or former partner in San Diego, a city of 3m people. Since then, 27,000 victims have passed through the centre and there has been just one such killing, of a victim who had never sought help. The centre's success has been recognised by the federal government, which has poured millions of dollars into opening similar centres across America - there are now 26, with a further 30 in the pipeline.
In Britain, both the government and domestic violence victims' groups, such as Refuge and Women's Aid, express their admiration for the San Diego model. Speaking to The Observer Magazine, Baroness Scotland QC, the Home Office minister responsible for domestic violence policy, says: 'It's clear to me that we need a holistic, well-integrated response. Co-locating services in one place is a real step forward.'
Clients of Britain's only Family Justice Centre, which opened in Croydon, south London in December 2005, say it has transformed their lives. Angela Penney, 42, says she suffered domestic violence for 25 years before first presenting herself last year. She lifts her hair to reveal a 27-stitch scar on her forehead, from where her former partner threw her against a door and half scalped her. She had pressed criminal charges several times, and once, she says, he spent a week on remand; but each time she withdrew her complaint. 'In the years of abuse, I'd fled to a refuge a couple of times, but I kept going back to him. All I really got at the refuge was a bed and room: it wasn't their fault, but there wasn't any aftercare or other form of support. When you're in this kind of relationship, you know it's wrong, but you can't see any way out.'
The last time Angela went back, mainly because 'his father died and I felt sorry for him', he beat her up, left her and then tried to get the courts to give him custody of their two children - on the grounds that she was depressed. Finally, in 2005, she suffered a full-blown breakdown, and both children began living with their father.
'I don't think I'd ever have recovered if I hadn't found this place,' she says. 'They listened to my stories when I needed someone to understand; they came to court with me and helped me fight for my kids. The elder is back with me now, and the younger stays every other week. They got me a non-molestation order [the British equivalent of a restraining order]. For the first time, I feel physically safe.'
The evidence suggests that the Croydon centre has also reduced repeated domestic violence, as well as providing other support. But financially dependent on the local council, two charities and the Metropolitan Police, it gets nothing from central government and cannot yet operate at its planned capacity. Its greatest problem is not threats from abusers, but a shortage of cash.
Each week, at least two women in the UK are killed by a current or former partner, a figure that has remained constant for many years. The police will receive a call for help over an incident of domestic violence every minute of every day: 570,000 a year. According to the Council of Europe, between six and 10 per cent of all women will experience domestic violence in any 12-month period. Of course, not every case has the potential to escalate to murder or serious assault, and the first need is to reliably assess those that might.
Two of the most notorious cases occurred in 2003, in the area covered by the Thames Valley force. The last moments of Julia Pemberton and Rana Faruqui were both recorded by 999 control rooms: the two women had dialled the emergency number shortly before their ex-partners killed them. In both cases, the police had failed to recognise what, in hindsight, were glaring warning signs of the peril the two women faced.
In the weeks before they were murdered, both women had experienced death threats and attacks on their property. Rana Faruqui's car brake pipes were severed, but despite her background of previous harassment, the police broke two appointments to visit her home near Slough in order to take a statement. The locks to the house Julia Pemberton shared with her 16-year-old son - who was also shot dead by her husband - were superglued while they were away, and she was sent copies of a statement she had made to get a non-molestation order, which had been defaced with further threats. The domestic violence co-ordinator at Newbury, Julia's local police station, had written a memo describing her case as one of the most frightening she had ever seen, but the police took no action.
Each time a case goes fatally wrong, the police tell reporters that 'lessons have been learnt', and promise that new procedures have been introduced to ensure the mistakes that led to an avoidable death will not be repeated. 'We have looked at our policies in light of this tragic case and we have strengthened them,' Derbyshire's deputy chief constable Alan Davies said last November, commenting on a devastating report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission on the murder of the showjumper Tania Moore at the hands of Mark Dyche. When she ended their relationship, he issued hundreds of threats and paid two other men to beat her with baseball bats, before running her car off the road and blasting her in the face with a shotgun. Tania had gone to the police six times about Dyche's campaign of harassment, but they did nothing to investigate it, and the IPCC inquiry led to the sacking of one officer and the demotion of four others.
However, issuing orders and devising policies is only part of the answer. When Clare Bernal's ex-boyfriend Michael Pech shot first her and then himself in the Knightsbridge branch of Harvey Nichols in 2005, he had already been convicted under the Protection from Harassment Act for threatening her. For several years before her murder, the Metropolitan Police had been using a formal risk-assessment 'tool', a questionnaire known as SPECCS, to help officers identify high-risk cases. But the young probationary constable with just nine months' service who interviewed Clare had only received one day's training in dealing with domestic violence, and the risk form stayed unused in her pocket.
On 1 May, members of the Bernal, Moore and Faruqui families met in London for the first time, to discuss setting up a joint campaign. Afterwards, they said that the success of the San Diego model proves that their relatives need not have died. 'We want constructive, determined action, not words and aspirations,' says Carol Faruqui, Rana's mother. 'We want the government to commit to reducing the number of these murders by at least 80 per cent within three years, and we believe that the widespread adoption of the San Diego model will achieve this.'
'When we took office, nothing had been done about domestic violence for the previous 18 years,' Baroness Scotland maintains, adding that Labour has done more to tackle the problem than any government in history. In the view of the bereaved families, it has not been enough. 'The key problem is that the police in most areas erroneously state that there is no scientific method of predicting when homicides may occur,' Faruqui adds. 'They do not accept that these murders are predictable and therefore potentially preventable.' At the end of March the three families wrote to Baroness Scotland expressing this view. As of 1 May, they had not received a reply.
In the US, attempts to devise a structured method for assessing the level of risk posed by abusers began much earlier than in Britain. One of the first and most sophisticated has an origin that might at first seem improbable. Gavin de Becker, the head of an LA-based company that specialises in protecting film stars, judges, corporate bosses and other public figures from the attentions of stalkers, had spent years developing a risk- assessment system applicable to his core business. Then, in 1994, in the wake of the OJ Simpson murder case, Bob Martin, a 28-year veteran of the LAPD, joined Gavin de Becker Associates. He swiftly realised that de Becker's techniques could easily be adapted to domestic violence.
Martin and de Becker worked backwards, analysing the factors common to hundreds of murders. They worked their way through thick police files, seeing the history of deceased victims' abuse; they read through thousands of threatening letters, and saw how cases often escalated in severity in response to specific stimuli - the occurrence of significant dates, such as a birthday, or the development of drug or alcohol abuse. Escalation might also occur after a 'trigger' event connected to the relationship, such as a victim leaving home, the courts denying access to children, or the obtaining of a legal restraining order.
The result was Mosaic-20, an analytical computerised model that gives a victim's risk a score out of 10, together with a value out of 200 for the risk score's reliability - a measure of the amount of data available. Hence, someone whose case was a nine, with a reliability rating of 190, would be in very serious danger.
'Mosaic means you can be objective,' Bob Martin says. 'You don't have to wing it. It also allows you to reassure [victims]. The reality is that some people are afraid where they needn't be; others aren't when they should.'
However, he adds, the unnecessarily frightened victim is a relatively rare phenomenon. De Becker called his 1999 book on avoiding violence The Gift of Fear, a title that reflects his belief that fear is a primal, human defence mechanism that we ignore at our peril. Independent academic research has confirmed that when domestic violence victims say they fear for their lives, this is the most accurate of all indicators that they are, indeed, in danger. 'Most of the time, what Mosaic does is validate intuition,' Martin says. 'Too many victims suppress their fears, tell themselves they can't be rational - and end up dead.'
While de Becker's clients from Hollywood may be in a position to pay for safety, Bob Martin recognises that most women in abusive relationships cannot. He helped set up the San Diego Family Justice Center and remains a consultant to its board - convinced that for 'ordinary' victims its approach is the best yet developed.
James Challoner, a businessman whose daughter's life was threatened by a former partner, has been trained by Martin and de Becker in the use of Mosaic. Working with the families of Rana Faruqui, Tania Moore and Clare Bernal, he has 'reverse engineered' the months before their murders, seeing how their cases would have rated. All would have been shown to be at high risk. 'These murders, like most killings of this kind, were predictable,' Challoner says, 'and hence preventable. There was a failure to recognise the signs, a failure to assess them, and a failure to protect the victim. The police can't give every potential victim a 24-hour guard. But the danger signals need to be much more widely publicised, and society has to start taking appropriate protective steps.'
Emerging from the elevator on the second floor of the Broadway tower, which houses the San Diego Family Justice Center, one steps through a gate in a beige picket fence, as if entering a garden in Desperate Housewives' Wisteria Lane. Chintz sofas stand on a thick, sky-blue carpet; there are magazines, children's toys. The only unsettling note is the fact that the receptionist's desk lies behind a screen of thick, bullet-proof glass. 'In the five years since we opened, five batterers have turned up here and tried to cause trouble,' says Casey Gwinn, the centre's co-founder and chair. 'They forgot that we don't have to call the cops: they live here. They were all led away in handcuffs.'
The carpets and chintz have a purpose. For victims, the centre is a haven they are free to visit whenever they want support or company. Like Lakeesha, Rosie Anic, 33, now shows few outward signs of her ordeal. Originally from Germany, she has a good job with a luxury hotel chain, and an apartment where she lives, happily, alone. When she first showed up at the centre in 2003, referred by a hospital emergency room, things were very different. She and her boyfriend, a wealthy, much older, retired dentist had recently moved to San Diego from Florida, where they had lived together for several years. He had been violent before, and even, she says, raped her. But as well as repeatedly apologising and promising that he would change, her partner had a financial hold on her - he was supporting her passage through college.
One day, Rosie says, 'he just went ballistic,' beating her and throttling her with a belt. (Research shows that attempted strangulation is one of the most common precursors to domestic murder.) Then, while she fled, bleeding, and knocked for help at a neighbour's door he called the police - telling them that his 'foreign girlfriend had committed an act of domestic violence against him'. An officer arrived, saw Rosie and swiftly assessed the reality of the situation. 'He told me, go back to the apartment, grab what you can in five minutes, then leave and don't go back. I got a few papers, some family photos and clothes, and then I was basically on the street with no money, and so shattered psychologically that I couldn't be by myself for months.
'In the early days, I was at the Family Justice Center from opening time until closing,' she says. 'I felt safe. I felt comfortable. Just to be somewhere you can relax and not look over your shoulder while they take care of everything meant so much - not to have to go to another building when I needed a health examination; to be able to get food; to see a detective without going outside. And the times I just lost it and started crying, there was the chaplain or a therapist.'
There were also the civil attorneys, who helped her obtain a restraining order when her former partner began a relentless campaign of harassment, and the cops and prosecutors who had him jailed when he breached it - 'he was so sick that even after attacking me, he tried to make it up by proposing marriage.' The centre, Rosie says, 'literally saved my life, physically and mentally. If he hadn't killed me, I would probably have killed myself. It took me about a year, but I got my life back.'
Gwinn, a veteran prosecutor who had already created San Diego's child abuse and domestic violence legal unit, first mooted the idea of a family justice centre to the city council in 1989 - the start of 13 years of persuasion. 'It is the simplest concept and you can take it anywhere - a centre is about to open in Jordan,' he says. 'But egos and turf wars get in the way. But now we've learnt how to do it, it doesn't need to take so long as it did here.'
Some of the families bereaved by domestic abuse in Britain have looked at the contrast in the official approach to domestic violence between most of the UK and America and drawn a wrenching conclusion. 'If the system they have in San Diego operated here,' says Stella Moore, Tania's mother, who has spent several days looking at the Family Justice Center, 'my daughter would still be alive.' The combination of risk assessment and one-stop access to diverse services 'just sounds wonderful,' says Tricia Bernal, the mother of Clare. 'I would like to be part of something similar here,' she says.
As Baroness Scotland is at pains to point out, the government has taken steps to improve the response to domestic violence nationally. It has introduced specialist domestic violence courts in an attempt to improve the conviction rate, where victims can be sure they will not bump into their abuser in the canteen or corridor, and early data suggests they have resulted in a reduction in the number of withdrawn prosecutions.
In March, Home Secretary John Reid announced a grant of £2m to roll out across the country a system known as 'Maracs' - multi-agency risk assessment conferences, fortnightly meetings between the various agencies involved with intimate partner abuse. As Casey Gwinn says, 'talking is good,' and in Cardiff, where Maracs were pioneered, and where the risk-assessment method uses many of the principles shared by Mosaic, Maracs have been quite successful. 'After a year, 42 per cent of our cases have been resolved: the victims are safe and they are no longer caught up in a chronic social problem,' says Jan Pickles, director of the Cardiff Women's Safety Unit, and the Marac chair.
Choosing between Maracs and Family Justice Centres 'is not an either-or,' insists Scotland. There is room for both. But defending the government's failure to fund centres directly, she insists that she has not 'seen anything, anywhere in the world, that has achieved such speedy results as Cardiff'. Before concluding that centres represent the best option, I must, she urges, talk to Pickles - who immediately deflates the minister's argument: 'I've had a leaflet from the San Diego Family Justice Center on the back of my office door for the past five years,' she says. 'They are my inspiration.' Inch by inch, she is trying to 'adopt a bite-sized approach', and is hoping soon to move some police and a medical service into the women's unit. But while this represents progress, 'San Diego is the ideal.'
Of course, there are differences between Britain and America, not least in the legal system, where prosecutors here maintain a greater distance from victims. Other than that, the biggest contrast between San Diego and Britain's only Family Justice Centre, in Croydon, is money. Each year, on top of the essential employment costs, San Diego's budget is $600,000 for staff and $1.2m for building overheads. Croydon's, at £246,000, is not much more than a quarter of that - a figure reflected in its much less spacious accommodation. (San Diego sees about 10,000 families each year, Croydon some 7,000.) But the guiding principles and the staff's commitment are identical.
As in San Diego, each new case at Croydon begins with a risk assessment by a trained advocate. Within the building can be found officials from the council social services and children's departments; family law solicitors from six local firms who attend on a weekly rota; the Samaritans, debt, drug and alcohol, immigration and relationship counsellors; the Probation Service; Women's Aid, the local refuge provider; and the 32 officers of the Croydon borough Metropolitan Police Community Safety Unit, most of them detectives. A forensic medical room, where an examiner will be able to treat, photograph and document injuries, is set to open shortly - when funds become available. There is no cafe, but there is a creche, the building's saddest room: 'A charity has given us the toys and big plasma TV,' says Jill Maddison, the centre's director, who - as the council's domestic violence policy adviser - spent years campaigning to open the unit. 'Unfortunately, we don't have the money to pay for workers qualified in childcare.'
'There is no comparison between the level of protection you can offer with a place like this and a system based on inter-agency meetings,' says Chief Supt Mark Gore, Croydon's borough commander. 'You don't have to wait a fortnight to call a case conference: you can call one immediately. If someone walks through the door this morning, the civil solicitors will have a non-molestation order in place by tonight, and if it's breached, we'll arrest.'
Esther Brewster-Thizy, the chief executive of Croydon Women's Aid, describes some of the other benefits of co-location. 'The younger solicitors can ask me about the consequences of certain actions; we can sit together whenever we feel like it and bounce ideas off one another, find out what's happening in different areas of the same case. Information sharing like that is a wonderful thing.'
In the year before the centre opened, there were five domestic murders in Croydon: none has taken place since. It may be too early to draw definitive conclusions, but the police are in no doubt that the overall level of violence is being reduced.
'We are trying to encourage other areas to co-locate,' says Baroness Scotland. Asked whether she will press the Treasury for money to help finance it, she refuses to answer.
'One of our saddest cases was a woman from Birmingham,' Jill Maddison says. 'Somehow she'd heard about us and got on the train with her kids because she thought we could help. Of course, there was nothing we could do.' 'This seems to be the future and it seems to work,' says Tricia Bernal. 'We can stop women being murdered. If it's a lack of funding that is stopping that from happening, I must say that concerns me.'
· The Family Justice Centre, 69 Park Lane, Croydon, Surrey CR0 1JD (020 8688 0100)
