Sophie loved going to the gym — “boot camp” classes were her favourite — and working with horses. But most of all, she loved her two sons, who were just five and six-years-old when she was killed by Sam Pybus, her occasional sexual partner, in February this year.

Last week, Pybus was sentenced to just four years and eight months in prison after admitting manslaughter. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) was ultimately convinced by his claim that Sophie had enjoyed rough sex and regularly asked him to choke her, and chose not to test the evidence in front of a jury at a murder trial.

At Teesside Crown Court, Judge Paul Watson QC accepted that Sophie was extremely physically and emotionally vulnerable. According to Parkington, she developed postnatal depression and sank into mental illness and alcohol abuse. By 2018, the couple had split; the boys continued living with their father, while Sophie moved to her own flat a short distance away. Parkington remained one of her few sources of support and would regularly visit, taking her food and checking on her.

Sophie, who was 33 when she was killed, lived in my hometown of Darlington. Over the past week, I have spoken to several people who knew her — many of whom admitted that she was frequently sexually exploited by men for alcohol.

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There is no suggestion that one of them was Pybus, who was married but had been having occasional sex with Sophie over a three-year period. What we do know, though, is that one night in February, he waited until his wife was asleep and then made his way to Sophie’s house, having drunk 24 bottles of lager over the previous ten hours.

Pybus told police that when he woke to find Sophie unconscious, he left the flat and sat in his car for fifteen minutes while “deciding what to do”. He did not attempt to resuscitate her or call an ambulance. The hospital was a short distance away — nearer to the flat than the police station that Pybus eventually drove to in order to hand himself in. The CPS stated that evidence was then gathered from a former boyfriend of Sophie who confirmed that she enjoyed being choked during sex. This witness has not been named, and the evidence was not tested in court.

But that was just one in a series of disturbing developments in this tragic case. Last year, following a campaign from the feminist group We Can’t Consent To This, the 2020 Domestic Abuse Bill outlined how the “rough sex gone wrong” defence would no longer be permissible as a mitigation to murder. After all, the “50 Shades of Grey” defence, as it is known, quite literally blames the victim for her own death. It is also unclear how a court can determine whether violence during sex is actually consensual.

So how did Pybus evade a trial on the basis that Sophie Moss consented to being choked?

In court, Pybus said the sex was “consensual”, but admitted he had little recollection of how Sophie died. Pybus eventually conceded he must have strangled her during sex because his hands were hurting.

Why his account of events was not put before a jury is perplexing. Since setting up Justice for Women (JfW) in 1990 to advocate on behalf of women who killed violent men, I cannot recall a single case in which the CPS decided to accept a plea of manslaughter and bypass a murder trial, despite there being overwhelming evidence of abuse perpetrated by the deceased towards the defendant.

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The case of Emma-Jayne Magson is just one example of the legal double standards when it comes to such cases. In 2016, Magson stabbed her partner James Knight after he attacked her and attempted to strangle her. There was a known history of domestic violence perpetrated by Knight towards Magson; on the night he died, Knight was captured on CCTV pushing Magson into the road.

She had also grown up witnessing horrific domestic violence which led to mental health problems in later life. But during the murder trial, there was no mention of any of this. Despite an appeal, Magson was sentenced to life with a minimum term of seventeen years.

Then there is the case of Farieissia Martin, who was 22 when she was sentenced to a minimum of 13 years in prison for the murder of Kyle Farrell in 2015. Martin, who had two small children with Farrell, had grabbed a knife when he tried to strangle her. Farrell’s history of violence had left Martin in fear for her life, but she was too frightened to call the police in case social services intervened and took away her children. During the trial, Farrell’s violent behaviour was inadequately explored — and Martin was convicted.

All of which raises an uncomfortable question: Why do men who kill women have it easier than women who kill men? Why is misogyny allowed to rule the criminal justice system?

In April this year, strangulation was made a specific offence in recognition of the potential for serious injuries and death. But despite this — and the abolition of the “rough sex” defence — the CPS gave Pybus the benefit of the doubt and accepted his plea to manslaughter.

“What this man did is abhorrent,” says Fiona McKenzie of We Can’t Consent To This. “There is no justice in the court’s apparent acceptance that it was violence Sophie consented to, so not really serious violence at all.” She thinks it is “absolutely right” that the Attorney General is considering whether the conviction should be referred to the appeal court as an unduly lenient sentence. “Pybus’s defence recasts sustained violence on a vulnerable woman as violence that she had asked for, that she knew the risks of and as a fatal situation she really had herself to blame for,” McKenzie tells me.

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As someone who has spent years campaigning against male violence, I am shocked but not surprised at the sympathy given to some men by the judicial system while women who should be treated leniently have the book thrown at them. The horrendous irony is that had Pybus knocked Moss over when he drove to her home, he could have been given a longer sentence: the average jail time for careless driving is 4 years, 8.5 months. (And no doubt the sentence would have been longer: Pybus drove to the police station while still drunk.)

It took Parkington several weeks after Moss died to tell their sons they would never see her again. “I sat them down and told him that mummy was poorly and in hospital but that the doctors couldn’t do anything more to help her,” he tells me, distraught. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

In the meantime, Pybus could serve as little as half of his sentence — just two years and 4 months if he keeps his nose clean in prison, meaning he would be out before his 35^th birthday.

What message does this send to abusive men? One that is loud and clear: that compared to men, some women’s lives are worth very little indeed.

Her mother, Lyly Maughan, is sitting next to her best friend, Heather Savage, who is the foster mother to her daughters. The girls were aged one and two when Fri killed their father with a single stab wound. Fri’s three brothers and other family members are sitting together looking nervous in the public gallery. Their hope is that Fri will walk free today and be reunited with her children. She has not seen them since March 2020, when Covid prevented prison visits.

Fri was convicted of murder six and a half years ago and jailed for life. But she is back in court because that ruling was quashed after new evidence came to light, and a retrial ordered. Her lawyers are convinced that Fri has served her time and doesn’t pose a danger to anyone.

Her case is the perfect illustration of everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system when it comes to domestic violence: a misunderstanding of coercive relationships, a misreading of abuse, victim blaming, excusing the perpetrator. And as recent research shows, failures by criminal justice agencies to provide protection to women almost always precedes domestic homicide, with women overwhelmingly the victims. So, this case comes back to trial at the perfect time to assess whether the domestic abuse bill has made a blind bit of difference to what happens in the courts and in women’s homes.

In a separate part of the public gallery sit the cousins and family members of the deceased, throwing hostile glances at Fri and her family. The police are also there, in case of any trouble between the two families from Toxteth.

Fri killed her partner, Kyle Farrell, during a violent row in which he had attempted to strangle her. She had been out visiting a friend and when she got back Kyle complained that she was later than he expected. A neighbour heard Fri screaming for help and, when they entered the house, saw “a lot of blood” and Kyle on the floor. In a panic, Fri told the neighbour a stranger must have come in and attacked him

The young couple, both 21 at the time, had known each other since school and had been in a relationship for five years. This fateful night was the climax of those five years of abuse. Kyle raped and attacked Fri on numerous occasions during their years together. Lyly often heard arguments between the couple, including one that ended with Kyle shouting that Fri should “go and get raped”.

Fri’s two daughters were born just ten months apart, the first when she was 19, the second 20. She had terminated several other pregnancies, telling Heather that they were a result of force and “not made of love”.  I knew something was going on,” says Lyly. “One time, she came over and her face was a terrible state, it was covered in bruises, but she gave excuse after excuse, saying one of the kids threw a bottle at her.”

However, she didn’t tell anyone in authority about the violence, in keeping with a largely unwritten code in the black community of Liverpool that you don’t “grass”.

She maintained that pretence when the police arrested her, assuming that Kyle would survive, and her children be removed if she made allegations of domestic abuse — something she had seen happen to many young women in her working-class community. It was only when she was told that Kyle had died, and the police said they believed she was a victim of domestic violence, that Fri eventually provided an accurate account of events.

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Despite that evidence, in May 2015, a jury in that same Liverpool court, and before that same judge, convicted Fri of Kyle’s murder. Her family was deeply unhappy. They felt the legal representation had failed to show the impact of the abuse Fri had suffered. So shortly after the conviction, Fri’s uncle contacted Justice for Women, which arranged a new legal team to explore grounds of appeal. Harriet Wistrich, the solicitor who had represented Sally Challen, took up the case. She was shocked to see that Fri’s previous legal team had failed to obtain any evidence exploring the impact of the history of domestic abuse on her mental health.

It takes a long time for victims of abuse to feel safe enough to talk about it to a psychiatrist. In particular, Fri was terrified of disclosing that she had been raped when she was 15 by a family friend. It was only after spending many months working with a counsellor specialising in domestic violence that Fri was able to open up.

The resulting psychiatric and psychological report set out the extent and nature of the sexual, physical and psychological abuse that Fri had suffered, concluding that Fri was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which made her hypervigilant in the face of further violence and may have caused her to lose control when threated with violence. The experts also noted that PTSD can cause “dissociation”, which may have explained why Fri could not remember stabbing Kyle, only the blood and panic afterwards.

Fri’s new lawyers also instructed a pathologist to closely examine mug-shot photographs of Fri taken by police shortly after her arrest for murder. The pathologist concluded that the visible bruise marks to her neck were probably caused by strangulation, consistent with Fri’s account of having been throttled prior to her grabbing a knife and stabbing Kyle. Had this evidence been disclosed by the police at the time of her original trial, Fri may not have ever been convicted of murder.

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Fri’s lawyers were convinced they had a solid case to appeal. But an application for permission to appeal was dismissed in February 2018. The application was then renewed before three judges, who noted that this was a “paradigm case of coercive control” and ordered the appeal to go ahead. The Crown Prosecution Service commissioned its own psychiatric and psychological evidence which agreed with the diagnosis of PTSD. However, the Crown opposed the appeal. The case eventually went to a full Court of Appeal hearing in December 2020, at which point the court quashed her murder conviction and ordered a retrial.

Fri’s lawyers wrote immediately to the CPS, indicating that Fri was willing to plead guilty to manslaughter, a lesser offence than murder. This was despite evidence supporting self-defence which, if successful at trial, would lead to a full acquittal. But the CPS rejected repeated requests to drop the murder charge. Eventually, the case was prepared for a retrial on murder to begin on 17 May.

On 18 May, the CPS agreed to accept a change of plea from guilty to manslaughter without intent. Fri readily agreed, fearing a hostile jury could reconvict her of murder despite the additional evidence. The case was adjourned for sentencing until 21 May.

I was there last week in Liverpool Crown Court last week to witness Mr Justice Dove sentence Fri for manslaughter, following a six-year battle for justice. There was, also, a separate offence to consider. Last year, when prisoners had been confined to their cells for 23-and-a-half hours a day during lockdown, Fri illicitly obtained a mobile phone to keep in touch with her children. She also removed a blade from her Bic razor, which she used to make picture frames for her girls.

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When sentencing, the judge told Fri to stand and addressed her sternly, more so than in other cases I have observed where the female defendant has been cleared of murder. Looking over at the row of family members of the deceased I wondered if the judge’s harsh tone was for their benefit.

He gave her 10 years for manslaughter, with an additional nine months for the possession of the illicit items and ordered the security staff standing either side of Fri to ‘take her down’. Instead of walking free, Fri had to go back inside for another six months. The maths is insanely complicated. But the point is, he could — he should, in Wistrich’s opinion­ —have chosen to let her go back to her family then.

The legal team was distraught, and everyone visibly upset that Fri was to have to go back to prison. Lyly was shocked that daughter had been “painted as the monster some of the media wrongly made her out to be. The judge didn’t say she had been strangled or mention that’s why she picked up the knife,” says Lyly, “so it sounded like she did it out of badness.”

Fri’s best friend was devastated. “He didn’t mention the strangling when he sentenced her.  The judge praised Kyle as a brilliant father, but he kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant. Why not let her come home to her kids?”

Fri, though, was grateful: “I’m no longer a murderer. It’s now accepted that I never intended to kill Kyle and that means the world to me.”

Wistrich was appalled by the harshness of the sentence. A just result, she says, would have been a sentence of six to eight years which would have better reflected the nature of the crime and would have meant immediate release from custody. Ten years is excessively punitive. Especially when you compare that with the lenient five-year sentence given to Anthony Williams who fatally strangled his wife in 2020 claiming depression. Fri was found guilty of an even lesser type of manslaughter. Sure, we’ve got a new Domestic Abuse bill, but “this result makes me feel like we have gone backwards for women victims”, says Wistrich.

While Fri sits alone in her prison cell for twenty-three and a half hours a day, having not seen or held her children for over a year, her legal team, her friends, and her family console themselves with the fact that she is not dead, and that she was able to defend herself against the violence inflicted upon her unlike so many others.

But no one should die — not women nor men — because of domestic abuse. It should be stopped before it gets anywhere near that stage, or, better still, stopped from ever happening in the first place. As Jane Monckton Smith outlines in her brilliant book In Control: Dangerous Relationships and How They End in Murder, domestic violence can be stopped in the early stages if police and prosecutors do their jobs effectively.

Every three days, a woman dies at the hands of her violent former or current partner. Those deaths are preventable. And had Fri been properly protected, Kyle Farrell would be alive today.

Meighan’s attack was sustained and vicious, including punching her in the face, pushing her into a hamster cage and threatening her with a wooden pallet while repeatedly knocking her over. A child witnessed the “sustained assault”, the court was told, and contacted 999 to report that a “domestic incident was taking place”. The attack was captured on CCTV and produced in court.

The judge, in sentencing Meighan, said, “I could have sent you to prison for this,” before handing down an 18-month community order and told to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work. So why didn’t he send Meighan to prison?

Because whether or not an abused woman speaks up against her abuser, there’s one thing that is indisputable when it comes to domestic abuse: the bodies in the morgue. Every three days a woman dies at the hands of her partner or ex-partner, and under Covid-19 lockdown that number has increased.

Five weeks into lockdown, the number of women killed by men was almost twice that of the average over the same time period during the past 11 years. The UN were so concerned they referred to domestic violence as a “shadow pandemic”. Even once lockdown lifts, and things go ‘back to normal’, almost one in three women aged 16-59 will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.

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This week, in order to address the problem, a ground-breaking Domestic Abuse Bill received its third reading in the House of Commons. It is a “once in a generation” opportunity to tackle the prevalence, protect the victims, and punish the perpetrators. It brings with it a new statutory definition of ‘domestic abuse’ and a range of measures designed to protect millions of victims. It is, for them, long awaited and will be celebrated.

But the Bill has limitations.

Karen Ingala Smith is the founder of Counting Dead Women which documents all women killed by men. For Ingala Smith, lockdown did not cause an increase in the number of abusive men, but it did give some a new tool with which to control women, and a further excuse for their behaviour.

“The normalisation and acceptance of men’s fatal violence against women is part of the problem,” says Ingala Smith, “and partly why it continues.”

She thinks that the bill doesn’t recognise sufficiently the fact that victims routinely try to protect themselves by doing what violent men demand — and often end up committing crimes. Many victims of domestic abuse also become victims of an unforgiving judicial system. A double blight.

Shockingly, almost 60% of women in prison or under community supervision are victims of domestic abuse, and for a significant number, domestic violence was a trigger to their offending. But current legal defences do not protect these women from prosecution or conviction.

Women being financially controlled by abusive men can often be compelled to steal food and other essential items. Others, some of whom I have met in prison during my work with Justice for Women, were coerced into benefit fraud; holding a weapon or drugs for an abuser; or defending themselves against their abuser.

Nearly half of women in prison report having committed offences to support someone else’s drug use, usually a partner’s. The Prison Reform Trust (PRT), presents evidence of how domestic abuse can lead victims to offend in its briefing, ‘There’s a reason we’re in trouble’.

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That’s why campaigners are still fighting for amendments as the Bill goes to the Lords. One such is a proposal by the supported by the PRT and the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) to address a significant gap in the law by creating statutory defences for survivors who offend due to their experience of domestic abuse.

The first clause would amend the law on self-defence, so that victims of domestic abuse acting in self-defence against their abuser would have the same legal protection that is already available to householders defending themselves against an intruder. The second would introduce a statutory defence for victims of domestic abuse giving them the same legal protection offered by the Modern Slavery Act for victims of trafficking who are compelled to offend (for example by being trafficked and compelled to work in a cannabis factory).

Jenny Earle from the PRT tells me that having specific defences on the statute book will ensure that fewer women are prosecuted and convicted of offences when they should instead be receiving support to exit a frightening relationship.

As this Bill progresses through the House of Lords, Baroness [Helena] Kennedy will be tabling these amendments.  “Legislative opportunities don’t come around too often,” says Baroness Kennedy. “We should seize the moment and align the protections with those given to victims in other legislation.”

Sarah had taken out numerous non-molestation orders against her ex-partner. She had moved home twice to escape her abuser and had a panic alarm fitted. The police had been called to more than 50 reports of domestic violence at the address.

On the night of the incident, her ex-partner broke into her house, and ordered her to take off her clothes. Sarah stabbed him in the belief he was about to rape her. She was initially charged with murder, which was changed to manslaughter with diminished responsibility. Sarah was given a 7-year 3-month prison sentence. If the proposed new clause to self-defence was available might have enabled her to be acquitted completely or not prosecuted at all, like Richard Osborn-Brookes, a 78 year old man who killed a burglar he feared would harm him.

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For self-defence to succeed, it is necessary to show that the defendant used force that was proportionate to the threat faced. The ‘householder’ defence was introduced following the case of Tony Martin, a farmer who killed a burglar who was trespassing on his premises. It was in response to public concern raised that a person who is defending his property should not be punished for doing so. The defence allows for a disproportionate, but not ‘grossly disproportionate’ response, recognising the level of fear and hyper-vigilance that may be experienced by the victim of the burglary could lead to a disproportionate use of force,

In fact for women in domestic violence relationships, that level of hyper-vigilance combined with their knowledge of the repeat pattern of behaviour, can and often does equally apply.

“There can be no justification for more favourable treatment in law for the householder,” says Harriet Wistrich, Director of the CWJ. “It is discriminatory and imperative that a similar defence should be available to victims of domestic abuse. Women should not be punished for totally understandable reactions to violence.”

The second defence, modelled on the Modern Slavery Act would provide a defence for women compelled to offend by their abuser.

Annie is one such woman. Having been coerced into assisting her abusive partner to evade the police after he committed a murder, she was charged with perverting the course of justice. Following the murder, the perpetrator called Annie and demanded she drove him to his lodgings, and to give him money and a pay-as-you-go mobile.

For Annie, the mental torture was far worse than the physical abuse. She is now diagnosed with serious emotional disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder. “Because of his abuse I had turned off every emotion to protect myself, and I would have done anything he asked me to,” she says. “But the CPS are carrying on the abuse and I feel I’m still under his control.”

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The CPS accepts that she was not involved with the murder at all, and that her actions did not help him evade the police, and he has since been convicted of murder. But it still intends to put her on trial for her actions following the murder.

“I did nothing wrong,” says Annie. “He held a knife at me the whole time I was driving him, threatening me the whole way, and yet I am the one that committed a crime?”

Irina is a Romanian woman who came to the UK on the promise that a Pakistani man she had met online would help find her work in the UK once they were married. In fact, he wanted to marry Irina so that he could depend on her for a spousal visa, as his was about to expire. The abuse began immediately: he did not help Irina find work and treated her like a slave throughout their 8-year marriage.

Irina had made previous allegations to the police about his abuse, including rape, but police took no action against him. Irina became very distressed one day and hit him with a cricket bat. She was charged with assault by beating. Irina has a psychiatric diagnosis of PTSD arising from the abuse but nevertheless, the CPS have decided it is in the public interest to prosecute her.

These stories are rarely heard — these stories of women trapped within the criminal justice system. Instead, we read about high-profile celebrity cases and men who are spared such incarceration by the silence of their victims.

But what about those women who are compelled by their abusers to break the law? What about the prisons teeming with those victims of domestic abuse? Isn’t it time we heard from them? So while the Bill is to be welcomed enthusiastically, offering a lifeline, literally, to so many women — there are still so many who need to be rescued.

Names of victims have been changed.

I have been writing about men getting away with rape, and women being blamed for sexual assault, for the past three decades. When I first started to campaign on this issue, in the early 1980s, I honestly didn’t imagine that, 2018, things would have, in many ways, got even worse.

What is it about the criminal justice system that means that so many of those men who actually havecommitted sexual offences are systematically let off the hook and the women are assumed to have lied? Why has nothing changed despite decades of feminist campaigning; survivors speaking out; and laws being changed?

According to the outgoing head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Alison Saunders, the system is undergoing a makeover, and better care is being taken over evidence that is being disclosed to the defendants. But the system is already weighted towards the rights of the defendants, rightly so of course, because of the prejudicial mythology surrounding the crime, i.e. that women are “making it up”. That distorting culture of disbelief  is prevalent even though all of the research shows that false allegations are extremely rare.

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When women do get convicted of making false allegations, punishment is extremely harsh. Jemma Beale was imprisoned for 10 years for perverting the course of justice, after the jury decided she had lied about being raped. She paid a serious price: her sentence was longer than that given to the vast majority of rapists. And the outrage at her crime was great, far exceeding any anger over the low conviction rate. Yet over the past few years, the attrition rate in England and Wales (the number of rapes reported that end in a conviction for rape) has remained at around 6%. Unless you think that 94% of women report rape are lying, we should be up in arms.

But that’s not the worst of it. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Home Office Inspectorates estimate that of the 50,000 rapes thought to occur each year, between 75% and 95% are never reported. And almost a third of reported cases recorded by police as “no crime” should have been properly investigated as rape. This means that there are more women in prison who have been raped than convicted rapists.

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If a man commits a rape, then he has, on average, a less than 1% chance of being convicted. Those most likely to result in a conviction are classic stranger rapes; in fact, the vast majority of rapes are committed by men known to the victim.

In the early 2000s, I sat through a number of rape trials as part of a research team examining whether or not recent changes in legislation – supposed to curtail the admission of so-called previous sexual history of the complainant – were being implemented. Every single trial, most of which ended in an acquittal, featured some type of slur against the complainant. If applications to admit previous sexual history evidence were made by the defence barrister, the judge inevitably allowed them.

The legislation was grossly ineffective, but even after our report was published, the Home Office did nothing to put it right. In fact, some years later, the footballer Ched Evans appealed against his rape conviction, and the young woman who had alleged rape was hauled through the most disgraceful ordeal, with her sex life described in lurid detail.

Even when men do get convicted of rape, often their sentences are often derisory. In 2010, Izzy Akinade was part of a group that gang raped and sexually assaulted a 14-year-old in woodlands in the Republic of Ireland. Akinade, 16-years old at the time, pleaded guilty of sexual assault. The judge gave him a two-year suspended sentence, saying that the conviction alone was punishment enough, and that it would make employment opportunities impossible for the young man.

The opposite happened. Immediately following his conviction, Akinade was recruited by Bohemians, and last year he was signed to Waterford Football Club. When he returned to the pitch, Akinade was given a standing ovation, and has since won a Man of the Match trophy. The fact that he is considered to be a role model and hero to young football fans tells us loud and clear that the stigma of rape remains firmly on the victims.

We women know how dangerous rapists are, but there are always those prepared to be taken in by their bullshit. Black cab rapist Worboys was considered safe for release by the Parole Board earlier this year, despite over 100 women coming forward to claim he had drugged and raped them. Two of his victims went through the ordeal of challenging the board’s decision and won. At least one dangerous man is locked up right now.

But how many aren’t? Isn’t it time we were honest about how many rapists get away with it and how many women are left to deal with it, and stop pretending we’re going to do anything about it. We might as well decriminalise it.

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