WARNING: This article contains graphic content and may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
She was a sergeant and he was a constable. They met at work and became a power couple, sporting matching police badges.
But their love story would end in violence. It didn’t matter that she outranked him — what happened flipped their power balance.
“It was just a slow burn downhill into what became a serious situation of coercive control, which I didn’t see that clearly at the time,” she said.
It began with verbal insults, but the woman said her ex-husband became increasingly controlling. He even used a listening device to spy on her, according to court files.
“cop finds out why they are in fact called bastards”
CBC’s research found that more than one-third of the allegations leading to officer suspensions since 2013 involved gender-based violence including sexual assault, domestic violence or sexual harassment.
“In the literature on gender-based violence, police are disproportionately perpetrators of particularly domestic violence,” said Danielle McNabb, an assistant professor who researches Canadian public law at Brock University.
“I do think that this really constitutes the tip of the iceberg from what we know about the pervasive underreporting of gender-based violence.”
The variety of scenarios uncovered in CBC’s data include off-duty officers who allegedly abused their spouses, on-duty officers who had sex with vulnerable people, as well as cops who worked in sexual or domestic abuse units.
Jesus Christ, do they do any checks of officers doing these roles? Truly fucking awful.
