🪞 SWANK LEGAL REFLECTION
Filed: 23 August 2025
Reference Code: SWANK-POL-LA-COMPLICITY
PDF Filename: 2025-08-23_Addendum_Westminster_PoliceSecondaryVictimisation.pdf
Summary: When the Police fail to shield victims and instead deliver them to social work inquisitors, it ceases to be safeguarding. It becomes complicity.
I. What Happened
The Director made police reports — multiple, logged, referenced — for harassment and hate crime. Instead of protection, she received betrayal.
The Metropolitan Police ignored her complaints.
Westminster scavenged the very men named in those complaints and rebranded them as “character witnesses.”
A victim’s words became ammunition; her safety, a bargaining chip; her abuse, a file note.
II. What This Reflection Establishes
That the Police–Local Authority partnership has inverted its duties:
Protectors became persecutors.
Safeguarding became surveillance.
Reports of hate crime became a shopping list for hostile testimony.
This is not failure. This is orchestration.
III. Why SWANK Logged It
Because evidence should protect the victim, not feed her oppressors. Because the law was not written for abusers to be recast as witnesses. Because when Westminster and the Police link arms, it is not child protection — it is retaliation wrapped in a safeguarding form.
IV. Violations
Article 3 ECHR – Degrading treatment: forcing victims to see their abusers rebranded as credible.
Article 8 ECHR – Family life dismantled by biased testimony.
Article 14 ECHR – Victim of hate crime treated less favourably for her disability and dissent.
Children Act 1989, s.1 – Welfare principle inverted; abusers privileged, children destabilised.
Equality Act 2010 – Reports weaponised instead of accommodated.
Bromley’s Family Law (14th ed., p.640): safeguarding cannot be a cudgel; yet here it is.
V. SWANK’s Position
This is not the work of guardians. It is the choreography of complicity.
Where police inaction meets local authority intrusion, the victim is abandoned twice over: first by the law, then by the welfare state.
SWANK calls it by its proper name: institutional retaliation, dressed as protection, filed as coercion.