By Marienna Pope-Weidemann (Gaia’s cousin), from The Gemini Project
If we can make it law, the Gaia Principle will ensure that any survivor denied justice or left in danger by police negligence and discrimination can hold officers to account. It is named in memory of my cousin Gaia Pope, who lost her life at the age of nineteen following just such failures.
The Gaia Principle has been backed by the Centre for Women’s Justice, Women’s Aid, Refuge, Rape Crisis England & Wales, Level Up and the Women’s Resource Centre. By making the thorough investigation of abuse a professional standards issue and repeat failure a form of misconduct, it empowers survivors and their advocates to hold police officers accountable to basic standards.
In a society where police bring charges in less than two percent of rape cases, nothing less than this level of accountability will do.
Gaia’s Story
Gaia Pope
On 7 November 2017, my cousin Gaia Pope went missing from our hometown in Dorset in the midst of a mental health crisis. Over the next eleven days I helped coordinate what became an enormous grassroots community search effort and Gaia’s disappearance became a major national news story. By the time her body was found, more than a week after she had died of hypothermia, most people had already gleaned that there was more to the story.
When she was sixteen, Gaia had been groomed and sexually exploited by a man we soon learned was an infamous child sex offender. The realisation that Gaia was just one of perhaps hundreds of young girls systematically targeted by this man and his associates, made it even more difficult for us to comprehend why Gaia’s case was dropped by Dorset Police.
Over the following months, despite her reports of threats to kill and ongoing intimidation, they refused her any form of protective order and never even made a safeguarding referral for her. Within two years Gaia was driven to her death by the re-traumatisation inflicted upon her by the disbelief and discrimination of state services that were supposed to protect her.
On the day she disappeared, Gaia called the police in a high state of distress, but the police officer taking the call hung up during the call dismissing her mental health crisis and attempts to report online harassment as “taking the piss” and “talking absolute rubbish.” He advised colleagues he thought the family was playing a hoax and instructed them not to transfer any more calls from us. I believe it was this that triggered the downward spiral that led Gaia to die of hypothermia over the following two days, while we battled with Dorset Police just trying to get them to acknowledge her as a missing person whose life was in danger.
BBC South news report and police control room recording
The 2022 inquest into Gaia’s death exposed over 50 institutional failings by police, healthcare and social services. This, despite the fact that the coroner excluded most of the evidence related to Gaia’s rape report as beyond the scope of the inquest proceedings and did everything she could to sweep the issue of sexual violence off the table all together, even trying to bully family witnesses into using language like “Gaia believed she was a rape survivor” when we gave our evidence.
When, after weeks of evidence, the coroner banned the jury from considering whether police failings contributed to Gaia’s death, it became clear that justice for Gaia wasn’t going to come from the courtroom. But the inquest had already unveiled the gut wrenching extent of police negligence in what was supposed to be a major investigation not just into Gaia’s allegation, but those of a significant number of other alleged victims. And while we knew that the perpetrator had been imprisoned not once but twice for other child sex offences (although he has yet to be prosecuted for rape,) what we did not know was that he was already under investigation before he first made contact with Gaia.
Accountability, Now
How is it that a known perpetrator could be grooming and abusing teenage girls right under the nose of investigators - and that his victims can still be denied their day in court when they come forward?
Many people fairly assume that the diligent investigation of serious crime, especially when presented with multiple independent allegations against the same suspect, is a police officer’s central duty. But as the data clearly shows, when it comes to abuse allegations this duty is neglected more often than not.
After I launched the Justice For Gaia campaign and started working with The Gemini Project, I learned that investigators routinely fail to join the dots between independent allegations and present them as a whole to the Crown Prosecution Service. I also learned about the vital work of Operation Soteria and how years of campaigning by survivors and allies had seen its principles accepted by the College of Policing into their new National Operating Model.
These are principles like “investigate the suspect, not just the victim,” and “remember to check for other independent allegations.” Hardly ground-breaking stuff and indeed, when I talk about the Gaia Principle, the response I get most often is “but how can it possibly be that they’re not doing this already? It’s so obvious!”
Yes it is obvious, if you’re coming from the perspective of taking an allegation seriously and you have the slightest understanding of sexual violence. So the fact that particular guidance is needed reflects the depth, breadth and power of systemic misogyny within policing - and why, if we want to see that guidance followed, we need the missing element of accountability that the Gaia Principle provides.
Without that, it’s just words on paper - and we know from the endless parade of reports on the crisis in rape justice and the prevalence of institutional racism just how much words on paper are worth.
The Big Picture
The Gaia Principle could be a game-changer ...it would benefit any survivor who reports to the police, by giving them the means to take a stand not just against their abuser but against police discrimination and indifference.
When it comes to a crime as damaging, devastating and potentially deadly as sexual violence, if an investigating officer can’t do their job they should lose their job. The time for good faith agreements is long past.
Independent research shows that a quarter of high-harm perpetrators are repeat offenders with as many as six different victims and data from Operation Soteria shows that a significant proportion of convicted abusers commit multiple offences against multiple victims.
The Gaia Principle could be a game-changer when it comes to the investigation of serial abusers and organised exploitation. But beyond this it would benefit any survivor who reports to the police, by giving them the means to take a stand not just against their abuser but against police discrimination and indifference.
What You Can Do
We have been campaigning for Gaia Principle since 2022 and are enormously grateful to Jess Phillips MP for re-tabling Amendment NC54 for the Report Stage and Third Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill. By making diligent investigation a legal requirement, this amendment promises to help bring the Gaia Principle into being.
It will also give survivors a legal basis on which to argue that misogynistic and negligent officers who repeatedly fail to meet this standard - like those who dismissed Gaia, or the innumerable women who made disclosures about police perpetrators like Wayne Couzens - should be taken off the streets for good.
The amendment needs your support. Please take a few minutes to join the call and write a letter to the Minister for Victims and Safeguarding, for the Gaia Principle to become law. You can also visit thegeminiproject.org/campaigns to donate and learn more and invite friends and allies to do the same. If your organisation would like to join our growing coalition of supporters, please write to me at marienna@thegeminiproject.org.
This is a grassroots effort towards a meaningful accountability mechanism in a bill that is determined to expand unaccountable police power and we need all the help we can get to make it happen.
Marienna Pope-Weidemann
Marienna Pope-Weidemann is a writer and movement builder with fifteen years experience in storytelling for social change. She led the grassroots Justice For Gaia campaign after the death of her cousin Gaia Pope and continues this work as Director of Campaigns & Communications for the Gemini Project, a grassroots surivor-led organisation working to end sexual violence.