A BBC investigation published on 16 April (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crl19dzdd38o) exposed how some people are fabricating domestic abuse claims to exploit the immigration system – leaving their British partners to have their lives pulled apart by false accusations. A lawyer interviewed in the piece described clients whose lives had been “turned upside down.”
That phrase stopped me. Because while the investigation is specifically about immigration fraud, the pattern underneath it – a partner weaponising the system, innocent people blindsided by accusations that seem utterly out of character – is one I recognise from somewhere much closer to home.
I want to talk about that, not as a commentator, but as someone who has lived it.
When we arrived in England, my children had known nothing but Thailand their whole lives. England was entirely new to them – and for a while, it was an adventure. Every trip to the park was a discovery. The seasons, the school run, the ordinary rhythms of English life that most people take for granted – to my kids, it was all fresh and exciting. We had a beautiful home. We were building something new, and I was proud of it. From the outside, it must have looked like the perfect family making a wonderful fresh start.
And yet, inside that relationship, something was very wrong – and I couldn’t see it clearly, because I was in it.
The thing about a certain kind of domestic abuse is that it is designed to be invisible. Not invisible to you – you feel it every day – but invisible to everyone else. The person doing it to you is, to the outside world, completely different. Likeable. Charming. The kind of person people would never suspect.
I didn’t realise I was a victim until I rang a men’s helpline.
The man on the other end asked me one question: “Does your wife act like this with other people?”
I thought about it. “She’s absolutely charming around everybody else,” I said.
“Well, I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but you’re the victim of domestic abuse.”
I remember sitting with that. My first instinct was to push back, to explain it away. Isn’t that exactly what victims do? We minimise. We rationalise. We’ve been told, in so many ways, that we’re the problem – and at some point, we start to believe it.
But that single question cracked something open. Because it named the pattern precisely: a person who is one thing to the world and another thing entirely to you.
I want to be clear about the context in which all of this happened. By the time any of it unfolded, our marriage had already broken down. Divorce was on the table. My wife was not trying to control me within an otherwise stable relationship. She was frightened – and she was fighting not just for herself, but for custody of the children and, quite possibly, for her right to remain in the country. I understand that. Fear does things to people, and I hold some compassion for the position she was in. What I want to name is what happened when that fear found its expression.
She called the police on me six times. Six.
On two of those occasions, I wasn’t even in the house. On the others, I was in my office, minding my own business. Each call was an attempt to use the system – authority, procedure, the weight of an official complaint – as an instrument of control. On the sixth call, a police officer finally recognised the situation for what it was and referred me for domestic abuse support.
Six calls. Think about that.
When I read the article, I felt the echo of this immediately. One of the lawyers interviewed describes clients being taken apart by partners who made false police reports – reports that never led to charges, never resulted in any action, but that could still be extracted from the system and placed in front of a decision-maker as supposed “evidence.” No conviction necessary. No finding of guilt. Just the existence of a complaint, a crime reference number, a record that something was alleged. That record then follows you – into immigration hearings, into benefits assessments, and, as I know from my own experience, into family court. It can be used to shape how a judge sees you, how contact with your children is decided, how the whole architecture of your life gets rebuilt around an accusation that was never proven because it was never true. And I thought: yes. I understand exactly how that works. I know what it feels like to have the machinery of protection turned into a weapon.
There is a chapter in my memoir, Innocent: A Prison Awakening, called Weaponising the System. It is one of the chapters I found hardest to write, because it describes something genuinely difficult to explain to people who haven’t experienced it: watching an institution designed to protect people be turned, deliberately, against you.
What I want to say here is that this dynamic – the false accusation, the weaponised complaint, the partner who is charming to everyone else while your life is being dismantled – is not unique to immigration cases. It happens in ordinary relationships, in this country, all the time.
And it happens to men who have absolutely no idea they are victims, because we have never been taught to recognise ourselves as one.
I want to speak directly to those men.
You might be in a relationship that looks fine from the outside. Your partner might be liked by everyone. You might still love them. And yet at home, something is very wrong. You feel constantly destabilised. You feel like you can never do anything right. You have perhaps been accused of things – by your partner, possibly even by systems or authorities – that seem completely at odds with who you are.
This is not rare. And it is not your fault.
The moment that changed things for me was a single, simple question from a stranger: “Does your wife act like this with other people?”
If the answer is no – if the person who is cruel or controlling or making accusations against you is, everywhere else, perfectly pleasant – then something is wrong. That gap is not coincidental. That gap is the abuse.
There are people who can help. The Men’s Advice Line (0808 8010327) is free, confidential, and staffed by people who understand this. You don’t need to be certain. You don’t need to have visible bruises or a police record. You just need to be willing to ask the question.
I came through what happened to me. There was a spiritual transformation I could not have predicted, and a complete rebuild of who I am and what I do. I work now with men navigating addiction, mental health, and the aftermath of the justice system. I do it because I know what it is to have your world dismantled, and to have to reconstruct yourself, piece by piece, from the inside.
This post is part of that work.
If you have been blindsided. If you are the man standing in the rubble of something you thought was solid. If you have had accusations thrown at you that don’t resemble who you are – please know that what you are experiencing has a name, that you are not alone, and that the truth, even when the system doesn’t protect it, is still worth standing in.
I know, because I’ve stood in it.
