Labour’s Early Release Scheme Could Set Our Tormentors Free

Three women dedicated their working lives to protecting and supporting society’s most vulnerable. At home, however, each lived with the constant fear that she might not survive.

Helen Duncanson, an ambulance worker, refers almost casually to “the time he came at me with a claw hammer” as our interview draws to a close.

By then, Helen, 41, has already described the catalogue of abuse inflicted by her former partner: being strangled until she lost consciousness, enduring sustained psychological torment and financial control, and being locked out of her home. On one occasion, she was forced to sleep in her freezing car before reporting for duty the next morning to help save other people’s lives.

Karen Haynes, a 54-year-old primary school teacher, endured almost three decades of torment at the hands of her headteacher husband. To the outside world he appeared to be a respected pillar of the community. In private, he claimed that his Freemason connections meant he could arrange her murder. “One call; one bullet,” he told her.

Kirsty Pellant, 46, had built an impressive career as a school safeguarding lead and was widely respected. That changed when parents were confronted with entirely fabricated allegations portraying her as a sexual predator who sold herself online under the name “Slutty Teacher”.

The man responsible was a teacher at her school, but Kirsty had never been in a relationship with him. By stealing her identity, wrecking her career and making even a trip to the supermarket feel terrifying, he transformed her life.

His vicious stalking campaign eventually drove men to turn up at Kirsty’s home in Kent. A judge later described the case as the worst example of its kind he had ever encountered.

All three women eventually found the strength to report their abusers to police. What followed was years of navigating a justice system they say proved punishing in its own right.

When their abusers were finally sent to prison, all three women felt an enormous sense of relief—not only for themselves, but for others who might otherwise have been targeted.

Today, though, none of them feels truly safe. The controversial Progression Model, introduced to reduce prison overcrowding by releasing thousands of offenders before the end of their sentences, began this week. The first 700 prisoners have been freed, with around 3,800 more due to follow in 10 phased releases by next June.

Helen, Kirsty and Karen are among the thousands of victims warned that their attackers may soon be back in the community. “We’re sitting ducks,” Helen says, fearing what could happen next. “What if he comes back to kill me?”

As we speak, Helen has been watching television images of the first prisoners leaving jail. Some punched the air, celebrated their release and thanked Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

“Thank you, mate… I appreciate it,” one jubilant inmate said as he left HMP Brixton after serving only a third of his sentence, when asked whether he had a message for the Prime Minister.

“I had to switch it off. I can’t watch it,” Helen says. “It feels as though they’re saying, ‘We’ve won.’”

Kirsty fears the consequences will be even more devastating. “The Government is using us as guinea pigs. They keep saying these men can be recalled to prison if something happens, but don’t they understand that by then a victim may already have been hurt again? I simply can’t believe what they’re doing.”

“What is the point of justice? Why do we have judges? Why are we bothering? Are women’s lives really worth so little?” Public anger intensified as details of the scheme emerged. Following widespread protests—including those triggered by the possible early release of PC Andrew Harper’s killers—Mr Burnham announced a partial reversal, saying rapists, sex offenders and people convicted of unlawful killing would be excluded.

Domestic abusers and stalkers, however, remain eligible for early release.

Which leaves an awful lot of victims, mostly women, terrified, angry, feeling let down by the authorities – and fearing for their lives all over again.

Helen, who lives near York, has been told that her tormentor, Michael Boyes – a man who, even before she met him, had 20 previous convictions, including for domestic abuse – may be free as early as March.

By then he will have served just 14 months of a three-and-a-half year sentence. When he was jailed in January, after admitting assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and controlling or coercive behaviour against Helen, the judge described what she had been through at his hands as ‘mental torture’ and imposed a ten-year restraining order.

Words can’t adequately convey what he did to Helen but he specialised in torture relating to memories of her mother. He once strangled her to the point of unconsciousness with a necklace her late mum had bought her. ‘I was so stupid, thinking, “don’t break, don’t break” because my mum had bought it’, she tells me.

He also smashed other prized gifts from her after forcing Helen to get on her hands and knees to beg him not to. She did. He smashed them anyway.

Helen attempted suicide towards the end of her ordeal, ‘and then he laughed at me for not even being able to kill myself properly. He told me no one cared about me. He told me no one would ever listen.’

How did she finally free herself? She tells me she said ‘enough’ on the night he insisted she return from a 12-hour ambulance shift to have his dinner on the table at 8pm. ‘He wanted steak pie, potatoes and veg, all cooked from scratch. I did it, and when he still wasn’t home by 10pm, something broke in me. I locked the doors.

‘It’s ludicrous really, I nearly let him kill me and the thing that broke the camel’s back was a steak pie.’

It took extraordinary courage for Helen to go to the police. She only did so because a colleague asked how she would feel if he went on to hurt another woman, or kill her?

It took even more courage for her to start rebuilding her life. Despite suffering from PTSD and having a demanding job, Helen enrolled in a degree course when she finally gained her freedom, celebrating the fact she could at last make independent decisions.

‘I thought there would be at least a few years of respite from fearing for my life and I could just get my head down, study, just breathe for a bit. I’m devastated, and so angry. I simply don’t understand how the Government can overrule a judge.’ Kirsty’s stalker – former paratrooper turned teacher Jonathan Bates, 54 – was sentenced to five years in prison in January 2025 for his crimes. She has been told he could be out as early as January.

Her sentence is ongoing. Her career in education is over. ‘I couldn’t go back,’ she tells me.

She is still having therapy – and still finding vile images purporting to be her online.

Karen, who lives in Port Talbot, also tried to take her own life, 28 years of an abusive marriage having convinced her that it was the only way out.

Her ex Christopher Haynes, a headteacher, had chosen what she wore, where she went, even what music she could listen to.

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His torture took place in full view. She describes him once asking a pub landlord to play Evil Woman on the sound system, telling all and sundry it was her favourite song.

The abuse was ‘insidious’, starting with him pinning her against the wall, threatening to kill any other man who looked at her, but descended into threats against Karen herself.

He threatened to ‘rip me limb from limb’ or ‘annihilate’ me. ‘He loved that word.’

Haynes revelled in the fear he inflicted, once telling her: ‘I am the best sociopath there ever was. You don’t even know what I am capable of.’

By 2021 Haynes, who would frequently pass out in a drunken haze, had become obsessed with serial killers.

That Christmas Day, he ‘threatened to blow my brains out’. Karen recorded the tirade.

Unknown to her, her daughter Ella had been standing outside the bedroom, recording too. ‘Mum, I thought he was going to kill you,’ she said.

The Christmas Day threats to Karen ended when an emergency responder overheard her daughter say, ‘Mum, he’s going to shoot you’, and told her to get out of the house. Armed police were there within minutes.

There was no shortage of incriminating messages and evidence but it still took over four years for this case to come to trial. He was sentenced to 21 months in prison. She knew he wouldn’t serve that, ‘but I thought we’d at least have one Christmas without having to worry about panic alarms’.

Now, she has been told he could be out by next month. ‘This is a man who spent nearly three decades controlling me. He got more dangerous towards the end, which is a recognised pattern with coercive control. Don’t they realise that these men are more dangerous when they have been challenged, when someone has stood up to them? These are the men who go on to kill.’

Karen simply will not hang around to see how dangerous her new situation might be. She is taking extraordinary steps to secure her own freedom.

She and her children – she has a 26-year-old daughter and a 17-year-old son with Haynes – are packing up and moving away from Britain completely.

She won’t say where they are going, for safety reasons, but the house is on the market.

She plans to change her name and start a whole new life. And her rage is palpable.

‘This Government has let women like me down,’ she says. ‘It feels like a gut punch. I’ve spent 30 years working in the public sector. I’ve given my life to the Government. People like me have done everything asked of us and more. And where are they when we need some protection?’

Helen feels similarly abandoned. ‘The Government asked us all to put our lives on the line in Covid – and yet when we want protection, no one is there for us.

‘They sit in their big Government houses and they have no idea what it’s like.

‘Well, I’ll tell you this: if anything happens to me, I don’t want anyone from the Government going to my family and apologising and saying “mistakes were made”.’

Of course, these women are carrying difficult pasts and unthinkable emotional baggage – but that is the point. Domestic abuse charities are seeing these sorts of fears multiplied and warning of a crisis to come.

According to Women’s Aid, nearly 79 per cent of victim support organisations have reported that survivors were frightened for their children’s safety.

Meanwhile, Alice Russell-Harris of Refuge has called on ministers to pause the early release of abusers until ‘necessary safeguarding measures, risk assessments and adequately resourced services are in place to properly support survivors’.

The Government insists that offenders released early will remain under intensive supervision subject to licence conditions and, where appropriate, electronic monitoring and exclusion zones.

It has also announced extra victim support and investment in probation. That doesn’t wash with these women. ‘Have they tried to get a panic alarm?’ asks Karen.

‘Oh yes you can get one – until the police ask for it back because there aren’t enough to go round. You might, if you are lucky, get a police patrol to swing by – but only for a time because they are overstretched.’

The speed with which this has been swept through has not helped. The goalposts have been moved with little warning, little clarification. Kirsty says she has sympathy with her probation liaison officer ‘who doesn’t seem to know much himself’.

While Kirsty and Karen initially received generic letters warning them about the possibility of early release, Helen had to phone her probation liaison officer to discover the timeline for her abuser.

‘I actually phoned up because I’d been told he could be eligible for release in September – about halfway through his sentence. They said, “Actually it now looks like March”. I said “What?”

‘But I haven’t been able to clarify anything. The idea that victims are kept informed is a joke.’

Nor is she comforted by the idea that her attacker would be tagged and police informed if he broke the terms of his licence. ‘At what point would they know? When he was in my house?’ she asks.

There is another obvious question in Kirsty’s case. ‘How do you electronically monitor a man whose offending was carried out online. How can you possibly know what my abuser is doing online?’

A more chilling point, too. ‘These men were deemed so dangerous that they needed to be off the streets. What has changed? No one can tell us that.

‘They’ve gone on some list saying, “Oh, he’s fine for release”, but this is the same person that a judge, having looked at the specifics, having examined all the evidence of this individual, said needed to be in prison.’

All these women understand there is a prison crisis. What they do not think is fair is that they’re being asked to absorb the risk because of Government failings.

‘I just read about someone in my area being sent to prison for having a cannabis farm,’ says Kirsty.

‘So they are still sending offenders there. Why does that person need a space and my abuser doesn’t? Why are there still offenders in prison for non-payment of fines. I believe that anyone who has harmed another human being should not be part of this scheme.’

Perhaps the Government will move to allay fears. Although any changes of policy will come too late for Karen.

At the end of our conversation, I say that it’s simply extraordinary that the UK is losing a primary school teacher because she no longer feels safe in her own home.

‘And a nurse,’ she points out. ‘My daughter, who is coming with me, is a nurse. She has no more faith in the system than I do.’