You may also like to know some statistics, confuzed which may help you and your friend decide how to deal with this.
1. When a victim of domestic violence finally plucks up courage to report their partner to the police on average they have suffered violence (and left it unreported) on between 12 and 35 previous occasions (depending whose report you read)
2. 44% of domestic violence victims are involved in more than one incident. No other offence shows anything like this level of repeat victimhood.
3. Offenders using violence against a partner in a domestic situation almost always escalate the level of their aggression as the number of unaddressed offences increases.
4. In more than 75% of cases where a partner starts a prosecution and then withdraws his or her consent before the prosecution is concluded, further violence occurs within three months.
The conclusions that you can draw from these statistics are:
1. The violence is likely to continue.
2. It is likely to get worse.
3. Retracting a statement which supports a prosecution in likely to result in more violence.
This violence is no fault of your flatmate. Many perpetrators insist that this is so, but it is not. Furthermore it is not a private matter. Many domestic violence prosecutions succeed without the support of the victim.
Forget your flatmate�s boyfriend�s problems he now has as a result of accepting the caution. The time to refuse a caution was when it was offered to him, not now. Your flatmate should do nothing to retract her support for his arrest. Most importantly of all, make sure she is no longer in a position to be assaulted by him.