WOMEN who found out their partners were undercover police spies insisted yesterday that they are the ‘victims of a conspiracy to rape’ by the police.
An ongoing public inquiry into undercover policing has seen several women win apologies and compensation.
Over a number years dozens of undercover officers, part of the covert Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), were unmasked.
They had infiltrated political parties, environmental groups and campaigns.
It also emerged that police had even spied on the family of Stephen Lawrence, the teenager murdered in London in 1993.
It was at this point that Theresa May, then Home Secretary. had to order a public inquiry.
This concluded that Police who had long-term sexual relationships with their targets ‘abused their positions’. The police then issued an ‘unreserved apology.’
However, one of the victims known as ‘Rosa’ (not her real name) said: ‘If you put all these things together, you have a team of officers conspiring to rape.’
She and another woman have spoken of feeling betrayed after falling in love with men who turned out to be spies. In some cases the police spies actually fathered children with them.
‘They know there was no informed consent,’ she said.
‘It’s the whole gang of them, and there’s no other way of terming it for me than a gang.
‘You’ve got mentors, you’ve got handlers a whole backroom team of people monitoring – and directing it would seem – their relationships, their activities.’
For the first time Rosa, and the other woman, both from Wales, have revealed on camera the full story of how they became involved in intimate relationships which seemed genuine, but were in fact charades as police forces infiltrated groups they thought needed monitoring.
In 2000, Rosa spent three months in South Africa looking for Jim Sutton, the man she was in love with. The trouble was that man did not really exist.
Rosa met him in a London pub while she was a political activist in a group called Reclaim the Streets.
Then Sutton stunned her by saying he wanted to go travelling, on his own – to ‘sort his head out’ and promptly disappeared.
He said he planned to go to Turkey, Syria and then South Africa. Rosa started her own detective work but could find no trace of the family he said he had. So she headed to South Africa, to find him.
‘I was walking round South Africa just saying “excuse me have you seen this person?” I was in torture, I needed answers.’
She found no trace of him, and returned to the UK. Her search continued though, and clues led her to south London, and the offices of the secret police unit Sutton worked for. Just two days later she found him.
The encounter forced Sutton to confess he had been living a lie. He was not Jim Sutton, he was police officer Jim Boyling.
