Activist launches bid to have undercover officer who seduced her prosecuted
An environmental activist tricked into a relationship with an undercover police officer has launched a legal action in a bid to see him prosecuted for a string of offences including rape.
The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, is trying to compel the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to bring a case against Jim Boyling for both sexual offences and misconduct in a public office.
Many women belonging to organisations deemed radical by police in the 1980s and 1990s were deceived into forming relationships with men sent to spy on them, some of which lasted for many years.
In 2014, the CPS decided not to prosecute such officers, citing lack of evidence.
The woman, known only as Monica, is the first to file a lawsuit challenging this refusal.
She told the Guardian: "What I went through, and other people went through, is wrong. I don't think that my private life and my sexuality should be something that should be spied on, or used to infiltrate organisations that are involved in trying to bring positive change.
I was lied to, and I was encouraged to be intimate and sexual with somebody who I would never, ever have got involved with if I had known who he was, if i had known his true motives and I had known his true identity.
Boyling went undercover between 1995 and 2000, posing as an environmental rights campaigner, and had relationships with at least three women, including Monica, who was an environmental activist with Reclaim The Streets.
She had a six-month relationship with Boyling in 1997 when she was 27.
She said: "(Boyling) was really friendly and engaging. I was really excited by the relationship. I loved him in a way. I really felt strongly for him."
Monica did not find out who he really was - an officer with the Special Demonstrations Squad - until he was exposed in 2011.
"If I don't challenge (the CPS's decision), then everything just gets brushed under the carpet, and apologies are just empty words ... and nothing really changes," she said.
She said she thinks that for Boyling "fundamentally (the relationship) was just sex, to enhance his cover, and as a perk of the job".
Boyling had a nine-year relationship with another woman known as Rosa, and she says she had children with him.
She said previously:"He had me isolated from all my friends, comrades and associates."
"I lived in an abusive relationship with him. I eventually escaped to a women's refuge with my children."
Both Rosa and another of Boyling's former partners have been offered apologies by the police.
At least 12 women have received compensation for the emotional trauma caused by being deceived in to relationships, and police chiefs have been forced to issue apologies.
