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No evidence of spiking by injection is ‘annoying but inevitable,’ says victim

She now wants better CCTV in clubs and more bag checks


Amy* believes she was spiked by injection back in November when she was out clubbing. She felt a prick in her back and soon noticed she was bleeding. The Oxford Brookes student contacted paramedics who took her to hospital but on the way, she fainted and felt very sick.

“Everything seemed very dizzy and kind of blurry so I didn’t really know what was happening, whether it was from the substance or whether it was my body’s reaction to being really nervous,” Amy told The Tab.

A police investigation was launched but nothing came of it. Unfortunately, this is the norm. While there were 670 formal reports of spiking by injection between September and December in the UK, the police have obtained no evidence of such crimes taking place. 

On hearing this news, Amy told The Tab it was “annoying but inevitable”. She adds: “I knew that when I reported it that unless they saw anything on CCTV (which they didn’t) the chances of finding someone would be slim.”

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Amy’s back on the night she claimed she was injected with a needle

Amy says her experiences with the police were good, as she managed to swiftly report the incident which was then dealt with formally.

It’s the role of nightclubs that Amy takes issue with. She thinks they need to do more bag checks and improve the way they “work alongside the police”.

Because the CCTV wasn’t good enough in the club, the police weren’t able to obtain any evidence to suggest a crime had been committed. This left Amy feeling like there was “no point” taking things further.

“I think there needs to be more CCTV around clubs, more advanced CCTV that can actually show less digitalised photos and more real life footage just so you can actually get a face and be able to zoom in and out,” Amy said.

Jeanie Bell is a member of the Local Government Association’s safer and stronger communities board.

“You’ve almost got like a two-fold problem, where you’ve got under-reporting from people attending venues and often they’ll leave the venue before they realise they’ve been spiked,” Bell told The Telegraph. “But then you’ve also got venues who may be reluctant to come forward and say, ‘Look, we think we might have a problem here with spiking in our venue, we’re not getting reports but we think that could be an issue’.

“Because they’re then concerned about whether they will be penalised; whether there will be licence revocations. The licensing authority does, actually, have quite a considerable amount of power in terms of how to manage premises effectively.”

*The victim’s name has been changed to preserve her anonymity

Featured image credit: cameras: Unsplash,  club: Unsplash, police officer: Unsplash

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