Sarah’s boyfriend used to say things she did not think much of at the time.

“I love it when you wear your hair up because I can see your neck,” he would say.

But as time went on, his behaviour started to worry her.

He did not like her leaving home, accused her of cheating, and said her behaviour was fuelling his mental health problems.

Sarah, whose name we have changed to protect her identity, was pregnant when she went to police to try to find out more about his past.

“I didn’t want to bring a child into a potentially abusive relationship,” she says.

Under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS), also known as Clare’s Law, people concerned their partner or ex-partner may have a history of being abusive can ask police to disclose incidents on their record in a “right to ask” application.

Government guidance released in 2023 says it should take police no longer than 28 days to respond “to ensure individuals have quicker access to the information they may need to protect themselves”.

Sarah followed up on her Clare’s Law request after a month and was told by police that they had not contacted her because there was nothing to disclose.

But, five months later, officers told her they did have a disclosure: her boyfriend was known to have strangled previous partners.

By that time, she says she had experienced her partner’s abuse first hand.

Police responses to a BBC News Freedom of Information request (FOI) suggest some people in England and Wales have waited more than two years for responses to their “right to ask” applications. Only 23 of 43 forces responded to our request with a breakdown of how often they were meeting the deadline in 2024.

Despite the statutory guidelines saying police should answer within 28 days, the figures show seven forces breached the time limit in more cases than they met it in 2024.

A further 10 failed to comply with the time limit in more than a quarter of cases.

Avon and Somerset police disclosed information following a “right to ask” application 685 times in 2024, but it took longer than 28 days in 539 of those cases – meaning they missed the deadline in almost 80% of cases.

Disclosures also took longer than 28 days in more than 60% of cases at West Mercia Police and Wiltshire Police.

The Wiltshire force has previously apologised for failures under Clare’s Law, which it said had led to two people coming to harm.

After police told Sarah there was nothing to disclose, her boyfriend’s behaviour escalated. He punched doors.

“On one occasion he threatened to kick the baby out of me,” she says, “and on another occasion, he threatened to throw me down [the] stairs.

“He used to manipulate me, gaslight me and say things like, ‘I only do what I do because you make me feel that bad,'” she says.

Then, after their child arrived, there were incidents when he strangled her to the point that she could not breathe for several seconds, she says.

After one assault, six months after her Clare’s Law request, Sarah called the police.

“I was pulled in on the back of the 999 call and they had some information to share with me,” she says.

When she told them about her previous information request, officers told her “they got it wrong”.

In fact, he was a high-risk perpetrator who had attacked previous partners, including by strangling them.

But by that time she says she had been “sucked in” and felt she “couldn’t get out of that relationship”.

Dr Charlotte Barlow, a criminologist at the University of Leeds, says: “When you are in a relationship with an abuser, it’s incredibly difficult to leave.

“Reasons include feeling afraid the abuse will escalate, fear their children will be taken away, scared they won’t be believed by police or other agencies, having nowhere to go, no access to finances.”

Dr Barlow’s research shows Clare’s Law is most effective for safeguarding when it is accessed earlier in a relationship, before a victim is fully under their partner’s control, meaning delays increase risks.

Police said sometimes those who contact officers can fail to engage when they are trying to give them information.

Forces also pointed to a steep increase in requests for information under Clare’s Law. In the year to March 2024 there were almost 59,000 requests for information under the disclosure scheme, up from about 14,000 in 2019.

“It is a massive resource burden on police,” says Dr Katerina Hadjimatheou, a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Essex.

“You sometimes have people with huge criminal histories over a period of decades and so police have to go into the system and search through,” she says.

“They’ve been given no resources to do Clare’s Law.”

Avon and Somerset Police says not delivering responses within the 28-day time frame during 2024 “wasn’t acceptable; and as a result, we have uplifted our resources over the [past] 12 months to improve and strengthen our response”. Now the force has 13 dedicated officers who risk assess new applications.

Both Avon and Somerset Police and West Mercia Police say the average time it takes them to make disclosures has fallen since 2024, while Wiltshire Police says it has invested in a “comprehensive restructure” of its domestic abuse support team.

A Home Office spokesperson told BBC News that the government fully expects police forces to meet the 28-day deadline, and its mission to halve violence against women and girls within a decade “includes the right to know whether they are safe from previous perpetrators”.

Although conviction information is available via an easily searchable national database, Dr Hadjimatheou says fragmented police computer systems mean finding information about all the relevant incidents can be more difficult.

Issues with information-sharing between police forces is “persistent”, says Isabella Lowenthal-Isaacs, policy manager at charity Women’s Aid.

“This is particularly concerning given many domestic abuse survivors flee across local authority boundaries.”

Police are exploring how automated technology might help compile the necessary data quickly, says assistant commissioner Louise Rolfe, the national policing lead for domestic abuse.

“Recent improvements to standardise the implementation of Clare’s Law are starting to have a positive impact, but there is more for us to do and further for us to go,” she says.

Dr Hadjimatheou’s research shows a significant majority of people who applied for a disclosure had not sought help from services for their abuse before, she says, so a Clare’s Law request presented a key opportunity to prevent serious harm.

“That person has contacted [the police] for a reason,” she says. “It’s a chance to put them in contact with services to help them to safeguard them and it’s being squandered.”

The academic argues the disclosure service would be cheaper and more effective if its public-facing part was run by domestic abuse services, rather than police officers.

“Think about all the people who want to know but are too scared to contact police,” she says.

For Sarah, a final attack, six months after the Clare’s Law disclosure, triggered her to break up with her partner.

“I was in the kitchen and he put his hand around my neck. I’m only 5ft 3ins and he was quite tall,” she says.

“My feet came off the floor and he pushed me over the kitchen sink.”

Although Sarah says that was the end of the physical abuse, her ex-partner continued to bombard her with text messages, emails and phone calls.

Since leaving her partner, she has developed chronic pain, which she attributes to the stress of her abuse.

“I just feel that had the Clare’s Law disclosure been given correctly at the correct time, then I could have made an informed decision as to whether I should stay or not,” she says.

“And I can’t say for definite, but I would more than likely have left.”

The police force which Sarah requested information from, which we are not naming, has since apologised to Sarah for the delay in her DVDS disclosure.

Details of support for domestic abuse in the UK are available at BBC Action Line

Additional reporting by Kris Bramwell.