Verbal abuse / harassment / intimidation / threatening behaviour

If you are the victim of any of the above acts and it is not related to someone doing this because of your age, gender, disability, ethnicity / race; sexual orientation or religion then please read on.

If however the verbal abuse / harrassment / intimidation or threatening behaviour is because of your age, gender, disability, ethnicity / race; sexual orientation or religion then please follow this link to the Hate Crime| webpage and follow the advice given on that page.

Tenancy Agreement

The Tenancy Agreement makes it clear that:

"Tenants are responsible for the behaviour of everyone living in or visiting the Property. They must also keep under control any animals living in or visiting the Property. This applies when they are in the Property, in communal areas (stairs, lifts, landings, entrance halls, paved areas, shared gardens and parking areas), on adjacent land and in the locality around the Property."

Tenants, members of the household and visitors must not cause or permit a nuisance, annoyance or disturbance to any other person.

Examples of nuisance, annoyance or disturbance include:

loud music; arguing and door slamming; allowing excessive or prolonged dog barking, dog fouling; offensive drunkenness; selling drugs or drug abuse; solvent abuse; rubbish dumping; playing ball games close to someone else’s Property.

OR harass or allow to be harassed any other person.

Examples of harassment include:-

racist behaviour or language; using or threatening .to use violence; using abusive or insulting graffiti or behaviour; damaging or threatening to damage another persons property or possessions; writing threatening, abusive of insulting graffiti; doing anything that interferes with the peace, comfort or convenience of other people.

What to do?

STEP 1

Depending on how confident you feel - you might consider approaching the person causing the offence and find out whether they realise how it is affecting you. It would be nice to think that if they knew how much offence it was causing that they would stop and apologise, if however, you are worried about approaching the person directly or you have approached them and they are not willing to stop this behaviour then please contact us| or the Police|.

STEP 2

It is essential that you keep a record of each and every incident and how it is effecting you. This information could be crucial to any legal action. If anyone else is a witness they should also be asked to keep a record and to complain to Gloucester City Homes and Gloucestershire Police.

Follow this link to download our incident log sheet.|

What can Gloucestershire Constabulary / Gloucester City Homes do to help?

There are a range of legal powers available to the Police to take action against people who verbally abuse others, harrass people, intimidate people or use threatening behaviour. This can range from a warning, to insome cases fines, to criminal prosecutions and imprisonment.

If however the person verbally abusing, harassing, intimidating or threatening others, is a tenant, leaseholder or shared owner who is a customer, member of the family of a customer or a visitor to a customer of Gloucester City Homes then the Police may ask us to investigate the incident in partnership with them.

If speaking with the person concerned does not stop the behaviour then Gloucester City Homes and the Police will decide what action can be taken to stop the unacceptable behaviour continuing. This could include the following non-legal action:

Gloucester City Homes or the Police could ask you and the person abusing you to attend mediation to try and work out a solution to the problem.

Alternatively we could ask the person who is being abusive etc to sign an Acceptable Behaviour Contract which gets them to agree to act in an acceptable way and stop their abusive, harassing, intimidating and threatening behaviour.

If that doesn't work the following legal action could be taken:

If that does not work, the Police will investigate and may decide to arrest the abusive person. This could lead to a prosecution and either community service or prison.

In addition Gloucester City Homes could ask the Courts for an injunction which forbids the person acting in an unacceptable way. If the injunction is broken the court could decide to jail the abusive person.

Alternatively Gloucester City Homes and the Police could decide to ask the courts for an Anti-social Behaviour Order (ASBO). If the ASBO is broken the court could decide to jail the abusive person.

Ultimately if this still fails to prevent the abusive person Gloucester City Homes could ask the Courts to threaten repossession of a tenants home, or the revocation of the lease for leaseholders or shared owners, suspended if they stopped the unacceptable behaviour. If they continued, Gloucester City Homes could ask the Court for repossession of the property and the abusive person causing the abusive person could be evicted. As the abusive person had caused themselves to become homeless it is unlikely that the Council's Housing service would be required to permanently rehouse them. They are more likely to have to find their own suitable alternative accommodation. This would ultimately depend on the circumstances of each case.