Baroness Garden of Frognal
Main Page: Baroness Garden of Frognal (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Domestic Abuse Bill
Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 77. Anyone wishing to press this amendment to a Division must make that clear in debate.
Amendment 77
Lord Ramsbotham (CB) [V]
Amendment 77, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff, is an amalgam of the two amendments I tabled in Committee. It is also an amalgam of the amendments tabled in the other place by Chris Bryant MP, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Acquired Brain Injury, in which I should declare an interest as a vice-chairman. I should also declare an interest as chairman of the Criminal Justice and Acquired Brain Injury Interest Group, which consists of a number of practitioners in the field and officials from the Department of Health and the Ministry of Justice.
In Committee, I outlined just why it was so important that all victims of domestic abuse should be screened and assessed for any acquired brain injury as quickly as possible after the event, and was very happy that the draft guidance to be issued by the Home Office to the police contains just such an instruction. I am keen that such an instruction should also be issued to the Prison and Probation Service, I hope statutorily, based on evidence produced by one of the members of the interest group the Disabilities Trust at HMP Drake Hall, a women’s prison in Staffordshire.
After Committee, I wrote to Ministers appealing to them to adopt my amendment as a government one, and I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay, for seeing me to discuss that. I am still hopeful and will not decide whether to divide the House until I have heard what he says in response.
Noble Lords often raise matters that they think should be in legislation during the detailed scrutiny that all Bills receive in this House, which Bill teams almost invariably brief their Ministers to turn down, but there is often method behind the apparent madness of the mover of a particular amendment, because officials simply cannot be expected to know as much detail as professionals in the field, and their successors may one day be grateful that they included a particular reminder or nuance.
I admit that I had not realised the importance of domestic abuse victims being screened for an acquired brain injury before I was educated, any more than did some of the victims screened at Drake Hall. Some of them realised that an injury had been inflicted during the abuse only when the reason for some of their symptoms was explained.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
My Lords, I am not getting any messages through on my iPad or my phone, so if there is anything I need to know I hope the Whip will let me know. I call the noble Lord, Lord Naseby. The noble Lord has scratched, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB) [V]
My Lords, this amendment is important and it has been carefully worded to cover all the suggested improvements, as my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham said. It must be incorporated into guidance to prisons. The victim of a domestic abuse brain injury, normally a woman, may suffer memory loss, get confused and her speech become slurred because of brain injury. There is no physical wound or bruise; the damage is internal and invisible. Some in the criminal justice system doubt her because she appears confused and disorganised through loss of some executive functions. The brain injury remains unrecognised, and most victims will never have consulted a doctor, often through fear of talking about the abuse.
The Disabilities Trust’s work in Drake Hall prison which my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham referred to found that 64% of women prisoners coming on to the secure estate for the first time had a brain injury, and almost two-thirds were from a domestic violence incident. Some 40% of the women had a traumatic injury labelled as a mental health diagnosis, and for many this was the first time anyone realised the cause of their behavioural symptoms. Similar work with male prisoners has verified exactly the same situation.
Women who have experienced domestic abuse need treatment. They may need surgery to remove a chronic clot on the brain, and they certainly need neurorehabilitation services to understand the condition and cope with it. As I said, the data from male prisoners is similar, and it is similar in young offenders too: around 40% have an acute brain injury affecting their behaviour.
We cannot ignore the size of the problem, with almost two-thirds of women having a brain injury that came about from domestic abuse. This must be incorporated into guidance. I feel that if the Government will not agree to do that, my noble friend will be forced, unfortunately, to divide the House.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
We now come to the group consisting of Amendment 82. Anyone wishing to press the amendment to a Division must make that clear in the debate.
Amendment 82
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
I now call the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. Is she there? No. Let us go on to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. Lady Walmsley, we cannot hear you.
Baroness Walmsley (LD) [V]
My Lords, I am sorry; I had not realised I had been called and did not hear the Deputy Speaker.
I am most grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for seeing the opportunity to bring this really important issue before your Lordships again. As she said, now is a very good time to return to a subject I first raised in your Lordships’ House 20 years ago, soon after I was introduced as a Peer. The time was right then, and it was also right when a group of us tried unsuccessfully to completely remove the reasonable punishment defence during the passage of the Children Act 2004. It is even more right now, as violence against children has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. Any time is a good time to stop violence against children.
The fact is that if this country cannot give its children equal protection under the laws of assault, such as their parents enjoy, it cannot say that it values its children and protects their rights. The committee on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child agrees and has been very critical of the UK. Public opinion also agrees: 20 years ago, 80% of the public thought it should be illegal for anyone to hit a child. Indeed, many thought it already was. I suspect it is even higher now. Most people think violence against a child is a particularly egregious act, especially when it happens in a child’s own home, from which she cannot escape, and is done by someone she should be able to trust to protect her.
Of course parents have a right to bring up their children to behave well, but there are many more effective ways of demonstrating right and wrong. In the 58 countries where the law bans parental violence against children, parents have been helped to learn better ways of carrying out their duty to discipline their child. It is often called “positive parenting”. Violence against a child is definitely negative parenting, and most young parents today agree and would not dream of hitting their child.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, has said, children learn by example. Parents who beat their child cannot be surprised if the child copies that behaviour and hits other children in the playground and, because violence begets violence, they may also grow up to beat their own children. Violence is also detrimental to the development of the child and should be regarded as an adverse childhood event—an ACE—deserving of intervention.
Recent research supports a ban on hitting children. A large long-term longitudinal study by Ma, Lee and Grogan-Kaylor, published in the Journal of Pediatrics in February, of a range of adverse child experiences with particular focus on violence against children, reached the following conclusion:
“ACEs and spanking have similar associations in predicting child externalizing behavior. Results support calls to consider physical punishment as a form of ACE. Our findings also underscore the importance of assessing exposure to ACEs and physical punishment among young children and providing appropriate intervention to children at risk.”
In other words, they found that hitting children does not stop them misbehaving; indeed it can make it worse and has an adverse effect on their development, so services with a duty to protect the child should intervene to stop it. That starts with the law of the land. In the UK, we have already acknowledged that a child who watches violence against its mother in the home is at risk of mental and emotional trauma. How much more trauma will a child suffer who is treated to the same violence himself or herself?
We all want to help parents with the hardest of tasks—bringing up a child healthy and happy—but the current law does not do that. It is discriminatory to children and unhelpful to parents. Hitting a child hard enough to cause a bruise is illegal, but some children do not bruise easily, so could be hit harder without the parents breaking the law. How does a parent know how hard they can hit a child before overstepping that limit? Of course, the answer is not to do it at all and find a better way that does not damage the child you love. The law is nonsense and must be changed.
People have realised this in other countries, including the other three in our own union. Scotland has banned and Wales is about to ban violence against children, and Northern Ireland is looking at it. It is instructive to look at how other countries did it; there is a common approach. When I was in New Zealand, I heard directly from the Minister there about how a lot of help was put in place for parents to learn better ways of disciplining children before removing the very damaging option that we are discussing today. Help with positive parenting and someone to turn to for advice—we need to do that too. It is not that difficult or expensive, but the benefits are enormous for families.
I have a final point. Sweden was the first country to ban parents from hitting children, over 40 years ago, yet Swedish prisons are not and were not full of caring parents who occasionally lost their temper and gave their child a trivial smack. By the way, most parents who do that regret it very much afterwards. Those who fear criminalising otherwise caring parents should remember that the CPS will charge someone with a criminal offence only if the situation meets two tests: first, there is a good chance of obtaining a conviction and, secondly, it is in the public interest. The situation I have just described would not fulfil those tests. However, the law on assault should be clear, helpful to parents and fair to children.
The Government need to show leadership here. When Sweden banned hitting children in 1979, there was not a majority of public opinion in favour of the change, as there is here, but its Government went ahead and did the right thing anyway. Now, Sweden could not get away with legalising hitting children as, I am pleased to say, strong public opinion would prevent such a move. I beg the Government to show similar leadership and accept this amendment, or do I have to spend another 20 years campaigning for it?
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
We are trying to get the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, but meanwhile I call the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I rise to speak against Amendment 82. I appreciate that the noble Baronesses who have tabled this amendment mean well, although their language is quite interesting because they have used the most extreme language. They talked about violence, battering and physical attacks. I do not see any need for a criminal ban on—I know the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, did not want to use this word but I will say—smacking, or an end to the reasonable chastisement law.
It is important we remember that all the law currently allows for is a parent to, if they wish, use a very mild smack on the bottom or a tap on the back of the hand or leg. There is no evidence that this very moderate and limited defence has been misused to allow parents to get away with abusing their children. The idea that it leads to escalation—a parent using a very mild smack today will beat their child black and blue tomorrow—is such an insult to millions of normal, decent parents who would never dream of doing any such thing. You might as well say that shouting at your child should be banned, because that too can sometimes escalate.
It is a ridiculous and offensive notion and frankly, for me, some of the alternatives that this “good parenting” brings in which families could use to chastise seem much worse. If I was a child, my choice would be to have the quick smack and be outside playing again rather than being locked up in my room for three or four hours on my own with nothing or nobody to speak to. We have no idea what the psychological effects of that are on young children.
The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, talked about public support. We do not have that public support. We know there are no popular calls for a ban. It may be an issue which obsesses certain activists and people, but the idea that the public are clamouring for us to criminalise parents who smack is far from the truth. Polling in Scotland and Wales ahead of the smacking bans there demonstrates how unwanted and unwelcome these new regimes are: 76% of Welsh adults said no to changing the law in 2017 and 74% of Scottish adults opposed a smacking ban. I have not seen much discussion of it in Northern Ireland. Let us not pretend the Great British public have given a mandate to change the law. In my view and in most parents’ views, smacking is a reasonable option that responsible parents must be free to use if they see fit.
Journalists, campaigners and some of the noble Lords who have spoken are prone to claiming that “this study says this” or “that research says that” or “that psychologist says this” and it deserves to be criminalised. But if you actually look at the data, you usually find either that the researchers are active campaigners dressing their views up as science or that the research did not make the claims attributed to it. I am not aware of any reliable studies showing causation between gentle physical chastisement of the kind we are talking about and negative child outcomes. By removing the reasonable chastisement protection, tapping your child on the hand or the bottom would become a crime—an assault, as some of the noble Baronesses call it.
If this happens, the police and others would have a duty to report and investigate every case that came to their attention. Every instance of a loving mum or dad using a little smack in a reasonable and normal manner, perhaps when the child was in imminent danger, would suddenly be liable for prosecution. That cannot be anything but detrimental to that family’s trust in the authorities. Removing the safeguard would likely result in significant overreporting to social services. The twitching curtain brigade would love it.
There are probably thousands of parents using reasonable chastisement every day, and the idea that they would all stop overnight because we tell them to is, I am afraid, pretty naive. Even if only a fraction of those parents came to the attention of the authorities, it would place considerable pressure on the already overburdened social services and police, and this would dilute the resources available to help truly vulnerable children and their families. Some of them would eventually slip through the cracks and be overlooked. I believe that this would be the legacy of passing this amendment.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
We now come to Amendment 87. Does the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, wish to move the amendment?
Amendment 87
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
Right. The Question is that Amendment 87 be agreed to. As many as are of that opinion will say “Content”, to the contrary “Not-Content”.
I have collected the voices, but the Division will have to be deferred, so voting will take place at a later stage.
The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)
I now call Amendment 87A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin.
Amendment 87A