Violence Against Women

Baroness Scotland of Asthal Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scotland of Asthal]

My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for bringing forward this wonderful and important debate—and, indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, for introducing so generously a subject that I shall touch on. Noble Lords will know that I have to declare my interest as patron of the Corporate Alliance Against Domestic Violence, the Global Foundation for the Elimination of Domestic Violence, and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Domestic and Sexual Violence.

This debate is timely, because we still live in a world where one in three women will suffer from domestic violence at some stage in their lives. It is still the greatest cause of morbidity in women and girls worldwide. Some 75% of those victims suffer abuse while at work and 56% of victims do not go to work at least five times a month. It was for that reason that we created the Corporate Alliance Against Domestic Violence in 2005, when I left government, to assist businesses to do what they could to reduce the impact of domestic violence on the workforce.

This issue can be tackled, but it needs us to tackle it together. In this country, we have moved from serial dysfunction to function by coming together in partnership to make a difference. Noble Lords will know that we managed together, with all parties working with the third sector and business, to reduce domestic violence in our country by 64% and reduce the economic cost of domestic violence by more than £7 billion.

However, it is not just in this country that we can do that. We worked with Spanish Ministers in 2006. As a result of that joint work and initiative, our Spanish colleagues took the matter further and reduced domestic violence homicide in Spain in 2006-10 by 25%. This is something we can do worldwide. For that reason I created the Global Foundation for the Elimination of Domestic Violence in 2011. I was proud to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, talk about the work of UN Women, because the global foundation joined its expert panel and assisted in drafting the UN policy in December 2011. We are now working in a number of countries, not least Turkey, where we have done a full in-country assessment. We launched EDV India in February this year. We have also formed a coalition of more than 200 organisations in 85 countries—the largest coalition to combat domestic violence—along with the Global Truce 2012 campaign. In doing that, we have, together with Peace One Day, reached 280 million people, and we hope to reach 3 billion people by 2015, so there is a great deal we can do.

However, there is concern here in our country that our focus hitherto has not been as good as it could be. Wearing my various hats, I am constantly being contacted by a number of our voluntary organisations, which are very concerned about this issue. Yesterday I was contacted by the Changing Lives project, which said that many female participants with whom it deals have overcome significant barriers around domestic violence, sexual abuse and forced marriages. The Changing Lives project provides advice and counselling to ensure that victims get support from local services. It trains staff and offers an advanced certificate in systemic family therapy. It also offers a brand of systemic family intervention that combines therapeutic support with parenting skills, and does so in community languages to bridge the gap. However, with the changes in funding, the level of support available to those affected by domestic violence has gone down significantly. As a significant number of community advice services have lost their funding and are no longer available to provide legal advice to these women, and they are not entitled to legal aid, many of these women and their children are experiencing a cycle of stress, physical health problems and mental distress.

All of us in this House, together with those outside, have fought very hard to change that paradigm. Have Her Majesty’s Government assessed, or do they intend to monitor, the effect that the cuts in public funding to legal aid, the provision of Sure Start places and parenting skills programmes, such as those provided in Bengali, Urdu and Somali, is having on vulnerable and hard-to-reach families? Will the Government help us to better address these issues in future?