Domestic Abuse Bill

Debate between Lord Mendelsohn and Lord Palmer of Childs Hill

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 25th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I shall speak in support of Amendments 3, 5, 168, 169 and 170. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, for proposing these amendments and I applaud the compelling case that she made in her speech. I also thank all colleagues for their thoughtful comments and support for these measures which, as I say, I strongly support.

It is good to see the Minister in his place and ready to respond to the amendments. I am sure he is aware that it was his head of chambers, my noble friend Lord Grabiner, who introduced the Bill that became the Divorce (Religious Marriages) Act 2002 with the support of the then Government. These amendments come firmly from that tradition and the approach of successive Governments to these matters. The 2002 Act has been valuable, but, alas, the position of so many women who are caught in this situation continues to be a source of great anxiety. These measures would give real benefit and relief, not only to the women who are so chained but to the men who wish to marry them and, most importantly, to the health and well-being of any children caught up in this awful situation. I would like to pay tribute to Jewish Women’s Aid, GETTout and the many legal experts and professionals who have done so much for those too many who have been caught in this awful position.

These amendments do not seek to legislate on what I consider to be essentially matters of religious doctrine and custom. They do not seek to involve the civil courts in questions of Jewish religious law. In fact, these provisions would provide greater flexibility for the courts to apply matters so as to ensure a greater appreciation of religious law and those involved in it. Her Majesty’s judges have proved to be able to deal very effectively with these issues, and I am sure that the beth din of today will be able to do so too, as indeed it has since 1866 when the then Government told the Chief Rabbinate that it no longer had the sole or main right to determine marriage or divorce in the United Kingdom.

What these measures will do, most importantly, is support the person who in adverse circumstances is the most powerless, vulnerable and likely to be experiencing coercive or abusive behaviour. There has been a tendency in this debate to raise grounds for criticising rabbis for not getting a grip on the problem, but it is important to recognise that religious law is biblical in origin and therefore seen to be immutable. Changes in practice and interpretation are very hard to achieve, most notably in the orthodox and ultra-orthodox communities, especially in the absence of any central parliament and in the context of so many different traditions. In my opinion, their position must be understood.

Under our civil law, the process of divorce is straightforward and gender neutral. Neither party can control or manipulate the process, and once the conditions for divorce are satisfied, the divorce is granted. Jewish law is different, because it is gendered and allows the man to control the proceedings. There is a degree of mutuality, but, fundamentally, the process provides for the male to be able to make the final determination and empowers the religious courts with the ability to overrule women. Central to this is the place of the man to be judged as being able to make a decision under religiously defined obligations of “free will” or “free from coercion”. It is a definition absent of responsibilities, or even adherence to common accepted principles of right or wrong.

Unfortunately, these established rules of religious law sometimes bring out the worst in people. On these occasions, the giving of the get may be used as a tactical device or a weapon of blackmail in relation to the ancillary arrangements for the children of the marriage and the financial settlement made in connection with the civil divorce. Alternatively, a refusal to deliver a get may be motivated simply by malice or spite that is in turn driven by jealousy or some other, perhaps understandable but nevertheless objectively unreasonable, purpose. We have to place the needs of the victims at the centre and, as with this important Bill, rebalance our approach to deal with the needs of the victim.

Of course, the job of the beth din is not straightforward and should be recognised as being complex, and is, I am sure, as sensitive as it is agonising. We must avoid getting involved in its processes and matters that offend religious law and focus on helping the victims. In doing this—and this is why these amendments are so important—I will illustrate the predicament of victims through three real-life examples.

The first is of a woman who had been divorced in the civil court, but is still waiting for her get after five years. On finally securing an appointment with the religious court to receive her get, it was made conditional upon her signing to agree a financial settlement of £150,000 less than that awarded by the civil court, and being forced to sign a document relinquishing any ownership of the joint properties. She was encouraged by the beth din to accept the offer as a legitimate way to secure her get, but she did not choose to do so.

Another example is of a woman who has been waiting 20 years for her get, and whose estranged husband has left the religious community, so it has no hold over him. This, and the effect of years of emotional and violent abuse during the marriage, continues to blight her life.

A third woman’s husband was being prosecuted for the sexual abuse of children. In trying to secure her get, she was asked, including by presiding members of the religious court, to lie to the police and tell them that the accusations had been fabricated, so that she could be given her religious divorce. Additional financial sums were requested. The husband made further demands that were impossible for the wife to fulfil, such as clearing his name of all convictions and expunging references on the internet. The woman had non-molestation and restraining orders against her husband, but, nevertheless, she was subjected to a campaign of harassment at home, in the street and through the posting of offensive and abusive messages on social media. The perpetrators have not been easy to identify, nor has there been any co-operation in the investigations. While the beth din expressed sympathy with her plight, there was no movement on the securing of the get.

Not every matter can be resolved easily and not every situation will fall into neat boxes with regard to the roles that either the religious or civil courts can play. It is therefore essential that we take this opportunity to level the playing field and make sure that we give the support to victims that these amendments would provide. Their objective is to enshrine the right of Jewish women to secure their get where it is being withheld by a recalcitrant ex-husband in order to exert control over the woman. Having a specific inclusion for victims of this kind of coercive behaviour, psychological abuse and often economic extortion would be valuable to those women who may have secured a civil divorce but are not considered to be divorced within the Jewish religion. It is in line with the key objective of the Bill, which is to raise awareness and understanding of domestic abuse and its impact on victims. The provisions categorise domestic abuse as conduct whereby one party seeks to compel the other to remain in a marriage against their will and uses an existing religious structure to perpetuate abuse and exert control.

There is a provision in law for the withholding of a civil divorce if a husband does not give a get, but in abusive cases, husbands are often in no rush to obtain a civil divorce, and with the bulk of the matrimonial assets and resources often being in their sole name, they are content to remain married without the final separation under way in the civil court.

While the Jewish religious courts have introduced communal and social sanctions with some degree of effectiveness, they are severely limited by having weak enforcement capabilities. This is why the law needs to go further to protect victims of this kind of coercive control and mental cruelty.

Women in this position must be entitled to the support afforded to other victims of domestic abuse under the Bill, whereby unreasonably refusing to grant a religious divorce means an act or pattern of acts designed to make a person subordinate and/or dependent by isolating them from sources of support, exploiting their resources and capacities for personal gain, depriving them of the means needed for independence, resistance and escape, and regulating their everyday behaviour. That is the absolute definition of coercive control.

It is important to bear in mind that for women who experience get refusal, it is highly likely that that is just one of many abusive behaviours perpetrated against them, often escalating over the course of several years. Sustained domestic abuse serves to humiliate, degrade and slowly remove a woman’s sense of self, severely limiting her wherewithal to advocate for herself. Many women in this position have explained the trauma and absolute desperation it creates, and the fact that they have no way of legitimising their concerns. In some cases a man uses the imbalance of power in his favour simply out of spite—perhaps out of dissatisfaction with the way the civil marriage ended, or with the financial settlement afforded him by the courts.

In other cases, a man may have mental health issues—commonly a personality disorder. In one example, a young woman, A, converted to Judaism and at 19 married a man, B, who quickly became physically and sexually abusive, as he suffered from bipolar disorder, of which she had been unaware during their short courtship. She left him after less than a year, but six years later remained in limbo, unable to marry within the religion she had chosen.

These amendments would provide the opportunity to ensure that the provisions and protections were available to all, and specifically to recognise the plight of these women, removing the shadow of abuse and control. The law cannot restore their right to exercise their faith through their ability to remarry and have children within their faith, but these measures, in this Bill, can provide women with protection through the courts, and give them access to a domestic abuse protection order on the grounds of get prevention.

As noble friends have said, beth din-approved gets have been achieved by using the law, and these particular measures, more creatively and assertively, and in tandem with other steps. Nothing in the amendments makes a case for using them in the first instance, or even making them a normal feature of proceedings in Jewish law governing divorces, the overwhelming majority of which, as colleagues have said, pass easily. I am sure that such a prospect, of being urged to be in compliance, would be unnecessary and would raise deep concerns. But these measures need to be more readily available to support victims, so I hope that the Government are willing to support the amendments, as they are in the tradition of their own approach and of the important progress that the Bill offers.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I first declare my interests as noted on the register; I think the relevant ones would be as a vice-president of the Jewish Leadership Council and as a long-standing member of the United Synagogue. I have signed all the amendments in this group, and I shall not refer to them individually. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, for leading on them. She said that she was speaking as a religious Jewish woman, so I thought it might be appropriate for me to speak as a religious Jewish man. These problems, which mainly affect women, are well known in the Jewish community.

Noble Lords will notice that the amendments in this group have been signed by Peers from the Cross Benches, the Conservative and Labour Benches, and by myself on the Liberal Democrat Benches. When I speak in debates, it is not often that I agree with all four of the speakers immediately before me—maybe this is due to my bad nature—but tonight I do, and I pay tribute to the details that they have added to the debate.

The questions we are asking are: what is abusive behaviour, and what is coercive behaviour? We are saying that spouses should not unreasonably prevent the dissolution of a Jewish religious marriage. Other noble Lords have mentioned the effects on the children of such marriages, and I shall expand a little on that. Previous amendments have said a lot about parental problems and responsibilities, but if no religious divorce—no get—is given, the children of that marriage cannot live separately with the divorced parent. Worse than that, the children of a marriage that is recognised in the civil courts but not in the Jewish religious courts are treated as illegitimate in the Jewish religion. What we need to do, if we can, is to use UK legislation to help those chained women.

Previous speakers have commented on recalcitrant husbands who demand to be paid off in order to give a get. We should do everything we can in UK legislation to give power to the women who have such problems. I would have given some examples, but the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, has already given some graphic ones, which I am sure will be well known to the Minister.