Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb
Main Page: Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (Green Party - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb's debates with the Ministry of Justice
(3 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I am absolutely delighted to be a signatory to this long overdue amendment, which I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the other co-signatories for bringing forward. It relates to a policy that I have advocated for years—that we should make misogyny a hate crime.
Part of the problem is that misogyny and sexism are deeply embedded in our society. The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, talked about a protective kindness from men towards women. Quite honestly, we do not need that. Misogyny and sexism can be covered up by teasing and even flattery, but it is totally inappropriate and it is time that men learned that. We have enshrined our condemnation of racism and homophobia in law, but we are not treating sexism as the same kind of priority and it is time that we did.
According to statistics, 90% of British women experienced street harassment before the age of 17. Street harassment is being shouted at. We are not talking about wolf-whistling; we are talking about men shouting at women, making them embarrassed and perhaps making them feel less free to walk down a street. Eighty-five per cent of women aged 17 to 24 have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances. Can your Lordships imagine that—that 85% of women have been groped by people whom they do not want to be groped by? Therefore, it is time to make misogyny a hate crime.
The amendment is long overdue and I hope that the Minister will say that she accepts it completely. Several noble Lords have talked about Nottinghamshire Police being trailblazers on this. It has seen a 25% increase in the reporting of misogynistic crime and a very high level of satisfaction among the people—mainly women—who have reported those crimes, because finally they have been taken seriously. As noble Lords have also said, only 11 out of 43 police forces in England and Wales have made misogyny a hate crime, have trialled it or are actively considering implementing this.
Part of the problem is that, just as the police are representative of society, there will be police officers who are sexist and misogynistic. This means that they need training. I have in the past mentioned the sort of domestic abuse training that some police forces are already getting. It makes the officers aware of exactly what happens and creates more empathy for the people who are being abused. For me, domestic abuse training is part of what will help to solve this problem that we have of misogyny. I hope that standing up and talking about it here will also help.
It would be a real shame for this amendment not to be accepted on to the statute book, but will the Minister at least promise to open a debate on this issue among police forces? It is in her power to do that. I would be very pleased if she accepted this amendment but, if not, could she take it forward in any way that she can?
I call the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.
My Lords, I shall speak briefly on this, as I think that the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, is one of those that would help to close a little gap in the whole issue. When people think about domestic abuse, they often think about physical abuse, and perhaps about emotional and mental abuse, but tackling economic abuse is just as important if we are to stamp out domestic abuse.
I have signed this amendment, as it is important that the child maintenance system is not misused as a tool of abuse. Domestic abusers must not be allowed to continue their domestic abuse by withholding or reducing their financial support for children. This amendment, like so many of those tabled to this Bill, is a reminder of how multifaceted domestic abuse is, and how abusers will exploit any opportunity they possibly can. We must deny them those opportunities and punish them for what they do.
Amendment 158 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, would require the Secretary of State to issue guidance to the Child Maintenance Service to tackle the problem of abusers continuing economic abuse by withholding or reducing child maintenance payments. As the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, said, we have just had a debate on the issue of economic abuse post separation, and one of the examples given of such abuse was through the perpetrator failing to pay child maintenance.
Child maintenance is an essential source of income for many single parents in enabling them to meet their children’s basic needs, including food and clothing, and is of particular importance to victims and survivors of economic abuse, who often rely on such payments for economic stability after leaving a perpetrator. Perpetrators of economic abuse are only too aware of this, however, and withholding or unreliably paying child maintenance can be a way in which they continue to control victims and survivors, including post separation. This issue does seem to highlight the importance of agencies such as the Child Maintenance Service that provide front-line services carrying out training to recognise and respond to economic abuse, as a means of domestic abuse, as part of how they operate.
Economic abuse perpetrated through child maintenance is not new, of course; it has been used by perpetrators for some time. However, the coronavirus seems to have exacerbated the situation through providing perpetrators with increased opportunities to interfere with child maintenance payments. During the present pandemic, it has been reported that the Department for Work and Pensions has redeployed a number of Child Maintenance Service staff in order to deal with the spike in universal credit claims. It has been said that this included staff tasked with enforcing or following up child maintenance.
The media have additionally reported that the Child Maintenance Service was accepting verbal evidence from paying parents seeking to stop or reduce payments in relation to their income decreasing during the pandemic, when this would usually require evidencing through documents such as payslips. In their response, could the Government indicate whether there is validity in these reports and what guidance has been issued by the Government to the Child Maintenance Service on tackling the problem of abusers continuing economic abuse by withholding or reducing child maintenance payments—not only prior to but during the pandemic?
We support the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, in raising this issue and await the Government’s response.
My Lords, I have tabled this probing amendment because I am trying to address the woeful underprosecution of domestic abuse and domestic violence in our courts. I do not think that the courts are quite set up to secure justice for survivors. Part of the problem is the intrusive nature of court into the survivors’ lives. The nature of domestic abuse means that deep and intimate details of a survivor’s life and their abuse can be exposed to the public eye. These intimate details can be exploited by the tabloid press or be the subject of trolling on social media. The higher the profile of the abuser or survivor or the more extreme the abuse, the more likely they are to face that media circus.
This should not be happening. Intrusion into survivors’ lives has to stop; they are revictimised and exploited by this publicity, which is incredibly damaging. Other survivors see this and it makes them less likely to report crimes that have been committed against them. It forces people to maintain secrecy for fear of becoming the latest victim of a media circus.
The courts are not currently set up to help survivors avoid this media chaos. There is scope for a survivor to seek a reporting restriction, but this is limited to situations where the restriction would help improve the quality of evidence or the level of co-operation given by a witness in preparing the case. This is not necessarily a survivor-focused approach; it is actually focused on helping the court to have the best available evidence, rather than the rights and protections of survivors. I hope that the Government will work with me to improve this. There must be some way to find agreement on the need to protect survivors, while allowing them to tell their story and obtain justice. I beg to move.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, for introducing this amendment. The openness of judicial proceedings is a fundamental principle enshrined in Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights. This underpins the requirement for a prosecution witness, including the victim, to be identifiable not only to the defendant but to the open court. It supports the defendant’s ability to present his case and to test the prosecution case by cross-examination. In some cases, it can encourage other witnesses to come forward, particularly if the victim has made false allegations in the past.
However, the principle of open justice can sometimes be a bar to successful prosecutions, and we know that domestic abuse survivors are less likely to report abuse if their name is going to appear in the press as a result. I speak from personal experience again. When I was a victim of domestic abuse, I was not prepared even to report my abuser to the police out of shame and fear that it might become public knowledge.
My Lords, I hope I can be relatively brief in my reply—not because the point is not important, nor indeed out of a lack of respect for any of the contributions we have just heard, but because there is a single and critical point, fundamental to the administration of justice, which lies at the heart of this debate.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, explained, this probing amendment is designed to protect the identity of complainants in domestic abuse cases by the automatic application of reporting restrictions from the point when the allegation is made. Although the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, referred us to Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, I dare say that the principle of open justice goes back much further than that. We are all familiar with the adage that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. That statement, with which we are all familiar, I am sure, recognises that automatic reporting restrictions of this kind are an exceptional interference with open justice. Therefore, we make those reporting restrictions available only when there is a real need to do so.
The most familiar precedent is in relation to complainants who allege that a sexual offence has been committed against them. In those circumstances, there is a clear justification for preventing the reporting of the complainant’s identity, because there is an overriding need for anonymity to be guaranteed from the outset so that victims of a type of offence that still carries considerable stigma are emboldened to come forward and tell the police. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, says, there are a couple of other such other examples in the law, but each of those is an exception to the general rule. We must be very careful, I would suggest, to limit those exceptions to cases where it is demonstrably required. Therefore, while I listened with care to the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and his personal and, if I may say, moving testimony, we do not consider that, as a matter of generality, domestic abuse cases in which no sexual offence has been committed fall into the same category such that they require automatic protection in the same way.
However, as a number of noble Lords identified, that does not mean that victims of domestic abuse should be denied anonymity where they both request and need it. The courts have discretionary powers to impose, on application, reporting restrictions prohibiting the naming of a witness, where the court is satisfied that being identified would diminish the quality of that witness’s evidence. I suggest that there is sufficient discretion before the courts to meet cases where reporting restrictions are required. To go further would be an unjustifiable interference with the extremely important principle of open justice.
I hope, therefore, given that this is a probing amendment —and while of course I am always willing to discuss anything with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones—that she will feel able to withdraw her amendment at this stage.
My Lords, I realise this is a tricky subject to legislate on, but I think there is a problem and we need to fix it in some way. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Paddick and Lord Rosser, for their largely sympathetic comments. I heard the Minister say that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. In that case, I would like him to go, perhaps, one of these days, to the High Court and see what is happening in the spy cops inquiry, where Judge Mitting—or rather the Met—is giving anonymity to many police officers who have committed crimes. Therefore, it does seem to me that somehow there is justice for some and not for others. I will, of course, withdraw the amendment now, but I still think this is a problem and that there has to be some way of sorting it out.