Domestic Abuse: Victims and Survivors

Baroness Newlove Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Newlove (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Chisholm for this debate. It saddens me, though, that we only have three minutes to talk about it. If it was to do with EU law, we would have three days. I think that shows you. Are we really serious about tackling domestic abuse? I am going to keep mine short. I have lots of speechwriting from my team, but I think this should be a debate about the victims and the survivors.

I have met many, both in my role as Victims’ Commissioner and outside the role, and the one thing that everybody has said to me is that they do not want to go to court. They do not want to go through these processes that we talk about here today. They want somebody to listen to them. They want them to understand what they are going through. They want them to help them to get out of a horrible, chronic relationship. And they want to protect their children. We have wonderful organisations that work tirelessly to help these victims. They are bursting at the seams because, when they do go to court, we have court backlogs, as we are noting, and it could be years before they get anywhere.

The one thing that we cannot see is coercive controlling. Even though we send perpetrators to prison, that coercive controlling still goes on while they are in prison. We need to tackle that with better training and understanding and looking at it like a chronic, invisible illness—which, as I stand here today, I have, but you would not think so because I do not have a broken arm or leg. We need, as a society, to look at people, and the default button should not be, “Well, they go back”. They go back because they need to put a roof over their head for their children. They go back because they have no control of their finances. They go back because they are worn down by the very person who says they love them. And they go back because they know the consequences of what will happen.

In this House and in the other place, we talk about legislation. This is for the professionals and this is where we can safeguard—and I hope that agencies will get this into perspective. But, more importantly, we are missing a trick. This is not about legislation; this is about understanding a societal problem. It is understanding the language that we talk about and it is understanding that, when a victim goes to report domestic abuse or any crime, this is not the first time that they are suffering at the hands of somebody who will absolutely go on to brutally murder them.

I ask the Minister not to keep using the two words “lessons learned”. It is an insult to the victim and to the family and, more importantly, as we have just seen in the young girl who has brutally lost her life, there is going to be yet another inquiry—another one that sits on the shelf—when in fact there needs to be accountability, because we have enough legislation that should have protected that child. As a whole, we need to do better, quicker, to protect other young lives.