Domestic Abuse Bill (Second sitting)

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 4th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Jess, I have a few more Members. Do you mind if I see a couple of others and return to you?

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

Q Actually, before I say anything, I would like to hear the witness continue to respond to hon. Members. Her story is important, and it is important that we hear it.

[Jess Phillips]

Q We only have a short space of time, and we need to make sure that those of us who have to scrutinise the Bill get the message about what needs to change in it. So you had to sleep rough in London—is that what you are saying?

Gilmara Garcia: Yes.

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[The Chair]

This will have to be the last question.

[Christine Jardine]

Q Now your situation has changed. Would it have been different if you had had recourse to public funds, and do you now have recourse to public funds?

Gilmara Garcia: Definitely. Every time, I repeat that if, in the first beginning, the process follows with a safety report, everything will be different. It is now four years later, and I am still suffering the consequences.

[The Chair]

Order. I am really sorry, but that has brought us to the end of this session. On behalf of the Committee, I thank you very much for coming in and giving your evidence. I know it is difficult in such a constrained time, but you gave the Committee a lot of helpful information. Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Somiya Basar and Saliha Rashid gave evidence.

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[Christine Jardine]

Q Can you tell us how important you think it might be for victims to have access to local authority welfare schemes? Also, do you think the definition of domestic abuse should apply only to those over 16? Please give a reason for your answer.

Lucy Hadley: I will respond to the question on the definition first. I echo my colleague Andrea’s points on compliance with the Istanbul convention. Another important means of ensuring the Bill is compliant with the Istanbul convention is to include a gender definition, which I know you have heard a lot about today. We believe that the age limit for domestic abuse should remain at 16. We do not feel that it should be lowered, but we absolutely agree that the definition needs to recognise that children are directly affected by living in a household where there is domestic abuse. We know they do not witness it but experience it, and it leads to long-term impacts on their health and wellbeing. Without clarity that they are specifically affected by domestic abuse and are survivors in their own right, we are concerned that we will still see inconsistent responses to recognising children as victims, particularly in the family courts and in other parts of the public sector, so we really support the proposed change.

On the issue of local welfare schemes, we would absolutely like the Bill to do more on welfare for survivors. The Bill rightly recognises economic abuse as a key part of the pattern of abuse that a perpetrator imposes on a victim, and economic abuse has really significant impacts on access to safety for survivors, and on their ability to leave a relationship and rebuild an independent life. Sadly, many welfare reforms have compounded women’s barriers to leaving, from the benefit cap to the two-child tax credit limit and many more. We would like the Bill to introduce a guarantee that the Government will assess the impact of welfare reforms on survivors, and we would also like the Bill to exempt survivors from the benefit cap, because it restricts their ability to move on safely from refuges and to build an independent life after suffering abuse.

Andrea Simon: It is probably unhelpful to extend the criminalisation of under-16s by reducing the age limit. We believe that it is important to have an urgent response or action plan for intimate partner and sexual violence that occurs between under-16s who are in a relationship. At present, the experience of some under-age victims of very serious gender-based and violent crimes committed by perpetrators who are also under 16 can be minimised in a way that they would not if the perpetrator was over 16. That needs to be taken seriously and recognised. We agree 100% with the need for the definition to recognise children and their experiences of domestic abuse, which are often connected to their parents’ experiences, but are also distinct. There are certainly many gaps that need addressing, in terms of service provision for children and the resources that are needed to address children’s needs.

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

Q As a former magistrate in domestic abuse courts, I have seen women suffer in court and have more trauma imposed on them. How do you feel about the new measures to prevent cross-examination in family courts and to ensure that we can get special measures? How important do you think they are?

Lucy Hadley: At Women’s Aid, we think they are absolutely essential measures, and we are so pleased that the ban on cross-examination is finally being brought forward in the Bill. For survivors who are being re-victimised and re-traumatised in the family courts, it is so important that the ban be in place. I think you heard earlier that we would like it to be strengthened and to apply to all cases where domestic abuse is alleged, not just where there is an evidence test for it. Unfortunately, many women who experience domestic abuse will never tell anyone about the abuse, so having a form of evidence is a challenge.

We would like the Bill to go much further on the family courts, and to deliver a safe family court system for survivors and their children. One of the experts by experience in the project I mentioned earlier told us that the family courts were “horrific, traumatic, psychological warfare”, and that the proceedings replicated the abuse of her relationship. That is what we hear time and again.

The family court estate can feel very unsafe for survivors. Sixty-one per cent. of survivors we surveyed in 2018 had no access to special protection measures at all in court. Those are really basic things like screens, separate entrances and exits, and waiting rooms, which are vital to keep them safe from the perpetrator while they go through family proceedings.

We would like to see the guarantee of special protection measures in the Bill extended from the criminal courts to the family and civil courts, because it is vital that women experience consistency across the different jurisdictions. Many women will never go to the criminal courts, but they will use the family courts, and it is important that they get the same treatment.

Finally, we would like a systemic change in the approach to safe child contact with a perpetrator of domestic abuse. There are really serious issues about the understanding of domestic abuse and coercive control by the family judiciary and professionals in the child contact system. Despite robust judicial guidance in the area—practice direction 12J—we continue to see a very strong presumption that parental involvement in a child’s life is in that child’s best interests, regardless, seemingly, sometimes, of any safeguarding concerns about domestic abuse. We would like to see an end to that assumption of contact in domestic abuse cases, with a focus on child contact arrangements that are always safe and in a child’s best interests.

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[Christine Jardine]

Q You were talking about victims of domestic abuse. In dealing with victims of domestic abuse, how often do you come across evidence of it being a misogynistic crime? How often are they victims of some sort of misogyny? Do we need to look at how the two interact?

Dame Vera Baird: That is a very interesting point. There may be that situation, but it has not made itself—if I can put it this way—systemically evident to me. Lyndsey was talking about the MARAC, and we had a thing in Northumbria called MATAC, which was a MARAC for perpetrators. You could see men who had left behind a trail of damaged women. They were not high-level and dangerous, but they were repeat. They got on extremely well with their mothers, who took them in every time, and the next girlfriend along the line, who took them in every time. Indeed, they had no difficulty with female probation officers, female staff and so on. I do not know whether there is an evident link between the two, but I see domestic abuse more as a determination to control that individual than as a piece of evidence of general misogyny.

[Christine Jardine]

Q Something that has come up several times today is children as victims of domestic abuse. Do we need an explicit recognition of the fact that a child does not actually have to be the victim? Being a witness de facto makes them a victim of the abuse, and that goes forward through their lives. Do we need some sort of recognition of that?

Dame Vera Baird: Yes. I am quite clear that children in a family in which there is domestic abuse are victims of domestic abuse, not bystanders or witnesses. In my view, that needs to be made explicit in the legislation. People have already talked about what could follow—better support, welfare, services and so on. It would also bring them into the Victims’ Commissioner’s remit, where they ought to be.

I think that change would also weaken children’s invidious position in the family courts, where it is possible to find that domestic abuse has been perpetrated by partner A on partner B, but that partner A, the perpetrator, is none the less parenting well. However, if it is understood that a child is a victim of A’s perpetrating violence—or domestic abuse without violence—on B, it will be much harder for the court to find that the person who has victimised them is parenting well. I am very troubled by the presumption of shared parenting that seems to trump practically everything else in the family court. I am very hopeful that, if one expressly makes children victims, that will undermine the strength of that presumption.

However, I hope—far more strongly even than that—that, at some point in the development of the Bill and its passage through Parliament, the Family Law Panel will report, and that what it suggests can be taken into the Bill’s provisions. In a way, to go ahead with this Bill without waiting for the outcome of that review is to miss a key opportunity. Let us face it: this is a once-in-a-generation Bill. They only come up that often, so it should be as comprehensive as possible and should certainly include some recommendations from that review.

[Mike Wood]

Q Dame Vera, there have been suggestions that the remit of the domestic abuse commissioner may be changed to being a rather different, more general violence against women and girls commissioner. What are your thoughts?

Dame Vera Baird: I would have preferred it to be a VAWG commissioner in the first instance, and indeed would still prefer it to be there now. One thing that is very evident—this is obviously not a criticism of the domestic abuse sector—is that the sexual violence sector is underplayed in the context of domestic abuse, which is a much bigger numerical problem, and is seen as something more linked with violence, but actually almost inevitably involves sexual exploitation and abuse.

If you want to abuse your intimate partner, a key tool is to sexually abuse them so that you undermine them even further. Had it been a VAWG commissioner, I think it would have meant that there was a better opportunity to bring forward the sexual violence sector, and to see the organisations in it as very important and needing the same sort of systemic funding that the domestic abuse sector is now beginning to get, particularly following this Bill, if the Government extend the statutory duty, as I know many people have suggested. That will be good for the sector, but the sexual violence sector needs funding just as effectively, so I think a VAWG commissioner would have been good.

I do not know why, but, in a sense, the Bill seems to me, from a sort of small p political point of view, to be slightly hung in the past. I understood why it was kept narrow, and that it was to cover only domestic abuse and only a domestic abuse commissioner, while the Government did not have a majority; if it became bigger, and therefore more controversial, because extra clauses and amendments were put on it, or if it widened into VAWG, there was not a majority to get it through. But now there is a huge majority to get it through. You can afford to take on all these exquisite ideas that are coming to you and have done all day. I really think you should pause and think about doing that. I am in such a hurry to get it home, so that it can help, but all the same, there are many more things that you could do with the Bill—many more.