Domestic Abuse Bill

Debbie Abrahams Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Thursday 15th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

I would also like to pay tribute to the great Cheryl Gillan, an inspirational and supportive colleague whose presence is felt very strongly on this side of the House. The Bill returns to us in different and better shape from how it left us. The amendments do not just add content, but expand the framework through which domestic abuse in all its insidious complexity is understood. It is something that may well outlive the relationship. I have seen through work I have done with a particular constituent of mine that coercive or controlling behaviour can live long after the couple have stopped living under the same roof.

The Bill recognises that the threat of certain forms of abuse can be as pernicious as the act itself. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Ruth Edwards) for the beautiful way she expressed the shame and humiliation that lies at the heart of revenge porn, which is an offence irrespective of whether the threat is actually carried out. The amendments provide protection against sexual violence that does not depend on any particular relationship status. The measures on revenge porn and non-fatal strangulation and the prohibition on the rough sex defence are all examples of that, and I pay tribute to Baroness Newlove for succeeding where we failed.

The Bill has evolved in part into a very significant body of law on sexual violence. It says to women, “It doesn’t matter if he is your husband or just someone that you met on Tinder. If he tries to choke you, that is a crime. If he tries to silence you by saying that he will share images of you online, that is a crime. If he hurts you, whether through choking or anything else, and says that you were up for it, that will not work; it is a crime.”

This Bill comes at a very important moment in a national conversation we are having. We know such things are happening because of the countless women who have submitted their stories to the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This in the past 18 months, detailing terrifying sexual violence in intimate encounters, and the more than 14,000 young women who have submitted anonymous testimonies on “Everyone’s Invited”, in particular describing the sharing of online images. Then there are the 40% of young women who told the BBC in 2019 that they had experienced unwanted strangulation. What we have heard time and time again is that they just thought it was normal. They did not think that they could report it. For now, these changes meet that challenge and give women a route to justice in respect of these crimes.

I want to speak briefly on judicial training. I start by reminding the House of what the Court of Appeal said about that in an appeal it heard on domestic abuse about a fortnight ago. It said that while domestic abuses are often not “crystal clear”, where there is detailed guidance on judicial training, the number of appeals tends to be smaller.

I would like to talk about judicial training in the context of non-fatal strangulation, which is something I have raised with Lord Wolfson. Subsection (2) of clause 72 says that the offence is initiated by consent. I understand as a matter of law and principle why that is, but we need to be realistic about what the offence looks like. First, we know that it is occurring frequently, and we know that it occupies a sprawling kind of grey area. As the Centre for Women’s Justice put it, there is

“growing pressure on young women to consent to violent, dangerous and demeaning acts”,

such as strangulation, most likely

“due to the widespread availability…and use of extreme pornography.”

Without proper training from the Judicial College, it is easy to see how the defence could be used to lead to an acquittal.

Very often, perhaps always, the victim will have consented to sex in the first place. She may on a previous occasion have consented to strangulation or something like it under duress or a desire to please, and by the time she reports it to the police, she may not have very strong evidence of physical injury. We know from precedent, such as the Samuel Price case in 2015 on very similar facts, that her history will be used against her in evidence and will be relevant. Judicial training is imperative so that a case founded on these facts is not destined to fail.

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab) [V]]

I would also like to associate myself with colleagues’ remarks about the sadness of the passing of His Royal Highness the Prince Philip, our dear colleague Dame Cheryl Gillan and of course Baroness Shirley Williams in the other place, and I send my sincere condolences to their families and friends.

I will be supporting the Lords amendments to this important Bill tonight. That we should need a Domestic Abuse Bill is a sad indictment of our society, but the facts speak for themselves. In England and Wales, two women a week will die at the hands of their partner, ex-partner or a family member. Yes, domestic abuse affects men as well, but most abuse is directed at women. Seventy-three years on from the commitment to universal human rights, which declared that

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”—

that women are equal to men—our fundamental rights to life are being denied by too many.

This violence against women and girls in a domestic or wider setting has context. For some, girl babies are seen as less important than boy babies, and daughters who are deemed to have shamed their families are punished, sometimes fatally. Too many still see their wives and daughters as chattels, and too many justify rape on how women dress. Our right to an education, to marry whom we wish, to work in whatever job we wish—limited only by our abilities, not by prejudice and discrimination—and to be paid equally for that work still elude us. If we want to stop violence against women, including in the home, we need a cultural change. Society needs to stop paying lip service to women’s rights and to treat women equally in every aspect of life, and this culture change requires leadership.

In addition to the cultural context, if we are going to try to prevent domestic abuse, we also need to recognise its drivers, including socioeconomic conditions. Yesterday, at the Work and Pensions Committee, we heard evidence that, although domestic abuse happens in all walks of life, being under financial pressure is associated with an increased risk of abuse. Poverty cannot be decoupled from abuse; it is both a cause and a consequence.

The lack of provision in the Bill to address wider cultural issues and the socioeconomic context associated with abuse were discussed at a recent Oldham roundtable looking at the impacts of covid on domestic abuse over the last year. In addition to these gaps, I noted with some concern that the detection of abuse at community level did not translate into incidents reported to the police. Reflecting national patterns during the first lockdown in Oldham, the average number of cases at MARAC doubled every fortnight and the numbers of children on child protection plans following domestic abuse concerns increased by 41%, but this was not reflected in the numbers of domestic abuse incidents reported to the police, which has remained fairly static at about 400 a month. This obviously suggests that domestic abuse has been under-reported and that there is an increased problem of hidden abuse, as colleagues have been discussing as we have been going along.

The concerns raised in Oldham about the provisions in the Bill were particularly related to the issues, first, of victims with complex needs; secondly, of victims with no recourse to public funds; and finally, of the practical implementation of the Bill and its funding mechanisms. On victims with complex needs, including disabled people or people with a mental health condition, there were concerns, on top of the shortage of refuge places ordinarily, about the new duty to support a victim in safe accommodation and the availability of appropriately adapted or supported safe accommodation. Basically, there are not enough places. I would also like to support my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) and other colleagues who have been raising the disappointment regarding the Government’s position on abuse of disabled women by their carers and the lack of the support for the Lords amendments on this, which we think is very short-sighted.

I also echo colleagues’ remarks concerning the Lords amendments to address the lack of support for women with no recourse to public funds—predominantly but not exclusively migrant women. Currently, the destitution domestic violence concession scheme is a lengthy and bureaucratic process, leaving these women in limbo, often without access to the support they need, and we need to change that.

On the practicalities of implementing the Bill, there are concerns that the timescales for local authorities will be challenging in the context of an ongoing pandemic, particularly in regard to the requirements to have local strategies in place by August and to spend budget allocations by April 2022. Similarly, there is concern that funding will be skewed towards services around the narrowly defined duty for local authorities, at the expense of other essential support services, and that needs to be addressed. Given the timescales, local authorities will need to commit funding in advance of the strategic framework being ready, and they may not be able to spend the full allocation within this year. I hope that the Minister will also be able to address those remarks in her closing statement.

The Bill is a good move forward, but supporting the Lords amendments could make it even stronger, and I hope colleagues will support it.