Domestic Abuse Offences

Emily Darlington Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Josh Babarinde]

I thank my friend the hon. Member for his kind words, and I completely agree that all abusers, domestic or not, must face the full force of the law. It is critical that happens for victims and survivors to have confidence in the police and our wider criminal justice system, and that is lacking for many victims and survivors. We see that in some of the consequences of the SDS40—standard determinate sentences—early release scheme that the Government had to implement in the light of the poor state that the last Government left our prisons in.

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for bringing forward such an important debate. Does he agree that one of the challenges of the current system is that domestic abusers and perpetrators are often convicted of a single act when domestic abuse happens over many years and can vary in the type of attacks and abuse that happen? Convicting abusers and perpetrators for the totality of their abuse therefore becomes difficult, and the prosecution will often go for the easiest single act to convict, thereby early release and the length of the conviction do not reflect the amount of abuse that their victim-survivor has had to endure.

[Josh Babarinde]

The hon. Member is absolutely right that domestic abuse is more than just an act; it is a campaign—a campaign of abuse, of misery and of an abuse of power by one or more people against another, and that is what makes it so difficult to convict.

There are so many areas in which the law could do better, and I was speaking about the early release scheme as an example. The scheme would release folks who had served 40% of their sentence rather than 50%. The Government nobly made a commitment to survivors that they would do everything possible to exclude domestic abusers from being released early under the SDS40 scheme, recognising that it can be super-destabilising for survivors, who need to prepare for when their abuser is back in society, their community and their neighbourhood.

Unfortunately, we know many domestic abusers were released early under the SDS40 scheme. That happened because the only way someone can be excluded from, or included in, an early release scheme is on the basis of the offence they have committed—something the Justice Secretary has confirmed—and not on the basis of anything else we might know about their behaviour. The problem is there is no specific offence of domestic abuse in the law. We therefore cannot properly exclude those people from an early release scheme, if that is something we are committing to those survivors.

Instead, we know domestic abusers are often convicted of actual bodily harm, assault or battery. Those offences were criminalised by an Act written in 1861—the Offences against the Person Act—that was not written with domestic abuse in mind. As a result, so many domestic abusers are falling through the cracks, and so many victims and survivors do not get the justice or recognition they deserve.