Domestic Abuse Bill (Ninth sitting)

Fay Jones Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 9th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 16th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Jess Phillips]

I rise to speak not with my own voice, but with those of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) and the hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier). I am better at doing one of those voices than I am the other, but I shall try to do justice to both.

The short term for this subject—given that we are debating short titles—is the “rough sex defence”. Other such terms are “Strangled to death in kinky sex romp,” “Woman shot in the vagina in a sex game gone wrong,” and, “Accused killed barmaid during kinky sex session.” Over the last few years, any one of us might have seen this type of headline. They are salacious, tacky and often used as clickbait. We all know that sex sells, but these headlines trivialise what is actually occurring. Women are being murdered and the men who killed them are exploiting a loophole in the law. The “rough sex defence”, as it has become known, is when a woman is killed in what the perpetrator defends as consensual violence. That means that, if your partner left you with 40 separate injuries, dreadful blunt force injuries to your head, a fractured eye socket and vaginal arterial bleeding, but explained that you had consented to such acts and that your death was simply a sex game gone wrong, there is a good chance that your murderer will end up with a lesser charge or a lighter sentence, or your death may not even be investigated.

The horrific injuries I just described were inflicted on Natalie Connolly. Her killer, John Broadhurst, left her to die at the bottom of the stairs, in a pool of her blood. She died of internal bleeding from 40 injuries that he inflicted on her body. He claimed that she insisted on rough sex, so it was her fault, not his. His lurid descriptions of what she insisted he do to her were unchallengeable. Not only did Mr Broadhurst kill Natalie, but he was able to entirely shape the narrative around her death, as she was not there to speak for herself.

That is why I support new clauses 10, 11 and 14. Currently, if a man assaults a woman during sex but falls short of killing her, she is in a much stronger position. She can tell the court that she did not consent, and the law gives her anonymity as a victim of a sex offence. The law bans him from using her previous sexual history in evidence of his defence, although that does not always work. But if he goes the whole way and kills her, she cannot give evidence, she has no anonymity, and his version of her previous sexual history is splashed all over the papers and compounds the grief of her relatives. This is a double injustice: not only does the man kill her, but he drags her name through the mud.

I cannot imagine the hurt and trauma of families who have already lost a daughter, sister, aunt or mother to have to hear the man who killed her describing luridly what he alleges about her sexual proclivities. Of course, she is not there to speak for herself; he kills her and then he defines her. We cannot allow that to continue to happen. We have the opportunity here to make these amendments, so that no victim is posthumously defined by their murderer.

Natalie’s case rightly caused widespread outrage, as her killer escaped a murder charge and was convicted only of manslaughter. He was sentenced to just three and a half years. We cannot have violence against woman and girls continually undercharged. Three and a half years! It is unfathomable.

New clause 6 would require consent from the Director of Public Prosecutions to charge anything less than murder in a domestic homicide. The rough sex defence has proved to be a powerful argument in court and has led to prosecutors backing down from a murder charge in favour of manslaughter, believing that they will stand a better chance of securing a conviction. New clause 7 would require the Director of Public Prosecutions to consult the immediate family of the deceased before deciding whether to give such consent and to provide them with adequate legal advice so that they can understand the legal background. Natalie’s grieving family said that they were not adequately supported in understanding why the charge was being dropped from murder to manslaughter, and what that would mean for the sentence.

We Can’t Consent To This found 67 recent cases of people in the UK who were killed during so-called sex games gone wrong; 60 of them were female. Following the deaths of those 60 women and girls there were 37 murder convictions, but in three of those cases, the deaths were treated as non-suspicious results of sex games until other evidence emerged—respectively, a confession to a friend, dismemberment of two other women, and a further review by a pathologist. They were not investigated as murder or even violent acts until, in one of those instances, the perpetrator had dismembered two other women. Seventeen cases resulted in manslaughter charges, with sentences of three years and upwards; five were subject to no charge, or found not guilty; and one case has yet to come to trial. In nearly half the cases, a murder conviction was not secured.

In the past five years, 18 women and girls have been killed in claimed consensual violent sexual activity. In 10 cases, the man was convicted of their murder; in six cases, the conviction was for manslaughter, and in one, there was no conviction. In one further case, there was a murder conviction only when the victim’s husband confessed to the crime; police had treated her violent death as non-suspicious. One woman’s death has yet to come to court. No one can consent to his or her own death, and it is time this defence was made no longer available.

[Fay Jones (Brecon and Radnorshire) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an extremely powerful speech. There are far too many cases to name them all, but I wanted to pay tribute to my colleague and hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris), who spoke so movingly about this issue on Second Reading when she mentioned the cases of Laura Huteson and Anna Banks. I feel that both their names ought to be on the record.

[Jess Phillips]

I could not agree more, and thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. Any opportunity to get women’s names on the record, especially those who have died, is absolutely fine with me.

New clause 5 arises from similar considerations, stating that where serious harm has occurred during sex because of the behaviour of one person, consent does not exist. We Can’t Consent To This found 115 cases of women who had been injured in non-fatal assaults that those accused said they had consented to. Examples of the non-fatal injuries that were claimed to be due to consensual sex include: being slashed in the back with a knife; two black eyes; being strangled; being punched in the stomach; being held against a wall and slashed with a knife, causing permanent disfigurement; being electrocuted with mains electricity; and a woman being throttled with a shoelace by a man she had met for sex—in that case, the strangulation was so severe that some of her brain cells died when the blood flow was interrupted.

In one case brought to the attention of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham this year by a solicitor, prosecutors declined to pursue charges against a man accused of sexual assault because of fears he would claim it was consensual sexual behaviour. In deciding not to proceed, the CPS prosecutor said in a letter to the complainant,

“A prosecution could follow in relation to this offence, but the courts have shown an interest in changing the law so that the suspect could say that you consented to these assaults. This would be difficult to disprove,”

for reasons set out earlier in the letter.

“If I prosecuted this offence it is likely to lead to lengthy legal proceedings in which the background to the case would have to be visited as far as the sexual practices that led to and accompanied the infliction of the injuries. In my opinion it is not in the public interest to pursue this charge”

in isolation.

We Can’t Consent To This, the campaign group, has found evidence of 67 cases in the past 10 years. That defence should never have been open to those defendants.