Domestic Abuse: Children

Jess Asato Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Jess Asato (Lowestoft) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley) on securing this important debate.

Domestic abuse does not just claim adult lives; it devastates children. Lybah, a child survivor of domestic abuse and a SafeLives changemaker, said:

“As a child I felt like I was often overlooked and was never really acknowledged as a victim of DA. Rather than helping me process what happened to me I was told by services to write down my thoughts and feelings and draw a picture of what a ‘happy family’ should look like.”

Some 71% of adult survivors are unable to access specialist support for their children, according to the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. That is why the work of Foundations in finding what works to support child victims—including piloting Bounce Back 4 Kids, a therapeutic programme supporting child recovery—is so important. Every year, around 200 children in the UK are bereaved by domestic homicide. Shockingly, we still do not know the actual number, because it is not officially recorded. Those children are the hidden victims behind the headlines.

Survivor Debrah prevented her father from murdering her mother by hitting him on the head with a poker. He told her that she “had better kill him” or he would kill her as well. A week and a half later, he succeeded in killing her mother. From prison, her father was able to block Debrah from living with her mother’s sister, instead sending her either to his own family or to live with a grandparent who had previously molested her. Her siblings were forced by social workers to visit him in prison. After just 14 months, her father was released and her younger siblings were made to live with him. They were beaten and starved and, within a year, he attempted to kill a new girlfriend. Debrah is one of the many children behind the shocking headlines we see far too often. I pay tribute to the tireless work of the Joanna Simpson Foundation and Children Heard and Seen, which I was honoured to host in Parliament recently, and do so much to support many of these children and the adults they become.

Many of these children face a double loss: one parent to bereavement and one parent to prison. They do so while carrying the stigma of their parent’s actions and the deeply conflicting emotions that come with it. Professionals working with these children often struggle with the language to explain what has happened. They were simply not trained to approach this subject. As there is no statutory mechanism to identify and support children when a parent goes to prison, schools frequently have no idea what a child is living through. Under current UK law, a parent convicted of killing their partner can retain parental responsibility, allowing them to influence important decisions about their children’s lives, causing deep distress for the families and caregivers who are supporting the children left behind.

Jade’s law was meant to change that, and was passed by Parliament in May 2024, but it has still not been implemented. I urge the Government to fast-track this, as families like that of Kennedi Westcarr-Sabaroche are still facing challenges from convicted murderers who continue to exert coercive control over their children from prison. Furthermore, the support they and their carers receive is patchy, short-term and inconsistent. Carers, often grandparents or extended family, are left to navigate grief, financial strain and complex legal processes with little help. Jodie Edith, the grieving mother of Kennedi Westcarr-Sabaroche, said:

“In April 2024, our world went dark after receiving the knock at the door that no parent could ever imagine, telling me that my beloved daughter Kennedi had been killed by her partner of nine years, leaving a child behind. With limited emotional trauma-informed support from counselling services for me, the caregiver, and my grandchild, it left us unable to grieve.”

That is why I hope the Government, in their VAWG strategy, will consider creating a dedicated, specialist national service providing wraparound support for children bereaved by domestic homicide and their carers, alongside a guarantee for every bereaved child to have an independent advocate to ensure their voice is heard in all decisions about their care and future. We also need specialist training for all professionals in contact with these children. Finally, we need to introduce a statutory duty to commission specialist services for child victims of domestic abuse. I proposed that in a debate on the Victims and Courts Bill, and I hope the Government will look at it again as the Bill moves to the House of Lords. I will finish with the words of child survivor Roann Court, who said:

“I watched my mum being brutally killed when I was 15, and the support was virtually non-existent for me and my family, which has had a lasting impact for us all. Children need support—we are as much victims as our parent who is killed.”