Domestic Abuse Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Debate between Jess Phillips and Fay Jones

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 12th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 17th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

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

I want to ask for clarification. Hon. Members know that some of us are very new to this, so it is possibly my mistake. The new clause really does not make sense to me, because subsection (1) states:

“A person is not guilty of an offence if the person is aged 18 or over when the person does the act which constitutes the offence”.

That strikes me as a typo, because it should say “under”, not “over”.

[Jess Phillips]

I cannot speak for the typo, but the new clause is almost exactly, word for word, based on what the Modern Slavery Act says about modern slavery. It may well be a typo, although, having said that, I cannot absolutely vouch for it not being one. However, as somebody who has had some success with my ability to write, I do find that the law is sometimes difficult to read. It could be a mistake or it could be completely right, but I am sure that we can come back to the hon. Lady and let her know.

New clause 46 is directly modelled on section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act, giving the same legal protections as those granted to victims of trafficking who are compelled to offend. Victims of trafficking rightly have a statutory defence where they have been compelled to offend as part of, or as a direct result of, their exploitation, yet there is no equivalent defence for people whose offending results from their experiences of domestic abuse. New clause 46 would address this significant gap in the law and reflect improved public understanding of domestic abuse. It should be accompanied by a policy framework, including special measures for vulnerable defendants, drawing on policies that are in place to support section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act. That would encourage earlier disclosure of abuse and access to support, to help break the cycle of victimisation and offending.

Research by the Prison Reform Trust has shown that types of offending driven by domestic abuse vary widely. They include shoplifting to supplement an inadequate allowance from an abusive partner; being coerced into benefit fraud; holding a weapon or drugs for the abuser, as the Minister quite rightly pointed out earlier; and defending themselves against their abuser. The law needs modernising to take account of the context of domestic abuse that is so often behind women’s offending in particular. Although usually minor, such offences can still leave victims behind bars and often separated from their children. Nearly half of prison sentences imposed on women are for theft offences, predominantly shoplifting.

We now understand how coercive and controlling behaviour can erode a victim’s sense of self and undermine their agency. As we heard this morning, however, there remains an inconsistent approach by the police and prosecutors where an individual’s offending may be attributable to domestic abuse and a lack of effective defences. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hove argued earlier, having effective defences on the statute book would direct everyone concerned in the criminal justice process to consider the domestic abuse context at an early stage. It would deter inappropriate prosecutions and, crucially, encourage earlier disclosure of abuse. A specific statutory defence is already provided for victims of trafficking in section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the policy framework that goes with it. This requires proactive early case management and means that all involved become more adept at recognising circumstances that indicate there is no public interest in prosecuting an individual or where the statutory defence should apply. It does not work in all cases—there are victims of human trafficking who end up behind bars—but I would like to think that it has heightened the awareness of people having to deal with them. Magistrates, judges and lawyers increasingly understand how exploitation in this context can lead to offending and are taking this into account to ensure that victims are not further punished.

The question asked earlier of Minister Chalk—or it might have been the new Minister Chalk—was whether this stops that process getting to the court room. In cases of modern slavery, the answer is yes. For example, if you were to find somebody in a cannabis farm or running drugs, the process stops before that point; is not like it gets to court. If somebody was sent shoplifting because of human trafficking, no one says, “This is going all the way to court”. The charges are simply not made. That is my experience. The same legislation and policy frameworks should be in place to protect defendants whose offending is attributable to their experience of domestic abuse.

I will now explain why the existing common law defence of duress does not work for individuals who are compelled to offend due to their experience of domestic abuse and how new clause 46 and schedule 1—sorry, new schedule 1; we are not going back to schedule 1, having come this far—would help fix the problem. Duress is a common law defence that can be applied to offences other than murder where the defendant was acting under the threat of imminent death or serious injury, and where there was no alternative course of action for a reasonable person with relevant characteristics. However, the legal test for duress is rarely used in the context of domestic abuse for three main reasons: the complexities of domestic abuse are ignored; as the emphasis is on death or threat of serious injury, the defence does not recognise psychological, sexual or financial abuse; and for the defence of duress to suceed, the threat of physical harm must be imminent. That fails to recognise the nature of domestic abuse behaviour, including coercive control, as it is typically entrenched, unpredictable and random. To a woman whose self-esteem has been demolished by past violence, the fear of violence may be ever-present and overpowering.

In a modern slavery case, someone would say, “You’ve got to go and do this.” Unfortunately, in the cases I handled, it was, “You’ve got to sleep with 30 men today.” Nobody is suggesting that those women should be criminalised, thank goodness. However, in the cases of domestic abuse that I have seen where a pattern of offending behaviour occurs—for almost all the women I saw in my female offenders service, there had been a pattern of domestic abuse—there is the suggestion that things had to be got: “Why haven’t I got this?” or “You’ve spent all your money and you haven’t bought this.” A woman would be faced with a situation where she had not got the things from the shop that he wanted, or did not have the money to buy something for the kids. That would often, I am afraid to say, lead to acquisitive crime offending.

It is also terrible when—I hope this has improved; I need to check—women are charged and sent to prison because their kids have not gone to school as part of their domestic abuse, as the children have attachment issues because of domestic abuse. I suppose they are free and easy at the moment because nobody is at school. On a number of occasions, I saw women criminalised because their children would not go to school, and domestic abuse was not taken into account.

The duress defence applies where a reasonable person with relevant characteristics has no alternative but to do what he or she did. For that to succeed, those experiencing abuse must show they were suffering from battered woman syndrome—it has been a long time since we called it that—or learned helplessness. Those are outdated concepts that pathologise women rather than offering an effective defence suitable for the circumstances. They require the production of medical evidence, which is not practicable in many cases involving low-level offending that are tried in a magistrates court. It would be complicated to try to get that. My favourite ever case of going to the GP about domestic violence—this shows why we may need to improve our health response to it—was when a woman I was working with tried to tell her GP that her husband was strangling her and she could not breathe. She left his office with inhalers.

Domestic Abuse Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Jess Phillips and Fay Jones

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.

Domestic Abuse Bill (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Jess Phillips and Fay Jones

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 11th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

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

The hon. Lady mentions some improvements that could be made, but does she welcome our election manifesto commitment about integrated domestic abuse courts?

[Jess Phillips]

Perhaps I am being a bit premature, but I look forward to the progress on that, because the sectors have been crying out for the integration of different court systems for years and years. As we have said about a million times during these debates, the approach of the specialist domestic violence courts have been patchy across the country. In some areas, they have dwindled, but in others they have come to the fore because of the covid-19 crisis. I would very much welcome anything that would standardise the situation in courts for victims of domestic violence, especially in respect of their experience of the courts, whether they be civil, criminal or private.