Domestic Abuse Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Julie Marson and Liz Saville Roberts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 9th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Liz Saville Roberts]

That broader awareness of what constitutes a household has been brought home to us in the past few months, as well as the nature of the tensions that can exist in such households. The thing that comes to my mind is younger households where house-sharing is common. One can imagine those are quite small households. But this applies more broadly than that.

If we were to assume that the nature of the coercive or abusive relationship is based on whether there is a sexual relationship between the two individuals in a formal sense, we would close our eyes to the wider experience and we should consider whether we should capture them in this legislation. That also applies where there are informal sexual relationships, which can be imposed on people to a degree in certain household environments.

I am aware that we have already voted on the specific aspect of this in relation to people and their carer. I would be grateful if the Minister would consider our experiences in the past few months and the inherent tension between whether we are looking at this on the basis of household—where someone is physically located—and those people who are intimately related, or whether this is an opportunity to capture a wider question.

[Julie Marson (Hertford and Stortford) (Con)]

This amendment and the previous amendment speak to a common motivation to protect against an abuse that takes place in our society among many abusers of different relations of the powerful against the weak. I know that we are all motivated by a desire to address that.

I was a magistrate in a general court for several years before specialist domestic abuse courts were even envisaged and came into being. I saw a whole range of different contexts of abuse, but I wanted to be a part of the domestic abuse courts because it spoke to something special: a specific context of abuse based on a very intimate relationship. I do not want to dilute that, because that direction of travel—to have fought so hard to get recognition for domestic abuse as the uniquely invidious and insidious crime that it is—is something I do not want to go against.

While I completely empathise with the desire to prevent abuse wherever we find it, I believe that the direction of travel that is encapsulated in this landmark Bill is where we want to go. That is why I would resist attempts to dilute that aim, context and direction of travel.