Crime: Domestic Violence

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for securing this debate. I will speak briefly from two perspectives: first, as people might expect, as a former police officer; and secondly, as people might not expect, as a victim of domestic violence in the past.

Despite the negative media attention surrounding the recent Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary report Everyone’s Business: Improving the Police Response to Domestic Abuse, it did highlight some good work carried out by, for example, the Metropolitan Police, an organisation of which I have 30 years’ experience—some of it not good. When I was a constable in the 1970s, we were told that domestic violence was the last thing that we should get involved with, as victims of domestic violence, once they had been patched up in casualty, invariably wanted to go back to their abusive partners and declined to assist the police with any prosecution.

I could not fully understand the mentality of these victims until I became a victim of domestic violence myself. My relationship started normally and lovingly but, imperceptibly, the coercive control and emotional abuse gradually took over. Sometimes something told you that things were not right: my partner’s tearing up of a birthday card from a friend which he thought was from a secret lover, for example; overly and unreasonably jealous behaviour, such as searching the contacts on my mobile phone and refusing to believe that “Bruno” was actually my boss’s official driver and not someone I was having an affair with; allowing me to go out for the night only for me to find that he was following me; and, almost inevitably, eventually a violent attack in the street. Even then, it was only when I was on a residential training course and began to talk to a female colleague that I realised that, however much I loved this individual, it was an abusive and dysfunctional relationship. Luckily for me, the violence was not serious. For too many others, mainly women, it can be fatal.

A decade or so ago, work was done in the Metropolitan Police to identify patterns of behaviour that led to domestic murder. It showed that a pattern of behaviour was established, starting with verbal abuse and coercive control, emotional abuse and then physical violence, tragically culminating in such murders. Officers were then instructed that, when attending domestic violence incidents, they should look out for such patterns in order to identify where victims were particularly vulnerable. This work was developed into a risk assessment tool by Laura Richards, initially in the Metropolitan Police, and then by the Association of Chief Police Officers, and is now widely used and known as DASH. I say “widely used”, but Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary found that it was inconsistently applied and that the police had to be consistent in their approach to domestic violence.

Interestingly, similar patterns of escalating behaviour were identified by the probation service in its report on working with racist offenders published in 1998, where the title of the report encapsulates this sort of progression: From Murmur to Murder. The report highlighted what could happen if racist behaviour was left unchallenged. There are direct parallels here, where unacceptable behaviour in a domestic setting can and tragically does escalate to violence and, all too frequently, to murder. Despite the research, the experience and the good work by some police forces, because such non-physical abuse, coercive control and emotional abuse are not considered by most police forces to be criminal offences, there is little the police or other agencies actually do until, tragically, in many cases, it is too late to prevent serious assaults or even deaths.

My understanding of the law as it stands is that if a stranger carried out the sort of non-physical abuse I suffered, he could be guilty of the criminal offences of harassment and stalking; but if I was in a relationship with that individual, he would be not be considered guilty of any criminal offence. That cannot be right. If my former partner had known that such behaviour did amount to a criminal offence, he might have thought twice about it. If I had known that such behaviour was a criminal offence, that might have helped me to redress the power imbalance in that relationship and helped me prevent the behaviour escalating into violence.

Although I have talked today about my own experience of same-sex domestic violence, the biggest issue is violence against women by men. I believe that the Government may be bringing forward legislation in the Queen’s Speech to extend the definition of child abuse to include psychological as well as physical harm. Legislation to criminalise patterns of behaviour that amount to psychological abuse and coercive control in domestic violence cases would not only help prevent further violent attacks but help save the lives of some of the more than 100 women a year in this country who die at the hands of men who they are or have been in a relationship with.