Domestic Violence (Police Response)

Debate between Mary Macleod and Tim Loughton

Thursday 10th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Tim Loughton]

My hon. Friend, who has a great interest in the subject, is absolutely right in her final comment. It is an excuse. Data protection has for too long in child protection cases, just as in domestic violence cases, been used as a reason for not acting, and that just should not be the case. Nothing under data protection prevents people from sharing the data in a responsible manner with other proper professionals, be it through MARACs or other structures, when clearly it is in the interests of the potential victims or victims that they are looking after.

We have a very good MARAC in West Sussex, where the agencies work well together. I also flag up MASHs—multi-agency safeguarding hubs. I visited many of them round the country and what matters there is getting all the professionals around the table eyeballing each other and talking to each other. It was interesting to visit the MASH in Haringey, an authority that has gone through a pretty traumatic time, with baby P, Victoria Climbié and others. I saw the way that its MASH works: when an incident comes in, around the same table very quickly will be social workers, police, people from the housing department and from education. They will all be sharing information quickly. They do not have to go through protocols about getting information; they will be on the phone and on the computer getting that information.

I also saw that in Stockport. People knew far more from talking to each other and they rarely had to go to the computer. If they did, it was usually to check something that they knew already. That is why it is so important that professionals talk to each other face to face, rather than through the internet and electronic communications. There is no substitute for the experience of professionals who have been on the front line—and often know a fact about a family going back many years—and can come up with the right information. They are more likely to make the right judgment and intervention.

I want to finish with three points about what should be done. We need to make this a high-profile taboo subject. Mariella Frostrup rightly wrote in an article some time ago:

“We need a Man Army”

that is able to stand up and say that domestic violence is “for cowards.” We know that an awful lot of people in this country—particularly young people—are unduly influenced by celebrities, and we need a few celebrities to come forward and say exactly that and use their influence for good, rather than appearing too often in our Sunday tabloid newspapers creating the wrong impressions for our young people to follow.

The United Nations’ “Real men don’t hit women” campaign is another thing that we need to make available to our young people. I absolutely echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth that we need better education. We need better hands-on education about respectful relationships, and we need to tailor it particularly to certain black and minority ethnic communities where we need to handle the issue very carefully.

Children are better able to cope and recover when they get the right help and support, for example, from other family members, peers and school. Some children find it helpful to speak to a professional—a trained counsellor or whoever—but it is not uncommon for victims of domestic violence and abuse to take a long time to recognise what is happening. For some families, domestic violence and abuse are a normal part of family life. Even when children realise that a situation is wrong, shame can make it difficult to speak out. As my hon. Friend also said, there is often a fear that children may be taken into care if a woman comes forward to say that there is a domestic violence problem.

We need to ensure that social workers can recognise who is to blame and are as open as possible, so that those women can open up to them without fearing that they will lose their children through no fault of their own. Having a trusting relationship outside the home can increase the chances that someone affected by domestic violence and abuse will manage to talk about their experience. Sharing the secret with someone outside the family is the first step in breaking out of the cycle of violence and abuse. We need to ensure that there are trusted confidants. In school, they will be teachers, school nurses and perhaps social workers working in schools, of which there are good examples. Children will be able to go to them, trust them and pour out their experience, so that someone can recognise that and do something about it.

Secondly, I have a concern about the legal aid changes. We had an event in the House on that issue last week. Necessary changes are being made in legal aid, and domestic violence cases should be exempted from them, but in some cases that is not happening. In some cases, women are not getting the professional support that they need to ensure that they are getting the full protection of the law. That is not acceptable. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be able to look at the matter in more detail to see whether there are unintended consequences from some of the changes being made to the availability of legal aid.

My third point was also made by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth in opening the debate. We need to ensure that there is better training of police and other professionals working with all the agencies. I am very glad to say that in my area and that of the Minister, largely due to the new police and crime commissioner, Katy Bourne, domestic violence has become one of the priorities. She has done a lot of work to ensure that Sussex police are sensitive to and able to cope with incidents of domestic violence. I pay tribute to the excellent women’s refuge services in Adur and Worthing in my constituency.

Housing is a particularly important element in all this. Too often, women are confined in accommodation where they are experiencing domestic violence because housing services are not liaising properly with the police, social workers and others to ensure that those women are appropriately relocated out of harm’s way, which often means across local authority boundaries. We need to have a better networking system between local authorities, so that safe accommodation can be made available, often at short notice.

[Mary Macleod]

I am very glad that my hon. Friend has raised the issue of children, because that is a critical part of the debate. He is considering housing. Part of the problem is often that a woman will go into a refuge for some time with her children, but then they end up getting put in temporary accommodation until something else is found. That is still unsettling for the children. I want to push councils to try to get families quickly into not temporary accommodation, but more stable housing, so that the lives of the children are not disrupted again and they can go on to live fulfilling lives.

[Tim Loughton]

Again, my hon. Friend is absolutely right, because we look at this issue as primarily about getting the victim out of harm’s way and into a place of safety—that is clearly the biggest priority—as well as the children. However, that situation may pertain for some time, and children need stability. They need continuity in their education and access to other people and friends around them. We therefore need to ensure that there is some long-term planning so that the children can still access all the services and facilities that they need as children growing up, but in safety. There are complications with that, but again, early intervention involving housing services, police, social workers and specialist domestic violence people and charities can make the process easier, rather than it just being a case of out of the frying pan into the fire.

I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) about psychological violence, because the issue is not just bruises and broken bones, although they are easier to see. As important in many cases but much less easy to see are the effects of the psychological violence of a controlling person—coercive control, as my hon. Friend puts it. We need to be better at detecting that. That means better psychological training for some of our social workers and more specialist domestic violence social workers who are able to bring in all the different aspects of the issue, as I have said.

There is also, of course, the question of what we do about sexual violence. We have talked about physical violence. I have just mentioned psychological violence. There is a worrying and growing trend of sexual violence. In this Chamber earlier this week, we had a very interesting debate about the pornification of the young and the influence that violent pornography in particular is having on impressionable young children. I remember a particularly appalling case on “Woman’s Hour” in which a 15-year-old girl had been forced to watch violently pornographic films, videos, by her boyfriend and then to re-enact the sex that had been portrayed in them. That was seen as normal by the boy, but when the girl was asked, “Why didn’t you just tell him where to go?”, her response was, “Well, I didn’t think I had the right to say no.” Again, that was a very depressing response. We need to ensure that our girls in particular have the confidence and the know-how to be able to say no and mean no, and that our young boys do not normalise pornographic violence and unacceptable hard-core sex as what growing up is all about. That goes back to the education process as well.