Domestic Violence

Stephen Pound Excerpts

Tuesday 11th September 2012 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Pound (Ealing North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) on securing this timely and intensely important debate. It is very much to his credit that he has brought the attention of the House to the matter. I also congratulate the right hon. Gentleman the Minister—

[The Minister of State, Home Department (Mr Jeremy Browne)]

Just “hon.”

[Stephen Pound]

Forgive me. Many of us consider that the hon. Gentleman is always right and never less than honourable. I congratulate him on his translation into his present position.

To be completely up front, I come from a generation that had the worst possible attitude towards domestic violence. My generation condoned domestic violence. I remember as a boy the number of women who walked into doors every Saturday night, the number of women who appeared in church on Sunday with a chiffon scarf around their neck, hiding finger marks, and the number of children who blanched every time someone lifted a hand. Very little was done about it.

Fortunately, we have moved on from that. It is no longer acceptable to pretend that domestic violence is not a problem. I would like to give particular credit, from my part of the world—west London—to Southall Black Sisters, which has been in existence now for more than 30 years. Many people will have known Hannana Siddiqui for her work on the Kiranjit Ahluwalia case. In that case, not only was the issue of ultimate violence—murder in the family—addressed, but the whole problem within particular communities. It became intensely difficult, and a number of well-meaning liberals such as myself stood back, thinking that we had no right to intrude into such matters. Those days have gone.

[Rehman Chishti]

On the hon. Gentleman’s point that certain domestic violence offences take place in certain communities, does he agree that one particular aspect is honour-based violence? There are more than 2,800 incidents a year. We now need a multi-agency approach to ensure that we get rid of that horrific practice.

[Stephen Pound]

There are few expressions I loathe and despise more than the use of the word “honour” in that context. There is nothing honourable about slaughtering, attacking, murdering, torturing, brutalising and beating women. To somehow imply that there is a shroud of ethnicity that can be spread across the issue and it then becomes acceptable—I know that that is not the hon. Gentleman’s view, and I know that he is far, far better than that—and to use the word that he used in that context frankly sticks in my throat.

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman that there is a huge problem in certain societies, and they are not all of one faith, colour, race or nationality. In my own ethnicity, believe you me, we would want to talk to some west London Irish families about their attitudes towards women. We do not have a great deal to be massively proud of. That issue has to be confronted, and it is being confronted. We need the resources to confront and intervene.

[Rehman Chishti]

Let me clarify for the hon. Gentleman. I agree that there is nothing honourable about the vile act. One uses the term “honour” because that is how it is used and labelled at the moment. If he wants to change the terminology and ask the Minister to ensure that we do so, I will push for that with him. I agree completely that there is no honour in that disgraceful act. It was used only because it is the term that is applied throughout the country.

[Stephen Pound]

May I say categorically, on the record, that I have immense respect for the hon. Gentleman? I have enjoyed many conversations with him, and I am grateful that he has joined us in the House. I certainly did not, at any stage, mean to imply any criticism; we are as one here. We look to the Minister’s febrile mind to come up with an alternative wording, in the sure and certain knowledge that he is the person who can achieve that.

[Julie Hilling]

My hon. Friend said that he thought that we were now in more enlightened times. I do not know whether he has seen the statistics from a Department of Health survey that say that 43% of teenage girls believe that it is acceptable for a boyfriend to be aggressive towards his partner, and that one in two boys and one in three girls believe that there are some circumstances in which it is okay to hit a woman or to force her to have sex. We have not moved greatly from those unenlightened times. Perhaps the only difference is that there were few resources to support women who were fleeing domestic violence. Sadly, we seem to be going back to the time when there were fewer resources to support women. Fundamentally, attitudes such as how men view women and how women view themselves regarding domestic violence have not changed.

[Stephen Pound]

Dr Pangloss has never been my role model on such occasions. I do not see that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. Believe you me, I am more than well aware of the fact that we have not remotely resolved the problem, but there has been an attitudinal change in society to a slight degree; it is not sufficient, but it is there. It is simply not acceptable nowadays to perpetrate the sort of behaviour that was the norm when I was in my 20s in west London.

Some 30 years ago, Erin Pizzey started the Chiswick women’s refuge. I remember going there on Christmas eve year after year with toys that we had collected for the children. It was explained that Pizzey, who was sometimes robust in her attitudes and was impatient—for sound reasons—would always insist on having no man within less than 20 feet of the building. We would therefore leave our sacks of toys 20 feet from Kew bridge for people to come out to collect. That was an improvement.

For me, as someone who has represented my area for 30 years, the biggest issue that we need to address today is not the existence of the problem, which is undeniable, or the need for early, positive and preventive intervention—I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) and the Minister will accept that, and we will return to that issue in a minute—but one particular aspect of the horrific nightmare of domestic violence: housing.

At the moment, I posit that every one of us is regularly confronted in our surgeries by victims of the foulest domestic violence who look to be re-housed as a solution to their problem. It is somehow felt that if they could move to another place or property, the problem would be solved. In London, that simply is not possible for two reasons. First, in my borough, there are 23,000 people on the waiting list. Secondly, my constituency is minute geographically. Someone could move from one side to the other and still be within a half-hour walk. If someone moves to other accommodation, do the children get uprooted and sent to a new school? Do they go anonymously to that school? Do people change their general practitioner, their sons’ football classes and their daughters’ dance classes? Do all those things have to change overnight? It simply is not possible.

That is why when people say—I have heard some say this—that domestic violence is exaggerated as a mechanism for accelerated movement through the housing transfer list, I find it intensely and immensely offensive. I also find it utterly unrealistic. In all honesty, there is no surplus of housing in the urban environment waiting for people to move into. I speak as someone who has spent many years working for a housing association in west London. One of my jobs was to facilitate such overnight—sometimes middle-of-a-Sunday-afternoon—transfers. Until the day I die, I will never forget the piles of school paintings, drawings and textbooks that were left behind by children whose mother never thought that they would go to that school again, because they moved on to another school in another part of west London, thinking that that would solve the problem. Did it solve the problem? Sadly, it did not, because the abusive partner saw such a move as a challenge, lay in wait outside each primary school, eventually located the mother and the problem started all over again.

There is one ray of sunshine. There is an organisation called the Place to Be, which some hon. Members may be aware of, that operates principally in primary schools. In my part of the world—west London—it provides a quiet place for children to talk to a skilled, trained mentor, who can actually talk through the problems that they face. Children will put a little note in a box, just like the bullying boxes that many schools have nowadays. More than anything else, we have found that little notes appear that say, “Please ask my Mummy’s boyfriend to stop hitting her”, and those are the mild ones. We see that over and over again.

The solution is not the refuge or the move, or somehow to seek to resolve the issue geographically, by transferring across the city. It is not somehow to blame the victim and say that the victim has to move; we have to look for preventive interventions for perpetrators and for early signposting. Unfortunately, like many in this room, I have had to speak to abusers. We have to do so; we cannot refuse to see them, although we might find that difficult and have to hold our noses. I have often been struck by the frustration evidenced by them—the low self-value and self-worth, and the failure to achieve anything in life. Very often, such people are like the father in the famous story in James Joyce’s “Dubliners”, who comes home and beats up his children because he has failed at work, does not have enough money and has failed in everything he does, and there is the agony of that boy who says:

“Don’t beat me, pa!... I’ll say a Hail Mary for you.”

It is very often like that—the frustration boils out from the parent who comes home, where the nearest person to hand is the child, the wife, the partner or the spouse.

We have to identify such violence early on, because I think that we can save some of those people. Yes, it is paramount that we save the victims and it is crucial that we save the collateral victims—the children and the people around them—but, in some cases, we also have to consider intervening on the person causing the problem. That may sound heretical, and it is much easier for people to switch off their minds and read the Daily Mail, or to demonise this great tattooed chav underclass who come home and bat their wives around, but there is much more to the problem than that. They make up a range of victims in their own different ways. I carry no candle for the abuser, but I recognise that intervention has to be across the piece.

Inevitably, everything that we do in politics in this place today is about resources and priorities. Nye Bevan was so right so many years ago when he said that the language of socialism is a language of priorities: we are in that world now. However, this priority has to be given full support and strength, because if we cannot provide preventive intervention and early identification, the problems that come over the hill will frankly be so vast that they will dwarf any demand or draw-down on the public purse now. I appreciate that such an argument may be made about many issues, but in the case of domestic violence, the argument makes itself.

Not only is there the corrosive, damaging and very often lethal impact on the victims and their immediate family, but, as has already been mentioned—I think by the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard)—such violence becomes a learned practice. I have seen children in the playground of a primary school hit girls, emulating their father’s or their mother’s boyfriend’s behaviour, which is a learned behaviour. I have seen young boys, at the age of six or seven, hit young girls, because they have seen such behaviour and they think that it is acceptable. That is a cost on society that we cannot afford.

[Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central) (Lab)]

I am sorry to cut off my hon. Friend in mid flow. There is clearly an issue of resources around local services, policing and such forms of intervention, but we should also ensure that the Government have a holistic approach to the economic impact on women of some of the changes to benefits, pensions and tax credits, which mean that women will not have as much financial freedom as they previously had; of the cuts to local councils, which have pressures on their budgets but will not, I hope, inevitably look at cutting services for domestic violence, although that is a risk; and of the legal aid changes that will impact on women’s ability to have the confidence to go forward and break out of the cycle of fear in which they live. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government should have an holistic approach to all those changes?

[Stephen Pound]

As ever, my hon. Friend makes not just a telling, but an extremely positive point. The draft universal credit regulations will be laid before the House in the next few weeks—I think that they are due when we return after the conference recess—so we are quickly approaching a crucial debate, in which we will have to discuss such matters for precisely the reason that he gave.

Many people do not seem to realise what will happen, say in the case of a woman who flees her violent male partner, if the male partner is named as the recipient of the benefit. What happens if the woman has to go to the abuser, who may still have her blood staining his knuckles, and ask him to sign the benefit over to her as a favour? Will he say that he is more than happy to co-operate and collaborate with her? No. One of the joys of child benefit—one of the most important things about it, and one of the greatest arguments for it—was that it was paid directly and solely to the woman, which is a principle that we seem to be losing.

What I have seen of the draft universal credit regulations fills me with dread, because I can see a fiscal servitude—the shackles of sterling—being locked on to women so that they cannot escape or break free, because of the complicated mechanisms that they are held in simply so that they can provide themselves with the basics, such as food and drink. Nowadays, we more and more see people turning to the charitable sector for the provision of the most basic of basics that, frankly, the state should provide.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about where power and resources lie in households, and about how a woman may be severely disadvantaged not only through the impact of domestic violence, but through what she then finds she has entitlements or access to. I have a case in my constituency in which the male in the household changed the tenancy agreement on the house, so that the woman did not realise, until she had to flee, that she had no access to that home under the arrangements he had set up. Does my hon. Friend agree that there must be a much more holistic approach to ensuring equal access to resources in the household, not just access to the important services that have to be available in a timely fashion when somebody becomes the victim of domestic violence?

[Stephen Pound]

In her short time in this House, my hon. Friend, whom I am proud to say is my respected neighbour, has earned an enviable reputation for coming up with exactly the right expression to illuminate a problem, and she has again done that extremely well. I entirely agree with her point, but I will go slightly further. I do not think that we can resolve the problem by identifying funding streams within the family; that could stop the problem getting worse, but would not actually stop it.

[Mr Edward Leigh in the Chair]

The hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys said that he did not want the debate to become a list of statistics being trotted round the course and, as in all things, I respect him for that. When it comes to statistics, however, it is worth drawing the House’s attention to the fact that 31% of local authority funding for the domestic violence and sexual abuse sector was cut between 2010-11 and 2011-12, which is a reduction from £7.8 million to £5.4 million in—I assume—England and Wales. That figure is massive, and I would say that that huge amount is cost-ineffective.

We have heard the word “holistic” used two or three times. Let us take that approach not because it is somehow a fiscally mature and sensible way of operating but because it could save lives. We cannot tolerate a situation in which young lives can be blighted and the lives of adults destroyed. We cannot see the destruction of the future of our country because of a lack of funding, financial support and early intervention.

I again congratulate the hon. Member for Pendle on securing this debate. I look forward to the Minister’s response and to a slightly different way of addressing this issue for the sake of present and future generations.