It is hard to understand what motivated the Tory party's decision to withdraw the Lord Chancellor's Bill on domestic violence. The Bill was likely to have been popular with public opinion-given the known public desire to reduce violence against women.
Thankfully, it now seems likely that the provisions of the Bill will be brought back as part of the new divorce legislation to be put before the House in the coming session. For the Tories-lagging at the polls and desperate to recover electoral popularity-the publicity risks of withdrawing the Bill ultimately seemed rather larger than those of pursuing it. The Conservative party does not want to be named as the party which does not care about violence against women.
The Family Homes and Domestic Violence Bill had been preceded by the utmost possible public consultation and planning. Domestic violence accounts for about one quarter of all violent crime in the UK; nearly one quarter of all murders. And it reproduces itself. Over one third of the inhabitants of our prisons have been in care as children. Most violent criminals have themselves witnessed or experienced extreme violence as children. To prevent violent crime, now and in the future, we should first prevent violence in the family.
In 1991 I myself chaired a victim support working party on domestic violence, which brought together the police, the Law Society, the probation service, marriage guidance counsellors, doctors, victim support volunteers and many others. We all saw the same need for urgent reform; agreed on what was needed and produced a detailed report.
Domestic violence is widespread. The remedies which exist for it in current law are ill-understood and do not work. Our report made front page news in the papers, including the Daily Mail, when it was released in 1992. It was warmly welcomed on all sides and followed by a report on domestic violence issues from the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, which made similar recommendations.
Bills which simply reform existing legislation are hard to find time for on the parliamentary timetable. They lack the newsy ring of proposals to privatise this or nationalise that. So there was much rejoicing when new procedures were devised by parliament-the so-called "Jellicoe" procedures-which allowed a Bill based on unanimously welcomed recommendations to find parliamentary time. The lot of battered women might actually have been improved.
But in a moral panic to beat all moral panics, the proposals of the Bill were suddenly found by the Daily Mail to threaten marriage.
Of course they did not. They would simply have rationalised existing law so that those in long-standing unmarried relationships would have been able to get temporary injunctions to protect themselves from violence-as married people can. Procedures for obtaining and enforcing such injunctions through the courts would have been clarified. The range of remedies for domestic violence which are now available in civil or criminal law, to either the married or the unmarried, are complex and hard to activate. Even solicitors often do not understand the options available to the aggrieved party. It is routine for the injured party, usually the woman, to be driven with her children from the family home and thrown on the mercy of a women's refuge or of the state. The aggressor remains in sole possession of the home. This is neither good policy nor good economics. It is hard to see how it can preserve marriage.
The Daily Mail-inspired moral panic now attaches itself to the proposed reform of the divorce laws themselves. There can be a real and honourable concern that changes in the law may devalue the institution of marriage. It is tempting to leap to the conclusion that if divorce were harder, then more families would stay together and fewer children would grow up in poverty. Tempting but wrong.
We not only have the highest divorce rate in Europe but the highest number of children born out of wedlock. Fewer people are choosing to marry at all. If the form of legal contract available to govern marriage appears too rigid, then people will do without it. The number of new marriages fell by 4 per cent in the last recorded year. More and more couples no longer wish to be locked into a relationship which requires the expensive services of lawyers to break it.
Single parent families are not caused by the divorce laws. Essentially they are caused by absent men, who refuse the responsibilities of fatherhood. This is the social problem we need to solve; and tinkering with state marriage regulations has little or nothing to do with it.
