In its latest report on violence against women and girls, published at the end of last week, the Joint Committee on Human Rights highlights some of the failings in tackling domestic and sexual violence in the UK in recent years. It is right to do so: funding cuts for refuges for domestic violence victims and a lack of expertise in the commissioning of care services has led to local authorities ring-fencing places for local women only, despite the refuge system being built on the premise that women may need to move to a new area when fleeing abuse. Combined with the cumulative effect of legal aid cuts and housing and welfare reforms, this has resulted in a chaotic, poorly-coordinated system in which women and their dependents are falling through the net.
I have been Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria since November 2012 and recently led a Labour Party commission on women’s safety. My experience in these roles has convinced me that not only is rapid and radical progress to protect abused women possible, it is absolutely essential.
During the course of the Labour Party commission, for example, I was made aware of cases including that of a young mother who ended up spending nights in 24-hour internet cafés with her baby after being turned away from an already full refuge, and of women sleeping in casualty departments or even returning to their unsafe home as they had nowhere else to go. The courts can let women down too: I learnt that about 40 per cent of domestic violence survivors do not meet the evidence threshold for legal aid brought in by Chris Grayling in 2012, and in many cases are therefore left without access to legal advice and representation.
Part of the problem is that a male-dominated judiciary doesn't properly grasp the issue of domestic and sexual violence against women. The report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights goes some way to acknowledging this by highlighting the need for those hearing rape and domestic violence trials to be specially-trained. It also acknowledges that evidence and questions about a complainant’s previous sexual history are still being allowed during rape trials, despite being forbidden by the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999. This is a very serious issue because it potentially allows prejudiced and irrelevant views now forbidden by law to affect the outcome of a trial. Proper training would mean judges would disallow such comments, not to mention other myths and stereotypes which make it to the courtroom, such as the suggestion that victims have in some way contributed to what has happened by, for instance, the way they have dressed. In the Northumbria region we have recently implemented our own safeguard against this in the shorter term by introducing a Court Observers' Panel. Representatives will be present at every rape trial for the next few months and will report back with any concerns about how the trial was conducted.
The committee's report also endorses the view that psychological violence against a victim in terms of coercive and controlling behaviour cannot be combated simply by making this a specific offence—welcome though that development, announced in December, is. Frontline staff, particularly police, need to be trained to identify the coercive and controlling behaviour of domestic abusers which can include threats, stalking, verbal abuse, preventing contact with friends and family and deprivation of money and even food.
One recommendation made by the report to help improve trials is that if the current pilots for the use of police body-worn cameras when attending domestic violence cases are successful, their use should be extended to all forces. The cameras help to build up the evidential base and encourage some early guilty pleas, sparing the victim further trauma. In Northumbria, we also ran a pilot scheme in which a domestic violence support worker attended call-out incidents with police. The pilot, which took place in Sunderland, found that victims who made contact with support workers in this way were much more likely to seek help from the domestic violence charity Wearside Women In Need than those who were simply given the phone number by police; in fact, the figure increased from 1 per cent to 55 per cent, a huge contribution to the chance of these women accessing support.
The committee's report is welcome, but there is much work to be done. The chaotic system currently in place urgently needs reform, from refuges to courtrooms, and more secure funding is needed, such as a national refuge fund to safeguard the places women and their children need and reformed funding for rape crisis centres to give them proper security. In the meantime, women who are in desperate need are being let down.
