15
Examination of witnesses
Meena Kumari and Catherine Briody.
Q126 The Chair: Welcome to this session of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee. Good morning everybody and welcome to our two witnesses. For the benefit of the public who might be viewing, this is a post-legislative scrutiny committee, where we are looking at a piece of legislation that was passed five years ago now to see how effective it has been. We are taking evidence from those who work in the sector and will be able to give us their expertise with regard to how the Act of Parliament is working out.
I welcome our two witnesses in this first session. Catherine Briody is head of violence against women and girls and youth commissioning at Islington Council; it is very nice to see you here, thank you very much for coming. Local authorities play a big part in this, as we know. It is also very nice to welcome Meena Kumari, the founder and director of H.O.P.E, a training consultancy group, which was founded in 2008 and delivers trauma-informed training around issues such as forced marriage, honour abuse and female genital mutilation. She has won many awards and is the recipient of great recognition for the work that she has done. It is really wonderful to see you both here today. The panel are Members of the House of Lords who themselves often have considerable experience in dealing with these issues.
My first question is mainly directed to you, Catherine. Can you outline the programme of prevention and research that you are responsible for, and how it works out with regard to outcomes, and some of the headline results that you have seen since the legislation was introduced?
Catherine Briody: I am from Islington Council and, before I talk about our work, I want to give credit to my team. I have Aisling Barker here today, who is currently on secondment to the Cabinet Office, and Karolina Bober. When I talk about this work, a lot of it is theirs. I want to talk about the things we do differently in Islington. In 2021, we replaced the monthly MARAC meeting with the daily safeguarding meeting, which meets every working day for an hour to hear two to three cases. The impact of that has been that we have really improved survivor engagement. We have a dedicated IDVA who contacts all survivors referred before the meeting to find out what their wishes are, and after the meeting to tell them what has happened.
We have much improved engagement in our partners. We get more non-police referrals than ever before, which has resulted in a big increase in referrals—social workers directly refer; GPs directly refer on occasion; health partners definitely refer—so it has made a big difference. We have been able to track all the actions from the meeting, so we know what impact it is having. We see it not as a meeting but as a full-time safeguarding function. Colleagues attend MAPPA meetings, for example, where perpetrators are also heard. They also chair and attend professional meetings.
The Chair: MARAC meetings are multiagency risk assessment meetings.
Catherine Briody: Yes. From that, we have seen a decrease in repeat referrals, which are currently at 22%, and we have dramatically increased survivor engagement. About 86% of survivors know about the meetings and have a say in what is happening, compared to about 20% previously. We also have stronger multiagency co-ordination and working.
There is a lot I can say about the daily safeguarding meeting, but I also want to talk about our workforce development team that Aisling heads up. We offer free training and consultations to anybody in Islington who works with survivors and families affected by domestic abuse, which has led to a change in the approach to domestic abuse. When we look at social work files, for example, we see evidence of a change of tone in how survivors are worked with and, increasingly, perpetrators being brought to account more often.
In terms of the Act, when non-fatal strangulation was brought in as a crime for the first time, we recognised there was a real lack of understanding about its impact among professionals. So the team trained all our Central North police on domestic abuse and non-fatal strangulation—some 750 police officers. We have also trained health colleagues, because a lot of them did not know about this. Out of that, we developed a non-fatal strangulation clinical pathway in Islington, which we are really proud of, which means that if someone experiences non-fatal strangulation they have an opportunity to see a vascular surgeon. I think 160 survivors have been referred through that pathway, which in some cases has uncovered problems they did not know about or which were undisclosed, like having had a stroke. This is really significant. Our team is training the NHS on non-fatal strangulation, and it is being rolled out to other parts of London. I will pause there because it is a lot.
The Chair: That is a phenomenal set of changes; it is really incredible. We have also been told that the integrated approach you describe has made responses to high-risk and medium-risk referrals 15 times quicker and that cases are heard on average within two to three working days, whereas it often used to be 40 to 50. We have also seen a 305% increase in requests for civil and legal protection orders, which is pretty extraordinary. That is because of the rapid response and people being much more knowledgeable and well informed.
Catherine Briody: Yes. It is about the partners that attend every day. Creating a daily safeguarding meeting was not an easy thing to do. There was quite a lot of resistance, because it is a lot of work and commitment. When we started, we were not sure how it was going to work, but partners found it did work. A social worker can refer a case, and they can immediately see the housing professional and hear what is happening with the police investigation. Sometimes the investigating officer is there. They can see it works. Previously, because of how the MARAC worked, there was so much time in between, and people were not always sure what actions had been taken and what the impact was. When you build the case, then you can bring the partners on board. That is what colleagues in my team have successfully done and led on in Islington.
Q127 The Chair: Meena, obviously the council’s response is on a different scale, but how is it working out for you?
Meena Kumari: There are a number of things that we have done at H.O.P.E Training. Five years ago, we started national H.O.P.E calls, looking at the Domestic Abuse Act and how it would impact and support victim-survivors. We worked with the Drive Partnership, SafeLives and Respect to set up a south Asian perpetrator intervention, focusing on a feasibility trial in Leicester, Leicestershire, Rutland and Bradford. It has been a phenomenal piece of work, not only because, as my colleague said, you need that multiagency response towards safeguarding, but it has been working with by-and-for organisations across the country, such as Sikh Women’s Aid, the Halo Project and Pegasus.
We have had some really interesting results. In a nine-month period of running a feasibility trial, working predominantly with men—it was open to men and women from a south Asian background to be referred in, and the majority of the referrals were from men—54 service users were referred in and 16 started the programme. We were able to deliver using a hybrid model, so some online and some in the room. Some 85% of those referrals were identified as serial perpetrators. As we sat in a system with the Drive Partnership, which has a history of running Drive sites and looking at high-harm, high-risk perpetrators—we were looking at standard to medium-risk perpetrators—that quality assurance was there, and we were able to tap into what Drive had previously done.
The Chair: Can you explain Drive for people listening?
Meena Kumari: My Drive colleague is also in the room, and I know Kyla will speak a bit later. For coming up to 10 years now, it has run different sites across the country, focusing in on high-harm, high-risk perpetrators, thinking about MARAC systems and processes. With safeguarding, sometimes the perpetrator gets lost in these MARAC systems, so we need to be holding them accountable. That is why Drive is so important. If you run services with perpetrators, it is really important that victim-survivors also have support. Some 25% of the victim-survivors attached to Sikh Women’s Aid and Halo had experienced or were at risk of honour-based abuse—that is why it is really important that we now have a statutory definition of it—but 15% had also experienced immigration status abuse. Having coercive control and domestic abuse defined, and economic abuse attached to that, has supported our work as by-and-for organisations.
We are really small, not on a grand scale. As you said, we are very different from local authorities and statutory providers. When you run a perpetrator service where people come on voluntarily, the motivation has to be there for them to stay with you for 20 weeks of delivery. So it is about community intervention, going out to local community services and saying to people, “This is what we do”. Providing a service in different languages was needed, and we were able to show that. The definition definitely supported this, but there is still a lot more that can be done.
Q128 Lord Russell of Liverpool: Obviously, this committee is looking at the effects of the Domestic Abuse Act. To what extent has the environment in which you operate and what you do been affected for good or for bad by the passage of the Act?
Catherine Briody: One of the main things is that it holds children as victims in their own right. This is really important as we learn more about the impact of domestic abuse on children. Our work in Islington has been informed by looking at the link between serious youth violence and what children have experienced—what services are there to support those children when they have experienced domestic abuse, and really holding them in mind. This has impacted on social work as well, and the training we do on how you work with the whole family and the child. It is really important and that has been really helpful. Also, when police turn up to incidents, they need to think about the children as well as the victim and what goes on in the household. There is often the discourse that children were not in the room, or the perpetrator is not violent to the child.
The Chair: Yes, saying “Not against his children” or “He is a good father”.
Catherine Briody: Yes—there is the trauma that those children experience and the long-term impacts that we see later through the system, when you think about the impact on children and how many of those cases come through our children’s social care services. I am sure that, in many boroughs, domestic violence in the home will be the main or second reason for referrals to safeguarding, so it is really important and helpful to have that legislative framing to put the focus on children and what they experience.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: In the work with perpetrators, to what extent is one finding ways to make them understand and realise the effects of their behaviour on their own children?
Catherine Briody: That is a really challenging area, because when fathers are referred to perpetrator programmes, sometimes it is in the context of child safeguarding proceedings and whether they will see their child a lot. They are referred to services and we know there is quite a lot of false compliance in their engagement. That is why you really have to start earlier. We have to realise the context that we are all living in—the misogyny that is deeply rooted across our society—and what younger people see. We are seeing the issue of adult child to parent violence, as I am sure a lot of areas do, but where that happens the violence did not start when they were an adult but with what happened in that home. The anger that that adult still living with his mother now feels and the intergenerational violence playing out is prevalent, but we need to think about what happened to that person, who is now an adult, when they were younger. It is such a massive problem to solve. There are so many victims and perpetrators across society. How can we tackle that? It cannot be dealt with just by individual projects or local authorities. It needs to be Government led.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: Meena, what effect has the Act had on your work?
Meena Kumari: I have directly delivered to perpetrators and have worked with them for 15 years now. We say, “In your modules and materials, you are going to address the impact your behaviour is having on children. You have to do that and address it”. The denial, blame or shame that comes up in perpetrator programmes is definitely evident. There are elements of shame—“I didn’t realise this was having an impact” or “I did realise, but because I have completely dehumanised everyone else who is in my home, including the victim-survivor and the child, now I’m kind of sitting here”.
However, that prevention space really needs to be emphasised. We run a teenage relationship programme in Leicester with another provider called Go-Getta, funded by our local police and crime commissioner across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. In the sessions we are doing with practitioners—we also deliver to parents and carers around teenage relationship abuse—we are finding a real lack of understanding or a safe space to have a conversation about what you just said, whether the abuse is adolescent on parent or teenager to teenager. But parents are saying: “If a young person comes and tells me about behaviour”, whether it sits in misogyny or another element, “what do I do with it?” It is harder when the parent may also be misogynistic, so you have got two elements of challenge.
Prevention needs a lot of work. A number of academics have written about it—we follow the work of Dr Ruth Weir and the VISION Consortium, and I have worked with Dr Olumide Adisa a lot on this—but the prevention space still needs a little more. I find I am almost getting perpetrators at a later stage. If I could get in a little earlier, what more impact could we have? Working with young people is very different from working with adults. Your materials and approach have to be different, but it does not mean we cannot do it.
The Chair: Another issue that witnesses have brought before us on previous occasions is when a woman confronts her partner, perhaps having taken advice, and says, “I’m not going to accept this any more”. A case finished just last week of a woman who was murdered when she told her partner that it was over—that she wanted to change the locks on the door and did not want him to stay any more. He went berserk and killed her. It is often about that moment, and making everybody alert to the fact that there are moments when serious, grievous violence can take place. It is often when a woman suddenly feels confident and supported enough to say that she is not going to accept violence or abuse of any kind any more. That moment is so treacherous and is something to bear in mind.
Q129 Baroness Sugg: I will just follow up on your previous answers about the main challenges you see in preventing domestic abuse and changing perpetrator behaviour. You talked about the life cycle of it, the importance of a space for prevention and early intervention. Is there anything you want to add on that? I am particularly interested in the DAPOs and the positive requirements for the perpetrator to take specific and proactive actions. How effective are they in your experience?
Meena Kumari: We definitely welcomed the DAPOs but, coming back to what I see nationally when I deliver training, there is a bit of a postcode lottery. What you have in your area and what people can be referred to as that positive requirement will depend on where you are in the country. In terms of requirements, we have quality standards attached to perpetrator programmes, which are definitely needed, but not everyone may be working or accredited to those standards. I am lucky that I work with providers such as Drive and the Hampton Trust. I deliver on CARA— that diversionary caution, a really early intervention which asks, “Is this your first offence?” A lot of the time, when someone says to me, “This is the first offence I’ve ever done”, I tend to think, “This is the first time you’ve been caught”. Does that make sense?
The Chair: Yes.
Meena Kumari: The DAPOs and the systems around them are great, but it is about enforcement and accountability. Once you have them in a room, whichever system you are referred into, how do those materials and those enforcements hold them accountable? How are you culturally competent? How are you aware of the nuances or the difference in perpetrators? I have worked with women as well as men, with male and female victims. We are lucky that our consortium ran perpetrator provisions with Drive for Black African and mixed heritage communities. Pamoja led on that and LEVEL led on LGBT communities as well. If you have orders attached to a DAPO, you also need to have perpetrator interventions that are intersectional.
The Chair: They are suited to a particular group.
Meena Kumari: Absolutely.
Catherine Briody: Islington has a test, learn and grow site for the Cabinet Office. We are doing some early tests at the moment with a focus on violence against women and girls, as we are the site for London. We are working with an organisation called Our Voice Our Journey to set up the REWIRED network for youth practitioners to have conversations with young people about misogyny and address the harmful things they are hearing online that are informing their behaviours and attitudes. That is really important, going back to the point I made about getting in as early as possible.
Previously, we were fortunate to work with Matt Brown from She Is Not Your Rehab, an organisation based in New Zealand that was doing work in Wales. He did some sessions for professionals in Islington. He also went into a school where he spoke to 400 boys for an hour. One of the teachers said she had never seen the children so quiet. They listened to everything he said, which was all about his experience of growing up with domestic abuse and child abuse. There were messages around not blaming women, how you treat them and being positive to your mothers. After the session, nearly 100 boys contacted him online. Boys want to have this space and conversation. They want to talk about what is going on and what they see, and to get support. We need to do more to provide those opportunities. We hope to address it through the test, learn and grow opportunity we have with the Cabinet Office over the coming year.
But we already do quite a lot of work in schools and training. For example, all our youth justice professionals are trained around domestic abuse, thinking about young people and domestic abuse in particular. We have run training on teen dating abuse for parents, carers and professionals, and we co-deliver it with a survivor who has lived experience of domestic abuse when they were a teenager. It is so impactful. In some of her sessions, women have come forward and disclosed domestic abuse for the first time. Bringing the survivor voice along with these messages and getting that across to the community is really important. They have so much to say and, obviously, they are experts in what happened to them.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: What age are the children who you talk to at these programmes? How young are they?
Catherine Briody: They were probably 15 or 16 up to sixth form when Matt Brown went in, but we do all ages. We also have a programme that talks to primary school children in Islington. Everyone says you need to start as early as possible. It is so important.
Baroness Sugg: Catherine, going back to your experience of the DAPOs and the positive requirements, have they been effective?
Catherine Briody: As my colleague said, they have been really helpful—the more tools we have, the better—but there is the issue around forced compliance with the positive actions. That is something we all need to be aware of and more vigilant about. There is also a lack of services to address perpetrator behaviour, which is a big ongoing issue. It is not just about them going to a specialist programme; it is about having services that can deal with their other issues. Often it is mental health, substance misuse and dual diagnosis, and often they cannot access those services because they do not meet thresholds, or they do not want to. Unless you address some of those fundamental issues, it is difficult to address other behaviours, including their domestic abuse.
Q130 Lord Polak: Meena has pre-empted my question on the postcode lottery. We are looking at the implementation of the provisions of the Act. The committee is also keen to know where things are going well or have improved. How do we stop that postcode lottery? In other words, where there is good, how can that be enacted elsewhere?
Meena Kumari: My colleagues will be covering the postcode lottery, so I will keep this brief. With the Changing Harmful Attitudes and Behaviour programme, where Leicester and Bradford ran the feasibility trial, what worked for us was the by-and-for multiagency approach to safeguarding. Fundamentally, we want all victim-survivors and children to be safe, and we want perpetrators to be held accountable. We also worked in a system where we were attached to the Drive Partnership, which has a history of running perpetrator intervention programmes and working alongside SafeLives and Respect. Thinking about the postcode lottery in that respect, I was very lucky in Leicester because I was able to deliver it in the city where I live. We also brought in other by-and-for providers. We were definitely in the right time and space; we were on a national working group and we fed into a lot of national systems change work that Dr Adisa was writing about.
Since the feasibility trial came to an end, I can now sit here and ask what we do next. We have data. We know that something is working and we want to continue it. But to continue something that we started for the communities, we need long-term sustainable funding and a plan behind it. If you are going to address perpetrators, hold them accountable and keep victims and children safe, you need a system to feed into that. The problem for me is that I sit on a two-three, three-year or 15-month system. That is really difficult when you do intervention work. You want long-term outcomes. I want to be able to come here in 10 years’ time and say, “Guess what? CHAB showed me in 10 years that, six months after catching up with those men, this is where they are now”. But that takes time and funding and it has to be sustainable.
The Chair: It involves commitment at many different levels, and the funding is rightly important. Catherine, this postcode lottery happens on many different fronts. We have 43 different police forces and I cannot remember how many local authorities and so on. How is the word spread on good practice? What are the mechanisms for getting the work we are hearing described out to other local authorities and parts of the country outside Leicester that have not yet been reached?
Catherine Briody: First, we all know that how local authorities set up their violence against women and girls services can be completely different, from our borough compared to our neighbouring borough—in terms of funding, how services are commissioned, whether they are in-house and what the focus is on. In Islington, we have senior leadership and political buy-in for our work around violence against women and girls. It is seen as a major priority, and we have been really fortunate in that sense. That has enabled us to build relationships with the police, which is a good example. The daily safeguarding meeting has been brought across the Met. It looked at some of our good practice and spread it wider, including us speaking at events and holding conferences. When Matt Brown came to Islington last year, we held a conference in central London to talk about some of the work in Islington and for him to talk about his message. However, you need the capacity to do that, and some areas sadly do not have it. That political buy-in and senior leadership is so important to give you the space to try new things and see if they work.
Q131 Baroness Hussein-Ece: I was an Islington councillor some years ago. I remember the very first domestic abuse co-ordinator we appointed about 30 years ago, Davina James-Hanman, who went on to work with the Government. Islington has a very long and distinguished track record of taking this very seriously.
My question was going to be about interventions in terms of minority communities. You have both talked very eloquently about the programme of prevention and the interventions for perpetrators, particularly from minoritised communities. When I worked with Imece, the Turkish and Kurdish-speaking women’s domestic violence project, I found that many of the victims are terrified of being stigmatised and pressured by their families not to come forward and report their partners or ex-partners because of the shame it would bring on the family. With more education and awareness, things have probably changed a bit now, but what is your experience of that? How do you work with those who come forward by going to organisations where they feel comfortable to talk about these matters? What work is being done, particularly with family honour-based crimes, where the pressure, usually on the woman, is such that they often feel scared to come forward for fear of being ostracised by their whole family and community?
Catherine Briody: We have really recognised that in Islington and continue to fund by-and-for services, including Imece, the Kurdish and Middle Eastern Women’s Organisation and Latin American Women’s Aid, which form our Samira project. They have IDVAs that work with survivors in the borough and are linked into all our partnership work. We also have a harmful practices forum, which a lot of the other by-and-for organisations attend. We do joint training with them to raise awareness with other colleagues; they are very much part of our partnership work in the borough. We have really good, trusted relationships with them. We continue to do that because, when we looked at our commissioning strategy, we spoke to survivors and many of them said they would not go to mainstream services. They talked about the importance of having different languages. We offer specialist domestic abuse counselling in different languages and continue to build on that partnership. It is not just about the services we commission; we value what they bring to the borough, which is quite incredible.
Meena Kumari: Honour-based abuse is a fundamental part of the core training that we deliver at H.O.P.E Training. We definitely picked up honour-based abuse perpetrators in our programme—thankfully, the statutory definition of honour-based abuse is in there. Baroness, thank you so much for the event you did the other day and what you said on stage. That there are multiple perpetrators in honour-based abuse is something we definitely pick up in risk assessments and in our professional judgment and curiosity. We also look at harmful practices—take out the word “culture”, because it has nothing to do with culture or religion—which, unfortunately, are still quite invisible in MARAC systems. Sometimes risk assessments will not pick that up, so you very much refer on your professional judgment.
Forced marriage legislation and protection orders have really taken off; as have conviction rates around forced marriages, which is brilliant. With FGM, we have had three convictions. We could have more, but the awareness is definitely increasing. However, we have passed things on virginity testing and child marriage, which have been led by a lot of people with lived experience. When it comes to honour-based abuse, in training rooms I sometimes find that perpetrators and victim-survivors have not caught up with what has changed from the perspective of legislation.
We are educating communities in different languages—I totally agree with Catherine; we offer a lot of the things we do in different languages—but it is also about referring it to the services that are culturally competent to pick up the harmful practices and making those referrals into existing systems. We work really closely with services such as IKWRO, Halo, Karma Nirvana and Southall Black Sisters. In Leicester, the Zinthiya Trust runs stand-alone accommodation services for people with no access to public funds. It does not need to wait for a concession; it takes them based on the fact that they do not have access to public funds. Housing is a massive issue with some of our HBA cases, because you cannot access some elements of public funds unless you apply for a concession.
It is great that we have these interventions, but there always seems to be some barrier that comes along. What I have found with perpetrator intervention is the way that immigration status is weaponised in honour-based abuse: “If you report me, I will get you deported. If you talk about this outside the community, I will tell the police that you’re lying or I’ll talk about your mental health”. Mental health also gets weaponised a lot. We run workshops at the moment that were recently commissioned, working work with honour-based abuse perpetrators. As I said to a colleague earlier, we have been inundated with bookings. I do not think it is because people do not understand honour-based abuse, but it is about linking that perpetrator mindset with honour-based abuse. We use Dr Roxanne Khan’s ideas around the three phases of recognising abuse, thinking about how perpetrators weaponise and what they use, and where people need to be referred to. A lot of the work that we use in training comes from academic research. It is really important that we utilise what academics are writing about honour-based abuse.
Baroness Hussein-Ece: In terms of accommodation and helping women with no access to public funds, if any work is being done, how widely spread is it? It is wonderful in your area, but it is not really available in the rest of the country.
Meena Kumari: In Leicester, there is a phenomenal by-and-for service called the Zinthiya Trust. It will apply for grant and trust funding and look at fundraising. Every time I speak to the CEO, I ask, “How’s it going? How are the bed spaces going?” But by-and-for services are filling gaps that should not really be there. Even in the Domestic Abuse Act, you have a statutory duty around housing, which is brilliant, but if you are a minoritised victim experiencing honour-based abuse and you are here on a particular visa and dependent on your perpetrator, how confident will you be to go to your local authority and say, “I understand what the legislation means and these are my rights”? A lot of the time you will not be, and that is why you need specialist IDVAs, domestic abuse practitioners and housing advocates. But the housing advocates and IDVAs also need training and investment. We need to continue that, especially around housing. Sometimes people think the power sits in one particular provision, and it does not. This is a multiagency approach. We do not want murders or deaths. A lot of this is about homicide prevention as well.
Q132 Baroness Neate: I want to ask about coercive and controlling behaviour and different manifestations of that, such as economic abuse. You already talked about threats around immigration status, and obviously there are other kinds of threat that can be weaponised by perpetrators. The Act further clarified coercive and controlling behaviour, which is super helpful. To what extent are perpetrator and behaviour change programmes able to deal with that?
Also, Catherine, I was super struck by what you said about the dramatic increase in survivor engagement with your daily safeguarding meeting compared with the MARAC. Do you have more information about what that looks like for the survivor? What are the outcomes, if you like, of that greater engagement with the meeting? It is a bit cheeky of me to go back to that point, but my official question is about coercive and controlling behaviour.
Meena Kumari: In training and in practice, we are picking up more and more cases of tech-related abuse and the systems that surround it and monitoring levels of isolation and harassment. It is not just about devices, apps and platforms; it is about smart devices in homes. The other day I was on training and someone talked about—bear with me—smart fridges. I do not know if anyone has one. AI is built in. A particular fridge will tell you how many items are left in it, how fresh your fruit is and how many times people have opened that door. However, imagine being a perpetrator using that technology of the fridge and the AI systems—because it goes to your phone—to be able to say to the victim, “I told you that you were not allowed to eat certain items out of the fridge”, as part of that coercive control.
The Chair: “They are mine. They are mine. That steak was for me”.
Meena Kumari: Exactly. Imagine the perpetrator saying, “And here’s the evidence that you did it”. That level of gaslighting, using tech-related abuse, has to be addressed. We are getting better at that in our systems, but we have to be able to record it on our support plans as front-line workers. Digital support being offered by IDVAs and domestic abuse practitioners to victim survivors is really important. We call it digital safety planning. How do you digitally safety plan with a survivor when you are doing advocacy? If I work with perpetrators and they tell me about technology and what they have access to—Ring doorbells is another one that constantly comes up as being used inappropriately—it is about challenging by saying, “What is the purpose of what you are doing?” A lot of that comes back to coercive and controlling behaviour.
Catherine Briody: Briefly on the issue of coercive and controlling behaviour, that is a really good example of how problems race ahead of solutions and how difficult it is to keep up with the new ways that perpetrators are using to control victims. I recently heard about a child’s hearing aid being used to locate a victim at a refuge. Training is really important, but we have to keep abreast of all the new things.
The Chair: You will have to bring us up to speed. How does that work? How do they misuse a child’s hearing aid?
Catherine Briody: I am the wrong person to answer that question, but I think it was linked up digitally, so they were able to use it to locate the child.
Baroness Neate: The child was with the mother in the refuge.
The Chair: Yes, I know, but I did not know that a hearing aid provided locational information to anybody.
Catherine Briody: I think it does now. Going back to your point about the daily safeguarding meeting, MARAC and how we engage survivors, it is about having a dedicated IDVA who contacts all the survivors before the meeting and tells them, “Your case is coming to a daily safeguarding meeting. This is what it is. What do you want? What are your hopes and wishes? What would you like the meeting to achieve? How can we keep you safe?” Then they would ring them up afterwards on the same day and tell them, “Okay, there is something happening with housing. This is what is happening with the police investigation. The investigating officer is going to contact you”. That is incredibly powerful. Sometimes survivors do not want to speak to the IDVA because they do not know them, but there may already be a trusted professional working with the survivor and family who will ask them to do it. That has made a big difference. Then we get the feedback afterwards from the survivor of how the meeting helped them.
Baroness Neate: Does it help avoid re-victimisation?
Catherine Briody: Yes, there has been a decrease in our repeat referrals. So, yes, I would hope so.
The Chair: Picking up on Baroness Neate’s question, are you conscious that the notion of coercive control is there in the language and understanding of all the people who are involved? Catherine is giving a nod to say yes, certainly within her domain. What about you, Meena?
Meena Kumari: People use the terminology of coercive control now in training and in language. The problem I sometimes see in training and in conversations with advocates is how you evidence it. It still goes back to the legislation, because we are so used to domestic abuse as always being physical. If you take economic abuse, link it with coercive and controlling behaviour and tech, tech can leave an element of evidence if it is on a phone or smart fridge, but if someone is playing mind games with you and there are no bruises but it is having a real impact on your psychological well-being and that prevents you from going to work, that is evidencing that element. That is where training and workshops still need to come in. In the prevention space, we see controlling and coercive behaviour and tech abuse with young people. In the teenage relationship abuse system that we sit in, we definitely see more controlling behaviour being disclosed to us, not just by parents but by practitioners in our workshops.
The Chair: I now turn to the cheeky question, which was addressed to you, Catherine. Polly, would you like to reframe it?
Baroness Neate: Catherine pretty much answered it. It was just about the focus on safeguarding in relation to the survivor rather than risk in relation to the survivor—risk for the perpetrator, safeguarding for the survivor. I was just interested in the actual outcomes of that. What better outcomes for survivors do you see as a result of that?
Catherine Briody: Building on what I said, it is about getting their voice in the meeting. You have conversations about individuals, but sometimes they do not even know the meeting is happening and their life is being discussed. What do they want? They are the experts. Very often they have been trying to keep themselves and their children safe for years. What do they think would work? Sometimes it will be, “I want to stay in my home, but can I get some more security? Can I get some other support? If I move, I want to go to these areas”. It is really practical measures that make a difference. That builds trust in the system, especially when they are told afterwards what has happened.
Q133 Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: I also should declare an interest that I was a councillor in Islington from 2018 until May this year. I hope it is okay to take a moment to say, Chair, that I felt very emotional when Catherine was speaking at the beginning because her team are incredible. I really want to pass on thanks for the incredible, dedicated work you do day in, day out. You have done this role since before I became a councillor, and your dedication and that of your team is exemplary. I am really proud of the pioneering work that you all do every day.
The Chair: Take that home with you.
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: It is on the record. Particularly in the work you did around She Is Not Your Rehab, there is some excellent best practice about working in schools in that prevention space, which always struggles to get money and attention, so it is really good that we are having this session. With that in mind, Meena, you spoke a little about the funding scenario, but thinking specifically now about your work with perpetrators in those prevention programmes, what funding issues arise? You mentioned longevity. Are there other things?
Meena Kumari: Short-term funding cycles are an issue. We delivered a 20-week perpetrator intervention service. The feasibility trial ran for 15 months. It was great that we were able to test it, but we want it to continue. Another issue is statutory commissioning and ring-fencing of funding streams. If perpetrator programmes are going to exist, they usually do so at the discretion of commissioning bodies or the commissioner, but priorities can shift. Sometimes you see a shift depending on who is in place and what conversations are happening.
We are a small, specialist by-and-for provider. We work with Sikh Women’s Aid and Halo and other by-and-for providers, such as Pamoja, which runs the Black African programme, and the women’s centre at Brunswick Centre that runs an LGBT programme. We are all very small by-and-for services, but I feel we have so much to bring to the big table. We want to stay at the table; we do not want the door closed on us because we are not seen as a priority today, but six months later we are. I want to thank the Drive Partnership, which gave us the opportunity to sit in this space and deliver programmes by services for services. Commissioning is two-way; providers such as Drive work with you and take that chance as well.
The Chair: Drive is about to appear on our next panel in the form of Kyla Kirkpatrick, so we will hear about the work that you pay tribute to.
Meena Kumari: I hope she will pay tribute to me as well.
The Chair: Lots of you need tributes because of the great work that you do.
Q134 Baroness Barran: I have a wrap-up question. Is there anything we have not covered that either of you would like to cover?
Catherine Briody: So much is happening in this space. It is really about thinking about what you can prioritise in local authorities and the differences between them, which we touched on before. On Baroness Hyde’s point about funding, we would love to do much more around perpetrator programmes, but when there is no new funding, there is a debate around what funding you have for violence against women and girls and the priority of keeping survivors and children safe. That is a difficult situation to be in. We cannot solve this issue—everyone knows that—without addressing these behaviours and working with perpetrators. We all need to do more to prioritise the work, which needs to be properly funded because it is expensive and really hard work to deal with perpetrators.
The Chair: Thank you both. This has been a wonderful session and we have learned an enormous amount from you. I am really grateful; tributes to both of you for the great work that you do. Thank you for coming.
