19
Examination of witnesses
Professor Nicole Westmarland, Jo Todd CBE and Kyla Kirkpatrick.
Q135 The Chair: Welcome back to this session of the committee, which is looking at the Domestic Abuse Act that was passed five years ago. This is a post-legislative scrutiny committee. We are looking to see whether that legislation, which was so important, is successful in reality. How well is it working? We want to see the good things that have come out of it and to identify gaps and problems that still exist.
We have Professor Nicole Westmarland, who is the director of the Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse. Her research consists of around 30 research projects in the field of male violence against women. She has worked on rape, domestic violence, prostitution and other subject matter and is one of the key and leading experts in the field.
Jo Todd is the chief executive of Respect, which she founded. It is a domestic abuse charity providing a national voice on perpetrators, male victims and young people. She has worked in the sector for 27 years. Thank you for coming along and lending us your expertise.
Then we have Kyla Kirkpatrick. You have already been referred to a number of times in the previous session, because you are the director of the Drive Partnership. You have worked in health and social care for over 20 years across the NHS and the voluntary sector, and joined Drive in 2016. It is a response to high-risk, high-harm domestic abuse perpetrators. You work with the police and crime commissioners and local delivery partners to challenge perpetrators of domestic abuse, particularly where the risks are running very high indeed.
I welcome all three of you to this panel session. I will start with the question I started with in our last group. You will be asked questions that will pull out specific areas that we want to home in on, so please briefly outline the programme of prevention or research that you are responsible for, how it works and what the outcomes have been so far. I will start with Kyla because we have heard so much about Drive and the way it has influenced the work of others.
Kyla Kirkpatrick: Across the session, you will hear me referring a lot to high-harm, high-risk perpetrators of domestic abuse and the work we do in relation to them. That involves a lot of work around the system. To start with, I want to remind everyone that the focus on high-harm, high-risk perpetrators and the systems that we are seeking to change is a means to an end. That end is improving safety for victim-survivors and children. In recent years, there has been such an increase in the understanding of the need to respond to perpetrators in order to increase victim-survivor safety. We welcome that and it is continuing to grow.
That recognition is very clear in relation to adult victim-survivors. As discussed in the last session, clearly there is a focus on seeing and treating children as victims in their own right. That is very much in place conceptually and in theory, and obviously in certain places we see best practice in terms of responding effectively to those children. However, I find that there is a journey to travel in really making the close connection between the very high-harm, risky behaviour of a perpetrator causing harm and the direct impact that that has on the child experiencing and bearing witness to it. There is a journey to go to really feel that viscerally. We would take different action in relation to the perpetrator if we really held centrally the impact that that was having on the child in that household. I just want to bring that into the room.
The Chair: It is a really important issue, because often it is not fully understood by those who are responding to emergency calls, for example. The police turn up and do not realise fully the impact that it is having more widely than on than the person who has been directly at the receiving end of physical abuse. The impact on children’s lives as they grow into adults and for society as a whole is huge. It will be very interesting to hear from you about how one can seek to do that.
Jo Todd: I thought I would start with a little context about perpetrators, because we talk about them as a homogenous group but they are really not. They are a very large and diverse group. I did a bit of maths, because there is no really good data, which is a big problem. There is no data on how many perpetrators there are and how they offend and perpetrate domestic abuse. There is no good data in that way. The National Police Chiefs’ Council has estimated that one in 20 adults is a perpetrator of violence against women and girls. That is a slightly bigger category—I have two 16 year-olds who are doing GCSEs at the moment, so I am very much in maths and all that and working out the percentages—and it means that there are 2.33 million perpetrators in England and Wales. It is a big number. That is the scale of the problem we are looking at.
That is a very diverse group of people. It is worth saying that the majority of those are men, and we have to be really honest about that. That does not mean that there are no women in that cohort. Obviously, domestic abuse happens in same-sex relationships as well, but we are talking about an issue of men’s violence against women. The Government recognise that. Getting to grips with the issue is no mean feat when the scale is so big.
The Chair: It is also important because we have moments—we are having one of those moments in our society right now, unfortunately—where there are suggestions that particular groupings are more likely to be perpetrators, whether that is racial groups, religious groups or a particular class. The reality is that this cuts across all classes and communities.
Jo Todd: It cuts across all communities, but some perpetrators go under the radar more. It is less visible in certain groups. That is something I want to interrogate more. One of the things that Respect has always done is have a curiosity about who perpetrators are and how we stop them. What do we do to stop them? I can tell you about some of the things we do. With powerful perpetrators who have status, it is not always visible, or it is an open secret but it is not dealt with. Sometimes what is visible to you is the thing that is different—if someone’s behaviour is very different from your community’s behaviour, for example.
The Chair: The Epstein scandal has basically raised awareness among many people about the extent to which coercive control, grooming and abuse can take many different forms. There has been a raised awareness because of that great scandal that it can operate at the most influential and highest levels in our societies. We are going to dig into all the different issues, but tell me a little more about your organisation and what it seeks to do.
Jo Todd: We operate across the whole of the UK. We run two national helplines, one for perpetrators and one for male victims. We are setting up a centre for excellence, because one of the things we have really recognised is that there is not enough evidence around the perpetration of domestic abuse. There is not enough co-ordination of that evidence; the data is very poor and there is a lot to do. We work really closely with Nicole and her team in Durham and a few others, but there are big gaps. We are a second-tier organisation. We develop models of work as well. We are one of the three partners on Drive: ourselves, Social Finance and SafeLives work together to develop that model.
We are also really interested in young people and have two programmes that work with them. One is about abuse in the home, particularly against mums but also against siblings and dads, and one is about intimate partner teenage abuse. We do quite a range of things. We are really interested in systems change as well as individual change. It is very easy just to think, “Right, we have to think about the men who are causing harm”, but behind the men who are causing harm is a society that enables and allows that to happen and systems that do not hold them to account. Quite a lot of our work and thinking is in the sphere of how we influence the Government, so we are here today. How do we actually get those shifts in culture change and system change that are needed as well as focusing on the individual?
Professor Nicole Westmarland: I am a professor of criminology, and have done a range of studies into violence and abuse. Kyla, you mentioned children, but actually it was a project on victims that made me pivot to research on perpetrators. I was not only seeing the impact on the women and children who were being harmed at that moment in time, but working with services that had maybe had three or four families in a 10-year period who were all there because of the same individual perpetrator. That is what made me change my direction of travel to thinking, “If we want to stop this, we have to be doing more with perpetrators”.
I have done a range of studies and been involved in Bright Light, which I know the committee has already heard about. I am one of the authors of the Home Office Standards for Domestic Abuse Perpetrator Interventions. With Liz Kelly, I ran Project Mirabal, which was a multisite longitudinal study that asked women, partners and ex-partners and their children about what differences they saw once their perpetrator had been on a programme. We found that physical and sexual violence ended almost entirely. Coercive and controlling behaviours reduced across nearly all measures, but not to the same extent as physical and sexual violence. From that, we drew the conclusion that well-run, accredited programmes for domestic abuse perpetrators can and do create behaviour change.
Q136 Lord Russell of Liverpool: This is specifically about the effect of the Domestic Abuse Act, given what this committee is about. What effect has the passage of the Act and its being in existence over the last nearly five years had on these areas of prevention and perpetrator treatment?
Kyla Kirkpatrick: If I may, I would like to say a very brief few words about the Drive project and the partnership, because it links to some points that I have noticed and I did not have the opportunity to do that just now. The Drive project focuses on high-harm, high-risk perpetrators of domestic abuse. I will concentrate on the three defining features of the way we work. The partnership is second tier; we have developed the model and we train other specialist services up to deliver in a local area. We have a centralised model that we continue to develop, and we have core elements of that model that we know need to be adhered to. That then enables flex for the local situation and the local system.
There are three defining features that we really want to hold to; all the work happens hand in hand with a victim-survivor support worker, an IDVA. All the work proceeds closely working with support for the victim-survivor, and then we take a three-pronged approach. First, we will look at disruption opportunities, so opportunities to interrupt the process of abuse. Secondly, we look for factors and issues for the perpetrator that interrupt the possibility of a behaviour change process for them or which may serve to increase the frequency or risk of abuse. That is a range of issues—it might be undiagnosed or untreated mental health issues, substance misuse or housing situations. There is a whole range of issues that we will look at and address with a view to reducing risk, reducing opportunities and encouraging progress towards behaviour change. Thirdly, there is the depth of behaviour change work. It is not a linear process; these things all happen together. We deliver that work on a one-to-one basis. There is a case management approach. That all takes place within the framework of a multiagency, co-ordinated community response.
Linking across to what Jo just said, this is not about one programme of work, working with one perpetrator and creating that long-term change. It has to happen in conjunction with other parts of the system and the other systemic responses to that perpetrator. We have the evidence base that shows significant reductions in abuse, reductions in serial and repeat presentation at MARAC, and reductions in crime and police intervention.
That brings me to what we have seen in relation to the effect of the Domestic Abuse Act. In summary, there has been progress and there have been some foundational shifts. I say that within the context, which I am sure everyone will understand, that there is still a lot more to do. It has brought more of a national framing to perpetrators and the first publishing of a perpetrator plan and a perpetrator response strategy. That is really significant for the work that we do. It enabled leadership from the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, who from the very beginning made sure that she was very familiar with the perpetrator response side of the work and continues to really keep abreast of that. We have started to see a shift in investment and funding. Again, I am sure you will have heard this many times—
The Chair: We all need more.
Kyla Kirkpatrick: We need more, but it was definitely a marker for that shift. We will come to it later, but it has enabled shifts in the understanding of coercive control. I will talk more about that later. My last point would be that, because the Drive project operates as a co-ordinated community and multiagency response, the Act laid the foundations for some understanding and coming together, and we have learned a lot in that process. I have quite a lot of other thoughts and things to say about where next with multiagency approaches, and we will probably come to that later.
Jo Todd: Similarly to Kyla, I would say that the Act for the first time committed the Government to a perpetrator strategy, which was then embedded in their violence against women and girls plan. That was a really important step forward. For a long time, domestic abuse perpetrators have been the invisible problem. This put them as a central pillar of that plan, so that made a big difference. The Act helped to shift that dial a bit and move things in the right direction. We are on the right path, but the progress is so slow and the scale is so small compared with what is needed. From where I am sitting that is very frustrating, and it has not lived up to what we were hoping for.
The Government’s own estimate is that domestic abuse alone costs £84 billion per year, and the funding pots that we see trying to solve the problem are so small in comparison. That sounds very mean-spirited because the Drive project received £53 million over four years to roll out across England and Wales, which we are really delighted about, but the scale of the problem is so much bigger than that funding can solve.
On the ground, what is the difference for perpetrators of domestic abuse? Are they feeling the pinch of the Act? I would have to say that most of them are not. Most are still acting with impunity and are under the radar. Either they are not coming to the attention of systems, or systems just do not have the right things in place to identify them and then do something useful with them. That is an ongoing problem: the statutory sector failing.
I have tried to come here with some thoughts of what might help that, because I do not just want to sit here and whinge. It is very easy in the voluntary sector to do that. At the moment, there is no real compunction or mechanism for statutory agencies to be held to account around the perpetration of domestic abuse, but perpetrators are everywhere. They are in every setting you could think of. Why would you not have a strategy within whatever your agency is for recognising and identifying them and doing something about it?
I would suggest some kind of statutory requirement for every agency to have a plan for what they are doing with perpetrators. Obviously, we would need some legislative change for that, but there could be mechanisms through things such as the national statement of expectations, which at the moment does not really have teeth, though it is all very good on paper. I am very much in the deeds not words camp. We find a lot on paper that I have no problem with, but when it transforms into change it is just not there. When Jess Phillips, who was our recent Minister for Violence Against Women and Girls—she and Alex Davies-Jones did a lot and really shifted the dial—resigned from her role, she said, “I’m just not seeing the change I and the country expect”, and I agree with that.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: She is not alone in that.
Professor Nicole Westmarland: I feel impatient about the speed and size of change as well. The wins that have come out of the Act are the Domestic Abuse Commissioner role, which is working well; the addition of non-fatal strangulation and suffocation, which in the past used to be such a serious crime just dropped into narratives about perpetrator behaviour; and the extension of coercive and controlling behaviour to post-separation abuse. Those are some things that have worked well.
However, the definition is now so broad. When we look at what that means for perpetrators, we are talking about very different types of perpetrators. We are talking about brothers who are fighting at a wedding or funeral on the same page as we are talking about children who have been harmed through their father’s use of abuse against them, and women who are at risk of being killed when they try to leave. These are very different types of perpetrators to have under one heading, for us then to think that we can create responses to them in the same way.
DAPOs are conceptually a good idea, but they are patchy at scale. We have insufficient police records and systems—something I know the committee has also heard about from previous panels—to deal with the complexity of managing that type of order. There are some positives, but the scale of this change has been infuriating.
Q137 Baroness Sugg: You spoke about the diversity of different types of perpetrators, and we heard about the funding issues, but could you outline the main challenges in preventing domestic abuse and changing that perpetrator behaviour? Nicole, you talked about some of the studies you have been doing where you can see that you can create behaviour change. You also mentioned the DAPOs. Do you have any comment on the effectiveness of the positive requirements that we have seen in the DAPOs?
Professor Nicole Westmarland: On the behaviour change programmes, I want to be clear that this is not about somebody going on a perpetrator behaviour change programme and coming out the most perfect human we can ever imagine. It is about saying that steps towards change happen, and for most of the women and children who were attached to the Respect interventions that we evaluated, their lives were better because the perpetrator had been on an intervention. That is also for perpetrators who have separated but are still involved in things such as coparenting.
They also do not exist just on their own; they are part of this multiagency system. In some of the most high-risk cases, there have been examples where perpetrators are not changing through that intervention, but the fact that they are engaged in an intervention and somebody has their eyes on them can mean that safety is increased for the women to leave. There have even been cases where women and children have actually left in the two-hour period in the week that the perpetrator is on that programme. It has benefits for victims and children even if the perpetrator does not change, although of course that is the overall aim.
In terms of DAPOs, usually these are shorter-term interventions, sometimes just a few sessions, and obviously there are positive requirements. We are really in the infancy of knowing about the effectiveness of these types of interventions. A lot of the research that has been done on that sort of intervention has tended to focus more on police reports and whether it has reduced the workload on policing. That is quite a different question from whether it has made the lives of women and children better.
I would say they are a good idea in practice but, like I say, they are quite minimal in terms of the rollout so far. I know you have heard the statistic that came out of our Bright Light research which showed that in one year Avon and Somerset had only 550 behaviour change places. Just to give you the context, the amount of domestic abuse measured through the Office for National Statistics that Avon and Somerset would have had in that 12-month period was 329,129 cases. We have 550 places. This is not 550 on long-term behaviour change programmes, but 550 things that will happen to anybody in terms of positive requirements. That includes perpetrator programmes, behaviour change programmes, Drive-style interventions and the positive requirements.
These things are here and we have heard some wonderful examples this morning already. They would be great if you are one of the very small number of victims who will benefit from these interventions. However, the reality is that, even though there are interventions that are doing great work, because there is no statutory duty for any statutory service to commission behaviour change work, this is at the bottom of the list. A lot of relationships have been built with police and crime commissioners, which are also on the way out. There is a lot of concern about what is going to happen in that moving landscape as well.
Baroness Sugg: Yes, I thought the same on the police and crime commissioners and what is going to happen next. That stat you shared really puts the scale of the problem into stark reality. Kyla, could you talk about your work with high-harm, high-risk perpetrators and what the main challenges are there?
Kyla Kirkpatrick: I agree with and echo a similar experience to Nicole’s statement, so I will build on that. There are two sides to this. I am going to start more broadly than the individual. There are obviously challenges in terms of rooting the issue in the individual and the individual change, but I am going to start more broadly, in line with what Jo Todd has flagged around how we need to change systems.
One of the key challenges is the risk of an assumption that one size fits all. As Jo has discussed, the range of perpetrators, cohorts and needs is vast, and we need nuance in our approach. One risk for us is that there can be a tendency to identify an intervention that has an evidence base, and then a lot of attention is paid to that one intervention. The Drive project very strongly promotes the message that we are one small part of the jigsaw puzzle, and that needs to remain the case. The other parts of the system need to be filled out, and appropriate interventions for different cohorts need attention and need to be built out. That includes specific interventions for minoritised communities. We will come on to that later.
In terms of the system, there are some challenges. We will work on the Drive project with the case management looking specifically at the individual, but the police response, children’s social care response, housing response and everything around that family and perpetrator also need to be taken into account. There is a need to hold the perpetrator to account through disruption or encouraging behaviour change, and that can be difficult to achieve in a consistent way. We are tapping into some issues around the postcode lottery.
There is absolutely fantastic practice out there across England and Wales, and we heard some of that this morning. We are often in situations where we are talking about what is not working. I would really welcome an environment where we focus on what is working, because we can identify clearly in all those spaces—policing, probation, children’s social care and housing—examples of how we want it to look everywhere. There is a lot more that we could say about that, but I will leave it there.
One other point I might introduce as an example is in relation to housing. Housing is obviously a national challenge. It is also a challenging issue for victim-survivors and children, who too often need to leave the family home or flee. I welcome all the work that is being done around safer accommodation. One conversation we have been exploring for a number of years—we have had a programme of work running in London for the last four or five years—is exploring where in that picture we are looking at perpetrators being the person to be removed from the family home. I know that that can be controversial and there are risks that it creates incentives. We understand all the complexities around it, but it is another tool in the toolkit that needs more serious consideration.
We find that it tends to be an appropriate response for between 14% and 20% of the cases we might be working with. We are not talking about everyone, but where it is needed and there is a pathway, it has a huge impact on families, particularly children and young people, who can remain in an area and a family home and not be uprooted. This will apply to all children, but we have some really moving case studies on teenagers and young people and the impact on them of a new partner coming into their home—the disruption, domestic abuse and the potential that they are going to have to flee. We have found solutions by removing the perpetrator from that home. In their view, they get their home back and their mother back. That is one example of where we really need to look across the system.
The Chair: That is really helpful.
Baroness Sugg: Jo, you talked about the challenge of the scale of funding. Do you have anything to add on the challenges for prevention and behaviour change?
Jo Todd: I thought I might give you a flavour of perpetrator work, because sometimes people are mystified as to what we mean by behaviour change and who these perpetrators are. I would really reiterate that they are just ordinary people. You cannot spot them in a room, mostly. Every now and again you can. Every now and again you will be in the presence of one and the hairs on the back of your neck will stand up, but most of the time they are under the radar in social situations. They are in this place, and you do not always know who they are. When we talk about them, they are just ordinary men. Some really want to change and we do not give them that opportunity. That is a crime.
I have worked on perpetrator programmes. It was a long time ago, but it sticks with me. I remember some of the groups I ran really clearly. The men said things to me such as, “I look in the mirror and I see my dad looking back at me, and I promised myself I wouldn’t turn into him but I have”. There are men out there who are crying out for change. They want to live a different life. They do not know how. They have grown up with models around them, they are living in situations where it is just the norm, and they want to step out of that. We have to give them that chance.
It is a skilled area of work to be able to work out whether their motivation is genuine. In your previous session, Catherine was talking about forced compliance and pretending in order to get a result and going on a programme in order to make her stay. That is a really common theme. However, what programmes can do with men who are genuine and want to change is this: you are not trying to save the relationship, but sometimes it is about helping them to let go of the relationship safely. Baroness Kennedy, you gave an example of a woman who was murdered at the point of trying to leave, which is the most common time that women are killed.
We need to be able to help a perpetrator through the process of his partner leaving so that that is a safe process. That is not just about behaviour change; that is about management of that whole situation, putting the survivor and what she needs at the centre and putting the children and what they need at the centre. We are really helping him to work through that process in a meaningful way because his life is falling apart, and it is his fault. All that and the mess of being human is what we are dealing with.
It is really important to be able to work with the motivation you have and be really clear-eyed about the fact that some of them are pulling the wool over your eyes. But this is part of being human. I often say to people when I have run training courses, “Think about something you’ve done that you feel really ashamed of—we’ve all done something where we feel really ashamed—and you’re now being asked to look that in the eye, confront it, talk about it, unpick it”. We are asking them to do something difficult, and they have not just done one thing that they are a bit ashamed of. Some have done cruel, unspeakable things. That is really skilled work. It is really important work, and there is not enough of it.
Sometimes we have talked about the 10-year plan and all that—would it not be nice to look forward 10 years and think that we could live in a slightly different world where those men are given that opportunity and they make those changes, and where the next family they go on to are safe and they are able to have safe contact with their children? We need to hold out the hope of that at the same time as being brutally realistic about the risks that some of them pose, and to have that range of service provision.
We need service provision such as Drive, which is really trying to grip the risk, but also early intervention. How can we get there so much earlier? How can we put programmes in place for young people as well? Again, that was talked about in your previous session. Work with young people is critical, but prevention is too late for a lot of them. This is one of the saddest things. I have teenagers, so it is in my mind a lot about them and their friends. The thought that a girl’s first relationship would be an abusive one is a horrible thought, but the thought that a boy’s first relationship is one in which he perpetrates abuse and control is awful too. I am the mum of three boys. But we need targeted intervention with boys, not just prevention work. By the time they are 15 or 16 and in relationships, it is too late for prevention. We need to be able to spot the ones who are risky and do something about it, because if we get them young we can turn them on to a different path. I am really confident of that.
The Chair: It is that business of spotting them and how good we can become at doing that.
Jo Todd: That is true of a lot of perpetrator work. That is where the state and communities have a huge role to play. The state interacts with young people through schooling and other state agencies, but in the communities they are in—the football group they go to, the drama group or whatever—there are loads of opportunities for spotting behaviour.
The Chair: Is there evidence which signals that a child who is bullying at school is likely to retain that bullying capacity into adulthood and their personal relationships?
Jo Todd: I do not know about evidence, but that certainly sounds like a pathway to me. If you ask any teacher of secondary school children, “Who are the boys you’re worried might be harmful to the girls in their lives?”, they probably would be able to pick some out. They might not get them all, but some of it is very much in plain sight.
Q138 Lord Polak: To be honest, we have covered this, but my question is about how we find the positive stuff and roll that out more. You have both just talked about that. Jo, you were suggesting that the state has to take more control. Our committee can make certain recommendations, and what we are trying to tease out is where there is positive stuff and how we can roll that out further. I think we have covered it, but if anybody wants to add to it, that is really where I am going.
Professor Nicole Westmarland: Mine is a really short one—it is just about another place to intervene. Given that so many men do not want to become like their fathers, one opportunity area that we do not have enough attention on is the role when men become fathers for the first time. We know that pregnancy is a time when domestic abuse can increase and that use of power and control can increase. The sessions on the impact on children in behaviour change programmes are some of the most powerful ones, because a lot of men will accept that they have been a crap partner but they do not want to be a crap father, and that is the very thing that they can see themselves doing. That is perhaps an opportunity.
Lord Polak: I like your northern words. I am happy with that.
Kyla Kirkpatrick: The University of Bristol’s data in its evaluation of the Drive project touches on exactly that. It has found evidence of that point being a lever for change.
The issue of mental health is a double-edged sword. Unrecognised and unmet mental health need is an issue that features quite highly in the high-risk, high-harm cohort. It also becomes a lever for engagement and change. Once a case manager on the Drive project is engaging with a perpetrator and that perpetrator experiences that professional curiosity and steps being taken towards assessing and addressing that mental health need, that becomes a lever for engagement. They are benefiting from the input they are getting around their mental health, and they are more likely to engage with wider parts of the programme. That is another point on an individual way of working, similar to working with parenthood. There are a number of other factors like that which we can home in on.
Jo Todd: Men on programmes talk about the impact on their children a lot. As Nicole said, it is sometimes the lever that might make them say, “I have a problem”. Sometimes, just out of the corner of their eye, in the middle of abusing their mother they catch their children’s eye, or something like that. Or there is an impact—their child who has never wet the bed before starts wetting the bed, or does not want to leave their mum, or does not want to go to school. There are lots of different ways they start realising the impact of their behaviour. Children are a big lever.
There is also something quite frustrating about the fact that men were children once, so they can empathise with what it is like to be a child. It is harder to empathise with what it is like to be a woman. You see that play out. When I have run perpetrator programmes, they can get in the headspace of what it was like because they remember a time they were frightened or did not have agency. They find it much harder to think about the experiences of a woman because they always can say, “Yes, but she was unreasonable, and she did this—she, she, she”. Programmes are often trying to get away from what she did and what you feel to what you did and what she feels, as a crude way of thinking of it.
However, behaviour change work has been really neglected in terms of funding over the last period of time. It has never been well funded, but it is the solution here in the long term if we really want to turn things around. There are men who just will not change, and we have to have a grip on them. We have to have a criminal justice system and other mechanisms such as Drive disrupting them, stopping them and all that. But for the ones who can change and want to change, we have to put things in place to help them.
The Chair: Jo, I know you have already said this, but I just want you to remind me. Where is Respect based? Is it up and down the country? How wide is it?
Jo Todd: We are UK-wide. We develop programmes and then support other organisations to deliver them. We have sites around for different types of programmes. Our main behaviour change one is called Make a Change. It is very community based; it is a partnership with Women’s Aid England. It is very survivor centred and focused. It is trying to get in at the earliest point—that does not mean they have not been doing it for a long time, but it is the point when it comes to attention.
The Chair: Before it accelerates into something.
Jo Todd: We are trying to get it as early as we possibly can. We think the Home Office is about to release a perpetrator fund, possibly next week.
The Chair: That sounds heartening.
Jo Todd: That is what we have heard. It will be linked into its violence against women and girls plan. We are hoping that there might be some significant funding there.
Q139 Baroness Hussein-Ece: I was going to ask about prevention and perpetrator behaviour. You have already told us quite powerfully and very informatively about the work—
The Chair: I am keen that you ask your specific question.
Baroness Hussein-Ece: Yes, well that is the question.
The Chair: I am mindful of the time, Meral.
Baroness Hussein-Ece: In terms of perpetrators and prevention programmes, specifically in minoritised communities, what is your research or work relating to that, particularly around issues such as honour-based abuse or stigmatising in the community, which prevents many women from coming forward and reporting?
Jo Todd: Meena in the last session gave you a lot of really rich information on some of that.
Baroness Hussein-Ece: She did, yes. I just want to know if you have had some experience within your work.
Jo Todd: I would say there is a lot of work to do. The perpetrators who harm migrant women, marginalised women and Black and minoritised women in our communities are not held to account sufficiently. There are some programmes such as Meena’s, which she described. We have another one, Rise, that one of our accredited members runs in London, which is a culturally specific programme and has really good results.
Within mainstream programmes we are also trying to embed the ability to respond effectively within mainstream settings, because there are so few of these culturally specific programmes that we have to make sure that our mainstream is doing as well as it can. We have programmes of training around that, but there needs to be more. There also needs to be more research and understanding of who is abusing women from the communities you are thinking about, because sometimes it is the men in those communities, but not always. Sometimes it is men from other communities, particularly with migrant women and their vulnerabilities.
There are a lot of questions about when a relationship is a relationship. When is it domestic abuse and when is it exploitation? There is a lot of crossover with sexual violence and sexual exploitation, and we need not to be drawing rigid lines. We need to make sure that there is enough flex in what we are doing to respond effectively.
Professor Nicole Westmarland: I would just reiterate what you have already heard, which is that the evidence points to partnerships with by-and-for organisations. That is included in the Home Office perpetrator intervention standards.
Kyla Kirkpatrick: I very much agree with Meena’s statement this morning. This is so much a two-way exchange. I know Meena spoke very kindly about the work we have done together and the support from the Drive Partnership, but the learning and expertise that mainstream services or an organisation such as the Drive Partnership are getting from the by-and-for organisations that we are working with are priceless. They have such depth of expertise around their communities and the issues. For me, it has been an incredibly important deep collaboration and learning.
We have lots of learning about that process because it is not easy. Just to reinforce some comments that Meena was making, we talk about resource but it is not only funding: we have all got the message on that one. It is other resources—time and the stretch that small organisations are taking on. They are really passionate about moving the dial on this and are going above and beyond. My message is that expertise is priceless and the infrastructure is not yet in place to get the most out of it. We will continue to work on that.
I have mentioned that one size does not fit all, and it is important to understand the depth and nuance that different communities face. We also know, for example, that Black victim-survivors face much more extreme and repeat abuse in comparison with white victim-survivors. They are 35% more likely to be repeat victims of domestic abuse.
The Chair: When you say repeat victims, are you talking about with the same partner or with different partners?
Kyla Kirkpatrick: It can be both. It may be repeat or serial. They are 35% more likely to experience that pattern. LGBT victims are at increased risk of suicide. Their suicide rate is higher and rates of self-harming are higher. There are specific harms that are playing out. Those are two communities that we are particularly working with. We know that there are similar increased risks for disability communities and other communities.
It is really important to hold those specific and heightened risks in mind. We are following the patterns that Jo has talked about, working with different competencies where we can. We are starting to look at what specific interventions look like, but we are so at the beginning of this journey and there is a lot more to be done. If it is possible, I would really encourage the committee to speak directly to some providers that are delivering specific interventions, to do this justice and understand the nuance for the communities. The community-based nature of this work is so important. How do we link that local community approach to national understanding and frameworks that will enable the spread of learning? Both those things need to happen.
The Chair: Are we training up enough people with the skills? I am just listening to Jo speaking about her insights and to all of you. I am concerned that here we have one of the country’s distinguished criminologists, but different universities—one not very far from you in Sheffield—are closing down their criminology departments. I just wonder whether we are seeing the equipping of enough professionals to deal with this very difficult and sensitive work with protagonists.
Jo Todd: We have our accredited membership, and I have a monthly meeting with the chief execs of that accredited membership. Before coming here, I asked them to help me prepare for today and asked them what they wanted me to say to you. One of the things they said most clearly was that there is a workforce crisis: recruitment and retention of the skilled people and the training programmes needed. That is in the specialist sector but also in the statutory sector. That is a really important point, and I am glad you have raised it. We have to do something considerable to improve, and to improve front-line statutory training so that the workforce—
The Chair: We need to draw more men into it too.
Jo Todd: Yes, absolutely.
Professor Nicole Westmarland: I would also make the point that a lot of people who set up these services originally are now at retirement age. There is a huge amount of knowledge that is—
The Chair: Which will be lost if we are not careful.
Professor Nicole Westmarland: Yes, we have lost it. Although our course at Durham has a lot on violence and abuse, as you can imagine, there are not the clear routes into perpetrator roles as have now been developed for victim roles. If you think about routes around workforce development for independent domestic violence advisers and independent sexual violence advisers, all the different training routes and clear steps that students can take if they want to work in that area, they are not there in relation to the perpetrator work.
It is increasingly women who are running these interventions as well. We used to have in the standards that we wanted a woman and a man to run behaviour change programmes, but the reality is that there are not enough men to be able to keep that requirement up. That is a problem.
The Chair: That is my understanding and experience.
Q140 Baroness Neate: One of the things the Act did was further clarify—I think valuably—coercive control. I want to focus specifically on that. What issues do behaviour change programmes face in specifically addressing coercive control in its different manifestations, such as economic abuse?
Professor Nicole Westmarland: As you know, coercive control is very individualised, very personalised to that individual victim and their characteristics. What they feel is important to them is the very thing that the perpetrator will focus on. That is why it was difficult to see, and that is why it was important that the Act clarified that. What we found by doing the research on Mirabal was that some aspects of coercive control were better and in some we did not see the impact. Economic abuse was the factor within the intervention programmes that shifted the least. That is partly about post-separation abuse and the tail that you can still have on post-separation coercive control through financial means.
That was 10 years ago now, and us finding that also meant that programmes were able to develop that area of work because they were able to see that they were doing better, for example, on physical and sexual violence and some other forms of coercive control than on that. That is an example of where we found a problem, but finding that problem has actually been quite a success because it has meant that programmes have been able to plug that gap a little more.
Jo Todd: I remember, Polly, when you were the chief exec at Women’s Aid, you described coercive control as the dark heart of domestic abuse.
Baroness Neate: It is.
Jo Todd: That is right. It is not something separate from physical violence, verbal abuse or anything like that. It is so wrapped up together. It is much easier to see physical violence. It is also much easier to stop it actually, because you could never be violent again and still hold the same threat and control over your partner that you always had. You have set up the circumstances of your relationship. There is always the idea that you could resort to it again if you chose to. It is a much harder thing to shift. We need to be really honest about that. Not everyone will shift in the way that we want them to, and we have to be honest about that and what we do about it.
That is why behaviour change programmes should not just exist on their own as a counselling group on a Tuesday night. That is why there should always be that loop back to the survivor. Is he changing? Is it enough for you? Are you going to make choices about this relationship? If deep down she still feels like she is under coercive control, even if everything else around has changed, we need to make sure she knows that there is no expectation that she stays. Often there is an expectation. He is doing a lot of work; he is going to this programme every week; look at what a great guy he is doing this. So she feels she cannot leave him now. It is really important she gets the opposite message, “Yes, you absolutely can. Your life is your life, and your choice is your choice. At any point, any of us can leave any relationship we’re in”. That is a really important concept for the perpetrators to hear as well.
Baroness Neate: Thinking about young people, there is some really shocking recent research about boys’ and girls’ attitudes towards the rights that men have to control a relationship. A lot of coercive control—I do not need to tell any of you this—is about entitlement, and a man’s sense of his right to be in charge. We have seen recent studies which have shown that young people are increasingly believing in that. I just wanted to chuck that in, because we have that mindset and then we have the use of technology by young people. I just wanted to ask you all to talk a bit about that. I will start with you, Kyla, because I have not brought you in yet on my questions. Please talk about coercive control more widely, but I just wanted to highlight that point.
Kyla Kirkpatrick: Yes, it is interesting that you raised that point specifically. It was something I wanted to touch on, and I will come to that. If I just start with the broader point about coercive control, I mentioned before that I see there has been helpful progress with the Act, and there is more understanding and recognition. There are pockets of really good practice with children’s social care; we see that understanding and identifying increasing. It is similar with police. We work in custody in some prisons at small scale; we are working with perpetrators within custody and seeing that through the gates. When we can work with prison staff, we are also seeing that recognition grow and a response being enabled. We see that, even in custody, coercive control will be initiated through technology. That is still happening. We are seeing it.
Where I would say there needs to be more is first, on what to do about it. It is good to see more interest from the Department of Health on this and we are looking at how this can progress, really training GPs to recognise perpetrator behaviour signs, including coercive control and the weaponisation of victim-survivor mental health, for example. But what is the next step? Now what? I have identified this. I see it. Where do we go with this? What do we do? There is more to be done on that front.
There is less awareness within the courts and judiciary. It is offset a little in the criminal court because you have other actors who are aware and can address that, but within the family court I would be really interested in what can change in terms of accountability and training for the judiciary.
The Chair: There is a move for the reform of the family courts, as you probably know. Among that is the whole thing of addressing areas where there has to be better training for the judiciary but also for those who mediate. Sometimes even trained mediators are not quite as aware of, for example, the way in which technology is now being used, as we have heard. But there is recognition and a younger generation of lawyers who are better informed are also educating the courts.
Kyla Kirkpatrick: Exactly. Just to touch on prevention, there is quite a lot happening now. That is one element that has not progressed much in relation to the Act. There has been less progress. However, I see that changing. There is a lot of early work starting now. We have accelerated research, small projects and exploration projects to build on what has gone on thus far. We probably are on the cusp of a lot more learning and initiatives.
I was really interested to be part of an event with the University of Manchester last week on its RISE research accelerator programme. It is putting emphasis on linking the research with practice from the outset so that there is that clear path between research and exploration, and how that is going to be translated into practice.
On your point, Polly, in those early primary prevention spaces it is about looking out for, identifying and then really focusing on the best intervention for some issues. I could take coercive control as one. In young early relationships, there are patterns of behaviour similar to adults, but how can we deal with them differently with young people? In those early relationships, they are seeing what might be oversurveillance and control around the whereabouts of a partner, but that is experienced very much in young relationships as love and care. We see this in adult relationships. There are different ways in which we work with young people to identify, recognise and process those emotions and feelings.
With the right political will and focus, I am quite excited about what is possible, offset by the terror of tech-facilitated abuse and the depths of that. There is a lot of work to be done, but it is a really interesting space.
The Chair: Baroness Hyde, it is that age-old question and it never gets enough time.
Q141 Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: The whole panel has touched on it, but is there anything else in relation to funding issues, specifically to do with the perpetrator and prevention space?
The Chair: The funding question lives through everything that you all say, of course.
Jo Todd: It is not just funding, because we are always going to ask for more and more money, but it is about how funding is allocated. It is about commissioning. We have a crisis in commissioning. Commissioning is really poor at the moment. There are pockets of great commissioning but there is no accountability. We have our own standards and the accreditation standards, which are practice-based standards. We have the standards that Nicole was one of the authors of—the Home Office standards, which have just gone through a second iteration. Those are good on paper but the commissioners are not using them, including the Home Office, which is not using its own standards. On the last round of funding it did not use its own standards, and that was really problematic.
The Chair: Is that because it knows how limited its resources are, so it is choosing the thing that it imagines will be less expensive?
Jo Todd: I do not know what is in its head when it has a good set of standards and then does not use them. I would like to see an expert on every commissioning panel. At the moment, it does not know what it does not know, so it is commissioning things where it does not understand the risks of the things it is commissioning. It is in such a crisis that my members would think it very remiss of me if I did not really push home the point and say that we are even thinking about asking for a statutory duty around accreditation and inspectorate of this work. It is an area where, if you get it wrong when you are working with a perpetrator, the consequences can be really severe, in the same way as, when a care home gets it wrong, we have proper scrutiny and inspectorate systems.
My fear is that we will end up with something hugely bureaucratic that will not actually solve the problems, but we are at the point of saying that it is not working. It is bad enough that we need a real shift in commissioning. Local commissioners just opt out of it sometimes. They have commissioned things such as a mixed-sex perpetrator programme: putting women and men together in the same programme, where women have then been predated on. Sometimes you just think any ordinary person who does not know anything about this would think that was a bad idea, but those things have been funded.
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: You have set off a whole other train of thought around the commissioning landscape and whether we as a committee—I have joined only recently—sufficiently understand everything we are asking in the light of that: what is local, what is strategic authorities with the devolution Bill, and then what is sitting at the top? When you were talking about Mirabal I was thinking about how much is dependent on individual police and crime commissioners who have really decided to prioritise funding for this. Is there somewhere that is commissioning well? Is there good commissioning practice out there that you would highlight to the committee?
Jo Todd: There is. Some of the Drive commissioning is, and Northumbria is doing it really well.
The Chair: I am picking this up and we will make a note of it. The issue of commissioning is a serious one; there are good places and Drive can be a guide on that. Time is running out. Nicole, do you have something that you think you could say in a sentence?
Professor Nicole Westmarland: Some of this is a push towards shorter, faster programmes. We have seen in other places in the world where this has gone very badly. We even see some interventions that are a worksheet that people work their way through. This is why we need to have standards. We need to be able to say that the type of thing that Polly was talking about takes a long time, as we have to unpick all these cultural messages that are coming from all directions. Changing behaviour is not a quick, cheap thing to do, and we cannot pretend it is.
The Chair: You can be sure that they will be trying to do it online before we know it. Anyway, I want to thank all three of you for your wisdom today. It has been really interesting and important, and we have all learned a great deal from you. The messaging is very serious, and it will be very valuable in our report.
