13
Examination of witnesses
Professor Michele Burman and Professor Mark Kebbell.
Q142 The Chair: Welcome, everybody, to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 post-legislative scrutiny committee. We are very grateful this morning to welcome Professor Michele Burman, professor of criminology at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Mark Kebbell, professor of forensic psychology at Griffith University in Australia. I thank him for extending his day to be with us; I know it is the evening for him. We have a series of questions to go through in about an hour in total. A couple of people here may have to dip in and out because of other parliamentary business, but please do not be distracted by that; we will just plough on.
Our focus is on the Domestic Abuse Act as it applies in England and Wales in particular, but we are very interested to learn from what has and has not worked in your jurisdictions. Professor Burman, could you talk a little about the main features of the approach in Scotland? Are there things we can learn from your approach? Then I will come to you, Professor Kebbell, with the same question.
Professor Michele Burman: Thank you very much for inviting me. It is a real pleasure to be here and speak to you all about the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act, which I will refer to as DASA for short. It is important to stress from the beginning that a key aim behind the Act was to expand legal understanding of domestic abuse in order to reflect the true experience of victims and provide recognition of the cumulative impact and consequences of all types of abuse—physical, emotional, psychological—including patterns of coercive and controlling behaviour. DASA also aimed to encourage a shift away from a focus on individual incidents or episodes of violence towards this recognition of the ongoing patterns of abuse, which many survivors are subjected to, and hence better reflect the impact that domestic abuse has on survivors’ psychological and emotional health. Essentially, DASA created a distinct gender-neutral offence of domestic abuse against a partner or an ex-partner, which requires that the perpetrator subjects the victim to a course of abusive behaviour.
Unlike the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 in England and Wales, there is no age limit imposed in our legislation; the Act applies to both victims and perpetrators of any age. For the offence to be committed, a reasonable person must consider that the course of behaviour would, first, be likely to cause the victim to suffer psychological or physical harm; and secondly, that the person perpetrating it intends to cause that harm, or is reckless to whether it causes harm. The key element in DASA is the emphasis on the course of behaviour, which is defined as behaviour on two or more occasions. Again, this is different to the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, which applies to a single incident or a course of conduct. Under DASA, the course of behaviour can include that which is directed at the victim in a personal manner but also that which makes use of a third party, or even that aimed towards property.
Thinking about domestic abusive behaviour, this includes any form of physical, verbal, sexual or psychological abuse which would be considered by a reasonable person to be likely to have the effects of rendering the victim dependent on the perpetrator, isolating the victim from their friends or support networks, controlling or monitoring their day-to-day activities, conscribing or restricting their freedom of action, and frightening or humiliating them. There is a long non-exhaustive list, but the net is cast widely.
There are particular aspects of the Act that are quite different from the English and Welsh equivalent. Although the Scottish approach drew upon the concept of coercive and controlling behaviour as underpinning an abusive course of conduct, in designing the legislation, the decision was taken to use the term “abusive behaviour” rather than “coercive control”. The Scottish framing has therefore created a slightly different threshold for understanding, identifying or evidencing a course of behaviour of domestic abuse. It does not rely exclusively on a legal definition of coercive control to understand domestic abuse as a course of behaviour, and this potentially provides greater flexibility in engaging with ongoing domestic abuse, even if coercive control is likely to remain central to that understanding and general dynamic.
The second thing I would mention is the narrower remit of DASA as compared to the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. DASA applies to behaviour perpetrated only on partners and ex-partners, which is very different to the England and Wales legislation, which includes a much wider range of relationships between the perpetrator and the victim. This tighter remit of DASA is considered very helpful for narrowing the focus, for example, for the policing of domestic abuse, and allows for a police response suited to the victim-perpetrator relationship and the broader case context. Those are the key differences between the two pieces of legislation that might be interesting to you.
The Chair: That is very interesting. I have a couple of questions on that but let us listen to Professor Kebbell and then I will come back to you.
Professor Mark Kebbell: I have to start by saying that I am not a lawyer; I am a forensic psychologist and my expertise is mainly around risk assessment, investigation and then decisions about management. Of course, that is wrapped in the legislation that we have here. We have different states and territories with broadly similar legislation, but I am based in Queensland and I am most familiar with the legislation here. We have a range of legislation, including a Domestic and Family Violence Protection Act, which can produce domestic violence orders; that seems to be very similar to the Domestic Abuse protection notices. These can be brought by a victim-survivor personally or by police without necessarily the involvement of a victim-survivor. Orders can be temporary, and once they have gone through court, they can be made for up to five years; and they can have quite strong powers about excluding someone, for example, from visiting a house or contacting someone, specifically to prevent abuse.
We have a general criminal code that includes things that you would expect such as assault, grievous bodily harm and stalking, which can all be aspects of domestic and family violence. We also have new legislation in two areas: one concerns a specific offence of choking, suffocation or strangulation in a domestic setting; and since May 2025 we have had coercive control legislation about patterns of offending, similar to the legislation Michele is discussing.
Q143 The Chair: That is terrific. Coming back to Professor Burman, I noted your comment about the tighter focus on partner and ex-partner being helpful. We have heard from a number of witnesses that, particularly for the police, the breadth of the definition in England can be challenging. I just wanted to understand two things a little better. First, is there a threshold of harm? You talk about humiliation being an example of the impact of abuse. Clearly, humiliation in any context is a bad thing, but not every level of it is criminal. Are there thresholds of harm that are used in interpreting the different behaviours? Secondly, having worked in the sector, “course of conduct” feels to me a much better fit for the nature of the problem we are trying to address. We talk about coercive control and we talk about a single incident, and we know the reasons for that, but in practice does that work much better?
Professor Michele Burman: In response to your first question about the threshold, the test in DASA is whether a reasonable person would consider that the abusive behaviour causes, or is likely to cause, psychological, emotional or physical harm. That is the main test—that of reasonableness, rather than a threshold-based approach.
In relation to the course of conduct—the course of behaviour as it is called under DASA—you are absolutely right; a key aim of legislation was to ensure that it reflected the lived experience, or the lived reality, of cumulative, ongoing, often escalating abuse that was occurring over a period of time, and shift the focus away from single incidents. That said, the course of abusive behaviour poses quite a difficult evidentiary challenge because of the various components: first, determining that there are at least two or more incidents, so the course of behaviour needs to be corroborated. It can be very difficult, particularly in more complex domestic abuse cases, for police and other professionals to determine whether there is a course of abusive behaviour and what the elements of that might look like. It is quite a challenging investigative landscape, but it certainly reflects the lived reality of victims’ experience.
The Chair: Professor Kebbell, you talked about the DAPO equivalent in various states in Australia and said that included pretty strong powers in certain cases. Are you able to give us a sense of what has been found to be most effective in those protection orders? Is there anything you would advise us, or those implementing DAPOs in this country, as not adding much value?
Professor Mark Kebbell: There are some instances where orders can be incredibly effective—for example, if someone is prohibited from visiting their ex-partner’s property, and they turn up. I can think of one example where a very violent man turned up at the property and was making threats to kill. The victim-survivor was terrified of him, as was the neighbour. When the police arrived, neither the neighbour nor the victim-survivor was prepared to provide statements, but the very fact that he was there was enough for him to be arrested and charged with the breach. That was a really good use of orders.
We have problems in that a lot of the recipients of these orders are often very confused about what they can and cannot do. They often breach in very minor ways, but the consequences can be very severe. So there needs to be a nuanced use to them. Over the last decade, we have tripled our use of such orders, and that is bringing in more and more people who may not necessarily need the more draconian aspects of them.
Q144 Lord Russell of Liverpool: Mark, I will direct this to you first because Michele has partly answered this question in her previous responses. This is to do with the definition of domestic abuse. How effective is the definition of domestic abuse across different jurisdictions? How much do definitions differ? What are the strengths? Are some better, clearer and more effective than others, and if so why? In practice, how well do these definitions work as applied by the police and the courts?
Professor Mark Kebbell: I can only really talk to Queensland in detail there. We define domestic violence as physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, economical or coercive behaviour, so it is quite broad. What that means for police attending scenes is somewhat complicated. It is a broad category, and there is a lot of discretion from officers at the scene to decide how to interpret matters. Most police have a strong preference to respond to physical violence over emotional abuse and so on. So they have a great deal of power and quite a lot of latitude; quite how they interpret it, and particularly the coercive control legislation, is not clear.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: To what extent have the police undergone, or are undergoing, specific training to help them identify, separate out and prioritise the different sorts of domestic abuse that they are confronted with?
Professor Mark Kebbell: My understanding is that Queensland Police Service does a one-day course on coercive control for every general duties officer; so they have quite a lot of knowledge and training around that. They struggle with prioritisation. Our risk assessment tool, the Domestic Violence Protective Assessment Framework, is based on the DASH system from England and Wales, with similar issues. They struggle in knowing who they should focus their resources on, particularly when there are multiple incidents of domestic and family violence in that they may find it difficult to know who are the most harmful of those people. Our police have a queue-like system where they are able to see the most recent 10 offences that a person has committed. But for many of our offenders, the amount of occurrences is in the thousands, so it is a challenge for them to get a good idea about how harmful someone is.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: Michele, is there anything you would like to add from Scotland’s point of view?
Professor Michele Burman: Scotland has long had a very broad definition of domestic abuse, which acknowledges this combination of psychological and physical dimensions, and the manipulation of power and control. In fact, from 2000, this broad definition of domestic abuse was adopted across a range of different policy areas. DASA incorporated much of that broad definition in terms of the kinds of behaviour that fall underneath it.
There are considerable strengths in the broad understanding of domestic abuse. It potentially enables victims to recognise that they are experiencing abuse and validates their experience; it may also empower them to seek help to prevent further escalation. But the expansiveness of a definition so broad also has weaknesses. I have already mentioned that proving a course of behaviour that includes psychological abuse, for example, requires very highly complex investigations and presents quite significant challenges evidentially. Research undertaken by myself and colleagues shortly after the introduction of DASA found very limited awareness or understanding of the dynamics of the gendered dimensions of domestic abuse and coercive control by the police and a growing concern that investigations to determine this course of conduct would prove much more time consuming, particularly when police are already dealing with such a high volume of domestic abuse cases. These cases require police to manage very large amounts of information drawn from multiple police systems, partner agencies, digital sources, including crime reports, body-worn video and intelligence records. This must all be reviewed and assessed to provide informed decision-making, which makes it very challenging. Police describe feeling overwhelmed by the volume of cases as well as by the volume of information available to them.
Similar findings were made in Project Bright Light, which the Chair referred to earlier and I was part of, which looked at the police investigation of domestic abuse in an English force, where their officers reported lacking the specialist skills required to manage complex domestic abuse investigations. In Scotland, a gap has been identified between the statutory definition of domestic abuse as a course of behaviour and its operationalisation in practice. There remains a tendency by the police to default to incident-based reasoning, which risks obscuring coercive control and cumulative harm in many cases.
You mentioned training. When the DASA was first implemented, it was accompanied by a raft of quite extensive training called Domestic Abuse Matters, which was rolled out to literally tens of thousands of officers in Police Scotland; but there has been relatively little follow-up on that. There is a common view, certainly from the Scottish Police Authority as well as researchers, that there is a clear need for ongoing training for police and judges on the nature and dynamics of domestic abuse and its gendered dimension. This training needs to reconcile the experience of victims and the effects of trauma to address outdated attitudes about domestic abuse—that it is just a relationship issue.
I might add, because this is very important, there is also a need to understand more about safety planning, which is important for victims and indeed often their families. This is a critical aspect of the response to domestic abuse, and there is a need to develop a consistent recording method for safety plans.
Q145 Lord Polak: We added children as victims in the 2021 Bill. I would be interested to hear about the practice and what we can learn from Australia first; we will come to Scotland after.
Professor Mark Kebbell: We put a great emphasis on protecting children, realising that they can be tremendously impacted and are secondary victims when exposed to domestic and family violence. That is at the heart of the domestic violence orders and their breaches. We have a system whereby high-risk people are referred to high-risk teams, and there is always an emphasis on protection for children.
I just add that we are seeing that a lot of police calls for service concern children who are abusive either of their parents, or a parent, or other children; we are seeing huge numbers of that, which does not get much attention.
Baroness Gerada: Can I just clarify; did you say children who are being abusive?
Professor Mark Kebbell: Yes. Children may be abusive to their parents or sometimes siblings, where often a single parent is unable to control or intervene. If you have, say, a 15-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy and they decide to fall out and are violent to each other, often a parent finds it very difficult to intervene and respond. A lot of our calls for service come from neighbours who are concerned about what is going on, either from noise or they are concerned for safety.
Professor Michele Burman: DASA also introduced new statutory provisions with the aim of making children more visible in the prosecution of domestic abuse. But it is important to note that DASA does not position children as direct victims of the primary domestic abuse offence, which is defined as abuse directed at a partner or an ex-partner; rather, it protects children under 18 by introducing a statutory aggravator, which essentially increases the severity of the offence if the perpetrator involves or negatively affects a child. This can take a number of forms. It could be direct behaviour towards the child, such as using demeaning or abusive language about the victim that causes the victim to feel humiliated; or there is a threat of violence towards a child to control or perhaps frighten the victim. It has a wide application. The aggravation applies to the involvement of any child in the offence. This could be the victim’s own child or another child living in or simply visiting the household, or a neighbour’s child and so on.
In terms of how this is working, the specific inclusion of children has been very much welcomed in DASA, but some researchers and children’s advocacy groups have criticised the Act for failing to conceptualise children as adjoined victims, relying instead on this statutory aggravation; they wanted the Act to go a little further. We do not have much evidence about how the child aggravator is operating in practice. The Scottish Government have been tracking data to monitor how often children are adversely affected either by witnessing abuse or by being targeted directly. The number of people convicted with the specific child aggravator included has grown steadily but is lower than expected, given what we know from other research about the presence of children in domestic abuse households or contexts.
The Chair: I find it fantastic that you have to prove that children have been affected.
Baroness Hussein-Ece: Could I just ask a question on that?
The Chair: Please do.
Baroness Hussein-Ece: We heard previously that in some cases particularly mothers are reluctant to report abuse because, when children’s services get involved, they worry that their children will be taken away as they will be deemed at risk. What is your experience of that sensitivity, that, once social services get involved, it will be purely a matter of, “The child is at risk; we need to take them away or put them on the at-risk register”?
Professor Michele Burman: There is an ongoing concern by many mothers who fear that the involvement of statutory services would result in the removal of their child. It is a fear that is grounded in some evidence and research. It is an ongoing concern, which often affects the engagement of a victim in an investigation or prosecution process. It is a well-founded fear and a real concern.
Baroness Neate: To clarify, do you think that concern has increased as a result of children being considered primary victims, or do you think it existed anyway? It probably existed anyway, but has it increased?
Professor Michele Burman: It definitely existed and has for some time, so it predated the introduction of DASA.
The Chair: Just to be clear on Baroness Neate’s question, has the legislation changed that dynamic, or does it remain as before?
Professor Michele Burman: I do not have any evidence to suggest that DASA has changed the dynamic and increased that concern. I am certainly not aware of any research that has looked at that matter in any detail.
The Chair: Professor Kebbell, are services offered directly to children in homes where they have been identified as routinely living with domestic abuse? Is there anything positive that we could learn from that?
Professor Mark Kebbell: As Michele alluded, child safety will normally be involved and there are referrals to various services. Some are more available than others. Child safety is a major reason why many people avoid and are reluctant to engage with police and the justice system. We certainly have huge problems with drug use, often by the victim and the perpetrator, and that is a very big motivator to not want the police being too involved.
Q146 Baroness Gerada: My question may seem rather redundant in terms of our Act, seeing as Mark is in Australia and Michele is in Scotland, but we would like you to answer it from your perspective. How does the funding landscape affect the manner in which legislation operates in your jurisdiction? Clearly, the Act does not operate where you are, but it might be interesting to hear how funding operates in your area. Michele in particular, you talked about teams and groups and coming together. That requires joint funding, which sounds easy but is invariably difficult. Mark, could you comment on that from the Australian perspective? Then we will go to Michele.
Professor Mark Kebbell: This is a tricky one. There are a lot of resources that are often used ineffectively, especially in policing; they are often spread across large numbers of offenders rather than being focused on the most persistent and harmful ones. There are issues with the response from government agencies and the voluntary or community sector in that we spend a lot of time assessing and very little time actually intervening and doing something.
In terms of resources, as you can imagine, if Government allocate money, they tend to give it to themselves before the community sector. So often the Government sector is well funded but the community sector, which does most of the heavy lifting, is relatively underfunded and often temporarily so. It is often scrambling around for money. It manages to keep staff because of the commitment even though, logically, people should look for other jobs because they are on short-term contracts. A lot of resources could be a bit more efficiently allocated. But, as a final point—I do not want to speak for too long—for many high-risk people, their problems are quite profound and they are not going to be easily solved.
Baroness Gerada: Not by a few sessions of therapy. Do you have pooled budgets? Do health and criminal justice budgets come together with housing and social care budgets, or does each individual area have its own budget?
Professor Mark Kebbell: We have moved to co-ordinated approaches, so different agencies will get pockets of money for different activities. To a large extent, their response will be out of their normal budget. For example, housing will be responsible for providing housing across the state. It is allowed to, and wants to, use some resources to provide housing to people who are trying to escape domestic and family violence. But it does not get an extra budget for that. Sometimes police get extra budget for training or to initiate something else, but it is not consistent. To my knowledge, health does not get special funding.
Baroness Gerada: Does the Scottish system do anything innovative? Or is it as everywhere else, different bits trying to scramble together?
Professor Michele Burman: I was thinking about this question in relation to children. Reduced budgetary concerns have been a contributory factor to this. There is ongoing work in Scotland to develop something called the Bairns’ Hoose. That is Scotland’s approach to the Icelandic Barnahus, which means “children’s house”. Bairns’ Hoose is under development and is starting to offer holistic child-centred support in some areas for children who have been victims or witnesses of abuse, as well as children under the age of criminal responsibility whose behaviours have caused harm. Bairns’ Hoose is all about connecting services around the needs of the child by collaborating across agencies and disciplines, bringing together, for example, child protection, health, justice and recovery services in one setting. This is a very promising development, bringing together a range of services to work around the safety and protection of the child.
The broader funding landscape in Scotland is quite precarious. It limits the operational effectiveness of DASA due to a number of pertinent factors. I have already mentioned that domestic abuse in Scotland, as in England and Wales, is a very large-volume crime. We see an increase in numbers of reports and the complexity of cases, but a reduced capacity of specialist support services to meet that demand. The budgets for front-line services are being reduced; funding streams are ever more precarious. This has led to longer waiting lists for advocacy and refuge space, leaving victims vulnerable and often traumatised by delays and long wait times.
Police are also experiencing budget constraints together with this increasing number of cases. In fact, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland estimates that the police receive notification of a domestic abuse incident every eight minutes, which is extraordinarily high. These numbers place significant pressures on Police Scotland to respond to domestic abuse. These ongoing challenges related to budgetary constraints, as well as in recruitment and retention, mean that police systems struggle to allocate and follow up cases appropriately.
The Chair: We have three more questions to get through, so I will be clock monitor for a bit. Baroness Porter joins us online and has a question.
Q147 Baroness Porter of Fulwood: We want to turn now to the issues around minoritised victims. Professor Burman, could you go first and tell us a bit about where the approach to minoritised victims is working and where it is not in Scotland? Where are the contrasts or similarities with what is happening in England and Wales?
Professor Michele Burman: I will try to be brief. Racially minoritised victims face distinct barriers when interacting with DASA and, in fact, many other legislative protections for gender-based violence in Scotland. There is a different level of complexity in relation to racially minoritised victims and systematic issues such as institutionalised racism, deep-seated fear and mistrust of police; criminal justice can prohibit reporting by minoritised victim-survivors, and it affects their access to justice. There are language barriers; there is fear of authorities due to concerns about community marginalisation or retribution; and a key factor, as you probably know, is immigration status. We have a wealth of research to establish that, if minoritised victims have insecure immigration status, they are much less likely to report or indeed gain a positive outcome from the criminal justice system.
Legislative definitions also play a key part here. The narrow parameters of DASA, which focuses on abuse towards partners and ex-partners, does not take account of extended family or so-called honour-based violence, which is not explicitly covered by the Scottish Act. This is a recognised failing, and there are moves to consider a statutory definition of honour-based abuse to capture extended family abuse and to account for more multi-perpetrator structures that may be found in minoritised cases.
In terms of effective approaches, we in Scotland suffer from—a common problem across many jurisdictions—the failure to systematically collect data on ethnicity in relation to criminal justice, which means it is impossible often to know the numbers of how many domestic abuse cases involve minoritised victims. Some police forces collect data; others do not; but this lack of coherent and systematic data collection across the whole country is a failure of long standing.
There are some positive steps though. The recent Domestic Abuse (Protection) (Scotland) Act, which was introduced in 2021 but is being implemented in stages, recognises that, for minoritised women, fleeing a home often carries the threat of destitution, community exile, or a loss of secure immigration status linked to their residence. Provisions under this Act, which have yet to be rolled out, allow social landlords rather than the victim to apply to courts to strip an abuser of their tenancy and legally transfer it to the victim. This can provide a vital safeguard for women who cannot risk initiating high-profile legal actions against a perpetrator for whatever reason.
Baroness Porter of Fulwood: Professor Kebbell, do you have anything to add from the work that you are doing in Australia?
Professor Mark Kebbell: We have very similar issues here. Some 30% of our population were born overseas, so we have very diverse communities. We have people from more countries than there are countries—from countries that do not even exist any more—and it is difficult for us to be prescriptive for every country. It is very important that people get cultural advice for a particular community to find out what the key issues are. As Michele pointed out, we have problems with visas going both ways, in fact, and people feel vulnerable about that. There are provisions to give permanent residency to victims of domestic and family violence, and many people avail themselves of that, although some are not aware of this.
Our biggest over-representation is our First Nations population, where a woman is six times as likely to be murdered by her partner as someone who is non-First Nations; that is a huge problem for us, compounded by the fact that many of our First Nations communities live in remote communities where there is very little resource. There are issues around trust and language barriers. We also have a large LGBTQIA+ community, and there are unique challenges for policing that section of the population.
Q148 Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: I want to ask about how consistently the legislation in your respective areas works across that jurisdiction. Professor Kebbell, we take the point that you will just talk to Queensland and not the entirety of Australia. Is it working in some places better than others? I confess I am much more familiar with the geography of Scotland than that of Queensland. I have been to Brisbane, but that is it. Professor Kebbell, talk about consistency across the jurisdiction, please.
Professor Mark Kebbell: We endeavour to provide the same services across the state, but this is incredibly difficult. A challenge is that in a single-person police station, if someone is taken into custody, there is no police for that area because the officer has to remain with the person who is in custody. The context of a lot of these disputes means that there is a family disagreement going on, which makes it very difficult to take one person into custody and leave the remaining family members without a police presence. We face real challenges, especially getting people into remote and regional areas. Fortunately, our population is heavily concentrated in South East Queensland, where most of the services and resources are, but it is a persistent problem in our remote communities.
Professor Michele Burman: I preface what I am going to say with a really important point, that DASA is used relatively infrequently in Scotland; rather, domestic abuse cases are much more frequently charged using existing statutory or common-law offences with a domestic abuse aggravator attached. To give you an example, in 2024-25, the Scottish police recorded almost 65,000 incidents of domestic abuse—an increase from previous years—and just over a third of them went on to be recorded as domestic abuse aggravated crimes and offences. They are recorded, for example, as common assault or threatening and abusive behaviour with an aggravator attached. But crimes recorded under DASA accounted for just 6% of domestic abuse aggravated crimes and offences recorded that year. This percentage is increasing but very slowly. That is really important to note.
There are a range of reasons for that, which I can talk to, but geography is really important in Scotland. The highest number of domestic abuse incidents are perhaps unsurprisingly recorded in urban areas, with a far lower number in Scotland’s expansive remote areas. There are lots of reasons for this beyond population density questions. There is a much lower police presence in remote areas such as the Highlands and across the islands. Specialist support services are spread much more thinly, so there is less access to intelligence from other potential safeguarding partners such as health and education, from whom evidence may be gained in relation to courses of conduct.
In relation to children in domestic abuse settings, information may come from education in other environments. These conditions in the more remote areas create challenges for the identification of previous incidents, ongoing cumulative harms in domestic abuse contexts, and impede understanding of the wider risks that might be present. So geography is very important, but that must be placed against this relatively low uptake or usage of the DASA legislation.
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton: On that—it not being connected to geography—could you say a little more? Is it the case that violence is being identified? You gave the example of common assault. Although DASA provides a much broader definition of domestic abuse, are people still leaning into a more traditional understanding of physical violence and then adding it on, rather than prosecuting under the breadth of what DASA allows?
Professor Michele Burman: There is a focus on physical violence. That is a very entrenched view, which the training delivered in Scotland has tried to work against. It is more a leaning into an incident-based approach rather than looking at course of conduct, which requires a lot more evidence, investigation and joining up of the dots across a range of abusive behaviours. So it defaults to a more incident-based approach.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: Are the 6% of cases where DASA is being used evenly spread across Scotland, or are there certain areas that are using it much more effectively than others? If so, how and why?
Professor Michele Burman: I do not know if I can answer the second part of your question, the how and why, but there is a higher use of DASA in more urban, city-based environments.
The Chair: In terms of sentencing or availability of protection for the victim and children, does it make a difference whether you are charged under the traditional common assault type of legislation or DASA?
Professor Michele Burman: There is not a stark difference. It would depend very much on the context, facts and seriousness of the case. The sentencing tariff would not necessarily differ. The domestic abuse aggravator that is attached to the existing crime or offences increases the severity and by so doing the likely sentencing tariff that would be imposed. But there is not a huge differential in terms of sentencing.
Q149 Baroness Rafferty: Mine is an easy question: is there anything you have not yet mentioned that you would like to draw to the attention of the committee?
Professor Michele Burman: Developing evidence from research with survivors in Scotland points to challenges with the operation of DASA. There is not a huge amount of research, but it produces similar kinds of findings. The issue is partly in the operation of DASA, but it is also very much linked to the wider operation of criminal justice processes in cases of domestic abuse and indeed gender-based violence more generally. Survivors talk about delays in court processes, successive court adjournments, a lack of information provision given to them, those kinds of things. DASA sought to situate victims at the centre of the criminal justice process, but the research undertaken highlights that they remain on the periphery and continue to be marginalised, so having inadequate knowledge of decision-making processes and rationale for—
The Chair: Sorry to interrupt you, but sometimes your microphone is cutting out. I do not know whether it is when you move around, but we lost a little of what you just said.
Professor Michele Burman: To sum up, research shows that, from a survivor perspective, the expectation that the reporting of domestic abuse would mean a route to safety is not always realised following DASA.
The Chair: That is an important finding. Thank you. I am sure you will point us to that research.
Professor Mark Kebbell: My final comments would be that this is a really difficult issue that we all struggle with, all around the world. The people who perpetrate the most significant harms are known across a whole range of services—for example, mental health or police and criminal justice—and they often have protracted problems that started from a difficult childhood. They have problems with substance use, mental health, and we see lots of people with cognitive difficulties. Consequently, with domestic violence orders, it can sometimes be difficult for perpetrators to understand what is required of them. The upshot is that these are people who find it difficult to change their behaviours in a quick and easy way.
Baroness Gerada: Professor Kebbell, what about gambling? Australia has quite a serious gambling problem, which nobody has mentioned. It is rarely mentioned, but literature shows an enormous overlap.
Professor Mark Kebbell: Yes, absolutely, we have a huge gambling problem. Of course, that is often related to suicide and violence. An issue with gambling is that it is often so easily hidden but can have an impact in a very quick, acute and dangerous way.
The Chair: Can I thank you both very much for your incredible expertise and clarity in the way you presented your answers? We are extremely grateful. I am sure colleagues will be following up with a few details but thank you so much. This public session is now concluded.
