Oral evidence: Domestic violence and abuse, HC 1015
Tuesday 17 July 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 17 July 2018.
Members present: Yvette Cooper (Chair); Rehman Chishti; Sir Christopher Chope; Stephen Doughty; Tim Loughton; Stuart C. McDonald; Alex Norris; Naz Shah; John Woodcock.
Questions 1–77
Witnesses
I: Councillor Simon Blackburn, Chairman, LGA Safer and Stronger Communities Board, Local Government Association; Siân Hawkins, Head of Campaigns and Public Affairs, Women’s Aid; and Pragna Patel, Southall Black Sisters.
II: Professor Jane Callaghan, Stirling University; Jane Gordon, Sisters for Change; and Deputy Chief Constable Louisa Rolfe, National Police Chiefs’ Council.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Local Government Association
– National Police Chiefs’ Council
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Councillor Simon Blackburn, Siân Hawkins and Pragna Patel.
Q1 Chair: Welcome, everyone, to this session of the Home Affairs Select Committee and our inquiry into domestic abuse and the Government’s legislation. I will begin by asking our panel to introduce themselves.
Pragna Patel: I am the Director of an NGO called Southall Black Sisters. We have been in existence for almost 40 years, supporting, advising and advocating on behalf of black minority women.
Siân Hawkins: I am the Head of Campaigns and Public Affairs at Women’s Aid in England. We are a nationally federated organisation, representing around 180 local specialist domestic abuse services who provide over 300 different types of services locally. At the national level we provide capacity training and support for our members. We also do campaigning and advocacy work and we have a training centre.
Councillor Blackburn: I am Chair of the Local Government Association Safer and Stronger Communities Board, which has quite a broad remit but one of the biggest and most important parts of it is violence against women and girls.
Q2 Chair: Thank you. We want to ask you about the Government’s planned legislation and what the issues should be there, but also more widely about what needs to be done to tackle domestic abuse. I will start by asking you what would your top priority be for change, just the one thing you would put at the very top of your list to make the greatest difference?
Pragna Patel: If I was to sum it up I would say that we need to close the gap between rhetoric and reality, rhetoric and practice. I believe that over the last 30 years or more we have made great progress in recognising issues of violence against women in all their various guises. I believe that we have made great progress in getting institutions such as the police, social services and others to recognise violence against women and children, but the implementation of laws and guidance is still very inconsistent and very patchy and there are huge gaps in protection in terms of the ground reality. It is a question of we can have very good laws and policies in place but how do we ensure consistent application and implementation of those policies in a way that conforms with human rights standards, and increasingly international human rights standards, on discrimination and violence against women. Closing that gap would be my top priority.
Siân Hawkins: I would absolutely echo Pragna’s comments. Building on that, a key priority for Women’s Aid is the resourcing and funding of specialist services. While we welcome this Bill coming forward—it is a fantastic opportunity—we have to have a sustainably funded, well resourced specialist domestic abuse sector because that is what underpins a good response and the response that we want from all statutory agencies. Our services are there to provide that specialism, to provide somewhere to go for women when they have exhausted all their other options, and without having that sustainable framework in place, I think the Bill risks being hugely undermined. A key aim of the Bill is to get more women coming forward, more reports of domestic abuse, a belief in a system that is going to protect and support survivors. Without having those services there to protect and support women, to keep them safe when they come forward, this Bill is going to fail.
Councillor Blackburn: I think we need to stop domestic abuse happening in the first place and the way that you do that is through education. We now have two generations of children and young people who have been brought up on a diet of hardcore internet pornography, who do not understand what a healthy, respectful relationship looks like. I think it is beholden upon us to make sure that young men and young women understand what that looks like.
Q3 Sir Christopher Chope: One of the issues of getting responses is responses from the police. What do you think the police should be doing now, without any more legislation, to make their response to domestic abuse more effective?
Pragna Patel: In some ways that is not an easy question to answer. At the moment there is too much variation in police response to domestic violence. We made a submission to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary when it was looking into reviewing police response to domestic violence. We catalogued a series of failures from, at one end of the spectrum, not recognising domestic violence or trivialising or minimising it to the other end of the spectrum where women who were reporting domestic violence were actually being arrested, detained and criminalised, and in between other responses that suggest that we still have a long way to go. I don’t think the answer is just training and awareness training because there has been over three decades of such training and we still don’t seem to narrow the gap between legislation, policy and guidance and implementation. There has to be more robust accountability measures put into place. I feel that we need to see the complaints system working much more robustly than it is at present.
At the moment there is this introduction of a super complaints system mechanism whereby certain organisations will be accredited to make complaints where they recognise systemic failures of policing around domestic violence over a period of time. It is difficult to know how that will pan out, but I am hoping that that will be a robust, transparent and effective mechanism of accountability because that is needed. We need to see more robust reviews looking at those systemic failures of policing and how they need to be addressed, so I am hoping the super complaint system will be one tool of accountability that will work to address the problem. It remains to be seen but we will see. That is one area.
I think there are very contradictory pressures on the police, to be frank and honest, and that does not help police officers on the front line assess what role they need to play. I will give you an example of what I mean. At the moment in the very hostile climate around immigration we are seeing immigration officers really confused about what to do when migrant women who have insecure immigration status report domestic violence. One would have thought that the response is protection first or protection last; at any cost the issue is one of protection. What is happening is that they are allowing their perceived role as immigration enforcement officers to overtake and override their duty to protect. In an emergency when women who don’t have immigration status need to call the police for protection, there is now a conflict as to what that officer should do: should that officer protect or should that officer report to the Home Office?
We are seeing also a real blurring of the role between immigration enforcement and policing to protect. MARACs, which are the multiagency conferences to assess high-risk cases in localities, are being asked to allow immigration officers to be part of that safeguarding process when they have no real obvious role to play in safeguarding. We are seeing immigration officers embedded in police stations and one has to then question what for, what is the purpose of that. It is not just the police. We are also seeing immigration officers embedded in social services departments, which also questions what is the role of social services when you are dealing with safeguarding issues concerning vulnerable, abused women and children.
The blurring of that kind of role and duty of protection on the one hand and immigration enforcement on the other hand is a massive and growing problem. For us on the front line, working with some of the most marginalised and vulnerable migrant women, it is serious because it will deter many women who already are hard to reach and will have difficulties coming forward. That is another really critical area that the police, but also other agencies, will need to address.
Q4 Sir Christopher Chope: Does anybody else want to chip in?
Siân Hawkins: It is an acute issue. The police are not just dealing with the odd domestic abuse case. It is a huge part of their daily work. The police get 100 calls every hour about domestic abuse. Domestic abuse accounts for 10% of all recorded crime and more than 10%, a third, of all recorded crime with assaults and injuries. This is something they are dealing with day in, day out. It is a constant kind of battle and what we know is that the police have undoubtedly upped their game over recent years in how they are responding to domestic abuse. The HMICFRS inspections over the last couple of years have helped police practice and policy in this area, and I know we have colleagues here from the police who can talk more on that.
There are positive things but I totally agree with Pragna that there is still a long way to go. There is the training issue and we want all police staff to have high quality training on identifying and responding to domestic abuse, particularly on coercion and control, understanding those non-physical types of abuse that women and children might be experiencing and understanding how to deal with that and support victims to report. We have a huge problem with attrition in domestic abuse cases where historically cases going through the criminal justice process are heavily reliant on the victim’s testimony, probably more so than in lots of other crime types. We do see a lot of attrition in these cases and part of building up the support for victims going through the justice process is having really good contacts with local specialist domestic abuse providers, making sure that all victims of domestic abuse who are calling the police are signposted to help and support.
Moreover, we are looking at a cultural change within the police of treating domestic abuse incredibly seriously, always believing victims when they come forward and offering them the right kind of help and support so that they have faith in the system. We know at the moment that four in five victims of domestic abuse are not going to the police, only a quarter of women in refuge—that is women who have to leave their homes because the violence is so bad—and only half of women accessing community-based services are going to the police. There is a massive gap there between the people who need that support and those who are willing to go to the police for help. I think there is a piece of work to be done on the culture in the police even still, even though absolutely improvements have been made, to make sure that that gap is closed.
Councillor Blackburn: I understand that DCC Louisa Rolfe is giving evidence in the next session. She and I sit on the Government’s national oversight group on domestic abuse. She will be able to talk to you more about the improvements that HMIC has seen over the past few years, which as both the previous speakers have noted is sizeable but there is much more to do. The only other thing to add from the Local Government Association’s point of view is that our behavioural insights team is working with Kent County Council and Kent Police on a controlled trial to see what more can be done in supporting victims by making sure that every phone call to the police is followed up by a call from victim support where specialist trained workers are offering support to women who have been victims of domestic abuse. We can send further details of that to you.
Pragna Patel: I think there is one other aspect to this that makes it difficult for the police to do their job, which is that domestic violence is becoming more and more gender neutralised in the way in which services are perceiving the problem. Once you gender neutralise an issue, you tend to respond to anyone’s perception that they are victim of domestic violence. In an incident where, for example, a woman might call a police officer and complain that the perpetrator, husband or partner, is abusing her, he makes a cross-allegation saying, “No, she is abusing me” and the police then record both of them as victims. That then feeds into statistics that are skewed because both are recognised as victims and that has consequences for how domestic violence is perceived not necessarily as a highly gendered matter impacting mainly on women, overwhelmingly on women. All the statistics from domestic homicide records to femicide census and other statistics show that victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly women, but at the local level when those statistics are skewed what you see is a neutralisation of the problem going on and that impacts on how services are commissioned.
Q5 Sir Christopher Chope: While accepting your analysis, what is your solution to that? There are men who are victims of domestic violence. Are you saying that they should be cast aside?
Pragna Patel: Not at all. I totally accept that there are men who are victims of domestic violence but there is also the need to recognise that the overwhelming majority are women and girls. We know that, the evidence is there internationally and nationally, and so a lot of the services still need to remain women-only, girl-only spaces. Neutralising the issue does not address the problem of gender-based violence, which remains pervasive. In fact, the Government’s own Domestic Violence Bill is problematic for us because the definition of domestic violence is not gendered and yet it lies uneasily in relation to the Istanbul convention, which is a convention combatting violence against women and girls. It is clear in the Istanbul convention that it is a gendered issue and that it needs to be addressed as a gendered issue and yet we have a Bill going through Parliament that is a domestic violence Bill and not a violence against women and girls Bill.
The problem starts at the very top when you do not signal that, yes, there can be others who are affected by domestic violence—I am talking about men—but generally we have to deal in this society with the pervasive nature of violence against women and girls manifested in a variety of ways.
Q6 John Woodcock: Thank you, Ms Patel. I wanted to press further on that last point, because it is really important and I take very much your wider point on the dangers of gender neutrality. Do you or any other member of the panel have a suggestion on that particular instance you mentioned, the example of a male perpetrator of abuse wrongly alleging and then skewing the figures? Possibly this is a question for the police in the next panel as well, but are there practical suggestions of how to avoid that?
Pragna Patel: I think the question lies in how the police investigate the incidents. What tends to happen is that there is very much a focus on an individual incident as a separate incident out of its context. One of the things that we say to the police is that there may be a cross-allegation and by all means you can investigate but even a cursory investigation will reveal that the incidents that women refer to often are occurring in the context of a continuum of domestic violence and coercive control. It is very easy to obtain that history and once you are able to investigate that, you will be able to discard the cross-allegation because that is not necessarily occurring in a history of coercive control.
One of the things that we are saying very clearly to the police is that when a report of domestic violence is made, it is vital that the investigation does not just focus on that particular incident at that particular moment but that there is an investigation into the whole history so that you get a sense of the kind of coercive controlling behaviour and environment in which the women exist. Once you have that, you are much more able to provide protection and to criminalise the perpetrator if criminal offences have been committed.
Q7 John Woodcock: That is very helpful. Can I widen out from that on to the creation of the statutory definition and the widening out of the terms of abuse to cover coercive control or economic abuse? What is the panel’s view on whether the statutory definition as it is proposed properly encapsulates that and what to do to ensure that it does?
Siân Hawkins: From our perspective, the statutory definition, as it is currently drafted and has been consulted on, does not reflect what we know about domestic abuse being a gendered issue. We welcome economic abuse being considered as part of the statutory definition. We think that is really positive and will help shape our understanding of the way that financial abuse and economic abuse is part of most women’s experiences of domestic abuse and is very often overlooked. Coercive control is a criminal offence and it is part of the definition, as it currently stands, the cross-government non-statutory definition. We welcome that also being part of the statutory definition, but for us the key thing is this gender issue and recognising the gendered nature of domestic abuse in that definition. Without that, we think it is going to pose really huge challenges.
An example of what we see happening on the front line, what our member services report back to us all the time, is that kind of trickling down of the gender neutralisation of domestic abuse to how services are being commissioned and funded. We know that the domestic abuse sector at the moment, as services for women, is chronically underfunded; 60% of referrals to refuges are being turned away. That is about 94 children and 90 women every day being turned away from services at their point of need, when they are desperate to flee abuse. That is partly because of funding cuts and commissioning practices where the gender neutralisation of this issue is then reflected in funding decisions that are being made and that is really problematic.
We know that there are male victims of domestic abuse needing support and services as well, but the way that women and men experience domestic abuse, qualitatively and quantitatively, is really different. We know women are much more likely to be repeat victims of domestic abuse, so they experience multiple incidents. In the data of people who are experiencing over 10 incidents of domestic abuse, over 80% of them are women. They are much more likely to experience fear, coercion, control and they are much more likely to be murdered by their partners than men are.
What we have to have at the heart of this definition is a recognition that this is a gendered set of crimes, it is a gendered phenomenon. If the definition does not recognise that, our understanding of what domestic is, and the understanding across all agencies of what domestic abuse is, is not going to be good enough to provide the best possible protection to survivors who need it.
Q8 John Woodcock: Thank you for that. We have had non-violent abuse recognised within statute for three years now and I think a few months ago we were on zero for the number of prosecutions there have been where there was not also an element of violence as part of it. Do you have confidence that putting non-violent abuse within the statutory definition will help that problem and, if not, what to do?
Pragna Patel: I don’t think it is going to solve the problem but it is a start. That is very important because at the moment coercive control, which has a non-physical element to it, whether it is economic abuse or emotional abuse, is simply not being properly policed, not just within the police force but it is not recognised in other agencies either, and that is vital.
I will give you one of the consequences of not recognising non-violent forms of abuse in the definition. Women often rely on the civil justice system, not just the criminal justice system, for court protection orders and orders effecting the protection of children. However, the legal aid agency and legal aid changes now mean that unless you are recognised as a victim of domestic violence, you will not have access to legal aid and you have to prove that you are a victim of domestic violence by providing a number of different types of evidence. If the violence that you face, the financial abuse, the coercive, controlling, emotional abuse that you face has not been recognised, you have no evidence to access legal aid, which means you can’t get protection when you turn up at court trying to seek a protection order. That is a very concrete, serious consequence of not recognising the wider forms of abuse within the definition.
The same goes for culturally-specific forms of harm. If they are not recognised in the definition, or at the very least in a preamble to a definition or in statutory guidance that should follow a definition, we are left with the same problem. The other thing is that there are inconsistencies in the definitions by which different agencies work. For example, the previous president of the Family Division in his practice direction recently gave a definition of domestic violence including culturally-specific forms of harm and that has been so useful for women who face those culturally-specific forms of harm and have needed to access legal aid for protection. That definition stays within the family courts but it is not necessarily the one used by, say, the police or social services or other agencies.
We have a problem with lack of consistency, so we need a cross-governmental definition as well that is absolutely consistently used across the legal systems, Government Departments and other agencies. Consistency of definition and inclusion of non-physical forms of violence are vital.
Q9 John Woodcock: Councillor Blackburn, what is your sense of the extent to which councils are geared up for identifying and supporting victims of non-violent abuse? What is the LGA’s view, if it has one, on gendering of the legislation and the definitions?
Councillor Blackburn: It is absolutely right that there is a gendered response to domestic abuse. As both of my colleagues have said, this is a heavily gendered crime. The advantage of including terms like psychological, economic, coercive and controlling behaviour in the definition is that it provides authorities in the broadest sense with more weapons in their armoury, for want of a better expression. For instance, we have started to see the police prosecuting drug dealing cases across county lines using modern slavery legislation, so it opens the door to a broader range of responses. Local government are absolutely up for the fight and up for the challenge. We believe that every single incidence of domestic abuse is one too many. Councils are stretched financially. An awful lot of services that used to exist to support victims and survivors simply are not there anymore.
Q10 John Woodcock: I am aware anecdotally not systematically of not simply refuges being cut but also support groups to help people. Could you and other members of the panel say a bit more about that?
Councillor Blackburn: It is important to remember that refuge provision is not the be all and end all of this situation. Ultimately every woman and every family entering a refuge represents a failure of all other services. I am sure all of us would want to end up in a situation where there was no need for refuges, but sadly at the moment there is. We would want to see much more investment in upstream solutions, working with women and families at an early stage, working with perpetrators, because this is about changing men’s behaviour. It speaks to the point that I referenced earlier about education in our schools to make sure that people understand what a healthy relationship is and for men to understand what is and is not acceptable behaviour.
There have been cuts to all council services. My own local authority in Blackpool is the hardest hit unitary authority in the whole of the UK. Our funding is now half of what it was in 2009. Our refuges remain open and our funding to Women’s Aid and to our local refuge remains in place. However, our funding to community groups who played a wider part in that response has not remained. We would very much like it to. As part of the LGA’s campaign at the moment we are highlighting that just to stand still, just to deliver the services that we are currently delivering for children’s social care and adult social care, we are facing a funding gap by 2020 of nearly £8 billion, so the scale of that challenge can’t be overestimated.
Q11 John Woodcock: I know others want to come in on resources. I have a final question on non-violent abuse. I am interested in your perception of whether generally IDVAs, the independent domestic violence advisers, are sufficiently adept at the moment across the piece to recognise a woman who presents is a victim of economic abuse. How much of a change needs to happen for that kind of network to be able to properly recognise abuse and help tackle it?
Pragna Patel: It is not just whether IDVAs are sufficiently trained or have the knowledge and skills to deal with and recognise economic abuse and so on. That is, of course, a matter of training. The wider question is the lack of IDVAs, the sheer lack of women’s services. I have to echo what you are saying, which is that in the local areas women’s services and services for the vulnerable, disabled, mentally ill, those who are dependent on drugs and alcohol are just decimated. We are finding more and more women with mental health problems arriving at our door. They require a considerable amount of intervention and skills, and it is multidimensional intervention in dealing with the abuse they may have suffered but also supporting their mental health and linking with the appropriate agencies who are so strapped for cash that they are not able to provide interventions on time in a way that helps.
Localism and austerity together have absolutely decimated these services. Localism has led to local authorities using their discretion as to which services to keep and which to let go of. What we are finding is that the more corporatised generic service operators are taking over functions that were once performed by more skilled, more specialist organisations. Those corporatised responses are very timebound and target-driven. A woman going into a refuge run by a housing association, for example, is seen as a homelessness unit rather than a whole person needing a range of interventions and support from counselling to advocacy to other support services and so on. Instead, she is just seen as homeless. What we are finding is that most services, even domestic violence services in local areas, are now providing support for only high-risk cases of domestic violence and for only six weeks. After six weeks, they are just left back on the street.
Organisations like ours are trying to buck that trend, which means the demands on us have increased and we can’t cope with the demands on us, for both the women’s complexity of needs and the sheer numbers. There are some real, serious challenges that are being faced at the local level.
Councillor Blackburn: First, in defence of localism, we have not seen what localism can do outwith of austerity. The two concepts arrived upon us at the same time. I am a passionate believer in the power of localism and that decisions—and it speaks to your later point—made locally and services commissioned from knowledgeable local providers are inevitably better than the sort of huge corporate organisations that seek to invade that territory.
But in specific answer to Mr Woodcock’s questions about the IDVAs, there are two issues. First is the total quantum; there are not enough IDVAs around. They are very well trained, very effective people in this field, but it is about where they are. The charity SafeLives is currently running a campaign to try to get IDVAs into mental health units, maternity units and A&E departments. That is crucial because an intervention at that point of crisis would be very effective and at the moment we do not have the funding. I don’t think any of our organisations have the funding to provide that sort of service.
Chair: We have a lot of issues that we want to ask you about, so many things we want to ask you about. I am going to ask for the further questions that if you don’t have comments on each question let others answer and we will try to cover as many issues as we can.
Q12 Alex Norris: John has led us nicely into resources. We currently have a twin-tracked process. We have a Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill coming through the Home Office and Housing, Communities and Local Government is currently reviewing the resources of the sector, especially looking at refuges. What will that review tell us and what impact will that have on the ability to deliver a successful Bill and then Act?
Siân Hawkins: From what we know about the work that Government are doing on this, they are looking at what the level of provision is for domestic abuse services across the board, asking local authorities where they have services, how much funding they get and how they are being commissioned. Women’s Aid runs a database called Routes to Support, which is funded by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, to provide a central database so that we know where all domestic abuse services are across the UK. It also enables us to support women into access to refuge because every morning refuge providers across the country will log on and let us know how many spaces they have in their refuges for that day, so through the national domestic violence helpline, we can link women up with those refuge spaces.
But what we know already is that there is a huge gap in demand for these services where, as I mentioned earlier, 60% of referrals to refuges specifically and about a quarter of referrals to community-based services are being turned away. We know that there is a huge gap around funding as well. Our latest annual survey of services found that 46% of domestic abuse organisations are running an area of service without any dedicated funding. Usually that is prevention within the local community, maybe a programme with local schools, or very often it is children’s services within their organisations. We know for the period from 2010 to 2017 that 10% of children’s services and domestic abuse children’s services were lost across the country. That is a massive gap and I know colleagues in the later panel can talk more about the impact of domestic abuse on children. But it is certainly a real problem for our services where they are losing that funding for children who, as we know, experience domestic abuse in huge numbers.
We are very worried about the impact of the Government’s proposals to change the way that refuges are funded from 2020. They are going to remove refuges entirely from the welfare system. Refuges at the moment get rent payments through housing benefit largely and then support payments that are locally commissioned, but 10% of services don’t have any locally commissioned funding at the moment. We are hugely worried about what the impact is going to be of removing refuges from the welfare system so that last form of secure funding that they get will be removed. This is not just refuges; obviously it is the whole short-term supported housing sector.
What we are saying is that refuges are 1% of supported housing and providing a solution for them that recognises that these sectors operate as a national network. Three-quarters of women accessing refuges will move across local authority boundaries in order to access those services. It is not a local service that should be fully locally funded and the lack of national oversight and national monitoring of what is happening locally has led to the situation where now there is an enormous gap in the need for services and the supply of them at the local level. We are very hopeful that the Government have heard our calls on that and recognise, like we have been saying since the Bill has been announced, that unless we have that sustainable service underpinning this legislation it is not going to work because there will be nowhere for the women who are coming forward to go.
Q13 Alex Norris: To come back on that, what you have pulled out there is a third process that is going on now. The consultation on short-term supported housing closed almost six months ago. What impact is that delay having on the sector at the moment?
Siân Hawkins: It has had a knock-on impact immediately and this is third time lucky now in terms of the announcements we are waiting on for supported housing funding. We have had two previous announcements that we clearly indicated were going to risk the sector entirely being decimated. Under the current proposals, we found that when we asked refuges—this is specific to refuges because it is the accommodation element we are talking about—over half the services would close or have to reduce bed spaces and that would lead to 4,000 fewer spaces being available across our network at a time when we are already incredibly stretched. The impact is immediate because you have a sector that is already chronically underfunded but is incredibly insecure about its future.
We know that providers that might have accommodation units within their stock that a Women’s Aid member will run as a managing agent arrangement have very little incentive to keep those units as refuges because those refuges are going to be outside of the welfare system, locally commissioned for rent and support costs, a very risky investment comparative to other longer-term types of supported housing that are remaining within the welfare system so that rent payment is automatic. There is not going to be any worries about that. We know that providers and commissioners are thinking again about whether or not to recommission services. They are worried about taking on that financial risk and also that the financial burden is being pushed much further down on to refuges, so contracts changing to full repairs, any kind of financial concern that a provider will have goes down to the service within that house. The Women’s Aid member service will suddenly have a hugely greater financial burden placed on them.
While we are waiting for announcements and a solution to come forward, there is a huge impact locally and we can’t wait anymore for a solution to this issue.
Q14 Alex Norris: Councillor Blackburn, I am sure you in local government have the same. We say in Nottingham that we encourage reporting to go up, we want reporting to go up when it is domestic abuse because that is how we start to tackle it. In an area of declining resources, what has that meant for your local authority and for the local government sector in general?
Councillor Blackburn: The reporting of domestic violence in local authority terms manifests itself as an increase in referrals to children’s social care. What we have seen is a more than 90% increase in the number of children who are on child protection plans over recent years. What that looks like on a day-to-day basis is 500 child protection inquiries are started every single day in England and Wales and 182 children and their families are placed on a child protection plan every day in England and Wales, set against a backdrop of dramatically declining central government funding. That is a huge issue for us.
If I can touch very briefly on your previous question, the lack of clarity and certainty around funding for refuges and supported housing is leading to organisations having to take very cautious decisions. An organisation that I am very peripherally involved in, SafeNet in Lancashire, has taken the very brave move to open a large refuge called Jane’s Place, named after Jane Clough, the Blackpool nurse who was murdered by her partner. That is a large refuge for women and families with very complex needs. They have taken a real leap into the unknown by doing that because there is no certainty about funding going forward. Very few people are willing and able to take that sort of risk, where we are seeing a decline in provision rather than the growth that there ought to be.
Q15 Alex Norris: Pragna, to develop that theme, you represent an organisation that works in a specific locality. How important is a national network to your organisation to provide support?
Pragna Patel: Absolutely vital. As Siân said, most women who come to us will not want to be rehabilitated in the same area because of the risks, so we rely on a national network of refuges. Particularly we rely on specialist refuges for black minority women. We can literally count them on two hands around the country. It is a quite scary situation. We cannot get women into refuges easily anymore, mainly because they are not catering for their specific needs. For example, young women who are escaping forced marriage or other forms of culturally specific forms of harm need to be able to go to a refuge and not feel they have to explain themselves all the time and where the workers, the staff, understand where they are coming from and what risks they face when they recount their experiences. There is a decimation definitely. The numbers of BME women’s refuges around the country that have closed is quite alarming.
But the other problem is that we cannot get women into refuges because if they have no recourse to public funds because of their immigration status, they cannot get into refuges at all. It is a massive problem and one that we are trying to creatively address in a number of ways, one through seeking grants to provide direct costs to women. For example, we are running a pilot project at the moment, provided with a grant from the Government’s tampon tax, to provide direct costs to women for three months for housing and subsistence needs while they sort out their immigration status, but three months is nowhere near enough. A lot of refuges still will not accept women if you provide direct costs because they don’t want the uncertainty of what is going to happen after the three months are over. It remains a massive problem; migrant women with insecure status who are subject to no recourse to public funds have very limited options for protection and that exposes them to higher risks of violence and exploitation.
Q16 Chair: Do you have figures on the estimated scale of that?
Pragna Patel: No. There are no national statistics but we are looking at probably a few thousand.
Q17 Chair: If you have any further estimates of scale, it would be really helpful if you could send those to us.
Pragna Patel: If we do.
Q18 Rehman Chishti: First, can I ask a question to Ms Patel? On the issue of resources and a cross-government departmental strategy, I know that in March 2016 the Home Office published a 2016-20 strategy looking at domestic violence and included in that was £80 million dedicated funding to provide core support for refugees and other accommodation-based services. Added to that, in 2017 £20 million was announced in the spring Budget further to support this area of work. With the strategy published and resources added to it, has that made a difference or has that made a difference at all?
Pragna Patel: No, absolutely no difference.
Q19 Rehman Chishti: You are saying that has made no difference at all?
Pragna Patel: As far as I can see, the demands on us have increased and increased, access to support has diminished. Looking at, say, women asylum seekers who have children and who face domestic abuse, when we go to children’s services in our local area, children’s services inevitably will decline to support until we threaten legal action. That is becoming a daily occurrence, that they are not meeting their duties under section 17 of the Children Act.
Q20 Rehman Chishti: I have prosecuted cases and defended cases and some of those were in domestic violence. I get the point about it is absolutely vital to get that support to people at a very early stage; before they even get to court it is absolutely crucial to get them that support. Rather than say to me that this has made no difference at all, it would be more constructive to say, “This made some difference, however we need X, Y and Z”, rather than coming to a Committee and saying, “That has made no difference at all”. If I may be as frank as I can, that undermines the argument that you make, because of course we have to do more, at the same time acknowledging that some difference has been made but more needs to be done and clarifying the areas where more needs to be done. Also if I push it back to you, if the £100 million has not made a difference and the £20 million in 2017, what further support and how much do you think we need to spend in this area to make it to the level that you think we need to make it to?
Pragna Patel: First of all, the reason why I am saying there has been very little difference is because you get one area of Government seeking to address a problem but other very contradictory policies that undercut and undermine that. What we are not seeing is joined-up governmental thinking about violence against women and girls, including minority women and girls. That is the first problem.
Secondly, there are different categories of migrant women. There are asylum-seeking migrant women, migrant women with no recourse and other categories, so you can’t lump them all together and say that this funding has impacted on all those categories of women. On the one hand Government may have provided funding but on the other hand what we are finding, and I can only talk from my experience, is that there are too many barriers still to meet their needs. What is needed, required and would be helpful and what we are calling for is a much more coherent and comprehensive policy framework for supporting all abused migrant women regardless of their immigration status. We need to see a proper comprehensive framework, not some piecemeal approach with some funding for some services but other doors have been closed. For example, women cannot now, because of the latest rounds of the Immigration Act, seek even private accommodation because of landlord checks on their status.
There are all sorts of ways in which policies undercut each other and there is no joined-up thinking. It would be really helpful if there was now a review and a commitment from the Government as part of this Domestic Violence Bill going through that says, “We are going to put migrant women at front and centre of this Bill because we recognise that they are excluded in many ways from the protection that is available. To do that, we now need to sit and think about an overarching, overreaching comprehensive policy to protect all migrant women”.
Q21 Rehman Chishti: Just a clarification on that, are you saying, from your understanding, that the Home Office 2017-20 strategy does not touch on the work of other Departments and that is solely Home Office? My understanding is that it touches on the work of other Departments working together.
Pragna Patel: Well, if it does we are not seeing it.
Q22 Rehman Chishti: But from your understanding. Have you seen that strategy?
Pragna Patel: No. I am saying that in certain areas we are not seeing that strategy.
Q23 Rehman Chishti: Have you seen that strategy?
Pragna Patel: Yes.
Q24 Rehman Chishti: Are you saying that strategy does not touch on the work of other Departments?
Pragna Patel: I am saying that the implementation is poor.
Q25 Rehman Chishti: But the actual strategy is correct?
Pragna Patel: The strategy may be fine but it is too piecemeal.
Q26 Rehman Chishti: No, it may be fine but you deal with the front line and you are in a far better position to understand some of the implications than, say, I am because I have not been touching that area of law for eight areas. Are you saying the strategy itself is fine but there are issues with the implementation of that strategy? They are two different questions.
Pragna Patel: There are two issues. There is the issue with implementation and there is the issue with the lack of resources.
Q27 Rehman Chishti: But the actual strategy itself is fine?
Pragna Patel: I started off right at the beginning by saying that there was a gap between the rhetoric and the reality.
Q28 Rehman Chishti: I am running out of time but just for clarification on that, in 2002 the domestic violence law was introduced to allow women on spousal visas a route to apply for indefinite leave to remain in the country. In 2012 the three-month recourse to benefits was applied, but you are saying that three months is not enough?
Pragna Patel: I am saying that those are welcome measures that we campaigned for and had introduced.
Q29 Rehman Chishti: But you say that three months is not enough. How long do you think that period should be?
Pragna Patel: We think it should be at least six months if not longer, six months, maybe nine months. First of all, they need to access legal aid lawyers, which is becoming more and more difficult around the country, particularly in parts of the country where legal aid is just decimated. There is that problem. Secondly, they need to be able to go into accommodation and so on and the accommodation providers need to feel certain that their problems will be resolved during that time period.
Q30 Rehman Chishti: Another question for you, dealing with the BME women: what is the scale of the transnational marriage abandonment problem where you have British nationals marrying women from other countries and then leaving them back in the countries of origin, which can lead to physical and financial abuse and problems?
Pragna Patel: It is an emerging phenomenon, so the scale of the problem is not completely understood. But let me explain to you that transnational marriage abandonment takes three forms. First of all, there are spouses who sponsor their wives over to this country and abandon them here. For those women protection is much better than it is for other abandoned women.
Q31 Rehman Chishti: I am talking about when the women return to their countries of origin.
Pragna Patel: We are probably talking about a few thousand who return to their countries of origin. There are thousands upon thousands who were never sponsored over. It is much harder to deal with that. The Government of India are trying to put measures into place to deal with women who have never been sponsored to Britain but whose lives have been ruined by British national spouses going there, marrying them, taking their dowries.
Q32 Rehman Chishti: The Government of India are doing it but you have other countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Pragna Patel: This is just an emerging problem. As far as I know, Pakistan and Bangladesh have not really recognised the issue. The real issue is those spouses who have been brought to this country and then taken back. They are being taken back so that the perpetrators can prevent them from exercising their rights under the DV rule and the DDV concession. There we are saying that the Home Office here should consider whether to grant them temporary visas so that they can return and apply for their rights.
Q33 Rehman Chishti: I get that. Just one question on the BME-related issues: the Government introduced the 2015 forced marriage legislation and we saw the first conviction taking place in relation to an incident in Birmingham. From what we have seen, that case was under investigation for a very long before the prosecution came into play. Of course it is welcome to see the prosecution and justice being done. From your understanding, why did it take so long to get justice in that case and the case being brought?
Pragna Patel: I don’t know the ins and outs of that particular case, but our feeling and general experience is that most young people feel very conflicted when they report a forced marriage. Although they want to be protected from the forced marriage, very few will contemplate bringing actions against their parents and their families because they want to retain some kind of relationship, if not now, later when they feel that maybe they can be rehabilitated back. For a lot of young people who come to us, their first thought is, “I am not going to talk about forced marriage and I am not going to report it and I don’t want you to do anything unless you can guarantee that you are not going to go and get my parents in trouble”. That is the first thing, so a lot of young people will not want to see their families prosecuted for all sorts of reasons. There the question is protecting them using the civil route of the forced marriage protection orders that are available and then supporting them in the best way we can to stay away from their families but be protected.
Q34 Rehman Chishti: Was the 2015 legislation that the Government brought in the right way forward?
Pragna Patel: The criminalisation of forced marriage is not an issue for us. As far as I am concerned, my experience tells me we are not ever going to see massive amounts of criminal proceedings here because this is a very complex area involving very young children who are being told, “Prosecute your parents”. They find that very difficult.
Q35 Rehman Chishti: It is the same as violence; the fact is the Government have to take action and legislation is the right way forward.
Pragna Patel: Absolutely they are. If a young person says, “I would like to see my parents prosecuted” our job is to support that young person, but the majority of young people will not want to see their parents prosecuted even if they are absolutely against what their parents are doing to them. What they say is, “I want to get away from the forced marriage. I am happy to live away if that has to be the case but I do not want to pursue the prosecution”. Unless they want to pursue the prosecution, prosecutions become difficult because they are the star witnesses and that is part of the problem. The issue is that if they want to see their families prosecuted or if it is so serious and there is enough evidence without their consent, it is possible for the police to prosecute, but there are always going to be a handful of cases.
Rehman Chishti: I have been told by the Chairman that I am running out of my time on this.
Chair: Yes, and very short answers to Rehman’s remaining questions.
Q36 Rehman Chishti: This is a question to Siân Hawkins in relation to viral and popular culture. Your organisation called out the behaviour of Adam Collard towards Rosie Williams on the recent “Love Island” programme and in relation to the Football World Cup made sure that with the football stats there were also stats on the number of incidents of domestic violence. How effective has that been to help address the point raised by Councillor Blackburn earlier that we have to end this culture in the first place and that is by changing attitudes at the very outset? How effective has that been?
Siân Hawkins: It has been really effective. We have commented recently on “Love Island” and also on “The Only Way is Essex”. These are hugely popular programmes that enormous numbers of us are watching and maybe audiences that we have not necessarily tapped into before. By us commenting on that and calling out those kinds of behaviours, which are signs of or signalling abusive behaviour, that is starting a national conversation with a different group of people that we do not necessarily normally talk to and tapping into those networks. The response has been amazing. Lots of women on Twitter and on social media are saying thank you to Women’s Aid for calling this behaviour out, for explaining why it is wrong, for giving them the language to explain why when they are talked to like that by partners, by men, they feel uncomfortable but they don’t know what to call it, they don’t know how to name it, they don’t have the language for that. It has been really important for us and we see it absolutely as our responsibility at Women’s Aid to identify and call out those types of behaviour that are happening and are not being addressed in the programmes. We don’t see anyone going in and explaining to those individuals why that behaviour is wrong, why their language is wrong, so it is up to us to make sure that message gets across. It has been really effective and hopefully there are lots of people out there who are now seeing that this behaviour is wrong and that they can come to us if they need help and support.
Q37 Rehman Chishti: A final question to Councillor Blackburn. You said earlier that we have to stop this from happening in the first place. From 2007-08 to 2016-17 there has been a 61% increase in convictions for domestic violence and we are looking at about 71,583 incidents every year. On the point raised by Ms Patel earlier about austerity but at the same time from the LGA perspective, are there authorities around the country—we have schools in areas where there are socioeconomic challenges but those schools are rated outstanding. Around the country, looking at this from an LGA perspective, there may be challenging financial circumstances but local authorities are doing a brilliant job in helping address this. Would you be able to give some examples of authorities that are doing that and doing that well?
Councillor Blackburn: There are very strong examples. I mentioned an organisation that I am peripherally involved with, SafeNet in Lancashire. I had a conversation with them yesterday in advance of appearing here and we discussed the flexibility that they find with local authorities across Lancashire with local connections, for instance. SafeNet do not turn any women away from the refuge unless they are full. Local authorities in Lancashire do not let those administrative and bureaucratic issues get in the way. SafeNet, among many other providers in Lancashire, will accommodate women who have no recourse to public funds. They will take on extremely complex funding battles in order to make sure that women remain safe.
There are numerous examples and my office can furnish the Committee with further examples of best practice across the country. However, that does not negate the fact that there are challenging financial circumstances and that local authorities are not always able to make the decisions that they would want to make. But, yes, good practice definitely does exist.
Q38 Tim Loughton: I want to come on to the issue of what changes in the law may help in domestic violence. Can I come back to you, Ms Patel, on legal aid? Clearly there are challenges about the changes in legal aid and the unintended consequences are that some women are now putting their cases in terms of domestic violence in order to get legal aid on difficult family court contact cases and some are not getting near a court at all because they do not qualify for legal aid. In practice, how big a problem do you think that is turning out to be in both cases?
Pragna Patel: From my experience, a significant amount of our work now is trying to access pro bono support for women who cannot access legal aid. They cannot access legal aid either because they are just above the financial threshold—
Q39 Tim Loughton: I understand why it is a problem but how big a problem is it?
Pragna Patel: I don’t know nationally how big a problem it is but I know that it is quite a significant problem. I would have to go and look at statistics from, say, the Law Society to ascertain that. As you will be aware, the problem is that more and more women are representing themselves or more and more women are trying to seek pro bono support or there are women who are not getting to court at all. What I know from my experience is that a lot of these cases involve very complex children proceedings and women are often left to fend for themselves in those children proceedings. That is very serious, because at the end of the day we are talking about children’s lives and yet they are being treated as if they do not deserve the kind of representation that they should have.
Q40 Tim Loughton: I understand that. Ms Hawkins, it would be useful to have some sort of statistics or at least good, well informed estimates as to how big a problem this is becoming on both aspects of the questions I posed.
Siân Hawkins: It is a huge issue for us. When we ask the women we speak to what should we be working on, what should Women’s Aid be campaigning on, family courts is the number one issue without a shadow of a doubt. I don’t know if I have the specific data off the top of my head but of all family cases only about 10% ever make it to the family courts and for quite a large proportion of them—about 80%—domestic abuse is the most significant welfare factor raised. Obviously cases are only going to the family courts where there are complications in that family breakdown. We have a small number of cases of overall family breakdowns going through the courts, in most of which there are domestic abuse allegations or evidence. Statistics from the National Audit Office show the number of cases that are going through the family courts where one or both parties are litigants in person, and that is about 80% of cases. It is a huge increase since the LASPO Bill went through and that is highly problematic for cases where there is domestic abuse allegations.
What we found in two different research studies that we have done—the most recent one we did with Queen Mary University in London called “What about my right not TO BE abused?” which is specifically looking at domestic abuse, family courts and human rights—was that a quarter of survivors of domestic abuse going through the family courts are being directly cross-examined by the perpetrator of the abuse against them. This practice is not taking place in the criminal courts. As we know, that would never happen, a perpetrator would never be able to cross-examine their victim, but in the family courts it is routinely happening because there is no legal representation if women are not eligible for legal aid, which can be for a range of reasons. Our primary concern with that at the moment is with means testing where the means test for legal aid often includes assets and savings that the victim of domestic abuse no longer has any access to whatsoever but it is still within the calculations.
Q41 Tim Loughton: I was going to come on to that. That is very helpful. I don’t know if you have already, but it would be very helpful for the Committee to see those two reports you referred to and the extent of that problem.
Can I come on to the children’s issue and start with you, Councillor? You referred to, and we know, the big increase in child protection plans. Interestingly, your authority takes more children into care than any other authority in the country by a margin of more than six times the lowest. Why is that?
Councillor Blackburn: Blackpool faces a conflation of issues. No one of those issues is unique but the fact that all of the circumstances exist at the same time in the same place is significant. There are huge numbers of transients in and out of the borough but within the borough as well. People come to Blackpool, by and large, for negative reasons. They come to Blackpool because they are running from something. They may have mental health problems, be fleeing domestic abuse, have drug problems or alcohol problems. They come to Blackpool because they came there once in 1978 and it is the one time in their life they can remember being happy. There is a huge oversupply of poor quality property, so what happens is that 18,000 people a year move into the borough in pursuit of a better life but of course they bring with them all of the issues that they had wherever they have come from. They end up in a seaside resort and there is nothing quite so shut as a shut seaside resort, so in November, December, January, February it is cold, it is grey, it is a bit miserable and they have cut themselves off from all of the forms of support, even if it was just knowing their GP or having an auntie who lived round the corner that could help out with the kids.
We import an awful lot of issues but I have reviewed all of the evidence. I am a former child protection social workers. We currently have 568 children in care as of yesterday. I am absolutely convinced that every single one of those children needs to be in public care. My worry is that we might be missing some. It is not that we are taking too many. The issue is getting children out of the care system at the other end. I have just approved a spend-to-save initiative whereby we are going to take on social workers who will work exclusively on returning children to their families when it is safe to do so.
Q42 Tim Loughton: I fully appreciate all that and it is not a comment on Blackpool. I was interested in why the numbers are skewed in that way. How many of the cases of kids coming into care would you estimate is down to domestic violence? Do you have specialist DV social workers who are smarter at the way you deal with those cases? Does the law need to be changed and the Children Act of 1989 need to be changed better to protect those children where there is domestic violence, or is it purely one of how we handle them and the processes, the resourcing, the staffing and so on?
Councillor Blackburn: In 2012 Ofsted visited Blackpool and gave us a damning report on our safeguarding arrangements. A huge amount of work has gone in and we came out of intervention I think three years ago now. One of the reflections that we took from the Ofsted review and from all of the work that we did afterwards was that we had a considerable number of very focused teams. There was a child sexual abuse team, a domestic violence team, a financial abuse team. What we realised was that all of our social workers needed to be good at all of those things. It was not good enough to say, “This is a domestic abuse case, so it goes over there”. It was that we needed to train all of our social workers in that, so that is what we have done. I don’t agree with the concept of having specific teams to deal with specific cases. I believe that all social workers should be trained.
Q43 Tim Loughton: I have seen in practice in places like Southport where there are specialist DV-trained social workers as part of every child protection team. I am not saying that everybody needs to be trained in such a way because you don’t want to spread it thinly but certainly to have those people who can advise when there is a DV angle to it.
Councillor Blackburn: I think that is a recipe for making sure that only 5% of your staff base understand domestic violence properly. I spent two years full-time at university to get a master’s in social work. We did a day and a half on domestic abuse. That is not good enough. All social workers need to understand this from all angles.
Q44 Chair: A day and a half?
Councillor Blackburn: I spent a day and a half on domestic abuse. In answer to your earlier question, domestic abuse is an issue in about 80% of our child protection plans and in about 80% of children who are taken into care. I suspect in all honesty it is higher than that but that is the reported level.
Q45 Tim Loughton: Certainly upwards of three-quarters is the average estimate and I think you are right that it is probably more than that. Can I ask the other witnesses on changes to the law better to protect children around DV? Do you think it is down to the law or do you think it is just processes, approaches, definitions and training?
Pragna Patel: The Children Act of 1989 is quite clear that if children are vulnerable they should be protected, and domestic violence and domestic abuse is one source of vulnerability. I don’t know if it is a question of sufficient resources but we are seeing—and I repeat what I said earlier—that when we refer women and children to the local authority children’s services in our area we are having to battle on a daily basis for risk assessments and needs assessment to be made. Often the quality of assessments is poor or they are not done at all, even though there is a statutory obligation to do so. This is where children are involved. What we are finding is that we then have a situation where throughout the day you are going backwards and forwards to social workers, convincing them they have a duty to do an assessment at the very least. We find in the end that we have to threaten legal action and it is when we threaten legal action or are about to begin legal action that they back down. That has become very normalised. That is one issue.
The other issue is that if they are migrant women and children and they approach social services, social services are likely to tell them to go and claim asylum whether or not they should claim asylum. They are not in any way qualified to give immigration advice but we find that they send them to Croydon or wherever to claim asylum. Why? Because then they can access NASS support. That is a way of avoiding responsibility.
The other thing and the worst part of it is that there is a very punitive response from social services to the extent that women are told that they will accommodate the children but not them, therefore breaching their human rights, or that they will pay for their tickets to back home, wherever that is, without any regard to whether there are risks involved, or that they should mediate with the perpetrators of abuse and return the children or get the children to live with the abuser. These are daily occurrences.
Q46 Tim Loughton: Finally, changes in the law, Ms Hawkins?
Siân Hawkins: I know we have other experts on children later, but just to quickly bring it back to the family courts, the cross-examination legislation that we were promised at the beginning of last year needs to come through.
Tim Loughton: Yes, I think we have got that.
Siân Hawkins: That allows women to effectively advocate for the safety of their children. We are also saying there needs to be a change in how contact is ordered in the family court cases. What we are saying is that there should be no automatic assumption that there will be unsupervised contact with a known perpetrator of domestic abuse where there are bail proceedings or court proceedings still ongoing for domestic abuse-related offences because we do not think that that is safe. Absolutely, risk assessments need to be in place.
Also, what we need to look at is the welfare system, which is there to protect families and to protect children as well. There is a whole range of welfare reform changes that have gone through recently, which are having huge unintended consequences on families and children where there is domestic abuse. We are worried about a range of different issues. Universal Credit is one single payment to a household: what happens when there is domestic abuse? There is the benefit cap and the two-child tax credit limit, and the so-called rape clause exemption and what they mean for pushing families and children further into poverty. There are huge issues with that that need to be looked at. That is not specifically in this Bill, in this legislation that we are expecting, but there are huge knock-on impacts that women are experiencing. We need to look across all of those different issues if we are going to get this right.
Q47 Stephen Doughty: I am conscious that we are running massively over time so I am going to be fairly brief. I recognise all of what you have been saying, and I have to say that in my own experience over the last six years as an MP, I have been shocked by the number of cases I have come across. They reflect all of the different issues that you have been speaking about today. I have a very positive relationship with South Wales Police. I have a police commissioner who takes these issues very seriously, but there are still many things we need to address.
Where do you think things are with multiagency working and multiagency responses? I have looked at some of the stuff that Siân and Pragna have said on this, your organisations and others. There were something like 83,000 high-risk domestic abuse cases discussed at MARACs—multiagency risk assessment conferences, for those watching—in the year ending March 2017. That is 36 per 10,000 adult females. I am certainly aware of situations where multiagency working is not happening. I had a case just recently with a failure of communication with the Probation Service that led to an individual being put seriously at risk and a convicted offender being released into the community. Is the MARAC approach working? Does it need to be put on a legal footing? Where do you think it sits, for example, around the protection of children?
Pragna Patel: It is a vast area. To try to be brief, I think MARAC is very important as a space to discuss the high-risk cases. That is the first problem. It only discusses high-risk cases. What I have found in my experience in the local areas is, for example, the string of domestic homicides involved women and children who would never have gone to MARAC in the first place. They would have been classified as no-risk or low-risk. There is an issue there about MARAC only dealing with high-risk cases.
The good thing, the positive aspect of MARAC working, is that it does bring agencies together. That is very useful in holding agencies to account because you can then and there ask agencies what actions they have taken, what follow-up actions are going to be required, and whether those have been taken when you have subsequent MARAC meetings. That is very useful.
When information and communication work, they work well. The problem we have—and again it comes back to the issue of resources and the sheer impact of austerity and so on—is that not all agencies come to MARAC. Our local MARAC at any one time looks at, for example recently, 27 cases and increasing in one day. If all agencies are required to be there, that takes the whole day. Our staff member who attends usually attends from 8.00 or 9.00 in the morning to 7.00 in the evening. A lot of agencies cannot afford to release staff for the whole day in that way.
Often what happens is that agencies only come to deal with their aspect, to only deal with cases that they are dealing with. You lose the collective learning that takes place because agencies come, they are there for their cases and then they go. Yet the other cases carry on and you lose the expertise and the input that should go into the collective decision-making. We very rarely see probation services and mental health services in MARAC meetings. They just cannot afford the time and resources to be there. There are major loopholes in relation to the way in which numbers of agencies are not coming together.
Q48 Stephen Doughty: Siân, do you have the same view about MARAC?
Siân Hawkins: Yes. I would echo Pragna’s comments. It is important to have that space and important to have an area where different agencies can come together, but the focus on high risk is obviously there because of the volume of cases that we are talking about. Like Pragna was saying, in domestic homicide reviews, so many women are categorised as having standard, medium risk and would never get to that process. There are some gaps in terms of how those are working.
It is really patchy across the country in how different MARACs are operating, who attends and what the outcomes are. MARACs are not an end to themselves. They can be an effective part of a process, but it cannot be seen as, “Oh, we will go to MARAC and that situation is sorted out”. Lots of women, the survivors, do not really understand what it is and how it is happening. They do not attend and they often do not know about the decisions that are being made on their behalf. It can be a useful framework but it certainly is not perfect in how it is working at the moment, and there are issues around it that need to be sorted out. We would not be advocating at this point for them to be put on a statutory footing.
Q49 Stephen Doughty: Would you be arguing that there needs to be more resource available, particularly for some agencies? You mentioned the Probation Service. Is there a particular problem there in the release of people who have been convicted of offences then returning to victims?
Pragna Patel: Exactly, because they are not being monitored. The question of what risks that presents for the women and how we minimise those risks never gets discussed because you do not have that communication at the end about what happens post release of perpetrators, whether bail conditions can be attached, whether we need to return to court and get protection orders and so on.
Stephen Doughty: Whether those are even monitored.
Pragna Patel: Whether those are monitored.
The other thing I would say is that often what happens is agencies treat MARAC as a dumping grounds. Although a case might be high risk and immediate steps need to be taken, it is postponed to when the MARAC hearing takes place, by which time the risk has changed. It could have become even more escalated and so on. There are serious problems with MARAC, and I agree that there are variations across the country.
MARAC is great, if it works well, for high-risk cases. We also need to see a range of other services for women who go, who may not be high-risk but whose risk can be monitored.
Stephen Doughty: That is very clear.
Chair: Thank you very much. Councillor Blackburn, I am conscious you raised something at the very beginning about prevention and exposure to hard-core pornography. We do not have time to pursue that right now, but if you have any further written evidence that you might be able to send us on your concerns about the scale of the problem and the impact that it is having, but also any measures that you think it would be helpful for the Government to take to start to address that, that would be immensely helpful as well.
Can I thank our first panel—we are very grateful for your time this morning—and ask our second panel to join us?
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Jane Callaghan, Jane Gordon and Deputy Chief Constable Louisa Rolfe.
Chair: Welcome, our second panel before us. Thank you very much for joining us, and thank you for your patience.
Q50 Alex Norris: DCC Rolfe, we heard in the last panel about pressures on policing. We talked about increased reporting. How are things going for the police? How are they managing current demand?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: It is fair to say that we are dealing with a stretch on the police service at the moment. The recent inspections and the consistent annual inspections by HMICFRS have shown an increasing priority in terms of our response to domestic abuse and some substantial improvements, but, as identified by the previous panel, we have much more work to do. It is something we are committed to doing. Every police force has committed increased resources to their public protection teams, which tend to deliver the specialist response to domestic abuse.
With an increase in reporting of 88% since 2010, at a time when police resources are facing greater stretch because of the increase in reporting of child abuse, child sexual exploitation, honour-based abuse and modern day slavery, a lot of these things are adding increased recognition and understanding but also a significant increase in expectation of the response from the police service and the response from other agencies. If you were to ask me what is my priority, it would be that there is a consistent, comprehensive, intelligent response from all statutory agencies that is underpinned and supported by a sustainable support sector in domestic abuse. Our response is hugely dependent on the response of others, whether that is other statutory agencies but also the support sector, from IDVAs to the agencies that provide refuge services and specific support to victims from minority communities.
Q51 Alex Norris: Having looked at what the Government are currently talking about around what might be in the Bill, do you have any concerns about your abilities as a police force to meet any extra demand in that?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: Yes, I do. While we welcome things like a breach of domestic violence protection orders as something that we can deal with with more teeth and the measures that will enable us to ensure that the family court is more cognisant of criminal proceedings, we are really conscious that we would want to deliver a continued improvement in service to victims. I am worried that some of the measures include things like increased protection orders, and there needs to be some really detailed understanding of the requirements on the police service and how we might facilitate that at a time when we have fewer resources to deal with the increased volume of demand.
Q52 Alex Norris: In the previous panel we heard—certainly I was surprised to hear—that perhaps social workers do not have very extensive training on domestic violence. If I were a new West Midlands Police constable-to-be, how much training would I get about domestic violence?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: You would find in your initial police training there would be the theme of public protection and vulnerability in every aspect of that training. Working with the College of Policing nationally, we have ensured that whatever you are dealing with in police training now, there are elements of vulnerability. Also, as an officer in West Midlands Police, you could expect to have, if you were working in our first response teams or our contact centres, at least one day’s training a year that would focus on particular aspects of vulnerability and domestic abuse. I know that a number of forces have spent much more time.
Since 2014, when HMIC first developed its report on everyone’s business, every force has invested in more training for domestic abuse. We have worked with the College of Policing to understand what good looks like, and particularly working with the charitable sector, ensuring that it is involved and survivors and victims are involved in delivery of training, and that the training includes a challenge of maybe embedded cultural perceptions of domestic abuse in the service. Those have been more and more effective. At the moment I am working with forces to ensure that we continue to improve training and deliver more and more training.
Q53 Alex Norris: Thank you. Jane Gordon, one of the flagship elements of what the Government have trialled so far has been around a domestic abuse commissioner. In the Sisters for Change submission to us, you said that you are concerned about the level of resourcing for that commissioner. Could you expand on that for us?
Jane Gordon: There are two concerns and one is around the financial resourcing of £1 million for 15 people. It goes to the prioritisation of the role. It goes to the scope of the role. Will it be a domestic violence commissioner? Will it be something broader, looking at violence against women as well as domestic violence? We have heard some soundings around that. It is also about what powers and functions the commissioner is going to have. We are particularly concerned that it does not seem that there is an intention to give the commissioner a really strong role in accountability, be it of local authorities or where there are real concerns about systemic failures. We are concerned about the resourcing, because I do not think that will be sufficient, but also about the particular powers the commissioner will have.
Also, joining up Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England, we had a large roundtable. We brought people from all over the devolved Administrations, and you will understand from my accent why I think that might be important. What was striking was that in Wales we have some advisers. In Scotland we have a new criminal offence of domestic abuse. In Northern Ireland we have nothing because the Assembly is not functioning. There is a real need, if we are going to take this seriously and if the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy across the UK is to be consistent, for making sure that the commissioner can operate across all of those or at least can bring people together so that there is some way of looking at that properly.
Q54 Alex Norris: Looking more broadly at resources, how well do you think the system is meeting the needs of BAME women and new and emerging communities as well?
Jane Gordon: Sisters for Change did a large piece of work over 18 to 24 months, which we published at the end of last year, looking at commissioning of BAME specialist services and looking at police and public authority responses to violence against BAME women and girls.
The commissioning landscape is not a particularly positive one. I think Pragna put forward some of the real concerns there are. The move to generic services with the great focus on value for money, which I understand in times of austerity, has changed that landscape considerably. As Councillor Blackburn said, austerity and localism hit at the same time, which means that we have such a plethora of different ways of dealing with domestic violence services across local authorities.
We looked at six local authority areas and we tried to map it. We tried to map it with the violence against women commissioners in local authorities, with the police and crime commissioners and with others working in statutory and non-statutory services. Nobody could paint a full picture. We made one diagram of one area in Northumbria where we came closest, but it was impossible to do that. That says to me that localism is a problem if we are having that inconsistent approach to funding services and also to responses.
Put in the mix the issues around specialist services as well as the move to gender neutrality, the statistics are absolutely clear that the BAME specialist services have been decimated by something like 45% in the last five years. When they are the critical access point for many women, particularly those who have language barriers or other freedom of movement restrictions, if we start closing those specialist services, we are losing one of the most critical access points for BAME victims of violence.
Q55 Rehman Chishti: A question to Professor Callaghan. First, in relation to resources—so that I am fair, having raised the question earlier with the previous panel in relation to resources—of course there are questions on resources. At the same time, one has to look at the resources that have been allocated and the strategy that has been put in place to see how effective it is and ask the question: what more can be done to help address it?
We saw the 2016 to 2020 strategy from the Home Office. From your experience, looking at that strategy and the point raised earlier that there needs to be a wider cross-departmental strategy across Government, is it the right strategy?
Secondly, in relation to resources, we have seen questions raised about resources before, but £80 million was dedicated to that strategy and £20 million was given in 2017. The budget is about £100 million. Would you say that has made a single bit of difference or not? There are some questions by the previous panel that it has made no difference. From your experience, being as fair as one can be, has it made some difference?
Professor Callaghan: Do you want me to address that specifically in relation to children or more broadly?
Rehman Chishti: Just broadly.
Professor Callaghan: I think there has been an impact. There has been evidence of greater integration of service response or at least a gesture in the direction of that. There has been evidence of better policing and, particularly in my area of specialism, a slightly better police response to children and young people, although I think there is a lot of work to be done in that area. Unfortunately, at the same time, demand is increasing and complexifying because of some of the issues that Pragna and Jane have raised. That places a particular kind of strain on services.
Yes, I think there has been a change and I think the strategy in some senses is appropriate, but there are clear gaps and there is also a much stronger need for joined-up working and also a need for recognition that austerity has produced constriction. In particular, in relation to children and young people, the impact of austerity measures on the domestic abuse services has tended to mean a constriction of service for children and young people specifically. In terms of our attempts to do early intervention and prevention work with vulnerable groups of children who might be at greater risk of becoming involved in later abusive relationships, that is an area that needs considerable focus.
Q56 Rehman Chishti: Can I just clarify? In relation to resources, we have also seen the £200 million Children’s Social Care Innovation Programme, which I have been told has a number of projects that focus on prevention of harm and improved outcomes for children and families experiencing domestic abuse. Put aside the £100 million; the £200 million here focused on children. Has that made a difference?
Professor Callaghan: I do not think it is filtering through necessarily to the places where it needs to go. I think sometimes it is getting stuck in social care and not moving out into specialist services.
I think also one of the areas that we do not sufficiently address is what health needs to be doing to address the needs of particularly children and young people. CAMHS funding and the increase in funding into CAMHS has largely focused on either very early intervention and prevention—things like the PWP role in children and young people’s services—or it has gone into a focus on diagnosis-led treatments. Of course, children who experience domestic abuse often do not attract a diagnosis, but they often have very high levels of mental health need. We have a misdirection of some of the funding into not quite the right places and perhaps not enough focus on the full range of sectorial response. For instance, I think schools are under resourced to address domestic abuse in children and young people.
Q57 Rehman Chishti: No doubt Mr Loughton is an expert, and Sarah can follow this up on the children aspect, but the £200 million allocation is to be welcomed in this area?
Professor Callaghan: Yes, absolutely.
Q58 Rehman Chishti: Moving away from resources, if I may, from your perspective do you think the role of the proposed domestic abuse commissioner is the right way forward and does it have the right powers and resources, from what we have been told, to do the job properly?
Professor Callaghan: I think it is an appropriate way forward. It is promising to have somebody who has their eyes very much focused on domestic abuse, and that is necessary because it tends to take a secondary position. It is such a complicated issue to address that it often slips down priorities. It is important to have somebody whose role is to advocate and to address service needs directly.
I am not sure the role as described has sufficient teeth, so I would agree with Jane that there is a need perhaps to strengthen the powers of the commissioner and the way that the commissioner functions. I do think it is an absolutely crucial innovation and it is important to support it.
Q59 Rehman Chishti: With regards to the forced marriage legislation that came in in 2015, which saw the first prosecution in 2018, from your experience of looking at the procedures, laws and how to address some of these difficult and challenging areas, do you think it is the right way forward?
Professor Callaghan: Yes. I have very limited expertise in that area, having only supported a small number of young people through those kinds of concerns. I think it is important to recognise criminal acts as criminal, so it is important to name it and to have it visible in legislation. Obviously, as Pragna suggested, it is not sufficient in itself. There is a need for a range of other services to be available around young people who experience forced marriage, but the actual recognition itself under the law is important.
Q60 Rehman Chishti: On other organisations, looking at documents I have here, in Operation Encompass a school in Leeds has attempted to tackle forced marriage by handing out spoons to students to hide them in their underwear to trigger metal detectors in airports, so that before they go they can then be taken to one side and they can raise their concerns, the information they may have, to the relevant authorities. These are small things, but these are measures that are moving in the right direction, are they not?
Professor Callaghan: Yes. It sounds silly but that kind of intervention absolutely is helpful. In my role as a university academic, I have supported young women who are at risk of forced marriage. I have also found the support of the specialist Home Office unit incredibly useful in giving those kinds of suggestions of things that you can do if you feel that you are at risk. Those risk management things are important, but of course they are very focused on the potential victim. What the criminal legislation does is train our eyes back on the perpetrator, which is important to do. We need to hold both spaces.
Q61 Stephen Doughty: I am going to ask you a similar question to what I asked the previous panel about multiagency working, in particular MARACs, and also the relationship particularly with the Probation Service and the ability to resource those types of cross-working. Is the system working? Does it need to be put on a statutory footing? Is it just a question of there not being enough resources for people to be involved in it? How do we deal with the lower-level, less extreme cases that have been missed by those processes?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: Where MARAC works, it can work really well. It is very noticeable in the police service that we do not want to limit the cases that go to MARAC, and I do not think other agencies do either, but there is a reality in the volume of cases that are dealt with there. The police service has a good record, and research has shown that the police service tends to refer more cases into MARAC than any other agency involved.
Sometimes we experience frustrations because the multiagency commitment is not universal. There is a noticeable stretch on services, and sometimes the cases at MARAC are very difficult to deal with because we are seeing an increasing number of victims and perpetrators with complex needs of drug and alcohol abuse and mental health needs. Often the response is entirely dependent on resources to support those individuals and address those very complex needs. We have seen a significant retraction in the availability of those services. Often MARAC can feel futile if there is nowhere to go other than some way of multiagency forum managing the risks. We would like to address the issues, rather than just be aware of and manage the risks.
Jane Gordon: Sisters for Change has made a recommendation on that. We think multiagency arrangements for domestic abuse should be put on statutory footing. That is not to say we think that MARAC is a perfect model. At the moment everybody recognises it is close to breaking point. The numbers are just ridiculous. Trying to deal with 20 to 30 cases in an afternoon does mean that there is a huge risk to those who are not going to be dealt with properly.
The reason why we suggested some kind of legal footing is twofold. First, at the moment, no public authority can hold each other accountable for acting and implementing recommendations. There are agreements made around a safety plan. The police cannot hold the health authority to account if it does not do a mental health assessment. Likewise, the health authority cannot hold the police to account if they have not done what they said they would do in part of that safety plan. That is a complete failure of accountability. That is one point.
The other is the comparison for other safeguarding and public protection arrangements. We have in our paper referred to the MAPPA public protection arrangements and also the multiagency child safeguarding arrangements. It is very striking that both of those have been put on to a statutory footing. It is very particularly striking around the multiagency child safeguarding arrangements when there was a review conducted that found that the current arrangements were inadequate and a new model was required to ensure collective responsibility. I could have read it like for like with the current arrangements for high-risk victims of domestic abuse. To me, this goes to not only accountability but also prioritisation. If we say we are trying to transform our response to domestic abuse, if we do not actually impose obligations on public authorities to make sure that they respond properly, we are saying once again that the level of this type of violence is acceptable and we are condoning it by not recognising it, in just the same way as we do other public protection arrangements.
Q62 Stephen Doughty: That is really helpful. On the wider question of partnership working, which is clearly needed, I am glad you mentioned devolution. We piloted various different things in Wales. We had the Act in 2015. Certainly in South Wales Police, it has been a priority of the commissioner and the chief constable after some quite serious failings that were previously exposed and some horrific cases. I know how seriously they take that partnership working, supporting frontline organisations but also ensuring people come together. Where do you think the best examples of wider partnership working are across the whole of the UK at the moment? Where should we be learning from?
Jane Gordon: I think everybody recognises the need for multiagency working. What we have is a real problem about who is fronting up and taking the burden. To be fair, often in MARACs the co-ordination role is left to the police and it is not a good balance, hence why we have suggested it should be a balance between local authorities, who have a lot of the cash around this, and the police but also health services. We know the NHS is in crisis, but it is very interesting that in July, when this Bill was first announced last year, it was absolutely placed on the fact that Education and Health and all of the different Departments would be involved. It seems that it has been much more driven by the Home Office and in fact frustration from officials that they have not been able to get as much departmental buy-in from other Departments.
I am not sure I can say that there is a best or worst. Everybody recognises there has to be this multiagency approach, and it is about how we embed that properly and effectively.
Stephen Doughty: That is very helpful.
Q63 Tim Loughton: Can I come back to the policing element, perhaps with you, DCC Rolfe? Then I want to go on to children. We spoke about the strategic pressures on the police at the moment. What does good policing of a domestic violence case look like?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: Good policing starts with that initial response. However, a victim contacts the police, whether that is through social media websites, a 101 call, coming into a station office, or through third party reporting, we need people who are receiving that call to understand, to assess the risk and ensure the right response. The majority of cases are called in to the police service through 909 or 101, and then for officers who respond to those cases to have a good level of understanding of domestic abuse.
One of our challenges has been that perennially, with domestic abuse, we talk about the solution being training. It is training, but it is also the right tools, the right leadership and the right prioritisation. What HMIC has recognised is that forces generally and responding officers have a good level of understanding of domestic abuse. We could do more to increase understanding of coercion and control, but we have got better at responding. We have got better at arresting and taking positive action to deal with perpetrators and to ensure that victims are safe. In terms of our response, we have a core responsibility to protect victims, to prosecute offenders, but also to take action to prevent offending. A good response should address all of those elements. Our guidance addresses those elements and the training we deliver addresses those elements.
We are currently working to trial a new, improved risk assessment tool that shows some good evaluation with academics and is shown to increase officers’ recognition of coercive and controlling behaviour, which we know tends to lead to the highest-risk cases and is a consistent feature in domestic homicide reviews.
From that initial response, if officers take the right action and arrest and deal with perpetrators and ensure the victim is safe, there is the right specialist follow-up: continue to assess and manage the risk, have a good safety plan, but also prosecute offenders, but do it in partnership with CPS, with the right support to victims. This is not about us taking a heavy-handed approach. In ensuring that we work with victims, we understand why they might feel reluctant or fearful about pursuing a prosecution. We need to ensure that we have the right support for them.
What we have found when we work with really good IDVA service providers is that many victims’ fear of a prosecution is driven by concerns about housing or financial security, concerns for children, concerns for welfare support, and probably less to do with traditional fear of going through the justice process. If we can address all of those issues with the right support services, we can secure the right outcomes for victims.
Q64 Tim Loughton: That is all very encouraging, and certainly the later stages in terms of dealing with other agencies and the support to the victim, not just the way you handle the perpetrator. How has it changed in terms of that initial callout? Now you have officers going to a DV suspected case. Will any officer go? What about a single-crewed officer going, for example? Have you made changes to how that initial interface is? I ask this because I went out with some of my local officers recently, as I do regularly, and there was an issue around double-crewing and single-crewing. There was a lot of single-crewing happening. If you have a heated domestic violence case, it is going to be much more challenging if you have a single-crew person trying to keep two parties apart and trying to deal with the victim and be supportive and get the perpetrator out of that heated scenario. It would come in as one call, I presume, if it is a DV case ongoing. Would you deal with it differently?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: When cases come in, the majority of police forces—I am pretty sure all police forces—will carry out a risk assessment on the telephone that they carry out with any call that comes in through 101 or 909. If it is something that is happening, if there is a threat to individuals, a threat of violence or the incident is happening right now, officers may be dispatched as a priority call to attend as soon as possible. That would generally be a double-crewed unit attending those calls.
There will be some cases that might come in that talk about a less proximate threat, something that might be a text message from an ex-partner that has caused concern, where the victim is asking that it is dealt with in a different way. We provide a lot of training to call handlers to differentiate between the priority of the call and the response and resource that is required to attend. A lot of double-crewing and single-crewing will be a matter for local police forces, but the majority would send, if it is an emergency call with something happening right now, a double-crewed unit to attend that incident.
In some forces they are trying innovative practice like an IDVA working alongside a police officer to attend incidents, and that has had some really promising outcomes.
Q65 Tim Loughton: Can I go back to children’s rights and the vulnerability of children in DV cases? Professor, do you think there are changes needed in the law—the Children Act or subsequent Acts—to make sure those children are properly supported?
Also, what has not been raised in these sessions is the intergenerational nature of this, the fact that if you have been a child in a domestic violence-blighted household, you are three times more likely than average to be the victim of domestic violence as an adult. What preventative stuff early on can we be doing, and does it need the change in legislation or is it practice, resources and training?
Professor Callaghan: I think it is both. If you do not mind, I will pick up on the example of policing to illustrate why I feel a legislation change is necessary.
In that very useful account of responding to domestic abuse, repeated mention was made of “the victim” and not multiple victims who might be present in the household. We know that there are two current doctoral studies that I am aware of—and I am sure there are more—where it has been shown quite clearly that police are not actually speaking to child victims when they are responding to domestic abuse cases. Partly it is down to resources, the dual-crew issue being a key element of that. It is also down to police training, that police are often anxious about how to deal with a child in that kind of situation. Although they have had extensive training in responding to domestic abuse, they have had less focused training in responding to children in situations of domestic abuse.
Certainly, anecdotally, the children that I speak to routinely as part of my work tell me that they want to be spoken to. Often children who themselves have called the police are not being spoken to when police are responding to them. Recognising that there is not just one victim is quite an important step in making sure that children’s voices are better heard.
Generally, the domestic abuse legislation as it stands and the proposed amendments do not take adequate account of children’s direct experiences of victimisation when domestic abuse occurs. Children experience direct harm as a consequence of exposure to domestic abuse. You have alluded to one element of that, which is their risk of becoming involved in domestic abuse as adults themselves. They are also at greater risk of a broad range of other harms, including mental health difficulties, educational difficulties, socioeconomic problems as a consequence of educational dropout, as well as things like exposure to a higher risk of CSE. A study that a colleague in the north of Ireland is working on at the moment is suggesting that children who experience domestic abuse are also more at risk of what she is describing as “grooming behaviours” that might expose them to involvement in criminal gangs as well. We have quite a high range of vulnerabilities that children experience as a direct consequence of their experience of domestic abuse.
Given that evidence of extensive harm, it surprises me greatly that we are still seeing legislation that does not want to recognise that very specific problem for children and young people. I do not feel it is adequately taken care of under the Children Act. I do not believe it is sufficiently named. One of the key issues that children or anybody recovering from trauma need to have is the ability to name the experience that has occurred to them. Family secrets and a sense that “bad things happen in my family” or “there are arguments in my family” are not sufficient to recognise the harm that children experience when domestic abuse occurs.
Also, there is a risk of unintended consequence when we play this under the Children Act, which is that often children who experience domestic abuse come to be seen in social services under the Children Act as being children at risk. In those cases, it is often framed as a failure to protect. The failure to protect almost always falls on to the mother, so we actually have a victim-blaming risk in play as a consequence of it. It is a very different and distinct form of family violence that is different from the other kinds of risks that children experience.
Q66 Tim Loughton: What would you change, legislation-wise?
Professor Callaghan: My strong preference would be that it was recognised in the Domestic Abuse Bill that there is not just an adult victim, but that where other members of the family are present, they are also considered as direct victims of abuse. At the moment, children are treated as collateral damage in domestic violence, and it is not good enough. Particularly, as we are recognising coercive control, I would challenge you to have a child in front of you who has experienced domestic abuse in the family who looks anything other than a victim of coercive control to you, because they do.
Q67 Tim Loughton: I completely agree with all of that, added to which is the fact that something like a third of domestic violence starts during pregnancy. You have the whole attachment issue of the prenatal mental illness that may bring on and affect the child who is still to be born. What in law do you change? You can change a definition—there needs to be “with regard to”—but that in itself is not going to change the approach to this. Does there not need to be more detail if it is a legislative matter? I am slightly reluctant because I know, having been a veteran of all the Children Acts over the last 15-plus years, the problem was too much legislation and too much regulation. That is why I am not convinced that the change in legislation is the way to achieve this, although we do need to change something to achieve this.
Professor Callaghan: For children who experience domestic abuse, the problem is too little legislation and too little direct recognition of their status as victims. There is a need for broader guidance around the way that children are responded to, and that has to be cross-cutting across all sectors. We need trauma-informed practice in schools. We need police officers who are trained to respond to children and young people effectively and appropriately. We need a recognition in mental health services that diagnosis is not the only way that children should be coming into services, and that trauma-informed services are absolutely crucial there.
In social care, some mention has been made already of the really inadequate training that social services receive for domestic abuse work. Given the huge proportion of their caseload, particularly for child-focused social workers, it is incomprehensible to me why we do not prepare our social workers better.
You were asking for some instances of good practice in social care, and, in general, in terms of integrated working, there is a fairly good model in various local authorities in Scotland, particularly taken forward by Anna Mitchell at Edinburgh Council. They have been doing some work using an American model called Safe and Together. I am not going to suggest it is a perfect model, but what it does do is try to draw together a multiagency and collaborative response to children. It is focused on keeping children with their caregivers and also on making sure that the perpetrator is visible in the system, which is another problem that happens quite frequently. It is good social work practice, fundamentally, but some of that integrated working that we have been talking about does enable a better focus on children’s safety.
Q68 Tim Loughton: Perhaps we could see that study.
Chair: That would be really helpful.
Professor Callaghan: I do not think it has been published but I can get a copy of the report.
Chair: Or a version of it. If someone were able to write us a note on it that we would be able to take into account, that would be immensely helpful.
Q69 Naz Shah: DCC Rolfe, we were talking earlier about text messages and the use of social media. I have come across a case where somebody has gone for a non-molestation order, where it has impacted on their mental health, where it has driven somebody to feel suicidal because their ex has just texted them but they need that number or whatever it is. Yet that does not impact on the ability to achieve a non-molestation order in some instances. Do you think this Bill goes far enough, or does it lack anything, or does it need strengthening for all intents and purposes to extend that legislation?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: In abuse via social media or any kind of means, we have noticed, certainly in policing, that many perpetrators of domestic abuse will exploit any means to control victims. Social media offers them great opportunities to do that: to manipulate, to isolate individuals, to convince them that they are worthless, to attack their esteem to the point that they do have suicidal thoughts and require support and care. I have worked with others to tackle the larger providers of social media to say, “There is more we think you can do”, because in policing sometimes it can be incredibly frustrating when we identify a victim and we would like an organisation to take action to remove damaging posts on social media to support that victim effectively. That can be incredibly frustrating.
I am not sure there is a greater requirement in legislation. I certainly have not thought that through, and I could take that away and look at it. There is some great work going on with a number of charities in the Tech For Good space.
One thing I would like to do is ensure that every police officer supporting a victim of domestic abuse or a survivor of abuse and children as well affected by that can give them good advice as to how to protect themselves and what they can do. I am not suggesting it is the responsibility of the victim at all, but I do think there is more we can do to offer people support with basic tools as to how to set privacy settings, what they can do and how they can address damaging things on social media. This is not just a problem of domestic abuse. It is something that we are seeing across society that is affecting young people in particular.
What concerns me is that if you look at the increase in victims of domestic abuse, we are finding there are more older people coming forward. I think that is because of the work we are doing to increase awareness and convince victims that this is not something they should tolerate. They can have confidence in coming forward and telling the police and support agencies about abuse. We are definitely seeing an increase in reporting in the 16-to-24 age group and, within that, greater use of social media to perpetrate offences of abuse.
Q70 Naz Shah: The Committee in the past has taken lots of evidence from Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube, and we have not been satisfied with the progress that they have made. I am very clear that it is not the victim’s responsibility to be doing that, but should there be some actual legislation, like we have orders of non-molestation, to extend to domestic abuse? Would you agree with me that we need some legislative change so that we can prosecute people who are hounding their exs or domestic violence or hounding children or using social media to have that conversation, whereas before they might not have because they are away from them, they might be in a refuge somewhere far away with the family, but through social media you can now—you might not know where they are—contact them from Snapchat, from all of these things, specifically for children? Would you agree with me that we need some legislation or to at least be looking at it?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: I would welcome looking at it. I would need to think in more depth about what exactly would be required, but certainly greater ability and a greater responsiveness from those large organisations to issues when they are flagged by statutory agencies. I think sometimes the frustration in policing is that the legislation is there but we do not necessarily get the urgency of the response that we require to these issues.
Q71 Naz Shah: This week marks the International Day of Remembrance for Victims of Honour Abuse, and on Friday it marks the second anniversary of Samia Shahid, who was also my constituent. Given that we are talking about extraterritorial powers in this Bill as well, potentially, do you think it goes far enough to address the issues of young people, or do you think it is culturally competent or reflective of the needs of communities that we do not necessarily have? I appreciate Pragna is sat behind and it is something that is her expertise, and we have worked together for more than 20 years, but I would really value particularly, Professor, what you think about how it impacts on communities and children.
Professor Callaghan: No, I do not feel that there is sufficient cultural competence in the domestic abuse proposals that we have seen so far. There is some nod in the direction of cultural specificity of particular kinds of violence and abuse, but I do not think it is sufficient as it currently stands. In particular, the recognition of the difficulties of reporting and managing abuse in quite extended family systems and in quite close-knit communities is very poorly integrated into the proposals as they stand. That leaves young people at risk of dating violence or of forced marriages quite exposed.
Q72 Naz Shah: Thank you. My final question is to all of you. Apart from more resources, which we all would really like, if you had a wish-list of legislative change or any changes—Jane, you have suggested Sisters for Change want the statutory footing for abuse, basically to improve public authority response to high-risk victims—or if you had three top priorities, what would they be? What would you like to see happen?
Jane Gordon: It is not surprising that, as a lawyer, I do believe that placing public authorities under obligations is a positive way of making sure that action actually happens. I would say, going slightly broader than that, the Human Rights Act imposes duties to protect and positive obligations on public authorities. I do not think those are well understood by many.
Q73 Naz Shah: Jane, you are saying about the Human Rights Act. Do you have any fears post Brexit of us losing any of this? We have not talked about that.
Jane Gordon: The current Government have said that they want to reform the Human Rights Act. They have particular problems with it in its current form and they would like to introduce a different bill of rights. At the moment, that has been pushed back, given there are so many others pieces of legislation to worry about. The conversation will no doubt come back and that will be a problem, but I think it is not going to happen for a while.
Professor Callaghan: In relation to children’s rights, England is already probably behind some of the other devolved Governments on that issue. With Brexit, I am concerned that the recognition of children’s rights that is advanced by organisations like the ROC within the Commission will be lost, and I have real concerns about that.
For me, a wish-list would be that children and young people get better recognition in legislation. Action for Children has recently brought forward a motion requesting that statutory obligations be placed on local authorities in relation to the protection of children experiencing domestic abuse, and that these be given a stronger representation across different local authority units. I strongly support that as well. Better legislation, better guidance and stronger obligations for the protection of children and young people.
Q74 Naz Shah: I attended a domestic violence incident with police officers while I was doing a shift, and there was a child there and it was very distressful. Would you want it to be a statutory obligation for all police officers to be trained? It could be that any officer who attends any domestic violence incident be trained in dealing with children.
Professor Callaghan: There should be an obligation that all professionals who are frontline workers, who have contact with children, be domestic abuse-aware, that they have a good understanding of domestic abuse. For frontline officers, it is really important that they know how to respond sensitively and how to deal with their own anxieties around the vulnerability of children. Children often want to speak, and the reason that children are not speaking about domestic abuse is because adults do not want to hear; it is too anxiety-provoking for adults. Helping professionals to work through some of that and to be able to provide skilful responses to children and young people is very important.
Jane Gordon: Could I jump in on that about the work we have done on callouts to BAME victims of violence? There are increasing numbers of cases coming to our attention where children are being asked to act as interpreters for their mothers who are reporting violence. That is a massive issue of trauma and retrauma, but also in not following proper process in making sure there is a proper interpreter there who can represent the mother properly. That is a really big issue that we have to also add in for specific protections for particular communities.
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: I absolutely agree on that particular point. The earlier panel talked about a sense of a lack of accountability for policing. I disagree with that a little bit, because there has been an annual inspection that goes in depth. It looks at not just the system and process of policing but actually reality checks by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services. That has been going on every year since 2014. Every police force surveys victims of domestic abuse, and those survey responses feed into the annual data return. There are the ONS national statistics of police response to domestic abuse and the domestic homicide reviews. Fewer recommendations for policing come out of those reviews than for any other agency, yet policing feels that it is held more to account in terms of its response to those recommendations.
While I would not sit here and suggest that policing does not have a lot more to do on the response to domestic abuse, that scrutiny could be shared across more agencies. On the response of other agencies, whether that is teachers, GPs, midwives or social workers, to recommendations or response to incidents of domestic abuse, I think it would certainly with delivery if we could be more confident of a consistent response to survivors, victims and families.
Q75 Naz Shah: Some forces have piloted that when children witness domestic violence, the next day their schools are informed that that child has witnessed DV and that they should be putting in provision to support that young person or child. Has that been rolled out across the country yet?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: Every force is keen to do it. There were 33 forces at the last count when HMICFRS carried out its last inspection. In reality, I know that forces will sometimes find that there is quite a complex landscape of education service provision. Often you can work with a number of schools in your local authority area, but not every school will sign up. Some areas will insist that it goes through almost a gatekeeping response of education authorities before schools are informed, which frankly misses the point of what it is about. That is something we are certainly working with and supporting forces where they are having challenges of implementing this. The fact that it is 33 forces so far for me does not indicate a reluctance from the police service to do it.
Q76 Naz Shah: Could you let us know the names of those 10 that have not yet, please?
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: I can bring those to you, but I certainly would not say—
Naz Shah: If you could just let the Committee know.
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: From my experience, it does not reflect a reluctance from the forces to implement this. It is more of a multiagency context.
Q77 Chair: Some final quick questions from me. The areas I have had greatest concerns for have been cases that have ended up in the family courts but have been ongoing cases where there might have been concerns raised about ongoing abuse or coercive control or threats to the children from the absent parent, and where it has been hard to get the statutory agencies, including both the police and social services, to engage. They say, “It is being dealt with by the family courts, it is being dealt with by Cafcass”, whereas the court process can be very slow. Do you think that is a fair assessment of a problem and, if so, how would you solve it?
Professor Callaghan: I think it is a fair assessment. It is something that is also very well documented across the country. Part of the difficulty is the risk-led focus of provision. When a family is no longer seen to be at risk because they are being dealt with through the child court system, there will not be a response from organisations that are risk-led. That fundamentally is one of the issues, and it has knock-on effects for other service provision as well, that we are so risk-focused. Probably thinking about the balance of risk and care, risk and support, and making sure that both things are right at the heart of particularly the social care response is important.
Jane Gordon: There is a really big issue, and there is a danger of stereotyping around custody and visitation rights. That has leaned in favour of perpetrators, most often male perpetrators, having access to children without there being proper assessment of that. Also, to make that even worse, there is the vilification of the mother in the whole failure to protect. I think there is a siloed approach where we have become so aware of child safeguarding duties, because they are statutory, and much less aware of adult safeguarding and recognising the trauma that the mother has experienced and punishing her and, therefore, taking children away. That feeds in.
There have been multiple occasions, which have now been challenged, around Cafcass and doing assessments and believing a very well turned out, very well spoken gentleman. In a BAME context, victims maybe do not speak English or are being seen as chaotic rather than perhaps traumatised. Work needs to be done there.
Professor Callaghan: If I could add to that, I think the failure to listen to children and young people often in contact disputes and to listen to them in a context way—it is not a simple case of a child’s authentic voice, but being able to hear what they are saying about their families and what is good for them is important as well.
Deputy Chief Constable Rolfe: In my experience, almost the opposite is often true. Police officers investigating quite serious cases of domestic abuse will be hugely frustrated that family court proceedings seem to be taking a different approach, as described by Jane, where perpetrators that we might consider as dangerous—the family court is not necessarily recognising the danger that investigating officers are.
Chair: Yes, that might get to the heart of my problem, that the police may think somebody is dangerous but are assuming that the family courts will sort it. Thank you very much for your evidence. We appreciate your time today.