Criminal Justice System: Women

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all who will contribute today for staying until the last moment before the House rises for a well-earned Recess. There is a wealth of expertise on the list of speakers, and I greatly look forward to hearing everyone’s contribution.

Opening a debate provides the opportunity, perhaps even the responsibility, to stand back a little and set the scene. Last month the Ministry of Justice launched the final report from my review, Importance of Strengthening Female Offenders’ Family and Other Relationships to Prevent Reoffending and Reduce Intergenerational Crime—quite a mouthful. Commissioned as part of the female offender strategy, in effect I was asked to look at women in the criminal justice system through the lens of family and other relational ties.

Obviously, it is my intention that this debate should go much wider than that. However, over the course of the review, I became aware of just how fundamentally important healthy and supportive relationships are to women in the criminal justice system, and how many other problematic issues stem from a lack of these. Ministry of Justice research identifies them as women’s biggest criminogenic need. If a woman has bad relationships and lacks good relationships, she is at greater risk of reoffending.

Nearly three-quarters of all female offenders, whether in custody or serving sentences in the community, have problems with relationships that increase this likelihood. This rises to over 80% of female prisoners. Many enter custody from chaotic relationships from which they require protection, and domestic abuse, which frequently includes pressure from coercive partners to commit crime, lurks in the background for 57% of them. Over half experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse in their family backgrounds and almost one-third spent time in care as children. Unresolved trauma related to such adversities in childhood or later life typically drives unhealthy coping strategies such as substance misuse and self-harm. Indeed, women’s vulnerabilities, concentrated in the criminal justice system, are the distillation of the breakdown of family and other relationships so prevalent in our wider society.

My concern about this and the lack of a comprehensive and coherent government strategy to address it was a key motivator for my becoming involved in politics over 12 years ago. It is a quarter of a century since the then aspirant Labour Prime Minister talked generally about being tough on the causes of crime and particularly about the role played by family breakdown. The implication was clear then and still is now: we need to do more to prevent crime happening in the first place. Research from the Centre for Social Justice, which controlled for factors such as socioeconomic grade and ethnicity, found that those who experience family breakdown in their childhood or youth are over twice as likely to experience homelessness, be in trouble with the police or spend time in prison.

Around a quarter of families with dependent children are headed by a single parent, which has perhaps normalised relationship breakdown. An understandable zeal to avoid piling stigma on top of the very heavy load single parents already bear can hamper public discussion about the significant challenges they face. They can also be framed almost exclusively in terms of financial poverty, as lack of money is a major problem for half of single parents. The lack of a co-parenting relationship to ease the load is a less readily acknowledged challenge, which is greatly amplified when a woman becomes enmeshed in the criminal justice system. The dependent children of three-quarters of women in prison are not looked after by their fathers. One study found that adult children of imprisoned mothers are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than adult children of imprisoned fathers.

Such evidence compels me to support this and former Governments’ efforts to keep women out of prison where possible, as such punishment encroaches on family life in many troubling ways. The damage done to good relationships is one of the “referred” pains of imprisonment, the psychosocial burdens experienced by an inmate’s family members. These pains are particularly acute when it is a primary carer who is behind bars.

Professor Nicola Lacey from the LSE points out that for most of the two centuries in which imprisonment has been routinely imposed as punishment for crime, the systems of thought and governance on which it rests have focused on,

“the individual offender and his or her relationship with the state”.

She goes on:

“Penal philosophy’s strongly individualistic presuppositions about the nature of human beings and social relations are open to challenge”.


Hence my call for the importance of family and other relationships to be the golden thread running through all processes and the culture of the criminal justice system, including liaison and diversion services, sentencing, probation and prison. Ministry of Justice research found that male and female prisoners who received family visits were 39% less likely to reoffend than those who do not. Healthy and supportive relationships are undoubtedly rehabilitation assets. Enabling offenders to maintain and strengthen these relationships where appropriate must be valued as much as other rehabilitation activities such as employment and education. Indeed, this is the third leg of the stool alongside these, and can bring stability, meaning and motivation to offenders’ lives.

As I have already touched upon, female offenders are typically among the most vulnerable members of society. This word is used so frequently in relation to female offenders that we need to understand exactly what it means. From the Latin “vulnerabilis”, it means “wounding” or being susceptible to “attack”, “physical harm or damage” or,

“emotional injury, especially in being easily hurt”.

This describes very well many of the women I met in prison, or those serving community sentences. Deprivation of liberty, the purpose of detention, has to be accompanied by diligent exercise of the duty of care. This has to involve thinking ahead to when a woman leaves prison, where she will live and who will be there to meet her.

While I was deeply motivated to improve the lives of mothers in prison and their children, many women have no children and no one in their family able or willing to come and see them. About half of prisoners may have no family or other visits and some have no supportive relationships at all. Frankly, these are the women who concern me most. Without the safe haven of good relationships, it is highly unlikely that they will be able to rebuild their lives. When they leave prison, they lose all anchor points and are cast adrift, and life can be unbearably difficult. Many will return to drugs or other crime. Abuse and trauma can have profoundly affected their ability to develop and sustain healthy, trusting relationships.

Therefore, it is essential that all professionals, wherever they are in the criminal justice system, are trained in and adopt a trauma-informed approach, and know which relationships are rehabilitation assets in the life of a female offender and which are toxic. I recommended gathering information about a woman’s relationships, any children in her care and other circumstances, such as her accommodation, in a personal circumstances file which she, not the state, owns and controls. The aim is that, with her permission, this information is used to help her sustain or resume supportive, meaningful relationships with people with whom she might otherwise lose touch. For the more than half of women in custody who have dependent children, we need to know who and where those children are.

A key priority of my review was enabling mothers to continue to shoulder their parental responsibilities. A governor told me women often ask her, “How can I stop being a mother now that I am in prison?” She replies, “We don’t want you to stop, we want you to continue”. These women are still assets to their family and need to know it, yet the practical and emotional difficulties that mothering from inside prison entails must not be underestimated. Several of my recommendations sought to mitigate these. For example, I proposed Skype-type visits for all women who do not breach risk boundaries.

On that subject, more broadly, I encouraged governors and the Government to think about risk-to-reward ratios. As a trader, I take risks for a living based on sound intelligence and the expectation that I will reap a reward. Research suggests that taking bold and ambitious steps to make the most of prisoners’ family and other ties could reap significant gains. Whatever is learned by rolling out Skype-type visits across the small female estate will inform deployment of this technology in the much larger male estate, where the risk-to-reward ratio might be harder to gauge without the insights garnered from a pathfinder population.

I also called for workforce changes inside female prisons, largely on the advice of prison governors on the female estate, who are incredibly alive to the essential role good relationships play in rehabilitation. One told me, “I don’t want more prison officers, I want social workers and family engagement workers”. As parenting difficulties and other family factors are not addressed in the community, she often sees the third generation of offenders come through her gate.

The family engagement worker model evaluated by Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology is highly effective in improving the quality of ties and resolving tensions between prisoners and family members. These workers can also help women reconnect, where necessary, with their families or friends. Much of their caseload involves supporting prisoners with ongoing children’s care proceedings, but they can struggle even to get hold of the community social worker who has a prisoner’s child on her caseload. They, and therefore the women they represent, are at a disadvantage because they do not have the same professional status. If every women’s prison had its own resident social worker, she or he could represent the interests of these women in professional dialogue with community-based social workers. In the sadly commonplace battles over custody of prisoners’ children, such equality of arms is incredibly important to ensure a just outcome.

Other noble Lords might describe the difficulties women face accessing housing on release—the desperate insecurity of those who have in some ways been kept safe in prison but are then turned out with nothing. Again, information captured in the personal circumstances file might enable contact to be made with someone who can provide a roof over her head until she gets back on her feet and, I hope, avoid the harrowing scenario of her ending up in a tent outside the prison perimeter.

A particularly pernicious Catch-22 is faced by women with children who cannot secure suitable accommodation until the family is living together, but whose children cannot join them until appropriate housing has been found. I recommended that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government change allocation guidance for local housing authorities to recognise the prospective housing needs of women leaving prison in a parallel way to families seeking large enough properties to house future foster and adoptive children. Every department of government, not just the Ministry of Justice, has a role to play in meeting the needs of women in the criminal justice system.

The Government’s implementation team, with whom I have already met, understand that the body of recommendations in the report is not a ceiling of good practice to aspire to, but a basic floor of provision. The goal is cultural change, in the criminal justice system and more widely in government.

I wanted to emphasise at the outset of this debate that meeting the relational needs of women in the criminal justice system is of fundamental importance. Without the unconditional support of at least one other human being, any talk of rehabilitation risks being empty rhetoric. Only once good foundations have been laid, can we start to rebuild damaged lives. I beg to move.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, the timings in today’s debate are very tight, so I think the House would appreciate it if all noble Lord speaking could keep to the time limits on the Order Paper.

Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 17th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Alderdice]

As someone who had to work with the guidance before the legislation came through— and this is for reassurance to colleagues—I know that the problem was that the medical profession had to work without guidance for a long time. What happened was that the guidance was introduced partly to satisfy—

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I remind the noble Lord that we may speak only once at this stage.

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

I heard the noble Lord, if that helps, so I understand the point that was about to be made. I welcome that and appreciate it, as indeed I appreciate the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Empey. There is no doubt that, as the consultation process unfolds, these elements will be drawn on. We cannot simply ignore them.

It is important to ensure that the regime that we bring in to Northern Ireland is human rights-compliant—that is absolutely at the heart of this—and that within those human rights remain elements of conscience and freedom of expression which we also spoke of earlier when we spoke about same-sex marriage. The amendment would also see the repeal of Sections 58 and 59 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, together with putting in place a moratorium against current and future investigations and prosecutions, which will decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, allowing terminations to take place where they fall within the framework of other existing protections and laws.

As this change will come in before the details of the new medical regulatory regime are finalised and that scheme is introduced, to mitigate the risk of abortions being carried out in circumstances that would fall outside the prospective regulatory scheme, we will ensure that appropriate measures are put in place, such as guidance issued by relevant Northern Ireland bodies, to provide legal clarity for the people affected and for the medical profession. Therefore, in answer to my noble friend Lord True’s point, our ambition is for this process to be recognised—and it will be a significant change—but to allow each step to take place in a carefully considered legal manner.

In putting in place the new regulations, it is only right that a period of consultation is taken forward, not on the question of whether this should be done but focusing on how it will be done and to seek views on the proposals for how best the recommendations of CEDAW can be implemented in Northern Ireland. That is our purpose. We appreciate that there is existing evidence supporting this type of case for reform, which we have spoken about before, such as legal judgments, domestic inquiries and international reports. We recognise those and have heard that case.

We will need to think very carefully about how we implement the CEDAW recommendations generally, including how we meet the recommendation to provide an exception in cases of rape and incest, which will require very careful consideration of the sensitive and distressing nature of these circumstances.

We will also consider all the necessary other amendments which may be required as part of the introduction of the new abortion regime. We will carefully consider the impact of Section 5 of the Criminal Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1967, including whether any amendments are required as part of the changes made elsewhere in legislation. The Government will work expeditiously between now and 21 October 2019 to ensure that all possible necessary steps are taken, but I return to the fact that I am still struggling with the ultimate deadline in the amendment. It is also important to stress at this point that our ambition is to try to realise this in a safe and secure manner for the women of Northern Ireland. That is the guiding point of this.

I was asked a question about abortions at 24 weeks. We can guarantee that no abortions will be carried out over 24 weeks. In this limbo period, it would be an offence under the 1945 Act as these would indeed be deemed to be viable, and would be children. I say that in response to the noble Lord, Lord McCrea. After the new regime, we would not introduce legislation that allowed later abortions than are taken in England or Wales. We would seek harmony.

Parliament: Freedom of Speech and the Rule of Law

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood]

That this House takes note of the potential conflict between the right of members to speak freely in Parliament and the obligation under the rule of law to obey court orders.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I respectfully remind your Lordships that the advisory speaking time in this debate is six minutes. When the clock shows six that means the six minutes are up.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, it will be obvious to all that the impetus for this debate, its essential backdrop, was the statement made by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, in the Chamber on 25 October last year, naming Philip Green under parliamentary privilege as the subject of an anonymity order issued by the court two days earlier.

I should make plain at the outset that my central objective in this debate is not to criticise the noble Lord, Lord Hain—although inevitably I will need to persuade your Lordships that he acted wrongly before I can hope to ask the House to change its procedures. To that end, I will have to spell out why I regard his statement as a misuse—indeed, I would suggest, a clear abuse—of privilege.

Still less do I seek to have the noble Lord, Lord Hain, disciplined. Indeed, as to that, while several complaints were made against him by members of the public, as well as by Philip Green’s solicitors, the Commissioner for Standards rightly recognised that the only complaint within her jurisdiction was an alleged breach of the noble Lord’s obligation to declare his role as global and governmental adviser to the law firm Gordon Dadds, which was acting for the Daily Telegraph in the litigation. Against that complaint, the noble Lord had a complete defence: he had no idea that Gordon Dadds was involved in the litigation. He would have known had he looked at the court judgment, because the solicitors’ name was prominently shown there—but he did not. Whether, overall, that is to his credit I leave to others. To set oneself up as a one-person or one-Peer court of final appeal over a fully considered Court of Appeal judgment without even reading the judgment might be thought a touch presumptuous. Indeed, the noble Lord in his evidence to the commissioner went further and said that he did not think it would have made any difference even if he had read the judgment—a judgment that had granted a short interim injunction pending a speedy trial of the issue so as not to pre-empt the final decision on the merits of anonymity.

Brexit: Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration

Baroness Barran Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wrigglesworth (LD)]

My Lords, I have worked in the north-east with the noble Viscount and his father over many decades and it is a pleasure to follow him. However, I fear that on this issue we are on opposite sides of the fence. Maybe, if we get together some time in the future, we will find a way of reconciling our views, but I fear not.

I want to talk a little about the referendum, because the one way of bringing reconciliation after a dispute is for the victor to be generous in attitude to those who have been defeated. I do not think the inflammatory and gross exaggerations about the outcome of the election by some of the Brexiteers have in any way helped to bring about that reconciliation. We have heard a great deal about the mandate from the 17.4 million people in the country who voted in favour of Brexit. We have heard very little about the 16.1 million who voted to stay. That amounts to 34.7% of the electorate.

I remember in the other place, back in 1979, we had great debates over the referendum on Scottish devolution. George Cunningham proposed an amendment that there should be a threshold of 40% of the electorate voting in favour of the legislation for it to go through. Of course, it did not reach the 40%—a very modest threshold—needed for that legislation to go ahead. In my experience, most clubs, institutions, businesses and all types of organisation have a threshold above 50% if they want to change the constitution or make an amendment. It is not 50% plus one, it is anything up to 75%, or two-thirds, before the vote becomes legitimate.

The language that people, including the Prime Minister, have used—talking about catastrophic betrayal and people being let down, with Members of Parliament saying that they have been instructed by this referendum when it has been so close and that they have been ordered what to do—really has not helped. Do MPs not have minds or judgment? Are they just going to accept the outcome of such a narrowly based referendum? If there is to be reconciliation, I hope some Brexiteers will start paying attention to the 16 million who voted to remain and seek to reconcile the differences between the people. The 40% threshold would, in effect, have ruled out the result of this referendum and I believe that we should move towards another vote on this deal.

Other dangerous myths and distortions have been introduced into this whole debate and we have heard some of them in the contributions in this House. The whole business of Project Fear and attacks on experts is deeply damaging to our political debate. I was very interested to see in last week’s Sunday Times that David Smith, the economics editor, had analysed different forecasts from the experts. Almost at the top of the list came the Office for Budget Responsibility, which got 10 out of 10 on all the points that it had forecast for 2018. Second on the list came the much maligned—from the Brexit side—CBI, which got nine out of 10. Just out of interest, who came bottom on the list? It was one Patrick Minford, of the Liverpool Research Group and founder member of Economists for Free Trade, who got three out of 10 for his forecasts for 2018 and had a similar result in 2017. Many things have been said but this attack on policy by evidence-based activity is deeply damaging to British politics and government, and I hope the attacks on experts will cease.

Another issue—which I regard as largely mythological —is covered by Clare Foges in today’s Times. She talks about the left behind and refutes the suggestion that they voted in protest against the metropolitan elite. It is very amusing that the metropolitan elite making this accusation have been educated at Eton, Dulwich College and other such places, yet they have the brass face to attack Members of the other House and this place for being elitist.

The fact is that over decades Governments of all parties have poured in money through development corporations. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, has probably done more than any other person in this country to try to help the areas hit by industrial change and the wind-down of the old industries, not just in Liverpool but everywhere in the country. It is simply not true to suggest that people have voted against the EU just because of 30, 40 or 50 years of decline in those areas; the issue is much more sophisticated and subtle than that. A great deal has been done and they should not be described as the left behind.

The noble Lords, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Soley, referred to the powerful arguments that Brexiteers have mounted. Some of us, including me and many on these Benches, take the view that this is not just about the cost of customs. We have an internationalist view of the world, in which we believe that co-operation between countries is the best way to solve the problems facing us, and such co-operation is needed now probably more than it ever has been. That being the case, we believe in co-operating with others through institutions such as the EU. That is the basis of our commitment to the EU. It is not to do with the price of exports and the market; it is about people working together.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I wonder whether the noble Lord was thinking of bringing his remarks to a close.

[Lord Wrigglesworth]

I shall support the noble Baroness’s Motion.

Voyeurism (Offences) (No. 2) Bill

Baroness Barran Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in this debate with mixed feelings. While it is a great honour to be part of the Second Reading of a Bill which seeks to limit the impact of violence against women and girls, it is also a sadness that we need this legislation, since it reflects the way in which gender-based violence is evolving, with new technology and social media in particular. Like others, I want to acknowledge the commitment of the honourable Member for Bath, my home town, in campaigning for this law, and of Gina Martin for her courage in bringing this issue forward.

As we have heard today, and in the evidence given to the Bill Committee in the other place, the Government are seeking to close a loophole in the current legislation in relation to where an offence of upskirting takes place; namely, a place that is neither private nor public, such as a school, festival or, as we have heard, public transport. There has been considerable debate about whether the motives of sexual gratification and humiliation of the victim are appropriate, with strong arguments made—including by the noble Baronesses, Lady Gale and Lady Burt, and by the highly respected Professor Clare McGlynn from Durham University—that these should be extended or removed, focusing rather on the impact of the crime on the victim.

Perhaps I may commend one approach to the Minister for consideration which, without broadening the specific list of motives, would bring greater attention to the impact on the victim. It applies particularly in relation to the motive of humiliation and would be to use language in the Bill that mirrors that in the Protection from Harassment Act. To paraphrase that Act, it states that the person whose conduct is in question ought to know that it will cause, in this case, humiliation or distress if a reasonable person in possession of the same information would think that the conduct would cause humiliation and distress. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister would comment on this approach, because I think it would really reflect, quite simply, the impact on the victim.

I am also sympathetic to those who have sought greater clarity in relation to the distribution of images secured via upskirting. Arguably, we can all agree that this is where the greatest harm is wrought. As has been mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, where the revenge porn legislation would have some applicability in relation to distribution, it would help if the Minister could confirm that the anonymity of the victim as it would apply under the sexual offences legislation would still apply in the event of a further prosecution under that law. Along with other noble Lords, I look forward to further debate on that issue in future.

I want to say one word about vulnerability. We know, particularly from research by Professor Betsy Stanko, that most sexual offences happen to women who are already vulnerable in some way, so I hope that great care will be taken to establish, in those cases where it is alleged that consent has been given, that this has not been extorted through threats or coercion, particularly of a vulnerable victim.

Returning to the scope of the Bill, I suggest to noble Lords that part of the unease that has been expressed on all sides of this House and by those who have already debated it in the other place simply reflects the size of the gap between the scale of abuse, using images without consent, and the number of convictions that are expected to arise as a result of passing this Bill—which, if I have understood correctly, is about 30 a year. We have seen that in Scotland there have been only a handful of cases convicted annually. So, along with my noble friend the Minister, I look forward very much to the publication of the Law Commission’s recommendations about online abuse and to future legislation on the use of images without consent. I welcome very much, with other noble Lords, the Women and Equalities Committee’s recommendations this morning in that regard.

I also want to reflect on the fragmented nature of the legislation in this area, which in some ways mirrors that in the field of domestic abuse, with which I am particularly familiar. It has been argued that many of the different permutations of abuse in this category of offending are covered by existing legislation, but we know from domestic abuse that where the legislation is very fragmented, it is often poorly understood and inconsistently implemented. It would be very helpful at some point if we could bring the offences together in one place, both for police and prosecutors and, equally importantly, for the general public, so that it is clear and easy to understand.

Finally, beyond the specifics of the Bill we face a tremendous task, which is to work out how we can change public attitudes, which continue to be so accepting of violence against women and girls, of which voyeurism is simply one example. I found the evidence from Lisa Hallgarten of Brook a helpful reality check in this regard. We need to be realistic about what is happening on the ground and as she pointed out, schools are not even equipped to deal with sexual bullying, sexual assault or domestic abuse among their pupils, let alone upskirting. I recently heard from Plan International UK about the extent of sexual harassment of young girls in this country. Its survey showed that two-thirds of girls aged between 14 and 21 have experienced unwanted sexual attention or harassment in a public place, with 15% of them having been touched, groped or grabbed. This is happening every day, on every street and on every bus.

We are also all very familiar in this House with the extent of wider sexual and domestic violence and its prevalence. So we all look forward, I am sure, to hearing more about how this will be tackled in the forthcoming domestic abuse Bill and the updated violence against women and girls strategy. In the meantime, in common with other noble Lords, I feel that this Bill to address upskirting is definitely a helpful step forward, but I hope that my noble friend the Minister agrees that there is still much to do beyond this to address the full spectrum of violence against women and girls, particularly in the area of prevention and public attitudes.