Violence Against Women

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, not just because she has given us the opportunity to discuss this wide-ranging subject but because of the importance of raising awareness of violence against women generally. I want to talk particularly about domestic violence and raising awareness of it.

For some years I was the chair of the board of Refuge, the domestic violence charity. In that capacity, I attended quite a number of events with different groups. On every one of those occasions, at which you can see people because you are standing at the front and facing the group, I was aware of at least one woman in the room who, with her expression and her body language, indicated that she was personally affected, although she would never say so. I often read the reaction as shock as she listened and as a sort of revelation—“This is not something that is happening only to me”, and, importantly, “What is happening to me is not my fault”. There is a need for awareness of the violence behind closed doors; it is private violence, but it is an issue for the whole of society.

My noble friend Lord Lester said that he welcomed this debate because women are civilised when we debate. Indeed we are; I do not take issue with him on that. I am not surprised that my noble friends Lord Lester and Lord Thomas are taking part in this debate. I wish that other male Members of this House were contributing as well—perhaps next time.

The Motion refers to services. This point applies more widely than just to services dealing with violence, but I want to draw attention to telephone and internet services. It is often much easier, for many reasons, to seek help initially on the telephone. There may be practical reasons for that, although sometimes it takes an awful lot of organisation and care for a woman in a difficult situation to use a telephone. However, emotionally, as well, it is sometimes easier to express oneself when one is not face to face, because the human voice is such a powerful instrument.

I know of the demands that were placed on Refuge and those who worked for it, often in a voluntary capacity, in maintaining a helpline some years ago. A lot is owed to them and to the helpline sponsors. The establishment of the 24-hour national domestic violence free phone helpline, run in partnership between Women’s Aid and Refuge, was not without its difficulties, but it was a good decision by the Government to support and fund it. Telephone helplines—in this case I have stressed 24-hour, national and free—and web-based services, to which the point also applies because increasingly people turn to the internet, are essentially not local. We are currently focusing very much on localised services, and I share in acknowledging the importance and effectiveness of services designed to meet the different needs of different communities. Sometimes those communities may be local, but helplines and internet services are not local services in the same way. They do not lend themselves in the same way to local organisation or, therefore, to local funding. I think that what I am saying is that not everything can be localised.

My third point is, in a way, more technical but it illustrates how society still needs to work towards recognising the extent—I think that I mean both the breadth and depth—of violence against women. I ask the Minister to take back the issue of introducing a criminal offence of liability for suicide, which would apply to cases in which the victim of cumulative abuse is ultimately driven to suicide. According to the British Crime Survey, 3 per cent of victims of domestic abuse in 2008-09 tried to kill themselves.

One woman who succeeded, in 2005, was Gurjit Dhaliwal, who suffered 25 years of abuse from her husband. It started, as so often it does, with controlling behaviour—“Don’t go there, don’t talk to that person”—and isolation from her family and it became physical when she was pregnant with her first child. Following a particularly brutal attack she hanged herself. She was found by her youngest son. Mr Dhaliwal was acquitted of manslaughter because the psychological harm that his wife had suffered did not fall within the definition of recognised psychiatric illness and therefore could not amount to grievous bodily harm. There is a distinction, and there was bound to be one, between psychological injury, which the court found in Mrs Dhaliwal’s case, and psychiatric harm.

I know that the Government are aware of this issue. In 2009, for instance, ACPO, in a review for the Home Office on tackling the perpetrators of violence against women and girls, considered whether there should be a new homicide offence of liability for suicide and whether this should be created particularly with regard to relationship-based violence, including domestic abuse and, of course, so-called honour-based violence. The chief executive of Refuge, Sandra Horley, has discussed this with the Home Secretary. With two such eminent lawyers sitting in front of me, I am hesitant to bring this into the debate, but I am asking for serious consideration of the issue. I am certainly not seeking to provide a prescription at this point. I am conscious, too, that before the election my party argued that we had too much legislation and that too many criminal offences were created when there was already an offence on the statute book. This does not fall within that category.

I attended my first board meeting of Refuge on the day when I was asked if I would be prepared to become a Member of your Lordships’ House. That was 20 years ago. In those 20 years we have seen huge advances in how the issue of domestic violence is dealt with, but we still have a long way to go.