Domestic Abuse Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Huw Merriman and Lord Coaker

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 29th October 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Vernon Coaker]

Q Emily, could you say a little about the difficulty with elderly people disclosing the fact that they are victims of this sort of abuse, and how difficult that must be? This morning, somebody raised the issue of older people, and I think this is a problem as you get older—hopefully, younger people have a different attitude, which is that you don’t suffer in silence. Have you made any estimate of the number of people that this affects? What initiatives have you found that have made a difference? What can we do about it, given that it is not only physical abuse and the economic abuse that Sarah was just talking about, but emotional abuse, control and those sorts of things?

Emily McCarron: You are right to say that older people often suffer in silence because they face a range of barriers to reporting the abuse. In many instances, it might be that they have suffered from the abuse for a very long time and are simply resigned to it or feel that no one is really listening to them. They might be very frightened. It is also the case that some older people have cognitive and physical decline, which makes it much harder to report. We know that there are very few services available to older people. We have reports from older people that they think that domestic abuse services are not for them; they think they are for younger women and do not want to take up the places of younger women and children, so are reluctant to report the abuse. It is also due to fear and a reliance on people financially. In many instances, they might not want to leave the perpetrator, so it is about what the correct response to that person’s needs is. That is why we are calling for a better response from healthcare professionals.

As it stands, the Bill is very focused on the criminal justice response, and that may not always be the only response that is right for older people. We are calling for better co-ordination and links between the criminal justice system, the healthcare system and local authorities, for a more co-ordinated response that is also linked up to social care, which obviously plays a part.

We are also calling for greater links with local authorities. At the moment, the possibility of domestic abuse is not always fully considered in assessments under the Care Act 2014, so we are calling for a better understanding of it. Certainly some successful training programmes have been delivered specifically to train people up on the needs of older people, because it is not always the criminal justice response that is needed.

[Huw Merriman]

Q Emily, may I take you back to your suggestion that the definition be widened to include carers? I can absolutely see the logic of that, but is there not a danger? Currently, “personally connected” effectively means being or having been in a relationship or being a relative. If you extended that to carers, why would you not extend it to people who provide paid services to the home, for example? There is a danger that you go from “personally connected” towards “comes into contact”. Where would you stop? I wonder if you have thought about that in terms of extending the definition.

Emily McCarron: We have. We see that there is a role for the Care Quality Commission to play in ensuring sufficient safeguards for professionals who provide paid professional care. We are going on the evidence we see at Age UK, on what the calls to our information and advice service tell us, and on case studies. We are seeing that, in addition to intimate partner abuse, older people raise concerns about the abuse they experience at the hands of unpaid carers. I can see that there would be some concerns about how far that goes, but we are just going on the evidence.

We see that older people are experiencing abuse at the hands of their carers. As I have said, that is related to their vulnerabilities, and often that person is the only person who they see—they are not in contact with many other people. We are seeing evidence of the same coercive control and of older people adapting their behaviour to deal with the abuse that they experience—for example, sticking to their rooms and avoiding all conflict. That is exactly the same pattern of abuse and coercive control that we see in other examples of domestic abuse. That is really what is driving our desire for this amendment to expand the definition of abuse.