Meeting of the Parliament 28 September 2017
I would be delighted to assist you in that effort, Presiding Officer. Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
The bill is about improving the justice system and how it serves the victims and punishes the perpetrators of domestic abuse. What the bill cannot do is eradicate domestic abuse. I remind members that abuse is about the exercise of power—as long as women are unequal in society, domestic abuse will persist. The bill could be perfect and domestic abuse would still persist, which is why we must redouble our efforts for the wider goal of achieving gender equality in society.
On that point, I love Paisley, but while back benchers in yesterday’s debate on Paisley’s bid to be city of culture were given six minutes for speeches, today I have four minutes to talk about a bill in a stage 1 debate. I cannot help but ask whether that is a product of having a Parliamentary Bureau that is composed entirely of men.
I very much welcome the bill and the way in which it is the result of consultation on various aspects of the issue. I welcome, too, the contributions from Justice Committee members. As Claire Baker said, we whole-heartedly support the bill’s principles. Like her, I will focus on what is missing from the bill and return to the need for a parallel offence of domestic abuse against children to be included at a later stage. I encourage the cabinet secretary to look at the evidence from Scottish Women’s Aid about the requirement for that. Equally, it is important to consider how good emergency banning orders would be, because the evidence has told us how ineffective exclusion orders are in the civil system.
I am a cynical soul these days, for a number of reasons, so I would like to consider how the bill’s principles might operate in practice. There is a history in the Parliament of doing brave things and of producing grand, world-leading legislation but then not fulfilling that legislation’s promise when it comes to delivering in practice. Just yesterday, at question time on the theme of education and skills, I talked about how proud I was of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and its provision for continuing care for looked-after young people, yet I exposed the fact that 99 per cent of the young people who should have access to such care currently do not have it.
I am sure that Parliament would be united in its hope that what we are doing with the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Bill will be realised in practice. To do that, we need to consider four things: education and training, resources, publicity and the relationship that the bill will have with the rest of the justice system.
On education and training, as a Conservative colleague said, we have to ensure that training on the principles behind the bill is provided to staff who will have any contact with the bill’s provisions.
My colleague Claire Baker discussed resourcing. We know that cuts to refuge services are a considerable issue in constituencies across the country, as are cuts to community policing and pressures on housing. I have talked in the chamber before about meeting a woman who was the victim of domestic abuse who was stuck in a refuge for 18 months because the housing list was so long. She wanted to move on from that experience, but she could not.
We will have to do a good job of advertising the benefits of the bill to the wider public, just as the Government has done on the issue of revenge porn; I commend the Government for the publicity campaign that has gone along with that new offence.
Ultimately, we have to look at the relationship between the bill and the rest of the justice system. Some colleagues have referred to the relationship between the bill and contact orders when it comes to families with children, where that is a necessary issue.
One thing that we have perhaps talked less about today is criminal procedure. I very much welcome the sections of the bill that address that. I cannot help but think about what the bill would have meant for constituents I have met during my time as a member of the Parliament. I think of one particular woman who came to my surgery having experienced domestic abuse. The bill would have helped her but, to her mind, it will not go far enough.
I will give members some examples of that woman’s experiences. She came to talk to me about what life was like for her and her children, having been subjected to an abusive partner. Her children had to give evidence from a remote site, but the Edinburgh remote site was closed, so they had to travel to Livingston to do that. That caused great discomfort for the family. The children were not told enough about what it would be like to give video evidence in court. They were not told that they would be streamed live not just to the judge but to the whole courtroom, and they were alarmed to hear about that after the event.
The trial date of the court case was moved on four occasions because the accused tried deliberately to prolong matters. That in itself is a form of abuse. The accused faced 30 charges and was eventually convicted on 10 counts, with three “not proven” verdicts, but he was released for background checks prior to sentencing. He absconded while he was on bail, but when he was caught, he was bailed again. The bill will not address that issue of criminal procedure, which I encourage the justice secretary to look at again.
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