Criminal Justice Committee 21 May 2025
It is a complex issue. We have largely incident-based reporting at the moment. We are not capturing non-fatal strangulation in those reports. I feel that we could have both. If we consider how serious rape is, and that it is a stand-alone offence that sits outwith DASA because of its severity, I believe that it could be both.
I am not a lawyer or a police officer, so I get to say what I would like to see. I believe that, where we can prosecute a case under DASA, we should, but there would be a merit to having non-fatal strangulation as a stand-alone offence. We are failing victims who are not disclosing because they do not understand the severity of it. We have had victims say, “What would I show them? There are no marks,” or “I wore polo necks to cover it up.” There is something that we are absolutely not getting to.
We looked at cases in our service. We are supporting 1,250 victims through multiple court cases. We apply a risk assessment to them, because the totality of the risk in the relationship is often very different to what is going through court. We might have a section 38 offence for causing fear and alarm, but when we ask the victim a whole load of questions about what happened to them, we pull out strangulation.
In 2023-24, we completed 1,201 risk assessments and found that 596 victims said they had been strangled. It is not clear how many of them had that in their charges of assault or how many cases were made under DASA. We do not have that information, but we know that the court case would not have captured that information from 596 victims. That tactic is increasing in prevalence. We see it more and more. Strangling is the most terrifying thing that happens to someone. When I think about how a victim understands an aggravator or a quicker way to do something, I think that we are failing them.