Meeting of the Parliament 15 September 2016
I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and I commend the Scottish Government and Parliament for their commitment to improving how the justice system responds to violence against women.
The importance of the proposed law, which will criminalise psychological abuse, control and coercion, cannot be emphasised enough. It will create clarity for survivors and potential victims of domestic abuse and improve the ability of the police and justice system to intervene. Although I welcome the proposed law, I acknowledge that other issues in the legal system must be addressed. Today I will touch briefly on court-mandated contact.
There is a real danger that if it is not handled in a holistic and child-centred way, court-mandated contact causes harm to children and risks continuing abuse to both the survivor and the child. The potential consequences cannot be overstated. In January, Women’s Aid published a disturbing report called “Nineteen Child Homicides”, which tells the stories in 19 cases of children who were intentionally killed by a parent who was a known perpetrator of domestic abuse. The killings were made possible through unsafe child contact arrangements, both formal and informal, over half of which were ordered through the courts.
It is crucial that domestic abuse is identified and its impact fully considered by the family court judiciary. Child contact arrangement orders must put the best interests of the child or children first, and they must protect the wellbeing of the parent with whom the child is living. Lord Justice Wall says:
“It is, in my view, high time that the Family Justice System abandoned any reliance on the proposition that a man can have a history of violence to the mother of his children but, nonetheless, be a good father.”
The proposed bill is an important signal of our determination to tackle violence against women in all its forms and will make an important contribution to our aim of achieving true gender equality. As well as ensuring that coercive and controlling behaviour can be dealt with more effectively, the proposed bill will also help to shape public attitudes by explicitly acknowledging that psychological abuse is unacceptable and criminal. That is important, because preventing and addressing violence against women and domestic abuse demands a fundamental change in societal attitudes. As well as raising awareness of and promoting an attitude of zero tolerance towards domestic abuse specifically, we must tackle the wider issue of gender inequality, which underlies all forms of violence against women.
Attitudes can be changed. Until just a few decades ago, it was accepted—as it had been for centuries—that a man had the right to rape his wife. It was only in 1989 in Scotland and 1991 in England that the courts abolished the legitimacy of marital rape. We should take heart and courage that, just over two decades later, marital rape is considered by the vast majority of our society to be as unacceptable and contemptible as rape by a stranger.
Domestic abuse, however, remains far too familiar, with roughly one in four women experiencing some form of domestic violence during their lifetime. The chief constable of Police Scotland has said that more than 20 per cent of all police operational time is spent dealing with domestic incidents. On average, a domestic incident is reported somewhere in Scotland every nine minutes. It is estimated that, as well as the women directly involved, around 100,000 children in Scotland live with domestic abuse.
To get to a stage where those figures are as unthinkable as a women being legally raped by her husband, we as a society need to accept our collective responsibility for ending the scourge of domestic abuse. That is the point—women cannot do it on their own; if we could, we would have sorted it out by now. We need everyone—women, men, adults, children and young people—to work towards creating a society in which the protection of women from violence is everybody’s business, in the same way that child protection is at the moment, and in which the right of a woman to be safe in her home and community is as deeply embedded and unquestioned as that of a child.
We need to create a society in which men, women, adults, young people and children know and understand what a healthy relationship is and where to get help for themselves, their family members or loved ones if they have concerns. I take heart from the thoughtful contributions from men and women on all sides of the chamber today and I look forward to us working together to make a real difference.
16:09