Hansard

Everyone in the chamber is aware that domestic abuse blights the lives of too many people in Scotland. Domestic abuse might not be obvious, because it is largely hidden and often occurs behind closed doors and out of sight, but we know that it is widespread.

The number of incidents is truly shocking. Even if they do not know it, everyone in the chamber is likely to have family or friends who have been abused or are being abused by a partner or ex-partner. In 2015-16, almost 60,000 domestic abuse incidents were reported to the police, but that is likely to be a significant underestimation of the true extent of domestic abuse. In 2014-15, the Scottish crime and justice survey found that only a fifth of people who had experienced partner abuse in the previous 12 months said that the police knew about the most recent incident. Fourteen per cent of adults have experienced partner abuse since the age of 16.

Anyone can be a victim of domestic abuse. It is most definitely not restricted to one gender or class, or to rural or urban areas. However, we know that women are disproportionately likely to be victims of domestic abuse: twice as many women as men report having experienced partner abuse in the previous 12 months, and nearly 80 per cent of all incidents of domestic abuse that were recorded by the police in 2015-16 had a female victim and a male perpetrator.

We, as a Parliament and a society, have moved a long way in our understanding of domestic abuse since the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999. I was a founding member of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee in this Parliament, and I well remember key stakeholders and groups such as Scottish Women’s Aid coming to the committee to seek to explain why steps were needed to tackle domestic abuse. Back then, it was sadly the case that too many people in our society saw domestic abuse solely in terms of physical violence.

Crucially, there was also an attitude in some parts of society that domestic abuse was a private matter that was no business of the police or anyone else. Time has moved on and attitudes have—thankfully—evolved. Our modern understanding of domestic abuse, which has been shaped by the experience of women who have been affected and the groups that help them, is now such that we know that domestic abuse is commonly experienced as a pattern of abusive behaviour that is sustained over time. It can take the form of physical violence or even overt threats, but it can also take a form of the abuser behaving in a highly controlling, coercive and abusive way over a long period of time. The Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Bill is the Scottish Government’s and Scottish Parliament’s next important step in the fight to address the scourge that is domestic abuse.

Parliament has already taken action to reform the criminal law concerning domestic abuse. In 2010, the Scottish Government ensured that what might be described as the traditionally understood form of domestic abuse, which was prosecuted using the common law offence of breach of the peace, could continue to be prosecuted using a new statutory offence of threatening and abusive behaviour. That followed a court judgment that called into question the scope of the offence of breach of the peace.

The Scottish Parliament has also legislated to create an offence of stalking, which can, on occasion, be relevant in cases of domestic abuse. However, notwithstanding those reforms, it is clear that the criminal law does not fully reflect what domestic abuse is in all its forms, as our modern understanding reveals.

As many members will know, the then Solicitor General for Scotland, Lesley Thomson QC, called on the Scottish Parliament in 2014 to consider the creation of a specific offence of domestic abuse. She said that, in her experience of prosecuting domestic abuse, the existing criminal law did not always reflect the experience of victims of long-term domestic abuse. The explanation that was given for that was that because the law focused on individual instances of, for example, threatening behaviour or assault, it did not reflect the fact that domestic abuse is commonly experienced as a pattern of abusive behaviour that is sustained over time.

The kind of cases that stakeholders have highlighted as being difficult to prosecute using the existing law are those in which an abuser behaves in a highly controlling, manipulative and abusive way towards their partner over a long period of time. Examples of what abusers may do to humiliate their partners are horrendous: forcing them to eat food off the floor, controlling access to the toilet or repeatedly putting them down or telling them that they are worthless.

Abusers can also try to control every aspect of their partner’s life—for example, preventing them from attending work or college; stopping them making contact with their family and friends; giving them no or limited access to money; and checking or controlling their use of their phone and of social media. Those actions are often not accompanied by physical violence or overt threats, because the abuser knows that the victim may be in so much fear of their partner that they do not need to take physical or threatening action in order to exert control.

That behaviour can be very difficult to prosecute under our existing law. Even where a prosecution is possible, a conviction—for example, for an incident of threatening or abusive behaviour—may leave the victim feeling that the court process and the sentence that was imposed did not reflect the reality of the abuse that they had experienced.

The centrepiece of the bill is the new offence of domestic abuse. The new offence modernises the criminal law to reflect our understanding of what domestic abuse is by providing for a specific offence that is intended to be comprehensive, so that abuse in its totality can be prosecuted as a single offence. It is a course-of-conduct offence that enables the entirety of the perpetrator’s abusive behaviour to be included in a single charge. That will allow the court to consider the totality of the abuse that is alleged to have taken place. It will enable the court to consider behaviour that would be criminal under the existing law, such as assault and threats, as well as psychological abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour, which can be difficult to prosecute under our existing law.