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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 03 March 2026 [Draft]

03 Mar 2026 · S6 · Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee

Item of business

“Sign LOUD: Perspectives of Deaf mothers and signing practitioners on domestic abuse, communication issues and the impact on Deaf families”

Dr Houghton Watch on SPTV

It is an important part of this, but it is really just one part. Mothers said that they received very little help in supporting their children through domestic abuse and moving away from it or that, while the agency was working to tackle the perpetrator, they were focused on supporting their children and the communication. We know that, in a hearing family, the perpetrator can actively seek to separate the mother and child, to make sure that they cannot communicate about the abuse and that the child is silenced, so that they do not reach out for support alongside the mother. That dynamic is further complicated by who in the family can speak English and who uses BSL.Deaf women said that, as mothers, they felt that it was difficult to access services for support. That is partly down to what Lucy Clark said about trusting agencies and women’s fear that, if they disclose abuse, their child will be taken away, especially if the perpetrator is hearing, confident, eloquent and able to manipulate services. That often traps these women further in a double trauma of domestic abuse and not being able to access support.Mothers and their practitioners also spoke about how programmes such as children experiencing domestic abuse recovery—CEDAR—and the Freedom Programme have started to pilot groups of deaf mothers and mixed groups of deaf and hearing mothers to support women to talk to their children about abuse. The children also need support to be able to talk about their experiences of domestic abuse. We have made great strides on that in Scotland, and it has been my lifetime’s work to get specialist support for children, but there is very little specialist support, especially for deaf children and the children of deaf adults, that allows us to understand their experiences. We have a lot of work to do there.We also saw that children were acting strongly in caring for and protecting their families, so we do not want to talk about them as if they are “poor wee victims”, as one of the young people I worked with said. These are children with active agency who are doing their best in a difficult situation, so they need support as people.Sometimes, mothers and children said that they felt that it was okay to have some language brokering, but not in a domestic abuse crisis situation, not in the justice system and not in contact with statutory services. We need to look at provision for deaf victims/survivors and the whole family while making sure that children are at the centre of that. There is a lot to do around mothers and children, but some of that is about the BSL capabilities of the children as well as of the rest of us.

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Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee 03 March 2026 [Draft]

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