My Lords, I signed Amendments 67 and 69, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton. She was right to talk about a strategic perspective over the whole of the legislation coming through from both the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office. Once again, the debate we are having about stalking advisers is because other parts of the system are not working.
I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, for laying Amendment 74. However, it is not specific to stalking, and talks about the importance of having a range of advisers. I do not disagree with that at all, but, for reasons I shall go into when I say more about why stalking advisers need to be visible in the Bill, there are very particular issues relating to stalking that mean that we must ensure that people get the best support they can.
I also thank the Suzy Lamplugh Trust and Laura Richards, not just for their briefing but for the phenomenal work they do every single day. It is extraordinarily difficult work and, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Russell, it is only a drop in the ocean given the number of victims of stalking now. In an age when people can use mobile phones and apps, stalking is becoming all the more prevalent.
The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, cited the benefits of an independent stalking adviser. From my perspective, most victims of stalking arrive at the beginning of a journey through the criminal justice system knowing nothing about it, let alone about any stalking experience other than theirs at that point—which may not be the last point of the crime of stalking against them. We need training for police officers, community officers, call centre staff and those in the education system to be able to recognise it and know when they need to get help.
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Once cases are referred to detectives, as mine was, it is no good having generalist detectives who do not understand the issues. When you explain to them the nature of a whole series of incidents, they look at you as if you have gone slightly mad. It takes some time for them to begin to understand that this is a game being played by a criminal who wants to unnerve you, and that as it progresses it gets more serious. We need detectives who have been trained and who understand stalking, that stalkers are manipulative and coercive, and that the behaviour of not all but some stalkers becomes increasingly serious and is likely to become violent.
We also need to ensure that the post-parole and release system knows and understands how to handle stalkers. She does not talk about it very much but Claire Waxman, the London victims’ commissioner, is herself a victim of stalking. In 2022 her 20-year stalker was jailed again, for breaching a lifetime restraining order for the sixth time. Because he had already been on remand for 16 months, he was released immediately, but Claire did not know. This character’s habit is to hang about near her place and do constant Google searches to try to get near her. This time he made false claims about her to her employer, the Mayor of London.
When we talk about manipulative behaviour, people who are listening to this for the first time may think that is extreme. It is not. We do not hear about most of the cases that go on, with the really sad perpetrators who cannot let go of the idea of the person they are targeting. Increasingly we are seeing more about personalities. I worry greatly for well-known personalities who have to make enormous security provisions, but it also happens to private individuals. We need stalking advisers to help guide them through the process, from the first day that they think something is happening, when they first go to the police, and as they then go through the police system, because they might see two or three different teams of people. What happens when they get to the courts? What happens if their stalker is jailed? What happens after they are released? What do you do if it starts all over again? That is a specialist training.