I have recovered my calm and my optimism that we may get some more positive noises from the Government in the next group.
This large group could easily have been degrouped because it covers two fairly distinct areas. This is a very long Bill with a lot of amendments, so maybe keeping this as one group was an attempt to assist the business managers. I hope that the Committee will bear with me in separating the two principal issues covered by this long list of amendments.
Amendments 84 to 100 are about what is called Jade’s law. There are other concerns about the family court and the way in which its process has been and is
being used abusively against victims within the definition in the current Bill. Amendments 82, 110, 111 and 117 refer to this.
I turn first to Jade’s law. The Committee will remember that last October the Government amended this Bill in the other place to include new Clause 16. This is what is being called Jade’s law. The intention is to ensure that a parent who kills a partner or an ex-partner with whom they have children will automatically have their parental responsibility suspended upon sentencing. The purpose is not to burden family members already in a state of some trauma with having to apply subsequently to the family court of their own volition to ask for the parental rights of the killer to be removed. Parental rights could be suspended as part of the sentencing process to take away that additional procedural burden. It is often bereaved grandparents and close family members who are in that devastating situation.
Jade’s law is named for Jade Ward, who was murdered by her former partner in 2021, with her four children sleeping in another room. Jade’s family campaigned for a change in the law after Jade’s murderer was able to continue to take part in decisions relating to the children. There are other case studies too.
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This suite of amendments is supported by the Victims’ Commissioner for London and, I believe, by our own noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, the Victims’ Commissioner. I will not burden the Committee with the many case studies in the briefings from the victims’ commissioners and from a number of victims and women’s groups. Members of the Committee will be able to read them at their leisure, I hope, before Report.
The steps that the Government have already taken by providing Clause 16 are welcome, but we do not think that they go far enough. These amendments would add a barring order to prevent the offender making repeated applications to the family court. Under the current Clause 16, an offender can still make these repeated applications to vary the prohibited steps orders. That is family law jargon, which is not my specialty—forgive me.
The amendments would also specify that this provision would not apply when a parent kills the other partner after experiencing domestic abuse themselves. That is an added complication to this already very complicated scenario. It is usually women who are victims of prolonged domestic abuse who kill. Clearly, it would often not be in the interests of the children, or anyone else, for them to be subject to this kind of suspension of their parental responsibility.
Further, we seek to extend the Government’s approach to offenders who are convicted of sexually abusing a child within the family. Currently, children and families in these circumstances endure significant financial and psychological burdens in having to take up family court proceedings after a criminal conviction for sexual abuse of a child in a family. That seems very odd in the 21st century. Bearing in mind that the burdens of proof are, rightly, greater in a criminal court, it would seem odd that someone who has been successfully convicted of sexual abuse of a child in a family would not automatically have parental responsibility suspended,
and that people have to run off, with the time that involves, and given the psychological and financial burden involved, and go separately to the family court, having not been able to go there straight away.
Amendment 84 contains the provision that adds the barring order to the current prohibited steps order. This would mean that a judge in a family court would have to review any application before proceedings in the family court could be initiated by the offender. That would take the pressure off the bereaved and grieving family members. If the circumstances have not changed for the offender, the application would not be considered further, and the family would not have to be embroiled in the proceedings. The amendment should not apply in cases where the offender was a victim of domestic abuse. It is envisaged as working alongside a strengthened exemption for domestic abuse victims, contained in Amendment 89.
The current exemption includes manslaughter but not murder. The renowned Centre for Women’s Justice research, Women Who Kill, collected data on 92 cases between 2008 and 2018 where a woman had killed her partner. In 77% of these cases, the centre found that there was evidence to suggest that the woman had experienced violence or abuse from the deceased. Of the 92 cases studied, 43% resulted none the less in a murder conviction rather than a manslaughter conviction, and 46% led to a manslaughter conviction. Only 7% led to an acquittal, which suggests to the Centre for Women’s Justice that there is still a real problem with the quality of legal advice—and, frankly, the quality of justice—that women who kill their partners after a period of domestic abuse are getting. That is a real concern. Regardless of the particular outcome, we think that, if the woman concerned is a victim for the purposes of this Bill, she should be exempt from the automatic suspension of parental rights. That makes sense.
Amendments 85 and 96 have effectively already been dealt with through the addition of sexual abuse against a child in the family to the offences already covered by Jade’s law.
I do not want to go too far in pre-empting the response that I might get in a little while from the noble Earl, save to say that it would be odd indeed if—as in the other place, when a similar amendment was put forward by my right honourable friend Harriet Harman—I were told that I needed to consider the Article 8 rights of the abuser. With respect to the Government, we think that Article 8 is a qualified right, and there are also the significant rights of the child. We think that the balance would be adequately respected through our amendments. I will put it no more strongly than that; I will save greater strength for later, if necessary.
I turn to the second suite of amendments, which cover a slightly distinct topic. We are not talking now about the bridge between criminal proceedings and family proceedings; we are now firmly in the family court, talking about the way in which family court proceedings can be used by abusers as a form of abuse in itself. The Government’s own 2020 harm panel report found significant evidence of this kind of abuse. We must bear in mind the very brave, calm and articulate —as always—comments on the previous group from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about her own
experience, and what has been said about Stella Creasy and so on. We know that abusers will use all sorts of legal complaints and legal processes as a form of abuse in itself. It is something that we really have to be very careful about.
The Government rightly took steps in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 to prevent domestic abuse victims being cross-examined in person by perpetrators. That was a long time after that prohibition was provided for rape victims. We think—when I say “we”, I am so grateful for the advice of the victims’ commissioners and various experts in the field in the NGOs—that there are still a number of ways in which the system can be, and is being, manipulated for the perpetration of abuse.
One problem is where abuse may have been proven in the criminal courts and accepted, and the abuse victim is then accused by the perpetrator of alienating the children. This is a very concerning area. I accept that sometimes, when there is marital breakdown, it is sad but inevitable that parents will weaponise relationships with the children and try to turn the children against the other parent. That is not, in my humble opinion, a syndrome or a medical condition; it is just something that angry people do sometimes on marital breakdown. However, this is being medicalised in some sort of quackish way and turned into a syndrome that then requires experts to come along and give evidence about whether the syndrome is in existence in that case, when really it is about how the children feel about their parents and what the parents may or may not be doing. They are matters of fact that one would not have thought require expensive and sometimes less than appropriately regulated and less than good faith so-called practitioners to deal with. These are really facts of life, facts of a situation, and judges ought to be able to deal with them. We certainly do not need them to be over-medicalised or such an accusation to be used against someone who is already a victim of domestic abuse. That is what Amendment 82 is about.
Amendment 117 again echoes the previous group. It would provide protection for victims of domestic abuse so that their private medical records were not disclosed to their domestic abuse perpetrators in the family court. There are further amendments in this group that have long been called for by London’s Victims’ Commissioner following extensive engagement with abuse survivors who have been through endless, repeated trauma in the family court. Amendment 110 would prohibit experts from undertaking the psychological assessments that I referred to earlier unless they were properly regulated, and we say regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council. At the moment, there are unregulated people making quasi-medical assessments about parental alienation.
Amendment 111 would prevent those currently on bail or awaiting trial for domestic or child sexual abuse offences having unsupervised contact with children. We think that that is a very reasonable request from the victims’ commissioners for improvement to what is supposed to be victims’ protection legislation.
I think that I have already dealt with Amendment 82 on parental alienation syndrome. There are many reports, including the domestic abuse commissioner’s report of
2023 and reports from international bodies—I could go on, but I do not want to detain the Committee—that raise real concerns about the way in which this so-called syndrome is used by abusers against the abused, and we rest on those.
Again, I have already mentioned the medical records referred to in Amendment 117. Noble Lords will have read the wealth of case studies in the briefings, including those from Rights of Women, Women’s Aid and the victims’ commissioners: if not, there will be an opportunity to read them before Report. On that basis, and with, I should have said at the beginning, the formidable cross-party support of the noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Helic—the latter of whom is not able to be in her place right now—I beg to move.
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