- Look for best practice worldwide for law better able to prevent domestic abuse, without needing victim to make formal complaint (Police gather evidence) and how to prevent Stalking, that can lead, sadly, all too often, to murder of the victim.
- Look into if best to temporarily take the abuser to police cells, to give time for the wife and children to escape to a Refuge?
- Fully fund National domestic abuse Refuges.
- Make mandatory, in-depth lessons about domestic abuse and coercive control
in 6th forms and 16-19 age group academies. PETITION
- Background
- At moment only generic lessons given to children younger than 16, less likely to be in relationships / live in partnerships.
- Obviously with lockdown, victims (mostly women) were locked in with their abuser and we saw:
- In 2021, England and Wales saw
6 per cent increase of
domestic abuse crimes recorded by Police - from 798,607 to 845,734.
- In 2020, 24,856 offences of coercive control
recorded by police in England and Wales.
- Women's Aid, whose campaign worked to make coercive control
a criminal act, gives examples, such as:
How do you know if coercive control
is happening to you?
- Isolating you from friends and family
- Depriving you of basic needs, such as food
- Monitoring your time
- Monitoring you via online communication tools or spyware
- Taking control over aspects of your everyday life, such as
- where you can go,
- who you can see,
- what you can wear and
- when you can sleep
- Depriving you access to support services, such as medical services
- Repeatedly putting you down, such as saying you’re worthless
- Humiliating, degrading or dehumanising you
- Controlling your finances
- Making threats or intimidating you
END FAMILY COURTS
Victim lady informs she was...a survivor of domestic abuse, currently going through the family courts.
Going through a family court process is complicated and painful, though for survivors of domestic abuse, it can be deadly - a recent BBC report shows the number of women who have committed suicide after family court judgements, which have left their children in the care of their abusers, some of whom were convicted paedophiles.
Victim's experiences of domestic violence at the hands of her ex-husband have left her with complex post traumatic stress disorder and suicidal thoughts. Her mental health issues have worsened while going through the family court system - where she wasn’t believed,
was re-traumatised and the full risk of her
ex partner to her family was not understood.
Neither judges nor barristers have training on the realities of domestic abuse, and abusers rely on flawed psychiatric concepts like “parental alienation” to get what they want.
Parental alienation, the idea that the mother is turning her children against their father through abuse allegations is being used across the country in family courts and is leading to children ending up in the care of abusers instead of their mothers.
The United Nations, as well as leading figures in the UK legal sector have already called for an end to the use of the parental alienation defence in court.
Training on domestic abuse - its dynamics, behaviours and effects would give the judiciary the background they need to make the compassionate, well-informed decisions which survivors desperately need, so that us and our children aren’t subjected to further harm.
Understanding the risk that abusers pose, the tactics they use and the consequences of their behaviour can be the difference between life and death for survivors, and the difference between a child being abused or not.