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Understanding the Domestic Abuse Bill

In Spring 2018 the government conducted a public consultation on Transforming the Response to Domestic Abuse, attracting over 3000 responses. In January 2019 the government published their response to the consultation and produced a draft Domestic Abuse Bill. The government response set out 123 commitments.

The draft Bill was scrutinised by a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament. This means that both MPs and members of the House of Lords examined the Bill. The Committee then published a report on the draft bill in June 2019. The Bill was then introduced in July 2019 and was given a Second Reading in October. However, the Bill fell with the dissolution of Parliament due to last year’s general election.

In December 2019 the government was elected with a manifesto commitment to “support all victims of domestic abuse and pass the Domestic Abuse Bill”. The bill was then re-introduced with a number of changes to the House of Commons and given its first reading in March 2020. The first reading is the first stage of a Bill’s passage through Parliament. The Second Reading took place on the 28th April 2020 and gave MPs the chance to debate the Bill for the first time. The Bill will now move to the Committee stage, where a detailed examination of the bill takes place.

Key Points

In 2018, an estimated 1.6 million women across the UK experienced violence including domestic violence, rape, forced marriage, sexual exploitation and other forms of abuse and harassment. The Domestic Abuse Bill sets out 3 key aims:

  1. To raise awareness and understanding of the devastating impact of domestic abuse on victims and their families.
  2. To further improve the effectiveness of the justice system in providing protection for victims of domestic abuse and bringing perpetrators to justice.
  3. To strengthen the support for victims of abuse by statutory agencies.

To achieve these key aims the government has set out a number of features of the Bill:

  • The Bill will create a statutory definition of domestic abuse. This will include physical violence but also emotional abuse such as coercive control, and economic abuse.
  • The Bill will establish a Domestic Abuse Commissioner to monitor the response of local authorities, the justice system and other agencies, and hold them all to account in tackling domestic abuse.
  • The Bill will provide for a new Domestic Abuse Protection Notice (DAPN) and Domestic Abuse Protection Order (DAPO).
  • A DAPN will give victims immediate protection following an incident. It will be issued by police and could, for example, require a perpetrator to leave the victim’s home for up to 48 hours.
  • A DAPO will provide flexible, longer-term protection for victims. DAPOs can impose both prohibitions (prohibiting contact with the victim) and positive requirements (e.g. completion of an alcohol misuse programme) on perpetrators. If a DAPO is breached it will be considered a criminal offence.
  • The Bill will place a duty on local authorities in England to provide support to victims of domestic abuse and their children in refuges and other safe accommodation.
  • The Bill will prohibit perpetrators of abuse from cross-examining their victims in person in the family courts in England and Wales.
  • The Bill will create a statutory presumption that victims of domestic abuse are eligible for special measures in the criminal courts (e.g. to enable them to give evidence via a video link).
  • The Bill will enable domestic abuse offenders to be subject to polygraph testing as a condition of their license following their release from custody.
  • The Bill will place the guidance supporting the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS), also known as Clare’s Law, on a statutory footing.
  • Clare’s Law enables the police to disclose information to a victim or potential victim of domestic abuse about their partner’s or ex-partner’s previous abuse or violent offending.
  • The Bill places a duty on the police to have regard to the guidance about the DVDS in order to make sure the scheme is used and applied consistently across all police forces.

Analysis

Whilst we welcome this urgently-needed, landmark piece of legislation to parliament, the Bill does face some shortcomings:

  1. We are pleased that the Bill will place a legal duty on local authorities. However, this needs to be underpinned by sustainable funding for specialist women’s services. According to Women’s Aid, the estimated cost to fund support for a safe and sustainable national network of refuges is £173million annually, a mere fraction of the £66billion that domestic abuse costs society each year.
  2. Furthermore, this duty on local authorities needs strong national oversight and guaranteed funding for those refuges led ‘by and for’ BAME women and other marginalised groups, who can be excluded from local funding systems.
  3. Councils must be required to fund specialist women’s refuges. At the moment funding could go to generic, unsafe housing services that do not have the expertise to help women and children escape their abuser and begin to recover.
  4. It is essential that all survivors escaping domestic abuse, those with children and those without, are considered ‘priority need’ for housing.
  5. The law must make survivors eligible for special protection measures in the family and civil courts, not only the criminal courts.
  6. In its current form, the Bill does not provide migrant women experiencing domestic abuse with support.

Get Involved

To find out more about our No More Violence campaign, including ways you get can get involved, visit: www.thewi.org.uk/campaigns/current-campaigns-and-initiatives/no-more-violence or email us at pa@nfwi.org.uk.

Sources of support

www.thewi.org.uk/dv-support

Further Information

For further information on the Domestic Abuse Bill visit the following websites: