Domestic Abuse Bill — House of Lords, 2021-02-03
Topic: Law and Crime
Helena Kennedy (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, like others, I want to express my gratitude to my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, for his generosity in giving time to discuss my amendments with me and those supporting me in seeking reform in a place where it is needed. I am grateful that he heard me and listened. I do not know what the response will be, but I ask him to listen again very carefully, because this is a matter where justice really should say that there must be some sort of conformity in law available in what I would say are very comparable circumstances It is important to remember that domestic abuse can lead to death. We have just heard a very powerful debate about strangulation, which really emphasised the ways in which those who have experienced non-fatal strangulation described how they felt they were going to die—that they could not breathe and somehow were losing consciousness. Of course, that is what happens if the pressure is continued. We also heard the statistic that one in seven of the women killed after a history of abuse have experienced strangulation. Let me tell you that this one in seven statistic is based on the circumstances where women have already given accounts to others—to their doctors, family members and lawyers—about experiences of strangulation. There are many women who have not given those accounts because of the shame still associated with domestic violence. Some of us have acted in cases involving fatality; one can rely only on the fact that strangulation is a very common feature in the patterns of domestic violence that lead to death Today, I will speak about a different set of circumstances from those that have engaged the House up until now. One of the tragic outcomes of domestic violence and abuse can be that the person at the receiving end of it ends up being the person in the dock, having taken the life of their abuser in the end. This happens rarely, unlike the other way around, where two women a week are murdered in this country by a spouse or partner. The statistics show that the number of women killing abusers is very small I can draw from my experience—it may be that my noble friend Lady Mallalieu has the same experience—as a criminal lawyer and a Queen’s Counsel for 30 years this year: the women I represented in homicide cases have invariably had a background of abuse, and one of the patterns or things that they describe in the histories that they give is fearing for their life on occasions. The women who end up killing a partner who has abused them have almost invariably felt that they were going to die on many of the occasions when they were assaulted previously It is important to remember that, when an accused person ends up in the dock, they can be wrongly convicted because of the law’s inadequacy—remember Sally Challen, a case that we have spoken about before in this House. This was a case in point where gaps in the law had failed a woman because she was convicted initially of murdering her husband before coercive control, which she had suffered for years, was understood properly by the courts In a high percentage of the cases that I have dealt with where women have killed a partner, pleading self-defence should have been available to the accused—the woman—but she has ended up seeking recourse in the fact that, very often, because of long-term abuse, women end up suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder of some kind or another, or depressive illness. Those are the tolls that domestic abuse takes on victims. It is one of the great scandals of our system that we do not often think about the impact of things relating to women and domestic abuse until pretty late in the day. A great deal of thought has gone into the amendment that I am presenting to the Committee today. It looks at self-defence and the objective test of reasonableness that is applied in self-defence, and I shall explain in a minute what that means.