Debate: The impact of intimate partner violence and custody rights on women and children
Date: MONDAY, 4 OCTOBER 2021
Speaker: Helena Dalli
Language: EN

Both the gender equality strategy and the EU strategy on the rights of the child put a strong focus on eradicating violence and ensuring that all women and children can live free from violence.  The victims’ rights strategy pays special attention to ensuring that the most vulnerable victims, such as child victims and victims of domestic violence, can fully rely on their rights to support and protection. For this protection, it does not matter where in the EU and in what circumstances the crime took place.  Children are affected by gender-based and domestic violence committed within their family in many ways. Some children suffer from physical, emotional or sexual violence that is aimed directly against them. Some children suffer when witnessing such violence aimed against one of their parents or siblings. Some children may also suffer from violence in the context of joint custody and visiting rights, when such rights are awarded to a violent parent. Indeed, the failure to restrict custody or unsupervised visiting rights may result in tragic consequences, both for the other parent and the child concerned.  All such children suffer in one way or another from gender-based and domestic violence. All such children are victims of this terrible crime. We need to protect all victims, and in particular children, no matter how they experience violence in their families. They may not even be aware that violence is being committed in their families, yet they may still suffer the consequences.  Domestic violence has been shown to negatively impact the physical, mental, emotional and behavioural development of children. It can also have lasting effects on health, well-being and prosperity well into adulthood. We fully agree with Parliament that in order to keep our promise to children, to protect them and to ensure their well-being, we must combat all forms of gender-based and domestic violence. We must provide adequate support to children to prevent that the consequences of the violence they experience impact their future.  This is exactly what we are doing. The revised Brussels IIa Regulation, applying as of August 2022, reinforces the rights of the child in cross-border custody cases by ensuring that they are heard and their perspective is taken into account. The new rules ensure a more effective cooperation between central authorities, courts and child protection authorities, or other competent authorities.  The central authorities are the direct interface with parents and should continue playing a key role in supporting courts and competent authorities in applying the Regulation.  In addition the gender equality strategy announced new legislative measures to achieve the objectives of the Istanbul Convention within the limits of EU competences. In line with Parliament’s request, the proposal for a directive on gender-based violence against women and domestic violence will propose measures to prevent such violence, including when perpetrated online, to protect and support victims, improve their access to justice and ensure better coordination between competent authorities.  The proposal will contain targeted measures aimed at criminalising specific types of conduct, in particular with regard to cyber violence. It will furthermore step up victims’ rights, in particular on compensation, prevention and protection for victims of domestic violence, including children victims and witnesses of such violence.  All this can be done with the existing legal basis. In addition, we will present an initiative inviting the Council to include hate crime and hate speech in the list of Euro-crimes set out in Article 83. This would subsequently allow the Commission to propose criminalising misogynistic hate speech and hate crime at EU level, a request which you repeat in this report.  We are confident that the upcoming initiatives will achieve our shared objectives and we look forward to cooperating with you on these initiatives.