Fy fawr oedd yn gyflwydoedd eich Cymru, 27 ym murredd 2017. Felly, y bydd o'r rhesy ëNo Apologiesí haf yn gweithasig. Y prifysgau ym Ysgrifennydd ym Hyllewoedd i'w rhagorau Ym Mhwylliant i'w Pryde—y bydd y prifysgau ym sefydig y cyfrwyr y Prifysgau Cymru a'r Plwythig Ysgrifennydd ym Ysgrifennydd ym Ysgrifennydd ym Ysgrifennydd ym Myll Mhwylliant ym Ysgrifennydd yng Nghymru. Rwy'n gweithio. Rwy'n gweithio. Item 2 is our fourth evidence session on domestic abuse on Scotland bill. I refer members to paper 1, which is a note by the clerk, and paper 2, which is a private paper. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr Marcia Scott, chief executive of Scotland's Women's Aid, and Heather Williams, chair of the SWA Board of Directors, and formerly the manager of Russia Women's Aid. I also welcome Geread Iampa Bolu Botu, who is from Shakti Women's Aid. Can I say I'm very grateful to Scottish Women's Aid for providing written submissions? That's always very helpful for the committee. With that, we now move to questions from members. Mary, then, John. Thank you, convener, and good morning. I'm really pleased that you could all come this morning, and I do thank you for the evidence that you've submitted. I wanted to ask a specific question into the effect that this legislation will have on women from an ethnic background, because there is sometimes a little understanding of the religious and cultural differences that separate different women. I know from meetings that, in another committee role that I've had with Shakti, there are quite specific issues around arranged marriage, honour-based violence, and a whole family dynamic. Perhaps I could start with Shakti. How do you think this bill has the potential to impact on women from different cultural backgrounds? First of all, I would like to thank the committee even to think about recognising the coercive control. It's so important that I was just saying to Marsha, if you ask a woman to record the times that coercive control happened and the times that physical abuse took place, I'm absolutely sure you'll have a large number of coercive control happening, but yet we haven't recognised the coercive control. We always look for physical abuse and the bruises, and that's what I want to say. For the way I would look at it is, we need to look at, doesn't matter what culture or ethnicity a woman comes from, it's a gender-based violence, and I think the perpetrators are using the rules, the roles that we set for men and women, so what they're doing is they're taking the role that the society set for a woman, cook, clean, nurture all these things, and then using those against her to assert their power. So first of all we have to look at it in a gender-based violence, and it doesn't matter which culture or religion or where the woman comes from, all of us have to follow the legislation in this country. We are living in this country, we are not living in our country, so we have to follow that. If you don't follow it, then I look at it as a discrimination against BME women for not following the legislation. The first thing, for ethnic minority women, one of the things that happens in a coercive control is, I want to raise one, two, three points. One is when the women is controlled in a way that they, it's more of a black, no I wouldn't say black male, it's more of saying, telling her that if you don't or if you do, I'm going to harm your family abroad, so that's something that you don't see in the mainstream because most of the women's family, paternal family, seem to live in our country, so that fear is there. And another thing that the perpetrator normally uses is to kind of create rumours against her character or the female siblings of hers and that will bring shame to the family and that will become honour-based violence and sometimes they use that when you're talking about cultural thing, that's what I want to raise. So that's something that's cultural thing. But then again, please don't look it in that way. Come back to gender-based violence. Another point that happens within BME communities that you don't see so much in mainstream or not at all is dowry-related abuse where there's constant demand from the perpetrator or from the family members to the women to bring in more money or expensive gifts from her parents. And sometimes the parents themselves are quite poor, they might have given some dowry at the beginning for the girl to get married and to have a better life, but later on they don't have that kind of money. And that turns into physical abuse. Here I haven't seen any killings, but if you take like India and all, women are burnt because of this dowry-related abuse. Sometimes they commit suicide, but I look at it as a murder rather than suicide because she is forced into taking that action. And another thing, how this is going to benefit ethnic minority women is, I don't know how many of you actually know about no records to public funds and how it applies to domestic abuse, immigration status, and the destitute domestic violence concession. So if a woman is fleeing domestic abuse, she can go under the destitute domestic abuse concession. But the problem now that we are facing is where there is coercive control, she has to evidence the abuse, domestic abuse. But where there is coercive control, there is not enough evidence that she actually can produce because she hasn't told anybody what's happening to her. And when she did disclose the abuse that happened to her, to her closest relations, which could be mum or sisters, then it's seen as I'm going back to the role of a woman, how we society expect a woman to cook, clean, do this and all. So for those reasons, her fears are kind of dismissed. It's kind of said, that's your role. You know, your husband is asking you to just cook for him. And we had cases where the husband wanted a woman to stay a size 10 all the time. But the way he says it to her, it's about your health, I want you to look pretty, I want you to wear this pretty clothes that I bring for you. The thing is, the day that, at the beginning women enjoy this because they don't know what's happening, but the day that either she's not feeling well or something, and the day that she says no, is when the physical abuse takes, this takes back to my coercive control, how many times it happens and then the physical abuse. But if you tell your mum, he always buys stuff for me and he wants me to dress up, would mum look at it as an abuse? No, she'll just say, he loves you. So anyway, that's part of it. So it's becoming difficult to evidence coercive control and therefore the women are now failing to get the secure immigration status which actually is putting them at real, real risk, because once they go on to destitute domestic abuse concession route, they're losing their current immigration status, which could be spouse visa, so they then, rightfully, are supposed to be deported. They then are supposed to leave. So can you see, it's like a carrot, you just say that there is this thing you can take, and if it fails, you're in more trouble than before? Just before I come to Dr Scott, do you think that there should be a way of reflecting in the bill the use of religious and cultural abuse almost as an aggravator to domestic abuse? Do you think that that would help? Sorry, I got distracted by my water, I think. Do I think that, let me just make sure that I understand, do I think that there should be something in the bill itself? More explicit about reflecting the cultural and religious abuse as an aggravator almost? I think that there's a crossover here between thinking around hate crime and how we approach that and the very specific nature of domestic abuse. I think I would support what Jerry was saying, which is that we need to remember that this is really about gender and that perpetrators use all kinds of things. Absolutely, they use culture and sort of familial permission giving, cultural permission giving. I think that I would be very interested in expanding our approach to hate crime that included gender and that allowed then some crossover around looking at how other protected characteristics are used to exacerbate existing abuse. Until we have a sound framework for thinking about gender and hate crime, I think that it's going to be difficult to do in the context of this bill. Ms Williams, do you have anything to add? I think that the experience that we had in Russia was around particularly women from Eastern European countries. I think that, as Giri said, the specifics for women who have insecure immigration status, even though there are issues around women from Eastern Europe, around their right to be here in particular with what's happening around Brexit, but also just in terms of their right to access benefits and things like that. That gets used against them in terms of if you leave, you're not going to be able to stay here on your own. I think that that gets used against women when they've got insecure immigration status if they're not originally from the UK. I think that the bill in terms of how it's set out and the factors that it's asking you to look at probably covers that in terms of the consultation that we did with women that we were working with. To the original consultation has expanded the behaviours and the tactics that abusers use. I think that it's about trying to look at it as part of the tactics that abusers use in the whole as opposed to seeing it as something that sits separately because it is about the abuses that are used, whatever they can to maintain that control. Can you say something? Please. I don't know what you meant by whether to include religious or cultural. We have to be very mindful when looking at it because you don't want the perpetrators to hide behind their cultural religious. It happened in the past where the judges have just said oh, this is a cultural thing, that's fine. It's manslaughter, not murder. It happened so we have to be very careful when we do think about including something into a cultural religion. A perpetrator could use it as an excuse to say that that was a reasonable behaviour. That's what you have to be mindful about. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Good morning, panel. Thanks for your evidence. I particularly want to pick up on the written evidence from Scottish Women's Aid there and the references to the human rights obligations placed in the Scottish Government. Particularly the comment that the bill is not perfect. I know that practical experience will shape understanding. We heard last week from the police that there already is an awareness. I don't know if you followed the evidence last week already an awareness of controlling and behaviour, coercive behaviour. It's important that we pass good laws and practical laws. Do you see challenges in the policing of this in its broader sense? Where it to pass, obviously? I think the bigger challenge is trying to police in our current context. And absolutely, as we said in our response, this will chart new land, new legislative territory in Scotland. Implementation of anything new is always a challenge. But I think the biggest risk to us is not challenging the status quo. So women have told us for 40 years that the impact, the traumatic effect of psychological violence and coercive control is by far worse than any other abuse that they experience. What kind of a risk averse response would we have if we didn't try then to create legislation that actually reflects their experience? I actually think that the Crown Office and the police, and I did follow their evidence giving session, are already working to the challenge of reflecting course of control in the way they train their officers, in the way they make first response calls, in the way they review cases for prosecution. The question is whether we give them the tools in this new legislation that actually allows them to do their job better. And I don't want to sound pie in the sky. I don't think it will go terribly well right away. And I also think that because of the nature of how you implement policy, it will be years before we see the actual impact on policing. And I think we have choices about whether we provide them with the resources that they need to do a better job or a worse job around this. But the last thing in the world I think either police are saying or that we are saying is that we should shy away from doing the right thing because we think that our police aren't capable of policing it. Can I just clarify them when you say resources? What do you mean by that? Are you meaning knowledge and the legislation? Thank you for that question. I think that our biggest concern about this bill, well, one of a number is that we fought really hard for a coercive control bill for a long time. But we are very aware and as a policy geek I'm extremely aware that a policy instrument is only as good as its implementation. And I think we have a history in Scotland and in lots of other legislatures of creating very good policy and seeing very little change in people's lives as a result of it because we haven't paid attention to the challenge and task of implementation. For us the biggest worry I suppose around implementation is there's a massive resource gap in terms of training in Scotland as it is around to implement equally safe. And this will be a big challenge for police, not just in terms of the new law, but in terms of behaviour change at the coalface for police officers in terms of support and supervision within their structures, in terms of partnership working so that social workers, health care, all of those folks understand the challenge. And if we really want, I mean this will be transformative potentially this legislation, but only if we actually pay attention to having competent judiciary, competent legal systems and making the rest of the system fit for purpose. Sorry that was a bit of a rant, but I really would like to see us and I would implore the Justice Committee's help with making sure that when we put a bill through that there's a chance that it will actually transform the lives of women and children. Okay, thank you very much indeed. Okay, Rona, followed by Murray. Thank you, convener. Good morning. I wanted to ask you about the defence of reasonable behaviour, which I know in your submission that you have some concerns about. I wonder if you could just expand on your worries about that. You say that it could be open to manipulation by abusers and maybe you could just expand a bit further. Absolutely. I think it's important for us to note that in the final assessment, we're very happy with having the reasonableness test in there. We are worried because one of the features of many domestic abuse perpetrators is that they seem rational and reasonable and righteous. If you were to look at a particular incident, for instance, the test of reasonableness would be very scary for us because often from the outside a particular incident doesn't look like it's a part of a pattern of coercion. The context of this bill reassures us in the sense that what we have now is an opportunity and a demand, actually, that the criminal justice system look at the course of behaviour and that they examine a particular incident in the context of that relationship. Since we are confident that the vast majority of professionals, officials and indeed the public in Scotland don't think that it's reasonable to threaten your children, to threaten killing their pets, to financially abuse, to do any of the things that we know are regular features of coercive control, we are content that as long as the nature of the abuse is seen in the context of the relationship that the reasonable test will actually be alright, I think, again, it's about implementation. I also think that Heather and I were talking about this prior to this session, that what we need to really pay close attention to is that the threshold for reasonableness, for distress, for all of the things that have been being discussed at such length with this committee needs to be the same across Scotland. That means that, in rural and remote areas in particular, the infrastructure that supports understanding and application of the law needs to be as robust as in the central belt where we have lots more resources. So are your concerns mainly that it would be open to interpretation and individual cases? I think the construct of the bill is sound. Again, the proof will be in the pudding in terms of the understanding of the judiciary and interpreting the bill. I can't bang on about that, and I do bang on about it a lot in public, but the importance of any sheriff or judge hearing a domestic abuse case must have, even now, specialist training. Sadly, most of us don't. I think that, in the context of this legislation, that's an even more critical need. Thank you, Heather. Coming from a rural area, one of the things that we've seen particularly around the stalking offence that we currently have is that what we often get is that, well, you know, women all say, well, he was at the shop at the same time as me or he was in the same place as me. And what you often get is in terms of that reasonableness is, well, actually, why wouldn't he have been there because it's the only shop in the area. But when that's happening all the time that this person's turning up, that's in your environment, that can become really distressing. But in rural areas you do hear that of, well, where else is he going to go or what else is going to, you know, why would that be a problem? You've both got to live in the same kind of small area. So I think that that would be a concern in terms of how we already see current legislation play out in relation to the issues that come with remote and rural areas. But also I think it's about recognising that sometimes the tactics that can be used by abusers who are living in remote and rural areas through isolation, so, you know, maybe they're the only one that drive and they go and get all the shopping because it makes sense because they drive and they're getting it on their way home from work. But actually what they're doing is they're controlling the food that comes into the house, they're controlling what that woman gets to eat. They're actually controlling, you know, just the sustenance that she can get and also her ability to actually do those kind of tasks because he's maybe saying to you that, well, it makes sense for me to do it. I'm doing it on my way home from work. But actually what he's saying to her is, well, you can't even manage to do a shop, you know. Every time you go shopping you spend far too much money and he checks the bin when he comes home to see actually what she's eating of the food that day or that the kids have eaten as well. So I think it's about recognising that, you know, in terms of some of the tactics that abusers use remote and ruralness can make things look slightly more reasonable than it maybe would in other circumstances. And I think that Marcia is right in terms of just in terms of the structures and the infrastructure that there is in rural Scotland, it's not the same as what we've got in the central belt. And for this bill to be successful, for it to have that transformational change that we believe it can have, that has to come a long way proper training for the sheriffs and for the judges, for the Crown Office and for the police and for other professionals at the moment. We have too many people who still don't understand domestic abuse and the dynamics. What you've just said highlights what Dr Scott was saying about the need for specialist training. Yeah, thank you. Mary? Sorry, yes. I'm sorry. I have to say because, yeah, I feel you need to know. One of the things when it comes to BME families, you need to consider the extended family members' involvement and sometimes the women and men have the same families because in Islam women and men marry their cousins, so your family is her family and sometimes actually the co-essu control is there when you have the contact issues with the children or something, but then if she is visiting her family, but that family is also his family, so he could be there and that's arranged by the extended family members and she doesn't know anything about that. She's just visiting her sister or her cousin and he happens to be there, although he has orders not to approach her, but then how are you going to say he's doing wrong? Because he's not doing wrong, he'll decide, I didn't know you were coming, yeah, I'm here. So just to know that kind of manipulation as I'll please. Thank you. That's helpful. Mary, then, then. Thank you very much. A couple of the issues that I was going to raise have already been touched on by Mary and by Rona as well because I thought it was really important what you said. Quite a few of the things that you've mentioned this morning because we heard privately from some victims of domestic abuse and we'd had a shakti representative at our group as well and it was here in some of those particular issues there. One woman that we spoke to, she talked about the influence of her mother in that situation as well and how that just encouraged to put up with it in a way. Also the no recourse to public funds and actually seeing the impact that that has on people in a situation where, like you've mentioned, the immigration status is up in the air and there they are entitled to nothing and especially when they have children here as well. So I was really glad to hear that raised. But there were a few other... Marsha, you mentioned earlier about a few other concerns that you've had with the bill as it is and I just really wanted to tease some more of that out as well as ask a particular point that was raised in your evidence about the emergency barring orders. I'm just wondering if you could expand a bit on that and is this something that's used, are there examples in other countries as well and just be interested to hear other panel members use on that. Thank you for that. I was just sitting here going, oh, I hope I get to talk about emergency barring orders. Absolutely. Well, we think this is a very good bill. We think it could be improved a bit. And one of the clear issues which also crosses over, John, with some of our human rights obligations for human rights instruments is that at the moment Scotland does not have sufficient legislative interventions around helping women in the context of a crisis around domestic abuse. And unlike most countries in the western world, I have to say, we do not have legislation that is effective in terms of emergency barring orders. So down south, for instance, and I do not suggest that we use their model because it's not very effective, but they have domestic violence protection orders which can be used by the police in a crisis situation.  We need a legal mechanism that allows women to stay at home and the perpetrator to be removed. And it's for a short period of time. There are many, many versions of this kind of legislation around Europe. We have a briefing paper that we're very happy to share with the committee if that would be helpful. But we, especially on the back of research that we did in Fife with women who had been made homeless as a result of domestic abuse, it's very, very clear to us that current practice in housing and homelessness departments has been to essentially make women become homeless in order to access services. And an emergency barring order would be an enormous improvement to this bill. And essentially I think is required in order for the bill to do what it says on the tin of our commitments to women's human rights not to be made homeless in order to access support. So the other thing that I would say in terms of the bill and I think you will have seen some of this in the consultation responses from our colleagues and the children's organizations also. We struggled really long and hard. And I just need to put down a marker to say that there has been, as Michael Matheson pointed out when the bill was launched, that there's been unprecedented engagement with the voluntary sector organizations on the development of this bill. We absolutely hated the first version, which was years ago. And I think the extraordinary transformation of this into a bill we can support shows a really good, the way that policy should be made. So anyway, one of the things that there's been lots of engagement about is the role of children. And the really critical principle, which isn't that difficult it seems to me for people to get, but which is not really reflected well in this bill, is that we have libraries of evidence that say that children who live in families where there is coercive control and domestic abuse experience coercive control and abuse. It doesn't matter whether they're in the room or in the house or in the country at the time of a particular incident. They're harmed by it. Some more than others, but the reality is that that is the very nature of domestic abuse that children are used, but also children are controlled. We wanted that reflected in the bill somehow, so that in particular, when we then saw the bill leave the criminal justice sphere and move into the civil justice sphere, that children being victimized by a perpetrator of domestic abuse did not get completely lost in the process then that looked at contact and visitation decisions made in the context of civil law. So we were hoping that we could have something in which absolutely children are victims of domestic abuse only when their parent is a victim of domestic abuse. So it's a difficult way to construct it, but we really wanted this bill to reflect the fact that if there were children in the family, there were child victims. I think it took us a while to get that principle across. I think the bill team actually did understand that at the end, but they struggled with finding a way to frame that in the bill. We've had commitments from officials that they would try and take this up in other pieces of legislation and policy, but I would think that there is a way that we could do this somehow and also make sure that children are seen all the way through in our responses when they are in a case as needing support and services needing to be covered by non-harassment orders. That is so important in terms of women and children's safety, those kinds of issues. So those would, I think, would be the emergency barring order and some way of acknowledging children's experiences of domestic abuse in a better way are the two big improvements that could happen with this bill. You very neatly just almost answered what my second question was going to be. We were just going to lead into the non-harassment orders as well and ask about some of the other evidence that we received, particularly from the likes of Children First, to talk about imposing non-harassment orders and that that should involve the child as well and to tease out your thoughts on that as well, but I take it that that is something that you would be supportive of. Actually, it was our idea. So we're happy to support it. I think it is really, really important that we understand that at the moment non-harassment orders do not work well for the vast, vast majority of cases in Scotland. I know that one of the consultation responses was from an anonymous person who has been in touch with us and was citing some research that she did in her area that said out of 500 convictions of domestic abuse, there were 30 non-harassment orders. They are not working. They are really a problem for women and for the system itself. We think that if we put in an expectation that non-harassment orders would be issued in the context of domestic abuse convictions, that it would save money. It would save trauma and it would send a really clear message to perpetrators about what their expected behaviour post-conviction is. It's critical that they cover children because if they just cover the mother, there is a massive then tool for further abuse in the context of approaching children. Non-harassment orders that cover children also are also a feature in lots of different forms of legislation across Europe. It's not like we would be plowing a whole new furrow around that cliché. I think that it's something that could make this legislation so transformative for children. Thank you very much. Moving on now, Liam McLean. Thank you. Good morning. If I could follow up a couple of points that have been raised by colleagues and then move on to a substantive point that hasn't yet been touched. Dr Scott, earlier on it was interesting and probably rather refreshing your suggestion that you didn't necessarily anticipate the legislation if implemented having a dramatic effect immediately. I would contrast that a bit with what we heard last week from the Crown Office and Police Scotland representatives who talked about their expectation that this would give a greater degree of confidence and certainty and that what we would see was an increase in numbers of women coming forward to raise concerns and complaints. Is that distinction just an order of timeframe? Is your expectation that this legislation will indeed lead to what we were hearing last week would be an increase in referrals and reports? It is about time probably as much, but it is also reflecting our understanding and I think our colleagues in Police and Crown would support this, which is that some of the victims, of course, of control are already in the system. It goes back to John what I was saying about the Police and Crown Office are already trying to make their experiences which they see as abuse fit in our current system to go into court. Any policy that is implemented generally takes quite a long time to have an impact, particularly something that relates to what is really seriously the biggest violation of women and children's human rights in Scotland and has massive numbers attached to it. I think that the areas where it will be the most challenge is not actually Police and Crown Office, but it's health, social work, and the officials in the public sector that engage with women and children who are experiencing domestic abuse every day and never see them. A bill around coercive control, if we have the capacity to help people in those areas, understand how their outcomes can be delivered better, cheaper, with less harm to everybody and trauma, that will be the sea change in Scotland, but it will take time. I will follow up a couple of points that Mari was probing with you earlier. In relation to non-harassment orders, is it right to say that your supportive of a system whereby such orders would have to be considered by the courts in relation to domestic abuse cases or would there be a presumption that they would be applied? I think that there is a nuanced difference between those two. The other point was in relation to coercive and controlling behaviour and the impact on children. I know that there is a concern around any requirement that the children have to be present in the room or within your shot, but given what you have already described in terms of the context in which coercive and controlling behaviour takes place, a course of action over a period, presumably the impact upon children would be viewed in a similar vein. It would be a course of behaviour over a period. Therefore, being within your shot or being in the room is rather irrelevant. Would the legislation to your mind not be interpreted in relation to children in the same way that we would expect it to be interpreted in relation to victims, women victims? I can't remember what the first part of that was. The first one was on the non-harassment orders presumption. Yes, the nuance of that. I can't really see any problem with presuming that there would be non-harassment orders and that, like in some of the legislation around contact that we have, which doesn't get paid much attention to, it should be that if there is one not issued, then somebody would have to make a really good case for why it wasn't appropriate. I absolutely do come down on the side of the stronger we can make that wording the better as far as I'm concerned, because, obviously, from the numbers that I've just cited, even in the existing framework in which it's clear that they could be used more often and more appropriately, they are not. Why is an application to be made? I suppose the change is that there wouldn't need to be an application made. It would simply fall to the court to have to consider. I'm not sure there's a huge difference other than perhaps setting the threshold for these applications being applied at a lower level than is being applied at the moment. At the moment, the difficulty that you have in non-harassment orders is that you have the PF that has to ask for it, and quite often that doesn't happen. It's starting to happen on a more regular basis than it has been, but even then there's reasons that Sheriff's will give is to why a non-harassment order isn't appropriate. Quite often that will be in relation to where there's children and that contact has to be facilitated. That certainly has been a recent example from one of the women that we supported in the Highlands. The non-harassment was asked for and the Sheriff refused it as a result of their contact having to be facilitated. The Sheriff felt that that would impact on the father's rights to have access to the children. When the PF has to ask for it, that's a difficulty because it becomes it's not something that happens on a regular basis. The change that's being proposed in here, I think that that's one of the things that will make a massive difference for women's safety. Sorry. Unless it talks about the way in which it impacts on contact in the sense that you're going to have the court arriving potentially at the same decision that if this interferes with contact it won't apply a non-harassment order. Not sure whether the legislation will address those sorts of situations. I think that at that point one of the things that we need to be looking at is in those circumstances where if we're looking at the non-harassment order also impact on applying to the children as well as the women, and that's what we're asking the court to consider, then yes at that point it would impact on a father's rights to have access to a children. However domestic abuse is a parenting choice and it impacts on the children and young people and therefore as a society if your behaviour is impacting negatively on your children then actually if you can't behave in a way that's appropriate then do you have a right to have access to your children if your behaviour is impacting on them negatively? I think that having the courts actually the sheriff have to having to consider a non-harassment order as standard actually will be a big step forward because at the present moment in time a non-harassment order isn't provided you're then having to look at going through the civil courts for an interdict which takes time takes a lot of stress and distress can be caused through having to go through the civil part but also in terms of women who work they have to pay for it and if it's not defended you're looking at at least £1,000 but if an interdict is defended you're looking at upwards to about £10,000 it would cost someone to actually have an interdict so there's a barrier to justice there for people who are in work but also the process that you then have to go through if it's a civil interdict as opposed to being a criminal non-harassment order some of the justice committee members heard from one of the women that we supported in your last inquiry into the operation of the crime office procreator fiscal service and she spoke about how she's had an interdict with a power arrest for the last five years the power arrest only lasts for three years and she's had to go back through the courts to have the power arrest re to have the power arrest made again and that's then being breached and she's now in the process of trying to take it back through the civil courts to have the civil interdict to have the court look at that and we're now a year almost down the road of when all this can happen when he reached the interdict and she's still no further forward so there's massive, massive issues about how women get protection through the civil process so actually having a criminal non-harassment order which is imposed by the court which actually says this is the standard of behaviour that we expect and if you don't admit the standard of behaviour then that is an offence and you will come back before the sheriff is actually something that will make a massive, massive difference Okay, thank you Just following up on a separate substantive point I think we've heard pretty much universal support for broadening a definition recognising the extent to which domestic abuse happens in non-physical respects as well but we've at the same time heard some concerns that the threshold for that abusive behaviour is perhaps lower than might be necessarily being contrasted with the legislation introduced south of the border from the end of 2015 Andrew DeKell in his evidence to us suggests that the key aspect is ensuring that the thresholds for criminalisation are sufficiently high in my submission I direct you to the English legislation which provides that the harm that is caused to the complainer has to be of sufficient severity and have a significant impact on their day-to-day life and he suggests that there's a risk that we criminalise what may be bad possibly just unpleasant behaviour but not necessarily what should be targeted as abusive or coercive and controlling behaviour I'm sure you've had an opportunity to read and listen to the contribution that Mr DeKell and others have made what would be your response on that issue of the thresholds I think, and with all due respect because I have lots of respect for Mr DeKell I think that's just a very academic and sophisticated way of saying it's just a domestic I think the the contract you couldn't have more contrast between this bill and the bill down south and our sister organisations down there say that it is not working well that there are very few prosecutions and the ones that do happen there is always physical violence involved and that a prosecution around coercive control as seen as the next best thing so there's a hierarchy of harms which absolutely does not reflect our experiences or women's experiences of coercive control as the most harmful I think in terms of a threshold this bill has, unlike the bill down south which is quite a simple bill and I think they've failed to grasp the nettle of the complications of this the construct or the frame of this bill is about looking at the perpetrator's behaviour rather than trying to prove some kind of harm with the victim and focusing on a threshold of distress despite the fact that distress is already an existing concept used in Scottish legislation in other laws is again about well is this just a domestic now interfering in family life in ways that are inappropriate but as you will well know having looked at this bill there are multiple tests in this bill that mean that trivial behaviour mundane bad behaviour on the part of all kinds of folks and families are never going to make it through of those sets of tests and there's no will in the system really to make that happen I don't think and I think the critical distinction Sorry just to stop you on those the safeguards I suppose in terms of addressing the concerns that Mr Tekel and two or three others have made what would those be to your mind what would you say would give some confidence that as you say the distress levels which are known and understood in the legislative context in Scotland I would refer you back to what Emory Hicks's testimony was because I think she said it quite eloquently about all the ways that the requirement for a course of behaviour that the different tests in order to get a case even robust enough into court mean that trivial events that are in fact just bad behaviour and as Heather and I were talking about before sometimes are responded to by police and should be appropriately but are not what we would call a course of behaviour I think the problem with looking at the threshold as an academic exercise which I think Mr Tekel did is that that kind of framework or perspective is not informed by what we see is a much bigger problem in the existing status quo which is the huge numbers of cases of domestic abuse that never even come into the courts so the legal academics never see them the professional societies never deal with these cases because the vast majority of them are just never wind up in the criminal justice system this is a law that absolutely reflects the fact that we need to be able to criminalize coercive control now there is no appetite from what I can gather in the court system or in the police system for taking trivial bad behaviour and creating a domestic abuse case out of it so I hear from some of our colleagues that this is about intruding in family life and I do have to say I think that when family life delivers abuse and trauma and distress then absolutely we should be interfering in family life and we don't want that kind of family life for anybody in Scotland and this focus on a threshold has I think always been an attempt to push the human rights aspect of women and children's experiences of domestic abuse out as only applying in public sectors and I'm so proud that this is a bill that actually challenges that and I think that I can't really speak to the yes there will be you know if and when this bill passes and gets implemented there will be misguided attempts to use it I think my biggest fear and I know our biggest fear in Scottish women's aid is that perpetrators will try to use it to control women because that's exactly what happens now with our existing legislation but that's much more likely to happen and even so we are willing to take that chance in order to have an improved tool Thank you Can I just add to that in terms of the definition and the thresholds that there has to be a course of conduct it actually probably provides a bit more protection than we currently have in terms of current legislation where if you and me were in a relationship and we were out in the street and we had an argument and the police were called that would be classed as a domestic incident and one of us would end up in court and have to answer to that and you see that within our court system happens on a fairly regular basis but that's not what we're talking about when we talk about women's domestic abuse domestic abuse causes fear it's about control and it's an ongoing pattern of behaviour where various tactics are being used and that's what this bill and the thresholds within it allows us to tackle the current law that we've got people who are not necessarily being used in domestic abuse but are bad behaviour which we're all perfectly capable of within our relationships actually end up before the court this legislation or the thresholds that are built into it in relation to the course of conduct actually provides a strength in the basis from which we're currently working from where you do find people who have got a domestic history or there's a conviction in relation to that because of an argument that's happened between a couple which, while is not okay is not what we would class as domestic abuse Thank you Thank you The majority of the issues I was going to raise have sort of been touched upon but I just wanted to return briefly to the defence of reasonableness and I was particularly interested in how that interacts with some of the cultural concerns that we heard about right at the beginning and whether or not behaviours which are maybe seen as being normal or have been normalised within particular families or cultural settings might sort of allow people to use that defence more easily The reasonableness is some... Yeah, it can be, you know it's made normal some of the behaviour of the perpetrators is normalised within the cultural context whether it's BME or it's a mainstream some of the acts are kind of accepted as normal thing so I haven't read that document that you're talking about reasonable It's in the law It's in the law But yes you have to be very careful where you set this reasonable threshold It's very important because you don't want the perpetrators not only the perpetrators it's also the society to look at it as a normal behaviour and there's nothing wrong with it and it's not domestic abuse I think I can't echo more eloquently than what Jerry said at the beginning which is that reasonableness or it's culture or it's the drink There are so many contexts in which abusive behaviours explained away in our society and what seems unacceptable from one perspective is seen as eminently reasonable so I have to say and I think that the reasonableness as previously said is a bit scary for us because domestic abuse was a perfectly reasonable response for centuries in Scotland but I actually do have faith that the system, especially if it has the training that it needs to do this well will use that test to set a new standard in courts but also in Scottish society about how it's reasonable to treat your partner and your children and also it depends for whom is it reasonable is it for the courts and for us or it's for the women the behaviour is reasonable that's what we have to look at it it's not for us to say one behaviour is reasonable after look at is it reasonable for the women does she feel it's reasonable his behaviour is what is important I think and I'll give you one example we always talk about this we had a client where this is coercive control the guy would use just his lighter so every time he would just say to her if something is not done or his control is that he used to threaten her that I will burn you so when the statement was taken from the women all that he did was there were other agencies around the table there was support worker and there's the police and everything else all that he did was take his lighter out and put it on the table that's all and none of the other people understood what that lighter meant for the women it meant a lot so that is coercive control that we can't see so is it reasonable or is it not reasonable so in the construct of this law what it does is require us to understand the circumstances the personal circumstances of the case the context of the case which is what I think the real strength of it is so absolutely if you look at it as an incident putting a lighter on the table is a reasonable act but a reasonable person if they understand the full context of that relationship would not think it was reasonable to threaten a woman with burning her even if that threat is non-verbal and is referenced through putting a lighter on the table does that make sense but it is about understanding the behaviour that a reasonable person would see the whole course of conduct it makes sense but what I then struggle with is if you think the threshold is correct and the thresholds correctly identify the types of behaviour that are required and we're not looking at the effect it would necessarily have on the individual why the defence is needed at all and just whether I don't from the course of behaviour is then asking people to do something else in looking at all the circumstances and I just wonder whether it's a way back in to then justifying some of the behaviours certainly in terms of the work that we did with some of the women that we support with the original consultation and that idea of reasonableness was certainly one that they were concerned about that it would be used in a way that would mean that their experiences weren't taken into account and just like Geary gave you the example they were the lighter I could give you a dozen similar examples but I think where the change in terms of what we've got now is about recognising that we're not taking an incident-based approach but that we are actually looking at the full circumstances of somebody's life and why something that they've done so for instance I meet you in the shop and I say to you I notice your son's got a new bike I hope he doesn't have an accident that would appear to be a reasonable conversation but that sets us off a lot of distress because in the context of our relationship what you were fretting in was that quite that I ever left or ever did anything that you weren't happy with that you would hurt my son so when I've left you and I've met you in the shop and you've made that statement it appears like a reasonable statement but when you take the full context of it you can understand why that's then caused the harm and the distress that it's caused and this bill does allow that in terms of whether the defensive reasonableness is one that personally I think it can be used I think it will be used particularly women with disabilities where the partner is my baby also the carer I think potentially for BME communities but obviously it's in there for some reason somebody thinks it needs to be there I believe that people were concerned that the concerns were that the threshold would be too low and that trivial cases could get in and so the reason for putting it in there is as a safeguard I'm totally with you on that if we didn't need a safeguard I'd be happy with that but I suspect there would be an outcry I think the issue with that if you're talking about trivial cases getting through is that the defence really only comes into play once they're accused of the offence of charge so it's not going to filter people out at an early stage the defence is only going to come into play once these cases go to court and what I'm worried about today is just a sort of come into my head was the idea perhaps that people's family members or other people who were involved in the situation would be brought in to give their view on whether or not particular incidents were reasonable and just the trauma that might be attached to that Part of the difficulty is that none of us have a proper picture of what goes on within our families or our relationships lines and I think the difficulty that's reasonable is that Marsha's already said a lot of perpetrators of abuse believe that their behaviour is perfectly reasonable that the things that they do are actually okay and I think it's you know but that sometimes the responses from people who are experiencing abuse on the outside don't always appear completely reasonable so that's one of the concern that I certainly have in relation to that because all you see is that response to a text message which isn't threatened necessarily or a comment that somebody's made and that's then triggered this whole fight or fight it's triggered that fear within somebody and you're seeing the response to that which doesn't always appear to be completely reasonable but that response is because of the course of conduct that has been through the entirety of that relationship and what this build does is it moves us away from looking at an incident based response because domestic abuse is not about a incident, it's about the tactics and the patterns of behaviour that impact but I agree That's going to work both ways on the defence as well because effectively you could be bringing children or parents of the victim to talk about long term courses of behaviour perhaps issues around mental health or issues around disability and there might be aspects of unreasonable behaviour on both sides but it might not be it won't necessarily mean that domestic abuse isn't there somewhere but it might be possible to sort of paint a different picture as a result and that's all that worries me Again it comes back to when I was looking at the beginning like you were saying the physical abuse takes place after a lot of coercive control has happened and also you're talking about bringing family members as witnesses and in BME communities the effort is to save the marriage so actually your own parents can go against you and then they actually give evidence against you saying that it's not him it's behaviour That's exactly the point I'm wondering about Believe me it happens and actually it surprised me working for Shakti for 18 years how many times I heard that her own family don't want to support her and her own family want to take her life away and they can never understand why so yeah you'll have that and that's something again the solicitors and the lawyers the legislative judges and I think it happened recently in a post marriage case in Glasgow where they brought in the previous the sisters of this victim who left home and gone away and they actually brought those people to kind of give evidence to say that the parents are perfect and they have never were against their wishes and all that was all rubbish and the young person was looking for an opportunity to get back with the family so this is one opportunity they got just support the family and they are welcome back into the family so you can't really I don't know it makes it difficult but you can't really trust what they're saying and I think what you're saying is you're concerned about the reasonableness being used as a way to mitigate people and to mitigate the perpetrator's behaviour and I think it's important and I was just looking at trying to find the exact language around it but I think it was conceived of as a mechanism to allow us to focus on the perpetrator's behaviour without having to prove specific harms to a victim and there's a whole lot of good reasons for why that is which we undoubtedly don't have time for but I think that was in the drafters of the bill I think the reasonableness needed to be there for the very few small cases in which there was some reasonable explanation for a series of behaviours that might on the outside look abusive and so in the context perhaps of somebody who has who has guardianship of somebody and it's their job to control certain things that in an independent relationship they should never be controlling but also to allow mechanisms for keeping the focus on the perpetrator's behaviour rather than the impact on the victim I hear your concerns and I share them but I think in the long run we would rather have the risk be on that side than to move to a bill that required proving harm which is enormously problematic That's super I was just a slightly different question which leads on just when we're talking about family relationships and other bits and pieces do you think that the offence covers all of the relevant parties or do you think we should be looking more perhaps at elder abuse, the use of other family members how it all interacts do you think that it's too narrow for those ex-partners? Considering that we've fought for 20 years to keep this definition possibly my answer to that would be knowing very happy with it, I will say as one of before I ever worked for Scottish Women's Aid I was one of a team of University of Edinburgh researchers who did the first research in Scotland or in the UK actually on older women in domestic abuse and I can tell you that what we found was shocking about the invisibility of older women in police reports in social work assessments in all kinds of things but the problem there was not that they weren't covered by the law they were absolutely covered by the law the problem was that the minute they got over a certain age then it became defined as elder abuse and people who ordinarily would respond robustly in the face of domestic abuse to a younger woman didn't see it, didn't identify it and didn't respond appropriately so from our perspective and I know there will be some people who will provide evidence to the contrary we think that there are adequate protections in this bill for people of all ages if it's used appropriately the difficulty of course is that the service providers who are providing services for older women and older men need to understand domestic abuse which is the biggest problem and I might disagree on other family members but we are really committed to Scotland continuing in its proud tradition of understanding this as gender-based violence and we are absolutely concerned that if you start to broaden it then we have this bill being confused with child abuse legislation with a whole variety of other difficulties that take our eyes off the price of gender Ben followed by Fulton Linn Stewart A large amount of the areas in which I wanted to ask questions on have been covered but there are a couple of one specific and one general query. In terms of the specifics I just wanted to absolutely clarify there's been some discussion in previous committees around the inclusion of recklessness within the definition and I just wanted to know at Scottish Women's Aid you to clarify your support for it within your written statement but it would be good to hear from others and yourself as to why you agree with the inclusion of that and secondly the Prime and Crooked Fiscal Service mentioned in their written submission that around the gender-based violence point that you just made that the bespoke offence will raise awareness and confidence in terms of increasing the amount of cases coming forward but also trying to advance and progress social change in order to tackle gender-based violence more widely and I wondered if you could comment on the bill's potential in that context. Absolutely I think I referred before to the fact that for 40 years we've been hearing stories about the impact of domestic abuse in the context in the form of course of control between women and children and the failure to have a legal instrument that would respond to what they have told us for 40 years sends a powerful message to women and children that their experiences of trauma are not of that much interest to us as people who make policy and law in Scotland not that I make policy and law although happy to try and I think the fact that we had such powerful testimony from the Crown Office and the police were the folks along with our services who are closest to the call face who are closest to the experiences that you heard about in this evidence session that our survivors provided that they have been trying to make law that is not fit for purpose work in these cases and it is in your gift as lawmakers to send a message that says that's not good enough anymore in Scotland and that we are listening to the voices of survivors and service users and the people who have never come into our system because they don't recognize their experiences in the things that we respond to and this is an opportunity for Scotland to stand above actually every other legislature that has made laws around domestic abuse and coercive control if this bill gets passed as Evan Stark says it will be the gold standard for statements both in law but in morality about what is okay and I can't imagine that we would want to walk away after the 10 to 15 years that it has taken us to get to this point absolutely the detail can be debated and should be debated but the challenge is clear in terms of law that fits that acknowledges women and children's rights as human rights and the opportunity is huge I think and the statement that it allows us to make as a service provider and as a policy advocacy to women and children saying you are being listened to your lives do matter your experiences count and yes we will be part of the transformation of your community that means that if this happens to you that there is accountability in the system and that you should come forward and you should expect protection and you should expect support I know I've had a wee rant there but I thank you for that question because I think it's easy to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of legislation especially because that's what you all do but from our perspective the ability to go out to the 36 service communities in which our services are based and say you have a bill that reflects what you have said you would like the Scottish Parliament to do about domestic abuse in Scotland now let us all make it so is a consummation devoutly to be wished thank you just from the inquiry in terms of inclusion of recklessness just for clarity you're supportive of that you want me to in terms of recklessness that's very much connected I think with some of the discussions we're having about reasonableness which is what are the hurdles in the bill that ensure that this law will not be used for trivial purposes or to prosecute people who are not being abusive or and we quite like the concept of recklessness because it again helps us create a focus on the abusive behaviour rather than on the impact of the victim so instead of having to prove which as I said is hugely problematic whatever serious harm might be which is what's in the law down south what we have is a statement about somebody either knowing that something is harmful or being reckless in the face of it and recklessness in that context is not a new concept for us in law and I think it's quite a nifty application of it here to be honest nifty not having a lot of gravitas I understand but in the sense that it's a mechanism that comes quite easily to hand in terms of well you should have known if you did not know you should have known and we talk about reckless driving and all kinds of things that are at that test of recklessness and I think in this bill it's quite a good tool for helping us create a robust case that abuses happened and without having to prove harm does that reply specifically enough yes, thank you a bunch of time so if the questions and the responses could be as succinct as possible and helpful, Fulton followed by Stuart thanks panel for evidence today, evidence that I think it's been very rich and I personally agree with fully and it's great to see all three of you so enthusiastic about the legislation come back to the issue of non-harassment orders you talked about why they should be used more which I agree with as I said but you think they could be made more robust when they are used I know it's a small number that you cited earlier being used but my own experience from being a social worker before being elected is that in many respects they're not particularly effective as well and have you got any ideas how they could perhaps be more robust I mean we've you're absolutely right sometimes that the non-harassment orders are as effective as they could be and part of that is about how they are then policed there's a specific example I can give you of a woman that we've worked with for quite some time and a non-harassment order was finally imposed as part of the sentence and the non-harassment order has been breached on a number of occasions and it was finally taken back to court and then there was nothing happened basically because it didn't meet the consistency of evidence and I think part of that is that the breach is a non-harassment order can be a bit like a lot of the time it's that kind of stalking and harassing behaviour that's on-going that's seen as being low level so for instance the car driving by and revving the engine all times of the night of being at the school when she's going to pick up the kids those types of things and I think it's that that sometimes I think trips it up is that it's not seen as being it's not a threat, it's not me coming up to you and saying you're using offensive language or threatening behaviour and I think that that's the difficulty is that our system doesn't police that particularly well we expect that when we talk about domestic abuse that the behaviour is abusive that it's me shouting at you or it's me using offensive language or actually threatening there's more subtle than that and at this point in time it doesn't lend itself to policing that particularly well however with a new legislation that type of behaviour would potentially be covered and a lot more or there's more scope for that to be dealt with and I think it is about having to get ourselves away from the idea that domestic abuse is about threatening abuse in that respect we can intimidate people in lots of different ways I suppose one that comes to mind and we've used recently in schools that we work in is the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump how did he try to intimidate her it was by invading her personal space David Davis and Leanne Wood on question time recently he went over and staring there's lots of different ways in which we can intimidate and try and get control of people that aren't necessarily overtly threatening and the current system focuses on that kind of overtly threatening behaviour and if it's not in that way we're not particularly good at following up and the courts dealing with that whereas hopefully with this new legislation it clearly states that it doesn't it gives the leeway for it not necessarily having to be that overtly threatening behaviour which gives some hope to eventually being able to improve the lives of those that are affected by domestic abuse because it actually fully breaks down what domestic abuse is and doesn't just focus on a incident or a thing let me just add to that I think there is some opportunity and it's a bit of a techie response I suppose but for better use of some of the technology for instance the electronic monitoring and those kinds of things that we are just beginning to explore I think in Scotland and it would be very I think that it would add some robustness to policing and responses if we explored and invested in electronic monitoring capacities to support some of the policing it would help provide evidence but it also would provide a significant amount of reassurance to some women who are who are not convinced that the perpetrator is going to abide by a non-harassment order and this is an important and that if and when he breaches it that the police will respond appropriately but I think the opportunity to support some of that policing with technology is potentially fruitful Do you think as well and I know this is something that maybe only developed once the bill was implemented in work in an area you've talked about as well but do you think that in terms of how these non-harassment orders are actually managed that there's work that can be done around what work has been done with the offender and what work has been done with the victim and where that fits into the length of time that maybe a non-harassment order is in place because obviously like anything you wouldn't expect a non-harassment order to be an indefinite thing however you know that the nature of that relationship might not change forever or it might not change at all or it might take a long time to change so I think that there is work to be done there as well and I just wondered very briefly given what the convener said what your thoughts are of that Will I go ahead I mean the reality is is that you know in terms of the outcomes at court that there's not enough work being done with perpetrators of abuse you know the system in terms of the Caledonia project etc it's very very sketchy across the whole of Scotland the Highlands for instance there is a you know the respect work gets done on a one to one basis but it's only with very very few perpetrators and it's those that are seen as being at the Kenny higher Kenny end and the difficulty is unless we address the behaviour then they will either go on and continue to abuse that partner or they'll find another partner and they'll start to abuse them and you know ultimately it's the perpetrator's abuse behaviour that needs to be addressed and at the moment we're not particularly great at doing that If I'm not mistaken there actually have been and maybe these are down south but some lifetime not in harassment order so I mean I think that's a tool that will be used very very rarely but potentially needed in rare cases but I do think there's a continuum exactly as you describe a response and that there would be an opportunity for work with perpetrators which I am not an expert on to integrate behaviour in compliance and non-compliance around a non-arrasment order into understandings of how behaviour change is needed in order for a perpetrator to respond appropriately to whatever treatment is being offered For the BME Implementing the harassment orders is a bit complicated like I mentioned before because of the family dynamics and the extended family members there might be a harassment orders on the man but to implement them is difficult because in one case for example we were involved in supporting the man and we were involved in supporting the women and there were interdicts and all but the thing was the children were taken to the grandparents house where the man would visit so he's actually not breaking any rules he's not asked not to visit his family home so he was visiting and the women would leave the children there she didn't want to but again it's because of the family pressure and she's actually not telling us that that's what she's doing so for that she's being blamed because she's the one who's putting the children at risk by taking them to the grandparents house and he would visit the children there and see so implementing is sometimes quite complicated so maybe these things when you're forming a bill you have to take into consideration how are we then going to protect women from these kind of situations that's all I want to say and it happens more often all they gave you one case scenario but it happens more often there was one women there were interdicts on the guy but she was and no request to public funds so she had nowhere to go therefore her in-laws who are parents of the husband offered her shelter they said she could stay with them so she was visiting his parents and there were no interdicts for him not to visit his parents home so how are you actually going to implement unless you have some kind of additional legislation to protect women from that kind of thing so actually in that case she is the one who is breaking the rules it's not him by allowing him to come in so yes we are very much over time now Stuart, if you could I just want to because I've heard different views at different times from the panel whose reasonableness is it because clearly when we're in court there are three reasonablenesses there's the perpetrator's view of reasonableness the victim's view of reasonableness and a societal view or the bench's view of reasonableness I just want to be clear where you think we should go in this particular where the victims are concerned there may be victims where the abuse over the long term has been of such a character as for the victim to normalise the behaviour to the extent they no longer realise that the behaviour of the perpetrator is unreasonable secondly the victim may lack mental capacity in particular in older couples where the victim may for example be suffering from dementia and therefore lack the mental capacity to make any assessment of whether reasonableness in relation to the behaviour of the perpetrator so whose reasonableness is it and in particular given that judges will tend to come from a particular social strata that may be disconnected from the day-to-day experience of the wider public where there is reasonableness and I am quite convinced that we should not incorporate the definition of reasonableness in the legislation because the facts and circumstances have to be brought to bear that was a long question can I have a short answer the very opposite of a succinct question but if you could have succinct answers please it's really hard to be quick first of all if you're under the illusion that domestic abuse doesn't happen in the homes where there are judges let's just out that one secondly and I've pulled up some text from our response so there's a reference here but it says we'd suggest that since the defence of reasonableness specifically states that the course of behaviour was reasonable in the particular circumstances that this wording is replicated in relation to the references to the reasonable person's consideration of the behaviour so in other words it's reasonable a reasonable person would consider the course of behaviour in the particular circumstances to be likely to cause B to suffer physical or psychological harm so really while all of this is quite interesting I think your question is really on point which is we are talking about the reasonableness of the people in the courtroom who are making the judgement about whether a crime has occurred and whether this particular perpetrator is the person who did the crime so that's the point around which reasonableness must respond I know that the convener is on my shoulder properly so the test of reasonableness is determined outside the relationship not inside it that's probably it there's just one thing I just thought whether you want the opportunity to come back at this the example that you used was outside the family one in connection to non-harassment orders the Hillary Clinton one Donald Trump one and the David Davis Leanne Wood I don't think you would want to muddy the waters because there is a real fear about the far leaching consequences of this I suppose that it was just to give an example of how intimidating behaviour can be to intimidate people and those two are ones that were very clearly in the public eye but you see that type of often the difficulty of the current situation in terms of the current legislation and the current law and the way that it's enacted is that we focus on violence we focus on actual threats we focus on what we as a society would think is abusive behaviour so I have to swear at you for that to be seen as being abusive I think that was important to get in record then can I pose one last question and it seems to me germane to the whole thing we think that there is a gap in the legislation most definitely and that's the course of behaviour gap how is it triggered that's the thing there's a course of conduct yes certainly and I notice specifically in the women's aid submission that don't ignore the existing law that's there, the stocking, the other but how is it triggered I think at the very beginning in your evidence you said it can be going on for years and years and at the point where suddenly they say well no, I'm not going to do that then it may materialise into violence so can it stand alone as an offence do we have enough for that? I think absolutely, I mean in terms of my experience at the time that I've worked done direct delivery work quite often the first time someone will contact us at women's aid the first thing they'll say to us is I don't know if he can help me if I ever hit me and they'll then come in or we'll speak to them and you will unpick a relationship where there's a huge huge amount of coercive control and behaviour which has an absolute negative impact on that women's physical integrity in terms of her belief in herself in terms of her mental wellbeing and so I think that there's lots of ways in which this can uncover itself you know, Marsha was saying about health and social care professionals I would actually say that a lot of health and social care professionals are really good particularly health visitors and saying to women that actually there's maybe an issue here your relationship sounds like that are you happy with your relationship that there's a high level of control and that you should maybe go and speak to women's aid so there's people who are involved in families lives or who come into contact with women or even friends and family who are actually able to say because actually you're no longer the person that you were and there's a lot of this when there maybe has been physical violence comes out when women are talking to the police but we can't do anything about it because it's not part of that specific incident that I want that you're given a statement about usually something triggers that the face of violence or enough is enough in leaving or someone's involved with a family and notices that difference between a family friend and a family member or it may just be that for a woman it's actually she's recognised that there's something's not right and she's tried to fix it within herself because quite often that's where it starts is that we will take responsibility for what's happening to ourselves and we'll try and change so we'll make sure that dinner's on the table at the right time we'll make sure that we cut our hair we are hair in a certain way or that we don't talk to our mums or our friends at the point that you start to then recognise that actually maybe the fault doesn't lie with you that it lies with the person who's telling you that it's your fault and that it's your behaviour that causes this. It's difficult to evidence coercive control whereas physical abuse is easier to... so coercive control takes much more listening and investigation to prove I think you need longer time to spend and for that reason we shouldn't actually abandon the bill because that's what we are trying to help women who are suffering coercive control so we shouldn't be fearful of investigation and listening One quick... Yes absolutely. I absolutely agree and I think that the trigger I'm hoping that the trigger will come sooner absolutely women call us all the time and say I'm not sure this is domestic abuse because I think we have this notion why doesn't she just leave is about that she doesn't mind being abused and I think our experience is that no one likes it but the gendered expectations of women and particularly if you look at the services we have for very young women that tell them that they're supposed to be this person and when young women have the same aspirations for having the space for action that all human beings have a right to then whether it's economic or being able to have their voice in Parliament or whatever it is those triggers will happen a lot sooner and perpetrators will have far fewer tools for it so it is a bit about being ambitious for women and girls that's been a long but very worthwhile evidence session bringing out a lot of things that will help us scrutiny of this bill so I can I thank the witnesses very much and suspend briefly for a change of witnesses and a five minute comfort break I welcome my second panel of witnesses on the domestic abuse Scotland bill Ronnie Barnes trustee action on elderly abuse Scotland Alan McCluskey director of operations Kevin Cain parliamentary policy and research officer victim support Scotland and following a late change to our agenda abused men in Scotland is represented by Alison Walk who is the trustee of the organisation you are very welcome can I thank the witnesses from elder abuse and VSS for providing written submissions always extremely helpful for the committee and I move now to questions from members can I perhaps start and look at the relationships covered I know this will be of particular interest to action and elderly abuse and to see if it should go further than partners and ex-partners thanks chair we feel it because there's particular issues to do with people as they get older that to confine it only to partners or ex-partners would perhaps be too restrictive because people do find themselves living with sons and daughters and other extended family members who then become caregivers and I think that in circumstances like that there is the likelihood and certainly in our experience abuse and exploitation and all manner of behaviours like that do occur and I think in order for this bill to properly protect older people it does need a large if you like the concept of who we're talking about here in terms of who are likely to be the perpetrators and who are likely to be the victims furthermore we think that there should be a specific aggregated offence for abuse of older people because we believe that not enough priority is given in the criminal justice system to the prosecution of offences against older people given the numbers of older people and the rise that there will be and the fact that older people require to be looked after in all manner of circumstances and situations the good thing is we're all living longer we're all living healthier lives but at certain points we are all going to become vulnerable and frail and this is not just something for a constituency of people out there this is about all of us and I think it's something that in terms of developing laws and protections it's something that we should be considering there's no doubt that there's a real issue there but I suppose the question is is this the appropriate bill to put it in it's called the domestic abuse bill it's very much what we've heard from some of the witnesses looked upon as a gender based bill without doubt then neighbours people looking after it's not even family it can be the perpetrators of abuse of the elderly I think the fear from some of the witnesses and I know you were both listening to the evidence was that it would then in some way water down this specific coercive control within a relationship that they want to make sure is covered that hasn't been in the past I have a question to yourselves as politicians if this is not the right bill then what is but I still think we have to address the fact that this is a significant growing problem in terms of abuse of all the people it cannot be shyed and I think our charity will continue to campaign to ensure that eventually we do get an aggravated offence which recognises the degree and type of offence that is happening day and daily we're also concerned about the fact that the criminal justice system doesn't particularly take it seriously and that the low level of reporting results in the low levels of serious prosecutions and the fact that we don't see the courts marking the fact that these offences are serious and giving sentences that reflect that and that's something we think should be addressed as well okay thank you anyone else on the panel Kevin? We will absolutely take cognisance of that view as a group who supports all victims however we mentioned by women's aid earlier on I think it is important that we restrict it to partner and ex partners and that that tallies with what we know about domestic abuse and what we know in terms of figures we've got to hand based on last years figures as an example out of all homicides in the UK 44% of female victims are killed by a partner or an ex partner so I think that highlights once more the gender dynamic that's at play here and how specific the offence needs to be and I think that as it stands Victim Support Scotland are comfortable that it's between partners and ex partners for that reason There is a danger perhaps taking on Ronnie's point absolutely but there is a danger that the bill may be weakened in the bill on the focus and the scope as it stands so I think to perhaps dilute it there are and there is other legislation rightly to protect older people and I think we concentrate on that whereas this bill is about domestic abuse, domestic violence and both the psychological and the aspect of violence and I think that's the strength that we want to see taken forward so otherwise in that definition it may lose a bit of traction and this bill is a very important piece of legislation that will be very much welcome Alison, did you have anything to add? I would have agreed with Ronnie actually because I feel it's abuse taking place in a home and the victim has no way of escaping they have to live there and keep returning there and to me I would have included it but it's not my specialty that would be in the wider context of the family Yes Anything else? I just think that it shouldn't be beyond us to be able to frame and to put into clauses the fact that it won't weaken the bill about perpetrators in terms of partners but I think to have to miss the opportunity to not include the fact that people are living in six situations being looked after by other caregivers and not to include them in this bill will be a real grave mistake because I'm not sure that the law as it stands covers the sort of situations that I'm talking about Stuart I'm the only set degenarian here so this is more relevant to me personally I've just been considering for example some of the provisions I've made one of which is power of welfare which I've given to two family members and in a third younger person in case they're not alive at the time I would not necessarily be living with a person who has power over my life and my circumstances how my hair's cut where I stay and so on and so forth How should that interaction with my making a choice in the last few years as I've done on that front be with what happens subsequently when I become incapable of exercising my own power to make decisions where does the line cross because what I have said about my future care for example I've said if I'm unaware of my surroundings get the cheapest possible provision don't put me in a posh home or anything would that be caught by the reasonable test that people might think in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years whatever it might be that that's unreasonable I think we're very well served with having good adult support and protection legislation in Scotland as opposed to what happens in the rest of the United Kingdom so I think we're very good at protecting people and taking account of their wishes and their needs and requirements but what we're not good at is criminal behaviour and I would have thought that the threshold in terms of what is criminal behaviour could be clearly understood if people are being exploited and abused and assaulted in whatever ways I think that should be clearly defined and I don't think there should be any confusion about whether or not it's at the soft end of caregiving it's not suggesting it's not a complex area because clearly it is and any familial situation where people are both caregivers and have responsibilities which they find difficult and therefore perhaps in a sense by default become abusers is to determination as to what you do about that and as I say there's probably adequate protection legislation in terms of adult support and protection to deal with situations like that when people recognise that they're getting into difficulties talking about sort of behaviour that is not acceptable it's criminal in its intent and it's to deal with situations like that because whether we like it or not people do get abused people do get violated and I think we've got to understand that and it's not trying to pretend that somehow you can sort of soften it away by saying that it's just to do with the circumstances and you've got to understand the perpetrator actually he was under pressure as well but I'm saying abuse is abuse let's deal with it and call it what it is John followed by Mary then Oliver Thank you morning panel a question following on Mr Barnes have I made from that I don't know if you heard the example that Dr Scott gave about the non-visibility of domestic violence as someone gets older could you comment on that because I thought that was quite a powerful statement that she made a vastly under reported situation something in the research that we did last year and this is mostly in England and the Wales something like only 6% of what we regard as criminal behaviour is actually reported people are very reluctant to come forward and we know this from our helpline but just to give you an example of some of the behaviours that do go on in 2013 in terms of financial abuse just let's take financial abuse of 680 calls that we received to the helpline we uncovered £25 million worth of abuse and that was people being defrodded having money stolen from them coerced out of their homes having their homes stolen that was the total monetary value and interestingly enough although we did a press release at the time not any of the national papers took that up there is a real lack of under reporting on issues to do with older people you will get the odd sensational thing that will come out but people are dying at the hands of their families and other sort of cruel perpetrators and these things are not actually being picked up but that's the scale of the problem we're talking about it's under reported because people are probably reluctant to come forward and also they're in this kind of relationship with people who are their caregivers for whom they are dependent but we've got to find the line ensuring that there's a kind of a zero tolerance and regard abusive older people and the say that we do with child protection it's something that's unacceptable and until we sort of make that mark and make those statements I'm afraid this situation is going to continue but remember this is about all of us this is not about some group of people out there I don't know, assembly we're all likely to be finding ourselves in some vulnerable situations at some times in our lives but they will be dependent on others we need to ensure that the law is robust enough to deal with situations when abuse is not anything other than what it is it's abuse you do touch on the under reporting in detail Mr Barnes, a number of issues that you cite is precluding people coming forward fear of loneliness rates have been pressed in a home embarrassed to report their own children or family members feeling they're a burden unable to find words to explain going back to the comment about some of this could be picked up at the moment a straightforward assault some could be picked up as domestic violence on the particular point and Dr Marcia Scott from Scottish Women's Aid said there was a concern that older people as people became older they became invisible in the sphere of domestic violence, domestic abuse which is what we're focusing on here gender based violence in particular which predominantly is violence by men against women do you not feel that there's an enhanced position for older people in any case where this bill to progress I'd like to think so but I still think that we would miss a trick if we didn't actually be more specific about who we regard as being covered by this and particularly in terms of who the perpetrators are and just to send a signal that in fact abuse of older people is not to be tolerated and I think that's something that we don't really have on the current criminal code because I think that the police probably find it difficult to prosecute certain circumstances there's the reliability or otherwise of witnesses older people themselves may not be very credible and yet particularly when you've got issues to do with dementia and people's lack of sort of mental capacity how then do you find that people who are likely to end up in court, how are they going to become credible so I think there's a kind of a way of which if you like people are being diverted and discouraged from following through on issues where they are being sort of violated and abused in whatever the circumstances so it's trying to find a means by which we all take this seriously the other things that we're also concerned about is that again in our research as you'll see in our submission of over 18,000 crimes against older people there are only 194 successful prosecutions and most of the penalties are either police costs with community service or suspended or deferred sentences I'm not suggesting you lock everybody up but I think there are certain crimes where you would expect somebody to be imprisoned for a significant length of time because of the violation of trust but the current sort of penal policy is that people are sort of if you like almost diverted from being sort of seriously dealt with and you've got signals to future perpetrators that this is a serious matter and that's what we want to do in the course of this is to send a signal and to highlight this as a growing and prevalent problem that needs to be addressed OK, thank you very much Mary, followed by Oliver Thank you, convener and good morning I wonder if I could perhaps come to you Alison to ask you for a bit more detail around abused men in Scotland because I was struck by a couple of comments that Mr Barnes made in response to a previous question where he said that elder abuse is under-reported and it's not always taken seriously and I suspect in relation to male victims of domestic abuse you could almost say the same thing and I wonder if you could perhaps comment on that in an earlier panel session Dr Scott said that as this legislation progresses training will be critical particularly in court of sheriffs and judges and I'm interested in your views specifically in relation to male victims of domestic abuse and it also expands out into if we think of the number of support organisations that are out there the majority of them are female based support organisations so is there a real job of education to be done with all the support organisations to make sure they are absolutely gender neutral? Yes. We do have concerns that sometimes men are forgotten as older people and actually the piece of research referred to by Dr Scott was actually about older women and not older men so we don't really know much about older men either. As for training we very strongly believe not necessarily gender neutral training there are gender differences and we acknowledge many gender differences but the training has to acknowledge the experience that many men do have we can't quantify the proportion of domestic abuse that takes place that affects men it can be anything between around 20% that actually come to the attention of the police 50% that some researchers would come up with it's somewhere in between there we also need to stress that coercive control does affect men as well there is some the initial research of when the terminology coercive control and also intimate terrorism that's similar when they were first introduced the authors insisted that they were predominantly what men did to women but there's been quite a lot of research since then that illustrates that actually it happens a lot to men as well by other men and more so by other women as well it's very common indeed and that needs to be recognised it's being called gendered abuse because I presume that's because it's between partners it's possibly because it's more it affects women more than men but it still affects a huge number of men and their children who are in the homes where this abuse is going on that we really need to take it more seriously now men who are affected and men we talk with often say now that the police are quite aware of what's going on they understand I think they were the first group of professionals to really get it social workers, doctors they all know it happens they all recognise it but just as it happened I had an email yesterday from a man who suffered many years of coercive control at the hands of his wife and he actually raised a problem that he found that illustrated the need for training for judges and sheriffs because when you're suffering coercive abuse he said the acceptable becomes not only accepted but expected it becomes normalised and that was mentioned earlier and so that when he's talking about it he's always minimising it and trying to excuse it and when it came he had two cases of you know criminal assault that came to court and he found it very difficult to be critical of what his wife had done he kept thinking well I was married to her once she's the mother of my children he was so used to minimising it anyway and explaining away the injuries or the awkward situations that were cropping up and the problem was that in both court appearances there was a not proven verdict because he didn't seem affected enough and that seems to be a gendered problem that on average a lot of men don't actually show the emotion they don't show the heart the damage that's being done sometimes they show anger and that doesn't work in their favour at all if they do that but if they don't show anything at all they just try and stick to the facts it works against them because all that happened was just dismissed so he was very much in favour of training and I really think that training has to be what we would say gender inclusive rather than gender neutral so that we can talk about issues and issues that particularly affect women and hopefully and people who don't identify as either or whatever but we need to make sure everybody's addressed I mean even if it was 1% it's important but it's a lot more than that Are men more likely or do you have any information are men more likely to wait longer to report abuse I believe they do they do seem to take much longer and sometimes that's attributed to masculinity it's a feeling of pride and men sometimes believe they should be strong they might feel that to admit that they're being abused by somebody who others might consider to be weaker than they are makes them less of a man that this position is put across quite often but the other real issue for men is that they find it hard to find support our charity is tiny and we do sometimes realise that it's not well enough known and we're still working on that but we couldn't cope with all the cases even if we were better known so there's the lack of services in the past there was an issue of going to a service and being laughed at not treated seriously and the other thing is just the public narrative about domestic abuse always sees it's about violence against women and girls by men in the previous session I don't think abuse of men was ever mentioned fair enough it was women's organizations but I think sometimes that narrative that we just heard is the only one people here out there so a man who's beginning to realize that what's happening to him isn't right and he's feeling awful he can't recognise it as domestic abuse because that's something that happens to women it's a women's issue so we maybe need to find a way of yes maintaining the importance of violence against women but raising awareness that actually there's violence against men out there as well and it's equally important for each individual man it's the same amount on average of suffering that has been very helpful thank you can I just amplify that because we the charity carried out a UK-wide prevalence study about abuse within older people 10 years ago and in Scotland 10 years ago there were more men than women who were subject to abuse which was contrary to the trend across the rest of the UK but that's 10 years ago on a very sparsal study but just to amplify Alison's point about how men also are likely to be victims of domestic abuse contrary to what the national profile would suggest that it is as an organisation we are gender inclusive across we support around 13% of our referrals are from men there is a particular stigma and a reluctance to come forward because it's not seen as the right thing to do from a man somehow it's more difficult to come forward and admit they've been harmed and hurt either by a male or a female in a relationship and that has gone on for a period of time so very much there is an awareness raising that needs to be done to encourage people and I think there is an opportunity through the bill to encourage all victims of abuse domestic abuse, domestic violence to come forward asking for help, asking for support is the right thing to do we as a national organisation are right across Scotland and we would work with partners to encourage people and support individuals to have the courage to come forward and hopefully through the bill there will be the confidence that victims have to say enough is enough and I want some help with that there were some questions earlier and discussions around training and I think absolutely training for the authorities, whether it be the police and the prosecution service they recognise they want to tackle this issue and we very much welcome the opportunity to work with our partners in encouraging people to come forward have the strength to come forward and let justice be done One more comment about the need for training just something that the person who emailed me yesterday threw in and I was really quite shocked by it he said that he was informed by somebody who was present that in the lawyer's room in the sheriff's court before the case against my wife was heard there were a number of ribald remarks about a man being a victim of female violence and casting doubts on my masculinity if people are coming across that I mean that is not encouraging men to come forward and if that attitudes prevalent in the legal profession we've got a big problem so yeah no I'm fine thank you just to say on what Mary was saying and what's just been said I think this bill will raise awareness for all victims of domestic abuse and will possibly encourage men to think well what's happening to me isn't right and give them a voice and you know for all really going what Alan and Kevin were saying so would you agree with that that this bill is a good thing to raise awareness generally I think it might be when I first heard about the possibility of a bill a law about coercive control I actually thought it might work in men's favour actually because they tend not they often do suffer from major serious assaults but very often it is just a low level constant attack I suppose that they don't recognise as abuse but if this is publicised and the sort of behaviour that this is about is publicised I think and hope more men will recognise it and more women and other men will recognise that it's maybe a sort of behaviour some people do but don't actually realise they're doing it I don't know if that's possible but it would certainly be a sharp reminder to people to be careful of their own behaviour Thank you Oliver followed by Ben Oath little you Oliver you've been My question has been answered Okay thank you Ben Thank you convener just very quickly Ronnie Barnes I thought he spoke very purposefully about the broadening of the bill's scope and the definition of the sort of abuse you're trying to capture as well as partner and ex-partner what if you were to redraft the definition yourself what would you put in there I suppose that we would go with the definition that we have within our own sort of charity which is a single or repeated actor lack of appropriate action occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust which causes harm or distress to an older person and that's very broad but I mean within that anything that strays into criminality in terms of abuse violence psychological abuse financial abuse I mean it wouldn't be hard to work up the things that particularly we know go on on a kind of daily basis and also there's also to do with neglect that's another feature of abuse a bit more insidious and that's something that may well happen say in care homes about standards and it's again trying to find a line in the threshold where something that becomes a poor standard becomes a criminal act and becomes willful it's trying to find the willfulness as opposed to the sort of the if you like more benign but accumulative effect so it's a complicated area I'm not in any way suggesting this is easy to try and find even a form of words or find a sort of a clause within your bill that's going to answer what I'm looking for but if we don't do it in this bill we've got to do it somewhere else because this is coming down the track to all of us and until we address this and get people to take it seriously this is still going to go on it's interesting that other countries have taken on this issue about abuse of older people and have made it an aggravated offence we had at our conference last year the prosecutor from San Diego who talked very eloquently and passionately about having had this law enforced for the last 20 years and the benefits it's brought to his community for clarity that was more an expansion on the concept of abuse and I was grateful for that that what I was interested in in terms of the perpetrator how would you seek to articulate that so would that be an expansion to family members to see the ambiguity that I'm starting with there I think that there are not necessarily family members but people who get close to victims who are able to exploit them and it's finding a means by which we send a signal that is unacceptable the thing is because we've got both if you like a regulated workforce who look after all the people but because people are able to look at and buy in their own care they've now got this unregulated workforce who people can sort of bring in and there's no way of knowing how unscrupulous those people can be and they can target victims because let's face it people in their latter years are going to become more vulnerable and that's before we talk about the issue of dementia and people's capacity and what's happening to them now as I say this is not easy but I still think we can look elsewhere and see what other nations have done to try and address this problem because if we don't the problem is just not going to go away and I think the opportunity through this bill and we are gratified that this bill is actually going to happen but I think this is an opportunity for us to at least have our concerns addressed as well in relation to older people and I know that it's not going to be easy for you to do that and just very briefly convener just another question and on McCleusie you mentioned set of figures around the percentage of male victims of abuse that were quantified within a survey that you did could you just clarify what the percentage was for female victims of abuse within that? 87% for females that come forward in our community service so it's 13% of men that come forward and 87% is female great thank you okay food yeah thanks convener thanks panel for the evidence at the last session just before you came on there was quite a lot to talk about the non-harassment orders that can be implemented by the court I wanted to know what you thought about specifically in relation to elders and also men what the abuser in those particular circumstances getting a non-harassment order if there'd be any complications to those situations and I say that by thinking about maybe an older person may or may not have the person who's been abused and may have quite significant care in role that may not be able to be picked up through the community services and actually I had in talking about a male victim of domestic violence actually it was aware of a situation some time ago where a male had been a victim the female actually got a non-harassment order which is quite strange in itself because they're not actually used a lot but then the female got one and it actually led to extreme difficulties in the family leading to the children actually needing other intervention because their needs were there therefore not being met so I suppose what I'm asking is I'm giving a couple examples here have you thought about how the non-harassment order aspect impacts your specific client groups I don't have statistics to hand on how many of the men we work with have tried to get non-harassment orders because I'm a trustee and the service manager is ill so I'm not quite sure how many of our clients have actually tried I know it's something that's not usually suggested to men and very few would try and few would get one on the other hand well no it's not a non-harassment order I was just going to say if there's any legal obstacle to men being with their families but at the moment it's sort of the procurator fiscal would I'm finding it hard to hear you I'm really sorry the procurator fiscal at the moment would apply for it but if there was a change through the legislation that there was more a presumption that if somebody had committed and been convicted of that offence that there would be a non-harassment order and put in place I'm thinking about what the possible if it's different from the likely to be experienced by a male having a non-harassment order which we talked more fully about in the last session sorry I'm still not hearing but I'll let you say something because I'm not quite sure if we look at all the people I think one of the successes that has been in the last 10 years has been the adult support and protection legislation which allows for the more complicated issues to do with carers becoming perpetrators and the familiar situations about you know I don't want to have my son leave the house but I want the abuse to stop and I think there are means by which that legislation can invoke sort of short term measures like banning orders or removal orders which can in fact bring about some change we're not trying through this to try and criminalise everything and to interfere as was said in the early session about family life because that's probably going to be one of the main criticism that this bill's going to have how much of the state is interfering in family life and how much of what happens is actually just what happens in families but it's all about finding that line where you actually are straying into what is criminal behaviour there are ways in which there are still means by which through adult support and protection legislation in Scotland that can address some of these more complicated family situations but it's when they go beyond that and go into, we have to be very clear about what is criminal behaviour and what isn't and I think there are means by which we can do that through this bill I think there would be many men who would not necessarily want the abusive partner taken away or not allowed to make contact it would be, I think it should be decided on individual cases it shouldn't be automatic but the possibility should be there for it to be relatively straightforward to put in place if it's needed me to maybe illustrate the chronology of one of our service users in terms of her court journey it will take me a couple of minutes to talk it through but it's in relation to non-harassment order it culminates in a non-harassment order which I believe would have happened sooner and I'm tying a number of things to the bill as I go it will just take me two minutes just to read it through No question of anyone being identified absolutely not for the purposes of anonymity I've changed all the detail it's the essence of it and the timeline won't be exact either it's noteworthy that there was a psychological and coercive element in this case and that the threats had been repeated, we'll call the individual Maggie her then partner pled not guilty to three charges disorderly conduct menacing statements and a common law breach of the peace now he was granted bail despite procurator fiscal opposing bail this case met section 1 relating to a course of behaviour the conditions in section 1 subsection 2 that the reasonable person would suffer psychological harm and section 2 subsection a that the abuse of behaviour included threats and intimidation so it's not entirely sure what Sheriff would have done had he been in receipt of a domestic abuse Scotland act but it's clear that he would have had it would have been less discretionary the now ex-partner was making life difficult he's released on bail the threats continued and at this point the procurator advised the police to consider whether there would be evidence to support a charge involving a contravention of section 39 subsection 1 of the criminal justice and licence in Scotland act which the committee will be well aware refers to stalking in the interim the perpetrator called again to court the civil court and whilst the petition did call in court no further order was made and the accused was released again now the accused was then arrested for sending sexually explicit texts and as outlined in section 4 subsection 2 of the current bill in his attempts to make contact with the child of the partner he's used that child to direct behaviour at the partner this wasn't taken into account during this process now if you bear with me it is important I'm going to get to the relevant point here finally the case called again six months down the line for the initial hearings over six months since the very first the very first set of intimidating behaviour occurred and so the law failed our service user at that point the sheriff sentenced the person to a community payback order a fine and a three year non harassment order because my point is we shall summarise quickly three or four months earlier if our client didn't have to go between the civil and the criminal courts and that process meant she was victimised over and over again and traumatised as a result and as a victim rights group that's what we want to do is support and signpost as best we can and a unifying law would have enabled us to do that and just finally by the way recklessness is important just to pick up on what you said earlier on about the responses of men that's actually in the bill the concept of recklessness which means the focus will be on the perpetrator whether the victim's a man or a woman so even if a man is being a bit stoic and taking a bit longer cut through this is your point really that the non harassment order could have been issued at the very beginning the stocking was proved the threatening communication through the text was proved but there was no automatic yes and the overaction coercive and psychological element that wasn't considered either which might have been an aggravated and the aggravating factor in relation to the child okay thank you recklessness just for clarity okay Fulton happy a brief question in relation to the wider scope of similar legislation south of the border we've heard evidence from previous panels that to an extent is too early to tell what the impact of that is in the first panel this morning we heard suggestions that the cases brought under that legislation have been more limited albeit I think that was in the context of the thresholds for abuse but it would seem that the legislation in the rest of the UK does broaden out to include some of the the situations that Mr Barnes and what you've been alluding to have you got any impressions of how that legislation is operating to date? I don't I'm hoping that research is not going to show that somehow it weakens the bill I think that was suggested in the earlier session that that may well be the case but I can't really see how including people who have got significant responsibilities and roles with older people can be seen to weaken the bill because if they are included it makes that clear that they are included I think to be fair to Dr Scott she was making that point in relation to the threshold of harm rather than the bread in that case it may suggest that the actual widening out of the definition of who could be the abuser may not in fact weaken the bill and if that is the case then maybe that is evident if you can gather evidence to suggest that that is helpful in terms of bringing in the kind of people that I'm talking about who need to be included in this then maybe that's something that might encourage yourselves to widen the definition for this bill Do Victim Support Scotland have a view or do you fall into the camp of it being a little early given that the implementation was only from the very end of 2015 I think at the moment it's too early to call on that one During course of our evidence we've heard from individuals and organisations who are either mothers or representing mothers and fathers about child contact being used by an ex-partner to abuse or undermine the other parent I wonder if you have any views on that and what might be done to address it Alison I was hoping to mention that certainly for fathers who have been abused when they leave the abusive home as they usually do and become non-resident fathers that an awful lot of abuse continues while they are in that situation In fact it's overwhelmingly men who suffer from this although I know women do as well but issues of contact the difficulty of even achieving contact in the first place can be very costly it can mean visits to the courts men have fathers have to prove that they're good fathers they might have been the main carer up until the separation but even then if the child stays with its mother in some cases unless there's an amicable agreement about contact men often find themselves in a situation of having to prove the good fathers proving that they're even safe for the child to be with even though the child's been in their sole company for lots of time up until the separation so that's a problem and contact can be turned off and on apparently at a whim arrangements can be changed court orders can be breached and in most cases the men are totally helpless if that happens and if they if they show annoyance that they've turned up to take the children and for some reason they're not having them and they get angry then they're at risk of having the police come because they've maybe shouted or sounded aggressive when they're actually just extremely upset and that can lead to all sorts of difficulties so I know that that is a major issue and I know that people who support fathers in these situations feel very strongly that this should be included as one of the behaviours that constitute coercive control because this sort of behaviour it's actually abuses the child too it's depriving a child from the benefit of a loving parent obviously in cases where one parent or the other is really dangerous and can be shown to be that's a different situation I'm talking about people who are not at all dangerous but acrimonious rather than dangerous so that is a major problem and it even extends to schools being told by one parent not to allow the other parent any information about the child when there's no legal reason why that should be the case it's just constant controlling making life difficult for the other person and it can be very upsetting for the person who's affected and for the child and the child needs to be considered it really is a form of child abuse sometimes child contact is denied because more money is being asked for more child support and even the organisations that deal with child support but it was the CSA and now it's the CMS I certainly was involved years ago in a case where a father was well claims were made by the mother that the father had resources which he didn't have it took 18 months to a tribunal where it was agreed that he wasn't owing any money and during all that time the stress the threat of sheriff officers coming around to extract this money that he didn't have it was appalling abuse so it's actually using another organisation to exert coercive control over a partner that you no longer have a good relationship with and it's really very serious indeed and I know for a while some men were committing suicide as a result of CSA action I haven't been involved in a case recently I don't know if it's quite as bad now but it's certainly something we need to be in mind and the other thing is false accusations of abuse for a purpose especially in separation battles it's an easy way to not have to see your former partner that you don't really want to see again for good enough reasons but again there's no legal reason to separate the child from that parent other than you don't want to see him but your child is a different person and it's his or her parent employers are often approached as well we've come across a few cases where somebody's maybe been a policeman or a teacher and an accusation of abuse or violence would seriously compromise their employment prospects it would be likely to lose their jobs and in some cases there were repeated inquiries to check out the truth of these accusations and the men were found to be faultless but the stress on everybody's part it's really difficult so I'd like to think that making use of other organisations or other people like brothers and fathers to harass an ex as well should come under the umbrella of coercive control and victim supported I don't know if you have any use maybe just a general point about the impact of domestic abuse and violence on a child after witness and experience cannot be underestimated and for some children unfortunately that is the norm that they live with and as a society we want to avoid a situation where a child witnessing that believes that's acceptable and then moves on to potentially offending behaviour we do a lot of support to children who appear as witnesses vulnerable witnesses in the court setting and some of the children are under 8 years old under 12 years old and under 18 in different categories and having to support the children for them to recount and recap what they have witnessed for that child is incredibly difficult and there's further work to be done I think to understand what support can be put in place generally for children in situations where they're caught up in a domestic violent family that's growing up when a perpetrator is causing harm whether it be to the male or the female to support the child through that and help them I think that concludes our questioning thank you all very much and can I perhaps assure Mr Barnes that he has well and truly the issue which I think we're all aware needs much more attention so please be assured at the very least of that today thank you all very much for attending we now move into private session the next committee meeting will be on Tuesday 20th of June when we will continue our evidence taking on the Domestic Abuse Scotland Bill and consider our forward work programme and suspend briefly now to allow the witnesses to leave and the public gallery to clear