Remember the days when our TV screens were full of men cracking jokes about ‘giving the missus a backhander’ if she complained about him coming home drunk? That was back when rank misogyny dominated police forces, and domestic violence was described as a private matter ‘between a man and his wife’.
Then along came those pesky feminists, demanding that domestic violence be treated in the same way as a man beating up another man in the street. These women set up domestic violence helplines and refuges without government funding, staffed by volunteers. This began in the late sixties and early seventies, so it would be fair to assume that things have improved beyond recognition since then.
Every aspect of the system is falling apart, and this costs lives
Not so. Figures released this week show that between 2020 and 2023, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline recorded a 40 per cent rise in victims (overwhelmingly women reporting violent men) seeking advice about the criminal justice system (CJS). This data, shown to Sky News, suggests that survivors still don’t trust the authorities to help them properly – and so are leaning on charities to help them deal with the aftermaths of their ordeals.
After decades of campaigning and advocacy by feminists and other experts in men’s violence towards women and girls, we might have expected improvement rather than worsening. But the CJS is broken. Figures published in November by the Office for National Statistics showed that the percentage of convictions for 2023 remained static at 76 per cent for a second year running. Male violence has always been deprioritised, from police through to magistrates and judges, because it’s seen as part of the normal fabric of society, with women so often disbelieved, and men so often given carte blanche.
There has long been a move towards encouraging women to use civil (rather than criminal) law in dealing with the hell of domestic violence. The phrase ‘not worth the paper’ has for decades now been used to describe so-called Protective Orders – which women must pay lawyers to help them obtain (unless they are entitled to legal aid), and are issued to the police who record them. At least that is the theory. In practice they are constantly breached by men who know they are unlikely to be arrested.
Mother and daughter Khaola Saleem and Raneem Oudah were stabbed to death outside their Solihull home by Raneem’s ex-husband in 2018. This double murder perfectly illustrates how the system fails women trapped by violent men. Raneem had called police countless times, but they decided he was not high-risk. She called 999 several times that night, after the perpetrator had been spotted stalking the two women, and was on the phone begging police to attend the scene as she was stabbed to death.
Protective orders are breached in their thousands; perpetrators feel invincible, because they are very rarely taken to task. Meanwhile, police are poorly-trained, under-resourced, and can – as has been highlighted since the Sarah Everard murder – themselves be perpetrators. The Crown Prosecution Service is not fit for purpose, and is, like the courts, underfunded. For women courageous enough to have reported their abuser, waiting times are off the scale. Women often end up dropping charges because they feel unsafe with the perpetrator at large during the process. Every aspect of the system is falling apart, and this costs lives.
We need a return to specialist support services run by feminists who are expert in male violence, and can support women through the process. All too often, contracts are given to non-specialist bodies that are clueless about the dynamics between these particular perpetrators and their victims. We also need a return to specialist policing, with separate units dedicated to these crimes featuring trained officers who know how to speak to victims – and to avoid being swayed by the manipulative tactics of perpetrators.
Relatively few men are charged and tried for these crimes, but for those that are, we need a return to the specialist domestic violence courts. These used to be commonplace and are now a rarity – but their waiting times were shorter, and the women (all vulnerable victims, living in fear for their lives) were given tailored, bespoke support.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to hold violent men accountable through the CJS. Every three days, a woman dies at the hands of a male former or current partner. It is a travesty. Those who say domestic violence is perpetrated equally by women against men, the morgues tell a different story. How many women will die before the system provides sufficient deterrent to stop these men committing such acts against the women they claim to love?
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