The Independent Sentencing Review report recommends long overdue changes to the criminal justice system – signalling welcome news while raising significant concerns for victims and survivors of domestic abuse.
Some of the good news
- Recognition that short-term custodial sentences disproportionately affect women; emphasising need for community-based sentencing instead.
- Acknowledgement that women are often coerced into crime by their partners.
- Highlighting the need for better identification, recording, data and information-sharing on perpetrators of domestic abuse, across the system.
- Understanding that victims and survivors of abuse will often have a trauma-based response to situations – and the need for trauma-informed training for a range of criminal justice professionals.
- Expansion of Specialist Domestic Abuse Courts; allowing IDVAS / SVAS to support clients in court.
At Woman’s Trust we have almost 30 years of expertise and insight in providing specialist trauma-informed support for domestic abuse survivors.
This makes us well-placed to provide trauma-informed training for criminal justice professionals, and specialist trauma-informed counselling for women to address the underlying causes of their offending and help them break the cycle of abuse.
However, measures to reduce the prison population will likely be implemented well-before arguably longer-term aspirations for the management of abuse perpetrators.
And in a system where it’s already hard to secure a conviction for domestic abuse, for some survivors the changes to prison terms and licencing arrangements may feel like rare and hard-fought justice is being diminished.
Moreover, this does nothing to address the physical and psychological safety of those survivors whose only physical and psychological safety comes from knowing their abuser is in prison.
To say nothing of those still trapped in abusive relationships hoping to escape.
The government needs to put urgent funding in place to support the physical and the psychological safety of survivors.
We repeat our urgent call to The Rt. Hon. Wes Streeting MP, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Home Office to recognise the significant mental health impact of domestic abuse and to fund specialist, long-term counselling support for survivors.
We placed this story in The Telegraph a few months ago, where a survivor explained the impact of perpetrators’ early release from her perspective.
My abusive partner has been released from prison and it terrifies me that I don’t know where he is.
Click here to read the Independent Sentencing Review report.
