Havant Women\u2019s Aid
\nAnnual General Meeting
\n4 September 2001<\/p>\n
It is good to be here this evening and to hear of the work, activity and energy of Women\u2019s Aid in Havant.<\/p>\n
I have been involved in work on violence against women for more than a third of a century.\u00a0 It is almost always depressing and frustrating and there are few laughs, apart that is from the laughter which springs from the astonishing resilience of women in and around a Women’s Aid refuge.<\/p>\n
But some things have changed over that 30 year period and are continuing to change.\u00a0 I am going to talk about that tonight.<\/p>\n
I started my criminological career as a forensic psychologist. When I was being trained, the culture of the time was captured by words of a senior police officer who said, “you have to remember that not all murders are equally serious.\u00a0 Some are just men killing their wives”.<\/p>\n
You take the culture of the day for granted.\u00a0 Generally, you have to be standing somewhere else in order to be able to challenge it.\u00a0 To regard murderers who kill strangers as more dangerous than husbands who killed wives was simply the way people looked at things.<\/p>\n
Domestic violence was just that, a domesticated form of violence.\u00a0 Rather less serious than other violence because at least we, the public, were not at risk.\u00a0 Every couple had a row from time to time and we should not be surprised if violence was part of that.<\/p>\n
I am pleased to say two things as a follow-up to that story. \u00a0First, that no senior police officer would say anything remotely like that today.\u00a0 Rather, they would go to great, and indeed impassioned, lengths to contradict it.\u00a0 The police have completely changed their views on violence in the home and handle it in a wholly different way.\u00a0 More of that later.<\/p>\n
Secondly, the Government has spoken out.\u00a0 Last year, the then Deputy Home Secretary, Paul Boateng said \u201cHome should be a place of safety and domestic violence should be seen as a breach of trust so serious as to be an aggravating factor in how [offenders are] dealt with and in sentencing\u201d.<\/p>\n
What a change!\u00a0 Here we have a Home Office Minister saying that, because of the breach of trust involved, domestic violence should be regarded more seriously than other forms of violence and should be treated as such by the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n
That is the position which the Government has taken in the UK and that is the position which the UK has promoted across the member and applicant states of the EU.<\/p>\n
So let’s celebrate that change.\u00a0 Like in any change in culture, one wonders why anyone ever saw it differently.<\/p>\n
But domestic violence continues at an unacceptably high level.\u00a0 In this country, each week, two women a week are killed by their partners, or ex-partners.\u00a0 Roughly one in four women and one in seven men reported a physical assault by a current or former partner in their lifetime.\u00a0 Between one in nine and one in ten women experience domestic violence in any given year.\u00a0 Figures like this may well be familiar to this audience.\u00a0 They are listed very graphically on Women’s Aid’s excellent website.<\/p>\n
With violence in the home, we know that women suffer 10 or 15 attacks before they go to the police.\u00a0 An average adult has to go to A&E, as a patient about twice in a lifetime.\u00a0 Before a woman is killed, she will have been to hospital because of her injuries between 30 and 35 times. Identifying the victims of domestic violence does not require a degree, just an ability to count to ten.\u00a0 Lots of people will know of the violence she is enduring.\u00a0 But most will not have the courage to ask questions.<\/p>\n
It’s just all so predictable.\u00a0 Last week, a Kent police officer killed his wife and children.\u00a0 The papers were full of how surprising this was: he was such a lovely man, who adored his children.\u00a0 Nobody would have imagined he could do it.<\/p>\n
I agree that, if that were true, it would indeed be astounding.\u00a0 It took just a day for a different version to emerge.\u00a0 He had attacked his wife before.\u00a0 His own force had considered charging him with assault.\u00a0 He was just like all those who murder their wives.\u00a0 He had been at it for years and killed her, as so many do, when she said she wanted to leave.<\/p>\n
There is something of that in my next story.\u00a0 But, not least because at AGMs one celebrates progress and hope, I wanted to talk tonight particularly about the case of Gina McCarthy.\u00a0 Like all stories of domestic violence, it is deeply disturbing.\u00a0 But this one has at least a little bit of hope as well.<\/p>\n
Gina lived with her husband, Paul Russell, and their baby son, Adam, in Torquay.\u00a0 She was the subject of considerable violence by Paul, and after an incident in which she was dragged down the stairs by her hair, she separated from him and took Adam to the Women\u2019s Aid refuge in Penzance.<\/p>\n
Paul was determined to try to find Gina and to go to some lengths to do so. He instructed an enquiry agent and initiated child contact proceedings in the court, ostensibly so he could see his son.\u00a0 As is not uncommon in such cases, Paul threw in an allegation, later proved groundless, that the boy was at risk of violence from his mother.<\/p>\n
Gina had to come out of hiding for the court hearings and to allow child contact. Her local court was, by now, Truro and Paul was beginning to work out where she was.<\/p>\n
While Paul started to search for Gina more earnestly he was convicted for the assault he had committed when he dragged her down the stairs.<\/p>\n
Four months after Gina had fled from Torquay Paul, by persisting with his contact order, sought an order from the court which involved a report by Penzance and Truro Social Services and Penzance Women\u2019s Aid.\u00a0 All this will have been disclosed, by the solicitor, to Paul Russell.\u00a0 Paul was getting closer.\u00a0 Penzance Women\u2019s Aid requested, and obtained, additional security and protection from the police.\u00a0 The court, by a series of directions, sought to increase the level of protection for Gina.<\/p>\n
On 9 May 1998, Paul Russell found Gina in her secure house and killed her.\u00a0 He is now serving life imprisonment for murder and Adam has been adopted out.<\/p>\n
But that is not the end, quite.\u00a0 At the urging of Women\u2019s Aid, Paul Boateng was determined to see whether anything could be done to reduce the chance of all this happening again with another victim in similar circumstances.\u00a0 He asked for a review into the circumstances of Gina’s death \u2013 itself slightly unusual in that this was likely to be more about civil, than criminal, law and therefore not within the normal ambit of the Home Office \u2013 and I\u00a0was the person who did that review.<\/p>\n
Because the outcome of this review is now public, I am able to speak publicly about the Gina McCarthy case for the first time. Because of the part which Women\u2019s Aid has played, it is a pleasure to be able to do so at a Women\u2019s Aid AGM.<\/p>\n
I was able to meet all the people involved in the case: the judges, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service staff and Gina\u2019s legal representative.\u00a0 All were immensely helpful and immensely shocked and distressed by the way this case had turned out.\u00a0 I had access to any papers.<\/p>\n
There was little doubt that the courts had done all the right things and the police had provided extensive protection, but it still ended in death.<\/p>\n
This bit of the tale is therefore also about attitudes to domestic violence.\u00a0 One attitude was that, if someone is determined enough to commit murder, in a free society, there is not much you can do to stop that. That can’t be right.<\/p>\n
Civil courts are less formal than criminal courts and commendably speedier.\u00a0 A criminal case can take several weeks, sometimes even months, before it comes to trial.\u00a0 By contrast, civil courts often have to act within twenty four hours, sometimes even less.\u00a0 This difference in time meant that Paul Russell’s outstanding criminal charges were not heard until after the contact proceedings were well under way.<\/p>\n
Indeed, although Paul Russell was charged with violence offences against Gina, and had serious previous convictions, little if any of this was put before the civil courts because of a convention that unproved criminal matters should not play a part in determining a civil matter.\u00a0 The two court systems were entirely separate.\u00a0 This left Paul free to argue that he was a fine, upstanding, father who would hurt nobody.<\/p>\n
Secondly, solicitors try to be open with their clients.\u00a0 This meant that, in a case like this when evidence is produced by a social worker from Cornwall or Penzance or wherever, Paul Russell could immediately see, not merely the content of the evidence, but the whereabouts of its author.\u00a0 If you know the name of the social worker, it is not difficult to find where he or she works.<\/p>\n
Thirdly, civil proceedings are handled by civil law lawyers, without the Crown Prosecution Service or the police having any part to play.\u00a0 The powerful Protection from Harassment Act 1997<\/em> creates offences for harassment and provides criminal penalties of up to five years’ imprisonment.\u00a0 But civil lawyers are likely to feel more at home with civil injunctions rather than the criminal powers and sanctions of the Protection from Harassment\u00a0 Act<\/em>.<\/p>\n I soon found out that, in relation to family law, the Lord Chancellor is advised by an Advisory Board on Family Law.\u00a0 This Board had a Children’s Act Sub-Committee which was reviewing the issue of child contact in cases of domestic violence.\u00a0 The Sub-Committee was chaired by Mr Justice Wall, who gave me immense help.<\/p>\n