Attorney General's Office

Government Office For The East Of England - Violence Against Women

Vera Baird QC MP
Solicitor General

Introduction

I am very pleased that you have invited me here today - two days before International Women's Day on March 8th - to talk to you about how the Government is tackling this most important of subjects.

Three million women across the UK experience rape, domestic violence, forced marriage, human trafficking or another form of violence every year. The total annual cost of violence against women is estimated to be £40.1billion per year.

Violence against women is both a consequence and a cause of gender inequality

We know that crimes of violence against women can have a devastating effect on victims, their friends and families. The way these crimes are dealt with is, understandably, a matter of great public concern. We are all here today because we care about the issues affecting women in society.

I am glad to see so many people here from such a range of organisations working in this field. I want to outline today some of the work we are doing across Government on violence against women, to give you an idea of the broader context for your efforts.

I hope that you will be able to go away from today's event with enthusiasm, a sense of purpose, and perhaps most importantly, with a clear idea of the role that each of you can play in ensuring that we all offer the best possible service to women.

The Government has already started to integrate work across the Violence against Women strands. We have aligned the Inter-Ministerial Groups on domestic violence, rape, sexual violence and prostitution. We now work closely together in the Inter-Ministerial Group on Human Trafficking and through addressing the Corston report on women offenders.

I am also pleased to be able to tell you that the Home Secretary will shortly be launching a national consultation on Violence against Women and women's safety. We see this as the beginning of integrating this work and moving towards a national cross-government strategy on Violence against Women

We are conscious that service provision is not what it could be in all areas of the country. We are tackling this by implementing national standards, improving the criminal justice response and strengthening and funding the voluntary sector where it is most needed.

I would like to start by highlighting to you specific work within the different strands of the Violence against Women strategy, across government, and then move onto work within the Crown Prosecution Service CPS Violence against Women strategy.

Although I will cover each strand individually, I recognise that many of these issues are not separate, but are mutually supportive of each other within the overall concept of the Violence Against Women strategy. They can only succeed together and not in isolation.

Domestic violence

The Government has a national domestic violence delivery plan, through which we intend to ensure that tackling domestic violence is mainstreamed in all public services.

We've set ourselves four main goals to achieve. In this way we hope we will be better able to equip practitioners to tackle the problem and to put in place arrangements that protect victims.

First, our goal is to increase early identification and intervention with victims of domestic violence. To this end:

• the Department of Health has produced a handbook for health professionals; is working preventatively through Family Intervention Panels and has produced a toolkit on children and domestic violence jointly with the Department of Children, Schools and Families.
• domestic violence work is now incorporated in Local Authority Area Agreements; and
• domestic violence risk assessments are being linked to child protection risk assessments.

The second goal is to build capacity within the domestic violence sector to provide effective advice and support to victims. We are therefore:

• setting national standards with the domestic violence voluntary sector; and
• funding a number of helplines, including:
• the 24 hour national domestic violence freephone helpline; and
• Broken Rainbow, a service for those in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities;
• The Men's Advice Line;
• A specific national helpline for victims of forced marriage and so-called honour crime; and
• Respect - a helpline for perpetrators.

On 10 February, the Home Secretary launched a new leaflet with information on how to support a friend or relative who is in a violent relationship. The "Supporting A Friend Or Relative" leaflet explains how you can recognise if someone you know is suffering from domestic violence, and what practical support is available in order to help them.

Our third goal is to improve the criminal justice response to domestic violence.
We have made great progress over the last few years - increasing successful prosecution outcomes in domestic violence cases from 46% in 2003 to 72.5% by December of last year.

Some of your Areas within the Eastern Region are some of the highest performing CPS Areas in England and Wales. By December 2008, Norfolk and Suffolk had achieved 83% successful outcomes, from charge to conviction, which is to be highly commended.

And how has this been achieved?
• firstly, we have trained all our prosecutors and associate prosecutors in dealing with domestic violence;
• secondly, we are continually revising our policies and guidance for prosecutors to ensure we learn and develop - we will be launching our revised versions of our domestic violence policy and guidance later this month, to ensure that we deliver the best possible service to victims; and
• thirdly, we have developed Specialist Domestic Violence Courts, which takes us on to:

Our fourth goal in the delivery plan - to support victims through the criminal justice system and manage perpetrators to reduce levels of risk.

Specialist Domestic Violence Courts - SDVCs - are essential if we are to improve the support we provide to domestic violence victims.

The SDVCs require a multi-agency approach. They bring the police; the CPS; courts and probation; together with voluntary sector support organisations to improve our collective response to cases of domestic violence. Working together cooperatively at a local operational level means that more offenders are brought to justice, victims are protected and better supported, and further violence is prevented.

The Specialist Domestic Violence Courts have been very successful in improving the outcomes of domestic violence cases and improving the support and satisfaction levels of victims and witnesses. As you may know, we now have 104 Specialist DV courts across England and Wales, of which seven are in this region. We are currently completing another round of accreditation of new courts and aim to have 128 by 2011.

As part of our efforts to support and protect victims of violence against women, the Government has guaranteed £3 million per year seed funding for at least three years for Independent Domestic Violence Advisers. IDVAs have, in my view, played a key role in the success of Specialist Domestic Violence Courts. In your Region, all Areas have IDVAs supporting victims and we commend work across Local Criminal Justice Boards and Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, including Local Authorities that are providing mainstreaming funding and support to these roles.

We also now have Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences - or MARACs - for high-risk victims of domestic violence operating in 200 areas. Again your region is to be commended in ensuring all your Areas have MARACs established. We will continue to roll out MARACs around the country.

Role of employers and trade unions

The importance of the role of businesses in tackling domestic violence should also not be overlooked. Home and work issues cannot always easily be separated and domestic violence can have a huge impact on working life. Initiatives like the Corporate Alliance Against Domestic Violence - which is a group of companies and organisations working together to address the impact of domestic violence in the workplace - are hugely valuable in this area.

Trade Unions, too, must, and do, play a role in challenging domestic violence and tackling fundamental issues of inequality of power, both within the workplace and the home.

Many public sector and private sector organisations now have employee domestic violence policies to deal with things like abuse and stalking. In fact, the CPS has led the way with this kind of initiative and its policy has been used as a model across Government.

Addressing offending

However, as well as providing support to victims and challenging domestic violence, we must seek to address the behaviour of offending more specifically. The Sentencing Guidelines Council issued principles for cases of domestic violence in December 2006. This guideline makes clear that offences committed in a domestic context should not be regarded as less serious than offences committed in a non-domestic context.

In addition, in order to manage perpetrators to reduce risk, all probation areas now run either the Integrated Domestic Abuse Programme or the Community Domestic Violence Programme. We are now better able to protect victims through the imaginative use of conditions in the sentencing court, including prohibited activities and exclusion orders.

This is not simply an issue of men being the offender in the majority of cases. Some men are victims of domestic violence of course, but also men have a very important role in challenging offending behaviour in other men.

In this respect, I would like to mention the work of the Men's Coalition, which was launched in November 2007. The Coalition aims to put issues of concern to men and boys including relationships, education and crime firmly on the public policy agenda. It is supported by the counseling service Relate; the Fatherhood Institute; and children's charity NCH.

Rape & sexual offences

The Government is resolutely committed to improving performance on tackling rape, one of the most traumatic crimes that a victim can experience. We want to increase reporting and conviction rates and ensure that victims are supported, the criminal justice response is improved and that prevention is maximised.

We are seeking to challenge many of the myths that surround cases of rape and hinder successful prosecutions. Recently there have been two important decisions in prosecuting such cases.

The first, in the case of Bree, established that an intoxicated woman can lose the capacity to give consent, a stage that can be reached well before she becomes unconscious. The second, in the case of Regina-v-D (JA), established that judges are entitled to direct juries that a late complaint does not necessarily mean that it is a false complaint. Both of these are groundbreaking decisions.

But there is still more to do. There is a myth that rape victims will always suffer physical injury. Forensic medical examiners could help dispel this myth if, in appropriate cases, they explained that absence of injury is not necessarily inconsistent with an allegation of rape.

The Tackling Violence Action Plan drives forward work on sexual violence, with a particular focus on improving the investigation and prosecution of rape and the protection of children from sex offenders.

We are going to be more than doubling the size of the Sexual Assault Referral Centre network by March 2011, ensuring that there is at least one in each of the 43 police force areas in England and Wales. The first SARC in this Region was approved in January 2009 and we hope more will follow. We are also aiming to ensure that all victims should have access to an Independent Sexual Violence Advisor by March 2011. We have recently announced a bidding round of £1.6 million for new and existing Sexual Assault Referral Centres and new funding will be available for Independent Sexual Violence Advisors from 2009. You will hear more on SARCs from the speakers later today.

We have also established a cross-Criminal Justice System Rape Performance Group to monitor the work of all police forces and CPS Areas against a series of indicators. In addition, the government has introduced sexual offences training for police officers and advocates prosecuting rape cases.

Under the cross-government Tackling Sexual Violence and Abuse Action Plan, we have set ourselves further targets on improving access to health and support services for victims, on improving the criminal justice response and on maximising prevention.

We are continuing to fund the invaluable work of the sexual violence voluntary sector. In the last year, £1.25 million of funding has been provided and this year we will be spending around £3 million to increase the capacity and stability of the sector. Last year we also announced an emergency fund of over £1 million to prevent immediate closures of those rape crisis centres most at risk.

Human trafficking

The Government is also responding to the challenges presented by human trafficking, drawing on the good practice and experiences we have had in tackling other forms of violence against women.

Representatives of all relevant Government departments and Non-Governmental Organisations liaise on a regular basis, to contribute to joint plans and initiatives and share best practice and developments. To ensure that progress in the UK response is monitored and maintained there is regular meeting of an Inter-Departmental Ministerial Group on human trafficking.

On 17 December 2008 we ratified the Council of Europe Convention on trafficking. This will be implemented in April 2009. Although the UK was largely compliant with the Convention, there were a number of additional victim provisions we needed to introduce.

These provisions were piloted during Operation Pentameter 2, a UK-wide, police-led anti-trafficking operation, which began last year, and Operation Tolerance - a pilot on trafficking for forced labour. The provisions should improve our ability to identify victims and bring more cases to justice. They include mechanisms for early identification of victims, national referral schemes, and the granting of recovery and reflection periods and renewable residence permits to victims.

The UK Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking was published in March 2007. It set out a multi-faceted strategy covering the areas of prevention; investigation, prosecution; providing protection and assistance to adult victims of trafficking; and child victims. We gave our commitment to keep it a 'living document' and published the Update to the UK Action Plan in July last year.

In supporting trafficked victims who have been recovered from their ordeal, the Government funds the POPPY project which provides bespoke, high level, supported accommodation. This year we are investing a further £1.3 million into the POPPY project. Between March 2003 and May 2008 353 victims have been supported by POPPY.

We also fund the UK Human Trafficking Centre, a multi agency task force, to tackle organised immigration crime. The UKHTC has a key role to play in coordinating work across stakeholders as well as with its partners, to deliver a diverse set of programmes. These include targeted campaigns to prevent and reduce trafficking, conducting research, delivering training and collecting and analysing information on all forms of trafficking.

We are also learning more about the phenomenon of internal trafficking of young British girls within the UK. British girls as young as 12 and 13 years of age are being groomed and trafficked within the UK for sexual exploitation by men who are either British citizens or organised crime gangs from other countries. The process of procuring and transferring girls is done in a similar fashion to organised international networks.

Prostitution

In terms of tackling the demand for trafficked victims - particularly those who are brought to the UK to be sold or exploited in prostitution, the Government began The Tackling Demand for Prostitution Review in January 2008. The Review focussed on how current policy can be strengthened to ensure that the demand for prostitution, and the impact this has on trafficking into the UK for sexual exploitation, is robustly tackled. The Review also considered options for legislative reform and the impact of alternative approaches adopted in other jurisdictions.

The findings were published in November 2008 and the Home Secretary has announced a range of measures we intend to introduce:

• Creating a new criminal offence of paying for sex with someone controlled for another person's gain. This means that it will be illegal to pay for sex with someone who has been trafficked or exploited through other means, for example those who remain involved for fear of violence from a partner or a pimp
• Taking tougher action to tackle kerb-crawlers by amending the law to allow police to arrest them for a first offence - and tougher action against kerb-crawlers, for example, by encouraging the naming and shaming of those convicted for kerb-crawling;
• Removal of the term "common" and introduction of "persistent element" for those who loiter or solicit for prostitution;
• Introducing tougher measures to crack down on brothels to tackle exploitation in the off-street market by creating closure powers to allow police to close down premises where sexual exploitation has taken place; and
• Revising licensing schemes for lap dancing clubs to enable them to be redefined as sex encounter establishments, rather than entertainment establishments.

The legislative measures are included in the Policing and Crime Bill which is currently going through Commons Committee stage.

No doubt, speakers from the Ipswich Prostitution Strategy will provide local details on your work this afternoon.

Forced Marriage & Honour-based violence

We are also focussing our attention on the issues of forced marriage and honour-based violence. Again our experience in tackling domestic violence and sexual offences has been invaluable in improving our response to these crimes.

The Government has established the Forced Marriage Unit at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This Unit is working with the Department of Health, the Department for Children, Families and Schools and the Ministry of Justice amongst others. The Unit now helps around 500 victims and potential victims in this area each year.

We have funded a new national helpline - the Honour Network - run by the charity Karma Nirvana, for victims of forced marriage and so-called honour based violence. We have also written to all schools and local authorities in relation to forced marriage and made available awareness raising materials.

In December 2008, CPS published a report of a pilot within four CPS Areas, that selected specialist prosecutors to deal with these crimes, provided them with guidance and training and monitored the cases for nine months. From this pilot we have identified the patterns of cases and ways to help improve prosecutions and support victims. We now plan to roll this out across the CPS nationally.

Legislation

The Government has also passed legislation to ensure that violence against women is taken seriously and to ensure that it can be tackled effectively.

The 2003 Sexual Offences Act strengthened and updated the law on sexual offences. In 2004 the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act modernised the approach to domestic violence, making it a criminal offence to breach a non-molestation order.

The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 has created a new offence of possessing violent and extreme pornographic material. The maximum penalty for possession of extreme pornographic images for an act which threatens a person's life; or an act which results in or is likely to result in serious injury is three years' imprisonment. For possession of other extreme images the maximum penalty is two years' imprisonment.

The Home Office carried out a consultation on the possession of non-photographic visual depictions of child sexual abuse. As a result, the Government has proposed a new criminal offence of possessing drawings and computer-generated images of children under the age of 18 engaging in sexual activity. Under these proposals offenders will be liable to up to three years imprisonment.

We have also legislated to improve our ability to prosecute trafficking cases, and the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act will provide civil protection for people at risk of forced marriage.

CPS - the Violence Against Women strategy

I would now like to talk to you briefly about how the CPS has risen to the challenge of tackling violence against women crimes in a truly integrated fashion.

I think it can be said that the CPS is a pioneer in tackling violence against women. It is, we believe, the first public prosecution service to integrate all forms of violence against women under the UN definition into a strategy and action plan which relates work in this area to a wider gender equality agenda. It is through this type of work that the CPS is achieving its vision of becoming a world class prosecution service.

The CPS Violence Against Women strategy and action plan is aimed at integrating, coordinating and improving prosecutions and support for victims in a range of crimes, including but not limited to; domestic violence; rape and sexual offences, honour-based violence; prostitution; and human trafficking.

Examples of CPS work

In the next three years, the CPS is focussed on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the criminal justice system, through bringing more offenders of violence against women crimes to justice.
It will seek to achieve this through:
• improving prosecution performance with a new violence against women indicator, including targets for increasing successful outcomes in domestic violence, rape and sexual offences;
• we have already met the April 2009 target of successful rape prosecutions of 59% and exceeded the target of 72% for domestic violence and sexual offences;
• the development of specific guidance for prosecutors on Violence against Women;
• the coordination and strengthening of Area coordinators and specialist prosecutors;
• annually measuring the satisfaction of stakeholders and
• improving training across a range of VAW work.

In addition, the CPS is targeting improved victim and witness support, safety and satisfaction. This will be achieved through:
• support systems for victims and outcome monitoring; and
• the development of a system to measure the support for and satisfaction of women victims of violence, across the criminal justice system.

Finally, the CPS is also seeking to address any disproportionality across the equality strands through:
• examining the equality profiles of defendants and victims; and
• ensuring Witness Care Units have support systems and information on support for victims and witnesses from all communities.

A Violence against Women Crime Report, highlighting CPS performance on prosecuting a range of these crimes, including domestic violence and rape, was published in December 2008 and will be produced annually.

Conclusion

I hope that I have been able to outline to you just some of the good work going on in this area. The Government has done, and is doing, much to focus attention on the issues that women are facing. We are seeking to properly equip practitioners to tackle the problem and putting into place arrangements that will protect victims.

But, there must be committed and collaborative working at both a national and local level if full advantage is to be taken of these strategies. This is the only way that we will be able to deal sensitively and effectively with those subjected to or at risk from these types of violence. Events like this are so very important to achieving these aims.

I am pleased that so many of you here today will be able to take up this challenge and directly influence for the better the lives of victims and those of their families. I would like to commend you all on your efforts so far.

The message we need to send out is that we understand the problem. We must show that we are committed to working effectively and sympathetically with victims to protect them and their children, and to enforce their rights and uphold the law.

By providing an effective multi-agency response and approach to victims and survivors we are implementing an ambitious programme to make our community a safer place for all.