Answer
My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a very good point. It is interesting to note that, as a result of domestic violence being made a crime, the number of cases in 1997, 814,000, was almost halved to 407,000 in 2006-07. As I said, the difficulty is that these things happen within families. We have taken a lot of advice and talked to many people. There is a feeling that the crime would go even further underground, because people generally do not want to put their families through it. It is an interesting debate which we will have to consider further as we enter more dialogue on this issue.