My Lords, I feel slightly embarrassed to be coming in ahead of the noble Baroness, Lady Helic, who has her name to one of these amendments. I look forward to hearing what she has to say.
I think—and I apologise if I have this wrong—that on Monday it was said from the Government Front Bench that refuge addresses were never disclosed. We need to allow for human error and human ingenuity. We have previously touched on how many victims have moved away from their home area in order that their whereabouts will not be discovered but, as we have also heard, abusers can be determined. So much of the issue is about power and control, so it is not difficult to see that an abuser might do everything to track down a victim. The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, referred to the prevalence of stalking. Knowing that a victim has moved to a refuge must be a red rag to some bulls. The dangers are not only to the victim of that abuser but to other occupants of the refuge. I am aware of situations where others have been endangered, including the children of the occupants, as well of course as the children of the victim and of the abuser, themselves victims. What must a child think when they are uprooted by Mummy, told that they are going somewhere where Daddy cannot get at them, and then Daddy appears? The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, also referred to the horror stories on which I have been briefed.
5.30 pm
We might say that the courts need to be sensitive. Sometimes they need strong, clear rules, and it appears that, although failures may not be that frequent, they can be extremely serious. I am not sure whether an office address will work in the case of a small refuge, as it may be a small room at the back of the premises. However, the amendment points us to how rules of the court can be used.
With regard to training, I recall some years ago rather tentatively mentioning training for the judiciary. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, who was sitting quite close by, said, “Oh, judges get lots of training these days”, so I am less hesitant about referring to it now. The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss, also mentioned it—I guess she may be coming in on the subject shortly. I suppose they have continuous professional development, like the rest of us, even though for parliamentarians it is a bit limited. The proposed new clause is quite extensive and includes
“a member of the Judiciary … an employee of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service … a social worker”
and “an appointed expert”, and that is not an exhaustive list. Subsection (1) refers to
“Any person who is working in a professional capacity in family proceedings”.
We started debates on the Bill with references to awareness, but awareness is not static, because our understanding develops, not least through the bravery of people who have lived experience, or, as the Minister
said on the previous group, real-world experience, and who are prepared to explain what it has been like, and sometimes continues to be like, to live that experience, and therefore what is best practice develops. That is in the nature of society. It is also in the nature of society that some things are deeply engrained, and we are all subject to unconscious biases.
Until it was pointed out to me, I had not thought that, because family proceedings are not in public, how the family courts approach domestic abuse is not much in the public eye, and therefore it must be harder to research and analyse. The Ministry of Justice’s harm report, which has been mentioned quite a lot this afternoon, identifies the overarching barriers to a consistent and effective response by the family courts to domestic abuse and other serious offences, including the adversarial process and silo working. When I was thinking about these amendments, it occurred to me that subsection (2) of Amendment 133 does not list counsel and other legal representatives as those who might benefit.
All those thoughts take me on to Amendment 134, which is about trauma. The term “trauma-informed” has entered common currency, as has “retraumatisation”. That does not always mean that the thoughts behind those terms are applied. I am not a psychologist, but I sense that trauma is often—or maybe more fairly sometimes—confused with stress, and of course they are related. But trauma has varied and long-lasting effects—one cannot overstress that they are long-lasting—including psychological and cognitive effects, and they are very often not apparent to other people and may not become apparent unless there is a careful, quite lengthy, building up of a relationship.
A victim can shut off his or her experience, or shut down, and be quite unable to describe an experience or even to recall it, or the description can be very confused or omit the most salient points. I know of an occasion when a psychologist who had assisted the police in interviewing a victim in a criminal case—I accept that this was not family proceedings—was asked by the court to assist in identifying the right questions to unlock the victim’s story. That is an extreme situation, but it illustrates the point. We will continue to learn about trauma, complex trauma and other conditions.
The noble Lord, Lord Rosser, referred to the CPS’s guidance for prosecutors on the neurological impact of trauma in rape and sexual offences cases. I was pointed to the Immigration and Asylum Tribunal’s joint presidential guidance note on vulnerable witnesses and appellants. I am very taken by paragraph 1 of that guidance, which says it is
“a reminder of good judgecraft.”