My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 164 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall. I do so as, in my former role as Victims’ Commissioner, I met many heartbroken families suffering from the loss of a dear loved one. In having such discussions with them, listening was really heartbreaking, especially knowing that nothing would bring their loved ones back.
I also speak on a personal level, albeit not about domestic abuse but about systems. In 2007, my late husband was murdered by a gang of youths. I found out afterwards that when a murder happens, the Home Office asks agencies to see if those charged are flagged up on their systems. To hear the background information of criminal activity is just shameful—even more so given that when I was a key speaker at an agency’s conference, I heard another speaker go into further detail on the procedures of gathering information for the Home Office. I ask the Committee to imagine the emotions going through my heart as I listened to a speaker that day describe how their agency breathed a sigh of relief that the offenders were not on its system as a red flag. However, I found that not to be true: one of the defendants was out on bail, awaiting sentence for a violent offence. Earlier on in the day when Garry was murdered, the defendant had appeared in court for a breach of bail and been bailed again with conditions that he then went on to breach in not just one attack but a further attack that night, which was Garry being kicked to death.
There have been some excellent speeches and they have been heartrending to listen to. I add my thanks to Laura Richards, the founder of the Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service, for her outstanding briefing. I commend her on her many years of hard work in helping families to understand why. In fact her briefing makes for extremely distressing and deeply disturbing reading, especially, as others have already mentioned, her outstanding report about 30 perpetrators, which describes a total of 109 women and children who were seriously harmed or murdered. In all those cases, they were let down by systemic failure. The cases highlight the failure of information-sharing, risk assessment and management across all agencies. Put simply, the focus should have been on the perpetrator and there should have been a MAPPA referral, but that rarely happens in practice regarding coercively controlling perpetrators and stalkers. This is exactly why a national co-ordinated mandatory approach is urgently needed for MAPPA to co-ordinate MAPPA-plus. Such systemic changes are urgently needed through law reform because, as Laura says, no amount of training has changed this.
The situation has to be dealt with as soon as possible, without more reviews that lead to no action because we are dealing with men who routinely terrorise
and harm women and girls, who need protection now. As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned, it is right, as we discuss such an important amendment to an important Bill, that we listen to a young lady’s horrendous story. It is only fitting to share it now. I have asked her permission so I am not reading this without her consent. She says:
“I must first introduce myself and share with you my own experience of domestic abuse. My name is Georgia Gabriel-Hooper. I am 17 and, along with my mother, I am a victim of domestic abuse. I was witness to the domestic homicide of my mother, only two months after my 14th birthday. I grew up with abuse in the home from a very early age. My parents divorced when I was two after my dad gambled and drank away all the money in the relationship, leaving my mum with major debts and a child to look after.
I faced the rigmarole of Cafcass, where it was decided that my father would get supervised contact for a period of time. He was soon allowed to see me away from the contact centre but subsequently chose to pay more attention to betting offices and alcohol than to his own daughter. I have now not seen him for five years, as he was more of a burden in my life than a parent.
My mum entered into another relationship while I was still young. This ended after several years, when I was aged approximately six. This relationship was extremely physically abusive towards myself, and we always found ourselves in the situation of having to make up excuses to people for why I was bruised. I used to be dragged up the stairs by my wrist and thrown into my room, even when I had not done anything wrong. I would be left with black bruises on my wrist and carpet burns and bruises from where I had tried to resist being taken away.
My mum was helpless in these situations: all she could do was stand and watch, as, if she intervened, it would only make the situation worse. We spent 10 months locking ourselves in a bedroom together at night, with three bolts fitted to the door to stop him being able to get to us. He also put nails in our car tyres and tacks on the drive. The police refused to do anything because the tacks he was putting down were on his own property, even though they were there with intent to harm.
Shortly after my seventh birthday, in 2010, my mum met my stepdad-to-be. At first, he was the most charming, lovely man, well respected by his peers. He was a farmer and undeniably intelligent. Andrew Hooper soon turned out to be our worst nightmare. He was an emotional abuser and extremely controlling and unpredictable. Unfortunately, my mum had a miscarriage roughly a year into their relationship. He made her sit on a wooden kitchen table all night and bleed into a bucket, as she was ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’. The abuse had already started long before this incident.
Coercive control is incredibly hard to spot. It is like carbon monoxide poisoning: you can’t see it, smell it or taste it until it is too late. My mum had a lot of friends and would often go out to meet them for a coffee or a meal at the pub. Andrew would punish my mum for this by giving her the silent treatment or humiliating her, in private or public. The mood swings and trouble that would come from venturing out eventually got too much, and my mum was cut off from a lot of friends.
We could not even have people over to visit us, as he would make us all so uncomfortable that nobody wanted to come back, and my mum was too embarrassed to even ask.
At some point in the relationship, Andrew made Mum aware of a situation that had occurred in 2004 regarding his ex-wife which resulted in him pleading guilty to affray and receiving a four-year suspended sentence. However, we were never told the full details, and it would not have mattered either, as he would still have managed to manipulate us into thinking that that was okay. We, of course, did not know his ex-wife, which made it very easy for him to convince us that she was a psycho and deranged and that his actions were to rescue his son from her. By the time we found out what had really happened, it was, of course, too late.
Andrew and my mother wed in 2016. The problems were meant to go away, but they only got worse. At this point, he really did have my mum where he wanted her, and leaving was made even harder. Things came to a head in December 2017, when a drunken Andrew smashed a television and was messing around with guns in his cabinet in the middle of the row. It was at this point that my mum made the decision to leave. From start to finish, it lasted approximately six weeks.
We stayed at my nan and grandad’s until we could find a house that we could move into. We were incessantly stalked. He would be outside the house, monitoring when we were in. He would drive round to our friends’ houses, hoping to find us there, and, if we were not there, he would flip between crying and rage, trying to get them to convince Mum to go back. He told a close friend that, if he could not have her, nobody would.
He removed our car from the drive without us knowing, as he had found the spare key. He kept the car for a matter of days before apologising and letting us have it back. However, he had fitted a tracker to the car, so he knew every move. There was also a long string of suicide threats, including one where he drove to my mum’s place of work and sat outside with a loaded shotgun, saying he would kill himself then and there if she did not go to him.
We did manage to find a property that we could move into in early January 2018. We had been there for three weeks before Andrew murdered my mother. She had gone out with a friend for the evening, when Andrew showed up unexpectedly to question my mum about what she was doing. My mum was in an area she would never normally go to, so, suddenly, we realised that he had been tracking her car. He made threats to destroy our belongings but not of physical harm. I was at a friend’s house, and my mum had to text me to tell me to call him in an attempt to calm him down. I received an angry fit of rage down the phone from him; this was the last time he ever spoke to me.”
3.15 pm
The letter continues: “The drive home was quiet, but full of tension and concern. As we pulled onto the drive, Andrew’s silver Land Rover Defender shot behind us, and he blocked us in. He got out of his vehicle and started trying to smash the driver’s side window. It was 11 o’clock at night and extremely dark; all I could see was his silhouette. I believed he may have had a spade or scaffolding pole in his hands. I jumped out of
the car, and, despite being in a medical boot and on crutches for three months, I ran around the front of the car, trying to call the police. I was running towards him, to either be a distraction or to take the beating so that my mum could get out of the car.
I never made it to him. Before I got there, he fired a 19th-century vintage shotgun through the window, shattering it and penetrating my mum’s arm and chest. That was not enough to kill her, so he fired again at her neck, and the shot went through her collar bone, severing her arteries and spinal cord, and came out through her armpit. The last words my mum ever said were, “Oh my God, he’s here”. If I had not got out of the vehicle, I would have likely been permanently injured or killed too.
He was sentenced to life, with 31 years minimum before eligible for parole, in 2019. It was then that it came out about his previous convictions, and I found out the truth from court and also family members of his. He had broken into his ex-wife’s house with surgical gloves and a carving knife in the hand, threatening to kill her and leaving her with permanent mental scars. He was prosecuted for aggravated burglary but pleaded guilty to affray and received four years’ suspended sentence. Somehow, after this violent incident, he was still allowed to keep his shotgun licence, something that will for ever play on my mind.
Had Andrew been placed on a register or monitored more closely after this, my mum may never have even entered into a relationship with him. Yes, we have Clare’s law, but it has flaws. First, a potential victim has to reach out to the police to ask about a specific person. That is their choice: they are not automatically notified that the person is a known abuser and a danger to them. Another major flaw is the fact that someone may not even know what Clare’s law is or that they have the right to ask the police someone’s history in the first place.
My question to you is: we have a sex offenders register —why do we not have a domestic abusers register, when we know that domestic abuse is just as prevalent, life-threatening and damaging as any sexual assault or misconduct? My mum might still be alive today if this had been in place. Next Tuesday, 26 January, is the third anniversary of my mum’s murder. You can make a difference to stop more victims getting murdered or permanently mentally scarred when they could easily have been saved.
At the age of 17, I have no parents, because I was failed by a system that was meant to protect us and take domestic abuse seriously. Her name was Cheryl Gabriel-Hooper; never ever forget.”
This Bill presents an opportunity to create a real change to better protect women and girls. We must not delay any further—too many women and girls are paying with their lives.