My Lords, when considering these amendments, I thought at first about tackling the perpetrators guilty of persistent stalking and constant and continued terrorising or harassment of the victim. The kind of stories that we have just heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, in the testimony about Cheryl is what came to mind.
For anyone who has experienced, or known friends or family on the receiving end of, that kind of treatment—constantly living under the awful reality of fear, looking over one’s shoulder and sometimes then facing police indifference or negligence—that is what springs to mind, as it did for me when I first looked at these amendments.
Yet I have some real qualms and queries about these amendments and feel that, however emotive this topic is, we need to pause and be cool. At the very least, I think there is a need for more precision in terms of what or who we are talking about. Who, exactly, does this allow the law to target? What constitutes a serial offender? What constitutes a serious enough offence to trigger these kinds of perpetrator interventions? Are there any time limits at all on surveillance, the sharing of information or the labelling of someone as a perpetrator? I worry that we could bring our own prejudices and subjective views and assume that we all agree on who or what we are talking about.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, stated as fact that
“past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour.”
I dispute that. It flies in the face of agency and the possibility of reform, and it is not necessarily the basis on which we should develop law. We should certainly suggest that it is not always true. We heard the terrible story of Colin, whose past behaviour went on and escalated. But this Bill broadly spells out abuse to include a huge range of different types of behaviour. Do we always think they will escalate and end up as murder?
We are told that if somebody moves and starts a new relationship or moves away, they must report to the police, but that assumes that they will always be an abuser. We assume the police should have the right under Clare’s law to warn partners. But again, I want to know: does that mean we consider abuse a permanent feature in somebody’s personality? I worry about a national system of surveillance that follows around somebody dubbed a perpetrator that involves all state agencies. This amounts to state stalking of those labelled as abusers. I worry when perpetrators are accused in this Bill of hiding in plain sight, as though they are permanently committing offences, when maybe they are living in plain sight as citizens who have done the time for their crime and are not offending. Why do we always see them as perpetrators?
Of course, the most extreme examples are being given here today, and some of those terrorising examples of the most violent abusers, leading to preventable murder, are what concern me and many others here. Yet this legislation has broadened the meaning of abuse to an ever-expanding number of behaviours, as though all of them are escalating behaviours. I worry about losing a sense of perspective and justice. I worry that we end up focusing on offenders, not offences. For legislators, that is nerve-wracking. I do not think that if somebody has been abusive, they should for ever be tarred as abusive or we should see it as predetermined that they will carry on.
We will go very close, if we are not careful, to seeing certain people as malevolent, dangerous and evil. Are we saying those who have ever committed any of the
multitude of abuses named in this law are a peculiar breed of criminal who, inevitably, no matter what, will strike again, and will carry on posing an ongoing threat? It is far too reminiscent of outdated views about “criminal types”, and that view of people has a long, unsavoury history.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bertin, earlier asked us to “spot the signs”, but I am worried about us wandering around spotting signs in people. In an earlier part of this Committee, we were told that football matches and drinking might lead to domestic abuse. The “spotting the signs” version of legislative change strikes me as being too arbitrary and rather dangerous. Whenever we discuss domestic abuse, I often detect a lurking class prejudice. But the most important thing is the danger of lumping together a variety of individuals and behaviours.
I will make one point as an aside. Many noble Lords have mentioned that we all received a huge amount of information before these amendments were discussed. That is true, and in the debate so far those briefings have been used as evidence. I will make a caveated note about what constitutes evidence. When people stand up and say “But the evidence shows”, it is not quite the same as the evidence of the efficacy or safety of, for example, a vaccine against coronavirus. The evidence we are sent as legislators is often commissioned by, and presented by, lobbying organisations. Their briefing documents, much repeated in this House, might be repeated as facts or truth, but they are not always objective —or, in fact, factual. At the very least, we should recognise that they can be contentious. So, I ask for some caution that, while we want to deal with the most extreme examples, in the course even of this discussion facts and evidence have been thrown in that have been ideological than helpful.