A law which enables women to check out the potential violent
pasts of their new partners is to be expanded nationwide in March 2014.
I wrote about Clare's law Last year when the pilot was first launched across several
counties in England and Wales, and questioned whether women really would seek
to find out whether their partner had a history of violence, and whether men
should be happy to submit themselves to such scrutiny on the basis that if they
have nothing to hide then it doesn’t matter.
Interestingly the articles I have read about the expansion
of this law have not given any indication as to the success of the pilot
scheme, actually there has been reporting that police have been confused about
what kind of information should be given.
And yet the scheme is being expanded, and I can’t help wondering why,
and whether anyone really benefits, or whether this is just a way to make it
look as if more is being done to prevent domestic violence without actually
doing anything more, but putting the onus back on to the potential
victims.
Last year 88 women were killed by abusive partners. That’s just under two women a week. I wonder how many of those abusive partners
had a history of domestic violence that was known to the authorities. I wonder how many of those women would have
gone to the authorities to check out their partner’s history before embarking
on a relationship with them, and if so, whether they would have decided against
starting the relationship in the first place?
Some people will say that one life saved makes it worth it. But surely there is more that can be done
without encouraging women to start out their relationships on a basis of mistrust
and suspicion? And a police check is not
a security net – in fact it creates a false sense of security, because reality
is that many women never report domestic violence, many women stay in abusive
relationships for years and do nothing, or leave, ensuring they get away and
never take steps to report their abusers, thus leaving them free to go on to
abuse other women, women whose police check may have shown them up to have no
history. But in fact no history doesn’t
mean not violent, it just means no known history.
Those 88 women who were killed by their partners knew they
were violent. As a general rule there is
a history of violence before someone kills their partner. And yet those women will have stayed in those
relationships for a time before either leaving and then being murdered (as
often happens) or being murdered during the course of the relationship.
Perhaps rather than putting the onus on women to ensure that
their partner doesn’t have a known history, we should be investing more in
ensuring that women who find themselves in abusive relationships can get the
support to leave before they potentially become a statistic. Perhaps we need to encourage women to speak
out if they are being abused so they can get the support to leave. There is no shame in being a victim of abuse –
the abuser is the one at fault, but by staying in such a relationship women can
only continue to be victims. More needs
to be done to try to encourage women to leave before it’s too late.
And if this law can have one positive outcome, perhaps it
should be that if a woman feels that she ought to be doing a police check into
the background of her potential new partner, perhaps that is a sign that she
shouldn’t be embarking on the relationship in the first place. If it feels wrong from the outset, to the
extent you would consider speaking to the police about a potential past, then
nothing positive can come of it
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