It’s time to be blunt: the government is about to expose hundreds of vulnerable women to the risk of death or serious injury. Survivors of domestic abuse, including women who have suffered years of physical violence and intimidation, are now preparing for the moment in October when 5,000 prisoners begin to be released early. What are these women supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go? Their abusers know where they live. They know where their children go to school.
Following an outcry, rapists and some child sex offenders have been excluded from the early release scheme. But by refusing to exclude men convicted of domestic violence, this government is sending a message that this category of crime – serial in nature and implicated in the deaths of one woman every five days – is simply not a priority.
In 2023, Keir Starmer promised to cut violence against women by half in a decade. It was an eye-catching pledge, although not obviously assisted by his proposal, when he became prime minister, to allow thousands of convicted criminals back on to the streets. No one denies that Andy Burnham has inherited an overcrowding crisis in UK prisons, but his solution – in effect, accepting the previous government’s plan with a few changes – involves taking a huge gamble with women’s lives.
For eight years, I was co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. I saw the devastating extent of intimate partner abuse and the chronic shortage of resources to support victims. I studied domestic homicide reviews with a shudder, seeing how one opportunity after another to save women’s lives had been missed. Now, in the midst of a justified furore, Burnham and his justice minister, Alex Norris, can’t claim they haven’t been warned.
The domestic abuse commissioner, Dame Nicole Jacobs, says the decision not to exclude domestic abuse perpetrators from this scheme “puts victims’ lives at risk”, adding: “These are individuals who are fixated on their victim and will stop at nothing to control and cause harm.” Intimate partner violence has special characteristics, including the fact that men seething with resentment towards former wives and girlfriends are all too likely to reoffend.
The data is limited – reoffending rates among men convicted of domestic abuse are not listed separately but hidden among other offences, including violence against the person, criminal damage and arson. Recent incidents of public disorder have confirmed that men who abuse partners have a wider propensity for violence; most people arrested for violent protests after the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s murderer had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse, for instance. In my book Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists, I pointed out that many men who commit public acts of extreme violence have histories of first abusing their families.
What we do know is that the proportion of released prisoners who go on to commit further offences is alarmingly high. Reoffending rates vary from about 29% if you include those with non-custodial sentences, to a “proven reoffending rate” of 43.8% for adults released from custody between January and March 2024, suggesting rehabilitation in prison is largely ineffective. The victims’ commissioner, Claire Waxman, has said “effective risk management, meaningful licence conditions, proper supervision and timely, trauma-informed communication and support remain critical” if the early release scheme goes ahead in its present form. That’s asking an awful lot of an overstretched probation service that can barely cope with its existing workload.
Last month the National Audit Office revealed that almost 9,000 people required to wear an electronic tag did not have one (the government disputes the figure, arguing the number is closer to 5,450). The report also delivered a damning verdict on how prisoners released on licence are monitored, concluding that “police and probation officers often lack relevant information or capacity to respond quickly to breaches”. Nearly half of alerts and breach notifications result in “no further action”.
This chaotic system is what ministers are relying on when they promise survivors of domestic abuse that their attackers will be monitored and served with notices banning them from specific areas. How is that supposed to reassure a woman when the man who beat her to within an inch of her life approaches her front door? Or when he springs out as she carries groceries to her car? Some victims already report facing sceptical questioning when they report breaches of licence conditions by their former partners.
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Women rarely commit violent crimes. We are overwhelmingly victims, not perpetrators. The criminal justice system has let us down for years, at present securing fewer than 3,000 convictions in the 70,000-plus rape cases reported to the police in England and Wales each year. We’ve been saying for a long time that rape has all but been decriminalised, which is why the original proposal to include sex offenders in the early release scheme was so insulting. Now we’re told the prime minister would have liked to go further, exempting more categories of offenders from the scheme, but the prisons crisis is so grave that victims of domestic violence will just have to put up with their abusers being released after serving only a third of their sentences.
Prisons are violent, unpleasant places, understaffed and racked by crime. Their only useful effect, as far as I’m concerned, is to protect women and children from men who have already hurt them – and wouldn’t hesitate to do it again, given the opportunity. The reality of the anodyne phrase “domestic violence” is broken limbs, fractured skulls and children cowering in corners. Exposing women to more of these horrors, at the hands of men already proved to be violent, means survivors will pay the price of political failure.
Joan Smith is an author, journalist and a former chair of the mayor of London’s VAWG board
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