The threat of domestic abuse has always been a grave and lingering fear for women and girls across the United Kingdom and around the world. By March 2024, there were an estimated 2.3 million victims of domestic abuse in the UK. Two in every three victims of domestic abuse are female. Women are also more likely to experience repeat violence, sexual violence or to be injured or killed by domestic abuse. Prosecutions for domestic abuse are extremely low. There is a continued decrease in the number of cases of domestic abuse referred to the CPS, with only 79% of cases resulting in a charge. Even less are successfully convicted with only 75% of charges being successfully prosecuted.
There can be no doubt that the UK’s stance on domestic abuse needs a drastic rethink to ensure the successful prosecution and the safety of the 1 in 5 people and 1 in 4 women who experience domestic abuse in their lifetime.
Political and societal will has pushed domestic violence and violence against women and girls to be treated on par with serious terrorism offences in an attempt to curb low prosecution rates and encourage the use of the police force’s full investigative capabilities. Often, the language of terror invokes a very visceral response. We think of an imminent threat and feel a sense of urgency to respond to it. It is a similar reaction to when something is described as an emergency. The Covid-19 pandemic, one of the most eminent threats to human life globally in our lifetime was labelled by the World Health Organisation as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in 2020. The language of emergency was then co-opted by the media and politicians alike.
What this article seeks to address is if any benefit can be given by comparison or labelling of domestic violence to terror or emergency. It will look to Covid-19 as an example of national emergency to address this by investigating whether domestic violence victims benefitted or were hindered by emergency responses.
The Law of National Emergency: Covid-19 and Domestic Abuse
The use of emergency, like terrorism, in law – whether as a comparison or a label – mandates an element of the extraordinary in working to target or remedy a certain issue. To go back to the example of Covid-19, the government introduced the Health Protection (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 under the Public Health (Control of the Disease) Act 1984. Parliamentary approval was different from usual. The regulations only ceased to have effect if there was a failure by both houses to approve the regulations within 28 days. Otherwise, the regulations would have immediate effect as they were introduced. Additionally the Coronavirus Act 2020 which regulated the pandemic response was labelled by the government itself as an ‘Emergency Bill’. This demonstrates how the language of emergency operates. There is a requirement of immediacy in legislative formulation and creation.
The difficulty of this is it may lead to a lack of foresight to consequences of the emergency powers. This can be demonstrated with relation to the increase of domestic abuse resulting from the national lockdowns.
The lockdowns imposed to prevent the spread of Covid-19 presented a significant risk for victims of domestic violence. In a survey conducted by Women’s Aid, 66.7% of women who were already experiencing abuse said that their abuser used the lockdowns, or the consequences of the covid-19 measures to worsen their abuse. Women’s Aid also reported a 41% increase in visits to their online Live Chat during the first lockdown. Additionally, calls to the Respect helpline, an organisation that works with perpetrators of domestic abuse had a 97% increase in activity, with 42% of perpetrators accessing the service.
Where many victims may have had the opportunity to leave their homes they shared with their abusers, they were suddenly plunged into state-mandated proximity. Increased stresses and strains inflicted on the population, including a lack of job security and resulting financial difficulties not only presented a risk for those who were already experiencing abuse but also allowed for the fermentation of violence as a stress-related response, despite no abuse having been present previously. Increased domestic violence, of which most victims are women, was a grimly predictable side-effect of pandemic response.
There were also significant barriers to accessing the in-person support so many domestic violence victims relied upon. Victim’s own daily methods of escaping abuse such as going for a walk, seeing a friend and attending the gym were stripped from them. Remote help was available, but a lack of in person consultation prevented the identification of nuances found in in-person consultation. For example, a phone conversation regarding a victim’s injury removed the indicators of abuse, such as a victim’s behaviour.
To some extent, the law provided for the incompatibility of lockdown and the reality of domestic violence. Permission was given for those fleeing abuse to leave their homes without facing a financial penalty under Regulation 6 of the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020. It could also be said that the increased public and political consciousness of state-mandated confinement on those suffering from abuse incentivised a revaluation of domestic abuse offences and funding for support services. As outlined by the House of Commons Library, the government increased funding to domestic abuse support services by millions of pounds to help them coordinate their response to the heightened risk of abuse during lockdowns. In addition, the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 was given royal assent for application in England and Wales which provided for a priority of domestic abuse victims for support from homelessness schemes, establishing in law the role of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and making controlling and coercive behaviour a criminal offence. In Northern Ireland, the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Act (Northern Ireland) 2021 secured the criminalisation of domestic abuse as a specific offence, including psychological abuse.
Lessons for the Future
There is a glaring lack of immediacy to these responses, although seemingly positive. While emergency law can provide the impetus to acknowledge issues once these have happened, the action resulting from the recognition will always be delayed. What should ideally occur is these considerations should be built into emergency response before an emergency scenario occurs. For example, in pandemic response formulation, heightened domestic abuse caused by lockdowns should have been considered long before Covid-19 was ever a possibility. This ensures adequate funding provision for services to move online, for shelters and other homelessness schemes to prepare for the acceptance for those fleeing abuse and for the police to be aware of additional demand on their services and to adequately prepare and train for a domestic violence call when social distancing restrictions are in place.
Additional allocations of funding and legislation preceding heightened demand are positive but are too little too late.
It should not take a short-term emergency period to prioritise what has been a long-standing threat to women and girls.
It is crucial that we ask why it takes the enaction of emergency law, and the imposition of the language of emergency to lead to important change to secure the safety and rights of victims of domestic violence.
By problematising emergency responses and the immediacy they mandate, we can see how the urgency a comparison of domestic violence to terrorism obfuscates criticism of what should have been a sustained legislative and financial backing against domestic violence in the past. It should not take a comparison to terrorism for politicians and law enforcement to take domestic violence seriously. The risk of such a comparison is that the period of ‘threat’ or ‘emergency’ can wither away when other issues of the day take their hold. This threatens domestic violence and violence against women and girls with relegation when the ‘urgency’ is no longer seen to exist. This is particularly problematic considering most domestic violence happens in the private sphere and is not always publicly acknowledged. Legislative efforts should be sustained and, most of all, recognise that the threat of domestic violence particularly to women is not a sliding scale of threat or danger as terrorism is. Abuse is a sustained reality for 1 in 4 women across the UK. It is time to recognise it is not comparable but is its own equally endangering threat that requires long-term prevention.
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