Worst domestic abusers to be monitored like terrorists
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Police will be asked to use counterterrorism-style tactics to monitor the country’s 1,000 most dangerous abusers in an attempt to meet the government’s manifesto pledge to halve violence against women and girls within a decade.
Control rooms responding to 999 calls will be given a dedicated domestic abuse adviser under plans to be announced within weeks to tackle what police have described as an “epidemic” of violence.
The measures are expected to be among the first changes to be introduced by a new cross-departmental “mission delivery board”, due to meet next month.
There are already cross-departmental panels planned for Labour’s five key pledges — economic growth, the NHS, clean energy, crime and justice and skills. However, in a sign of his personal commitment to the cause, Sir Keir Starmer has decided to set up a separate mission delivery board focused on the issue following a spate of violent incidents and soaring levels of crime against women on British railways.
The board will be chaired by Jess Phillips, the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls.
A senior Whitehall source said: “The prime minister is fired up about this issue. He sees it as a massive priority and wants to throw everything at it.”
It is understood that Starmer is still haunted by the story of Jane Clough, the 26-year-old nurse who died in 2010 after being stabbed 71 times by her former partner, Jonathan Vass. He had been charged with raping her and had been freed on bail. She had been pregnant with their child when she made the allegations against him. Vass was given a life sentence.
Starmer met her parents, John and Penny Clough, during his time as head of the Crown Prosecution Service and helped them to change the law to allow prosecutors to appeal a crown court judge’s ruling at the High Court. The three became friends and the Labour leader spoke about the case in his conference speech in Brighton in September 2021.
Phillips will begin with a six-month data-gathering exercise to assess the scale of the problem. Government insiders claim that the dataset held by departments is inadequate and a fresh audit of violent offences committed against women has been commissioned. It is believed that much of the data is not held by the Home Office and will require input from education and health officials.
This will help to inform a crackdown similar to that seen in Australia earlier this year after Anthony Albanese’s Labor government declared that violence against women had become a national crisis. New measures there include a “leaving violence payment” of $5,000 to help women meet the costs of fleeing a relationship, plus new services, risk assessments and safety planning. There is also legislation to ban deepfake pornography and $6.5 million of extra funding for the eSafety commissioner to test age verification to protect children from pornography and other age-restricted online services.
Among the first changes to be introduced in the UK will be a watchlist of 1,000 of the country’s most prolific offenders, using data and intelligence on named suspects and repeat offenders of rape, stalking and domestic abuse. Police forces will be asked to rank high-risk suspects according to the frequency and severity of allegations made against them, and how recent the claims are. Once identified, the perpetrators will be targeted by police using tactics and tools normally reserved for counterterror and organised crime. The new approach is designed to encourage policing and criminal justice systems to look more at wider patterns of behaviour rather than individual incidents.
Domestic violence specialists will also be introduced into 999 call centres. This follows the 2018 case of Raneem Oudeh, who called 999 six times following an altercation with her estranged husband Janbaz Tarin. The final emergency call recorded the moment he killed her and her mother Khaola Saleem.
Other changes expected within a year include compulsory training for police in England and Wales on combating violence against women and girls. Officers would be unable to achieve promotion without some experience of working in either child protection or a domestic violence unit.
The renewed focus on tackling violence against women and girls comes weeks after a report found that such crimes rose by almost 40 per cent between 2018 and 2023 — which a leading female police chief described as a “national emergency”.
More than a million offences were recorded by police within the five-year period but a report commissioned by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing estimated that each year at least one woman in 12 will be a victim — or more than two million women in the country. The crimes include sexual assault, stalking and harassment.
In 2021 there were 7,561 violent crimes recorded on the railways, rising to 11,357 last year, while sexual offences rose by 10 per cent from 2,235 to 2,475 over the same period. Cases of sexual harassment reported over the same period doubled to 1,908. The rises will in part be down to increased reporting.
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