Official Report 609KB pdf
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Item 4 is the first of two evidence sessions on domestic abuse. The committee is continuing its evidence-gathering programme on current priorities and challenges across the justice system, and today’s first panel of witnesses will focus on advocacy and victim experience, including how statutory protections, court processes and advocacy services operate for victims/survivors of domestic abuse and sexual violence. I warmly welcome Nicola Love, external affairs manager at Rape Crisis Scotland, and Fiona McMullen, operations manager at Advocacy Support Safety Information Services Together—ASSIST. You are both very welcome, and we are glad to have you with us.
I will kick off with a question to you both. We have seen a rise in the numbers of rape cases and domestic abuse and domestic violence cases. I am keen to understand the impact of that on the services that you both provide. Can you speak broadly to that rise and its real-life impact on your services?
As you pointed out, we are looking at 50-year highs in reports of rape and sexual violence, and, as you know, there is an intrinsic link between the number of cases of rape and the number of survivors who experience that as a result of an intimate partner relationship. Rape Crisis Scotland runs a national advocacy service that provides support to survivors of rape and sexual violence who are engaging or considering engaging in the criminal justice process. Our advocacy workers provide support and information at every stage of the process. They might provide support during police interviews and they might attend court with a survivor.
It is not that complex: if more people are reporting rape and sexual violence, there is a greater need for independent advocacy to support people; if a greater number of people are attending court, a greater number of advocacy workers are needed to support people. The challenges that we face are directly linked to the fact that the funding for that work is frozen and has been frozen for a significant number of years. We are looking at real-terms cuts, but there probably was not enough funding to deal with the demand in the first place. There is definitely not enough funding to deal with the demand now.
I saw some commentary, which might have been from Glasgow and Clyde Rape Crisis, suggesting that its centre would need another £500,000 in financial year 2026-27 just to maintain current service levels. Broadly, is that an accurate picture across the service nationally due to the pressure that we are seeing? What will the consequences be if you do not get that support?
In 2022, in consultation with all our local delivery partners, including Glasgow and Clyde, we estimated that we would need about £3.5 million to provide services at current demand levels. The Government said that we could have £2 million, so we were operating with around 60 per cent of the required funding from that point. That was in 2022. If you are looking at services—whether in Glasgow or the rest of Scotland—that since then have only faced increased demand, it is obvious that there is not enough funding. The consequences of that are that survivors do not have the support that they need to access the justice system, and that those services are not even able to market themselves to help more people who they might have otherwise helped, because they are already struggling and having to turn away people who refer themselves.
We are stuck in a situation in which survivors are not able to access support when they need it. That disenfranchises them, and it takes them out of wanting to participate in the criminal justice process in the first place. Our sticking point is that, if you cannot provide the kind of advocacy and support that makes people feel able to participate in that process, they simply will not participate in it.
Do you want to add to that, Ms McMullen?
Yes, and thank you for the opportunity. It might be helpful if I briefly explain what we do so that you understand the difference between our work and that of other specialist domestic abuse services. Domestic abuse court advocacy—DACA—services have been designed and modelled to provide support to victims and children who have cases going through criminal court processes. Starting in 2004, ASSIST has built services up so that we now cover most of the west of Scotland. There are pockets of services in other areas, too, but there is not a consistent approach available across Scotland to people living in any given area. That is important to know.
What is the reason for there not being a consistent approach? Is that due to funding by local authorities? Why is the postcode lottery kicking in?
The postcode lottery is kicking in because services are unable to set up in particular areas as they require funding.
A great deal of work has been done by SafeLives—funded by the Scottish Government and in partnership with ASSIST—to look at domestic abuse court advocacy accreditation across Scotland so that, one day, wherever you live—for example, you live in Inverness but go to Glasgow for the weekend and there is an incident, so your court is in Glasgow but you return to Inverness—your support, your safety planning and, if you are high risk and need a co-ordinated community response, your multi-agency risk assessment conference will all happen in the area where you live.
We are not in that position yet, but much has been done in developing standards, accrediting the work and training DACA workers, in addition to their training in independent domestic abuse advocacy, or IDAA—we are full of acronyms. That is high-risk work, and we add to its complexity with the criminal court process.
Lots has been done to embed new services. DACA services are in 20 local authorities, but those authorities are not providing the same thing. Across the authorities, different client groups receive the services, and there are different court forums, whether that is summary—where most domestic abuse cases sit—or up to the High Court. There are variances, which is due to funding, so we want a day where there is no postcode lottery in Scotland.
I will go back to what DACA services do. We are not an add-on to the criminal justice system. Over 22 years, we have shown that the model is integral to the criminal justice system working in the best way that it can for victims of domestic abuse. They tell us that, when they report, they increase their risk, and what is heard at court is usually a fraction of the abuse that they are being subjected to. Therefore, from that point onwards, they need robust risk assessment and safety planning in order to go through the criminal justice process.
We hear a lot of talk about best practice in the services that we provide. To me, best practice is aspirational, but the work that we do is not aspirational. It must be safe practice, and that should be non-negotiable.
On the funding of ASSIST, in 22 years, we have never said no during the development of what have been really positive developments in the criminal justice system. We have been involved in the disclosure scheme. We have been involved in multi-agency risk assessment conferences across 14 local authorities in all levels and forums of court, making sure that we are there and that victims are safe and supported.
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However, in January, we had to take the difficult decision to put in place a temporary pause on any referrals not already identified as high risk, usually by the police. That is important, because when someone makes a report to the police, that risk is often unknown. They might not have disclosed everything to the police at the time of the incident, so they will need the support and the skill and experience of a DACA worker to explore that further. We also do prevention work in relation to some of the most worrying summary cases, by which I mean those in which what goes through court does not reflect the incident.
That has been a significant challenge. For every year for which the emergency referral provisions remain in place, we are losing 2,500 victims who are not accessing our service. We put the pause in place in January, hoping that it would be temporary, but we are now in September and it is still in place.
In addition, we are approaching October, and our service and many others that are funded by the victim-centred approach fund and delivering equally safe do not know what the funding picture for next April will be. Domestic abuse is not temporary, nor is domestic homicide, but the funding still is.
That was very helpful. You have painted a stark picture, which is what the committee needs in order to be able to interrogate the matter further with decision makers.
I have a final question for both of you before I hand over to my colleague Ms Chapman. Recommendation 19 in the report on the prosecution of domestic abuse cases at sheriff summary level that was produced by HM Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland back in 2024 talks about communication with victims in summary domestic abuse cases. I am keen to hear from either of you on that, because I am conscious that the inspectorate intends to look at the issue again, as the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service does not seem to be making progress on it. We will question COPFS on that later in the meeting.
I would be very happy to speak to that. ASSIST is significantly embedded in the case management model that has been rolled out across Scotland, which has been very successful in enabling an early resolution to cases to be achieved. The inspection in relation to communication with victims has been part of that.
We are seeing improvements in that respect, but those improvements are dependent on resources. The chronic underfunding is not limited to specialist services such as ours but is being experienced by COPFS in relation to fiscals and victim information and advice, and by the police. I train fiscals, and part of that training is about how to undertake victim engagement in a trauma-informed, domestic abuse-competent way. I regularly hear about the volume of calls that fiscals are making with regard to victim engagement and keeping victims in those cases informed. On any given day, fiscals can have a list of 20 or 30 victims to call to engage them in the process. Although we have made huge inroads in terms of the appetite, the skill and the experience when it comes to making it meaningful to victims when that call or that invitation is made, we have a long way to go when it comes to resources.
I will be brief, because we are quite tight for time. Out of 10, what mark would you give for the progress that has been made?
I would probably say seven.
Okay.
I did not give an eight because of the resources issue.
That is helpful.
Ms Love, do you have anything to add to that?
Fiona McMullen has already touched on the lack of resourcing. What that produces is inconsistency. There will be survivors who go through the system who have good communication and who understand what is happening and why, but there will also be survivors who are left completely in the dark. The fact that there is a complete lack of consistency across the board makes things very difficult and underlines why independent advocacy is so important.
Thank you. I will hand over to Ms Chapman, who has a declaration of interests to make before she begins her questions.
Good morning, both. Before I get to my questions, I alert colleagues to my entry in the register of members’ interests: prior to my election in 2021, I worked for a rape crisis centre.
I thank you both for what you have said this morning. I am interested in what you have said about what essentially comes down to this point: whether we treat advocacy as core justice system infrastructure and fund and resource it accordingly. If we do not, we have not only discrepancies but failures in relation to people who are seeking to access justice.
I come to Nicola Love first. What does it mean to a survivor if they do not have the advocacy that they need when they need it? That is, of course, if they want to go through the criminal justice system; I appreciate that not every survivor does. Without that advocacy support, what are they left with?
Very little, I suppose. As you said, not all survivors will want to go through the criminal justice process, and a lot of people try to access independent advocacy through our services because they want to explore whether that is something that they might want to do, or something that they feel like they can do. The earlier advocacy is involved in that process, the better the outcome tends to be for the survivor.
Fiona McMullen put it well when she talked about the fact that our service is not an add-on—it is not just something that is nice to have. The advocacy worker is the only person who is working independently of the criminal justice process and is advocating for the survivor’s interests. Sometimes, when you do not get the resourcing or the personnel right, that is the only person who is really interested in making sure that the survivor understands what is happening around them, which obviously has a profound impact on them.
You say that independence is crucial. There has been some discussion about what sort of advocacy support could be brought into the statutory services. Why is that independence so important?
Survivors’ trust in the justice system has historically been very low, and it remains so. I do not say that to discredit any of the objectively very good work that is being done by justice agencies; and we are happy to work alongside them to achieve that.
However, that does not change a survivor’s general perception when they enter the process. There is a kind of distrust. Someone may have an unfortunate interaction when they make an initial approach to the police, and that can affect whether they feel that they can take things forward. Having an advocacy worker who is able to talk that through with them and make interventions on their behalf when that is appropriate is incredibly important, and it keeps people focused.
I highlight the amount of survivor feedback that we get that amounts to saying, “If we didn’t have an advocacy worker there to help us through the process, we wouldn’t have felt able to complete it.”
It is crucial for access to justice.
That would be our assessment of it, yes.
Do you have a sense of what the committee should understand as the minimum level of advocacy service provision for every survivor?
It is difficult, because provision is always fluctuating across the country. Fiona McMullen talked about the numbers on waiting lists for her service, which are a little bit higher than the numbers on ours. Nonetheless, in the financial year 2025-26, we had 1,378 survivors on the waiting list for advocacy support somewhere in Scotland, and that does not begin to count survivors who could not join waiting lists when they were closed. In addition, some centres, such as the one in Dundee, choose not to operate waiting lists because they find that leaving survivors to languish on a rape crisis waiting list is a form of trauma in itself.
We are missing an incredible amount of people. As I alluded to when Mr Linden asked a question, we cannot go out there and reach all the people we potentially could or might want to reach, because we can barely reach the folk who are turning to us themselves. It is important to understand that there is no expansion—there is no way to reach every survivor. At this point, we can barely reach half of them.
You asked what would happen if we were not there. This work is absolutely about murder and suicide prevention—that is the model. We are working with victims who have been brave enough to report, and who have often raised their risk by doing so, in a fluid court process that is complex and difficult to navigate, and which touches many different organisations. Having a trusted professional to navigate them through that without having to repeat their story is essential.
It is not only about preventative work to prevent risk from escalating—the first response that someone gets from the criminal justice process will set the tone for how they engage in the future. I am thinking in particular of our young victims. If that engagement is positive and they feel safe and supported, they will continue to engage.
Domestic abuse is, sadly, a repeat crime. It is very different from any other crime in that, once it starts, the court process does not necessarily manage to end it. The abuse continues in many different ways, sometimes very creatively, outwith the court process. What happens in court cannot necessarily manage that through the outcome at sentencing. It is crucial that that is managed with regard to the totality of risk.
Thank you for that. You alluded to something that I want to explore a little bit, which is that the abuse continues beyond and outside the court process. I think that the system is very poor at recognising and understanding coercive control, and at capturing that meaningfully. How does your service help to unearth those kinds of abuses? What is your assessment of the relationship between civil and criminal courts? These cases often bridge both systems.
I also want to come back to your point about independence. Victims are living with the situation day in, day out, and have to some extent kept themselves safe to that point. They have the best knowledge of what they need, and what they need from us, and I think that independence sits within that.
There may be times that a victim does not want to take the action that we might want them to take with regard to increasing safety. They know how to manage safety, and what we do in our independent role is walk alongside them on their journey, at their pace, to keep them engaged.
We might think about coercive control as a situation where the perpetrator has the remote control. When the victim reports to the police, she—I will use gendered language—takes the remote control back. We have the potential, with our processes, to keep that remote control in her hands or to take it away from her. That links in with what we see in criminal and civil courts. We temporarily, at times, give that remote control to the victim, and then the case goes into the civil court arena, and we take it back again and actually give it back to the perpetrator. We say, “Okay—we’ve acknowledged the coercive control here, and we’ve got a non-harassment order for you, but we’re looking at child contact here and we’re not taking account of the danger you see in that for yourself, as the non-abusing parent, and that you see extending to your children.”
With coercive control, children do not witness isolation, exhaustion, degradation and threats; they are subjected to those things alongside the non-abusing parent.
Thank you for that. I have one final question, if I have time. I come back to what you touched on in response to the convener’s questions about communication. How do we ensure that, when we talk about better communication, we are talking about genuine support rather than simply better letter writing? That is what the tick-box might look like—”Yes, we have sent that information” or “We’ve had that phone call.” How important is it that there is a genuine trauma-informed approach? We now all use that term, but how do we ensure that better communication is not just better letter writing?
That will look different for different victims. We have to talk to victims and ask them how they want to engage with us—is it by letter, text or phone? I know that that sounds basic, but I do not know whether you have tried to get a 25-year-old on the phone. It used to be a 17-year-old, but we now have a whole client group who do not pick up the phone and do not want to do things in that way. It sounds basic, but we need to understand the victim.
That is where, again, court advocacy services can help. They can say, “This is how this victim wants to be communicated with.” The victim might want to use the witness gateway and look at their statement online when the trial is approaching—with the support of an advocacy worker afterwards, because that can be traumatising— or they might not want to be contacted every time something is not continued; they might want you to contact them only when you know something concrete. Other victims will say that, in the absence of information, they create a narrative of what is going on, and they want to get that call even if it is to tell them that nothing is happening. We need to listen to individual victims and work with them where they are.
That highlights why that independent and personal support is so important.
Nicola, do you want to say anything on coercive control or communication?
With regard to what communication looks like, we tie ourselves up in knots over what “trauma informed” means and does not mean. I think that it means understanding what someone has been through, and understanding that writing a letter telling that person what has happened does not necessarily mean that they understand the contents of that letter or its implications for them.
In particular, when cases start to call, we might see a complainer being cut out of the process because they are seen as a witness, and that aspect is not necessarily looked at. Someone spoke to me about not understanding why their perpetrator had been prosecuted on a rape charge but previous domestic abuse charges against them had been dropped. I can understand that from a prosecutor’s perspective. I can understand why it has been looked at from the perspective of what will achieve the most successful outcome that will come with the highest sentencing threshold. However, a survivor does not understand that if it is not explained to them properly. They think that a huge part of the abuse that they experienced has just been erased from the criminal justice process and are understandably upset about it.
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If we are thinking of advocacy as—to use your words, Fiona—preventative infrastructure, it needs to be individual and almost bespoke for every survivor. Otherwise, we run the risk of not supporting the individuals.
Many of the tactics are similar, whether isolation, exhaustion, degradation or threats. However, the way that they are carried out will be unique and bespoke to the person. The perpetrator knows what will work. It might be hidden in plain sight. It might be something that would not impact on me but impacts on that victim because of who they are and the knowledge that the perpetrator has about them.
I hand over to Ms Bland, who will follow some of that line of questioning.
Welcome, Fiona and Nicola. It has been interesting to listen to your evidence. I will open up the discussion and go right back to prevention looking at society as a whole. I am interested in your thoughts about how we educate society to recognise the signs of coercion and controlling behaviour so that it is not only victims and survivors who have to identify it but families, friends and neighbours. What are your thoughts on a public campaign and education in schools?
Rape Crisis recognises the need for age-appropriate education to be embedded from a relatively early age on topics such as consent and healthy relationships so that, when young people are growing up and have relationships in their formative years they have some awareness and understanding of what a good, healthy relationship is and is not and what consent is and is not. We and other organisations do that work in a relatively piecemeal, limited way. However, the outcomes and responses from young people point to the fact that they retain that information, as do some of the academic evaluations that examine whether they do.
Tony Lenehan gave evidence to the committee a couple of meetings ago about growing numbers of young men who are demonstrating patterns of domestic abuse at an early age. Technology is starting to outrun us a little bit.
That is why I mentioned a campaign. Do we need to start counteracting the normalisation of abusive relationships,? What are your thoughts on that?
We have had some highly successful campaigns, one being the recent “Don’t be that guy” campaign by Police Scotland. I also draw attention to the work of the EmilyTest organisation in colleges and universities, which talks about bystander intervention.
We also need to do something about prevention when we work with child witnesses and young victims who are witnesses in a court process or witnesses to the abuse. How do we support them so that, as they continue through life, we have our messaging right about what is acceptable?
I know that you were talking about pre-offending education, but we need to think about how we manage young men who cause harm towards partners or ex-partners to ensure that we address that harm in a way that does not assume that it is situational, one-off and necessarily impulse behaviour. We certainly work with a number of young victims and young offenders for whom the abuse is absolutely bespoke, nuanced and well thought through. It is the opposite of impulse behaviour. We need to get that right. When someone comes into the system, there is a touch, however light, and we need not only to get that right with the person causing harm but to ensure that, if we do not prosecute some such cases—I am thinking about the Children (Care and Justice (Scotland) Act 2024—we do not erode any rights of a victim who would have had the right to special bail conditions, a non-harassment order or advocacy support through a criminal court process.
What is your wish for the next steps? What can we do to make this better?
My wish is very basic: we need front-line resource in every part of the system, whether that is court buildings or police on the front line. If we want the police to be skilled investigators and to consider DASA in most reports and uncover whether there is potential for that criminality, we need to fund and resource that. We have heard the stats about the number of reports that Police Scotland is dealing with each day. It is not possible to be a skilled domestic abuse front-line officer in that environment or landscape.
We sound like broken records when we talk about resourcing, but it is absolutely fundamental to meet the situation that we are in.
We would like a commitment to prevention education for every child in Scotland to tackle the increasing normalisation. We see a pattern of boys and young men starting to offend, so we need to consider what meaningful interventions we can put in place to prevent it from escalating. Police Scotland’s “Don’t be that guy” campaign is relaunching in some form, so you might be interested in looking at that further.
Thank you.
Good morning. Fiona McMullen just said that, given the scale of the cases that Police Scotland is dealing with, it is not possible to become a skilled domestic abuse officer in that landscape. Will you explain what you mean by that?
With DASA, we have gold-standard legislation that allows us to prosecute coercive control. How do we know that something is coercive control? Victims do not turn up at a police station and say, “I’m experiencing this, this and this—I can see that it’s coercive control.” They are far more likely to attend a police station and say, “I’ve been assaulted. I’ve been shouted and sworn at,” or other things relating to section 38 assaults.
We need skilled police officers who have time. Very positively, the police have started to introduce a risk assessment prior to taking a statement. That has potential to capture the wider totality of risk before we get into a statement about what looks like one incident of abuse. That is when we will see the number of DASA cases rising.
That is clear. What is your assessment of the current level of training and capability among investigating police officers in respect of the issue? Where are the gaps?
The gaps are in the time that is available to manage the level of demand. We have seen demand rise. It is the highest that it has been in the past 10 years. We do not have more resource, so we are expecting front-line officers, who deal with all sorts of criminality, to understand coercive control and the dangers of non-fatal strangulation, and to be able to encourage a victim to disclose that at the first point of contact so that the risk can be managed. We are not there, despite the efforts that are being made.
You mentioned time, but what about the input training that is required to develop those capabilities?
Pre-covid, in preparation for DASA, a huge piece of training work was done with all police personnel in Police Scotland.
All?
Yes. It was domestic abuse matters training, which was delivered by a police person and a domestic abuse specialist. It was incredible training and was predominantly face to face. We were told at the time, “This is excellent, but we need time to fully investigate cases.”
Has there been follow-up on that? That was quite a while ago.
It would be best for Police Scotland to answer that.
So you are not involved in that directly.
Not currently.
We provide regular feedback—we have standing quarterly or biannual meetings that allow us to give feedback to the police and the Crown Office. We have had quite a lot of success through being able to give regular feedback to address specific issues, although maybe not at the systemic level that Fiona McMullen is talking about.
The landscape evolves all the time. We need continual training of police officers, because we have challenges with artificial intelligence and other tech, and with stalking and—
You mentioned that the landscape is changing.
Yes. We have repeated breaches of bail that are not being managed due to the prison population crisis. We have to continually evolve. That training needs to continue, but time is also needed. That is policing that, in the past, might have been picked up by tier 2 of Police Scotland.
What do you mean by tier 2?
Tier 1 is front-line police officers responding to incidents. Tier 2 is the domestic abuse investigation units and domestic abuse safeguarding units. They are domestic abuse specialists in the police. In perhaps one small area that we cover, due to the demand, the police have enough resources to be able to go in with a proactive investigative approach to criminality. However, that is not possible in some of the larger areas.
That is simply because of lack of resource.
Yes.
It is a lack of police officers, basically.
We can pin a lot on training, but training is only meaningful if it can be applied, practised, reflected on and reviewed.
Yes—it is a continuous process, like continuous improvement.
HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland’s thematic review of domestic abuse, which is three years old now, talked about the issue of counter-allegations, and that has also been raised in other places. What is happening in relation to counter-allegations? That seems to be a common tactic that is used by alleged perpetrators against their victims.
We have seen increasing prevalence of that. Through our work with the Scottish Women’s Rights Centre, we have started to produce a piece of research in collaboration with some of our legal partners and Scottish Women’s Aid. I will certainly make that available to the committee when it is ready. When we are not recognising patterns of behaviour or looking at things in the round, we tend to look at things in isolation, such as people saying, “She shouted at me,” “She sent me a horrible text message,” or, “She hit me.”
That is really complex, so it might be helpful to simplify it. When police go to an incident where a person says that someone did something, if there is corroboration for domestic abuse, there is a presumption in favour of prosecution. We absolutely need to retain that, because otherwise we would have the discretion of thousands of police officers, which would take us back a long way.
In among that, you will have clever perpetrators who will use proactive prosecution against a victim and will manipulate what happened. Sometimes, we have victims who say, “It did happen—I shouted and swore at him—but wait until I tell you what he has been doing.” He is smart enough, knowing the system, to give a no-comment interview. You then have the position where a victim of domestic abuse—the primary victim—might go through a court process. We need a solid understanding in the police, in line with the joint protocol, so that the standard prosecution reports that go from the police to the Crown, which marks the cases, give the full context of the incident, so that that can be addressed by the Crown.
You are speaking as though that stuff does not happen currently.
It happens, but there will always be room for it not to happen if we do not have the appropriate quality of standard prosecution report or an understanding of what is happening. There are thousands of police officers across Scotland, so there will be room for that to go wrong.
We accept referrals for male and female victims, and we have cases—
Sure, but more than 80 per cent of the victims are women.
Absolutely. However, we have men who are the victim of domestic abuse going through court. We have some who, after checks and balances and careful assessment, we are confident are the primary victims of the domestic abuse. We have others—
Those are people who are subject to a criminal process, because of counter-allegations.
Yes. We might have a man who is a victim of domestic abuse in one incident, and who has been the perpetrator of domestic abuse in another. Alternatively, that might not be known, but we have assessed that, given the totality of the relationship, they might not be the primary victim. There are two things going on there. There is what we do in a court process, and there is how we manage that in a community co-ordinated response.
There is also a prevalence of behaviours by those who are alleged to be perpetrators of controlling behaviour, to the extent that they counter-allege abuse and the victim—I think that “primary victim” was the term that you used—becomes subject themselves to being stuck in a cell.
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That is where we need the understanding of Police Scotland in terms of what they interpret, what they report to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and how that is managed.
Do you both have concerns about your current levels of confidence in police officers’ capability to discern such a counter-allegation when it is bogus?
It is really complex for police officers. They are out at the time of an incident and told to charge where there is evidence. There is always room for improvement when it comes to counter-allegations. We have had concerning cases.
In passing, you mentioned bail, but we should mention section 23D of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995, which we have discussed before in committee and which was recently mentioned in the chamber. What is your concern about the nature of the current arrangements on bail?
What are you asking about in particular?
We struck off section 23D, so an argument can be made that the conditions for bail were in effect lowered. Previously, when section 23D was in place, there was a presumption for a higher standard for bail versus remand.
We absolutely see challenges in that area.
Are you against section 23D being—
I am for having proper risk assessments before such decisions are made.
By sheriffs?
By sheriffs, with the information that they have available to them. If someone is on bail, those conditions must be appropriate and robust—
And enforceable.
And enforceable. Also, if they are breached, that in itself, regardless of the nature of the breach, shows an emboldened perpetrator who is content to disregard a court order. What sheriffs do with breaches of bail has changed considerably in the past several years.
You are again advocating for better information to be made available to the sheriff to make an informed judgment—
And for more robust sentencing around breaches.
Is that not currently happening, then?
Not always, no.
What determines whether it happens or not?
Some of the decisions are resource led rather than risk based, but those are complex circumstances to consider. That is where we need someone managing that risk and that safety on bail, because you could give conditions to one person and they will adhere to them and you could give them to the next person and they will not.
However, the sheriff does not have all the information. Forgive me, because I might be misreading between the lines, but you seem to have suggested that sheriffs do not always have all the information.
They will not always have all the information—
Why not?
Because what they will have is based on the incident or the abuse that has been reported to the police and anything else that the victim can tell them that has made its way into that standard prosecution report. However, victims will not necessarily have had the opportunity or felt confident enough to disclose all that at the time.
We will need to bring this part to a close.
Can I come back in later on domestic abuse protection notices and orders?
You can come back in later, if that is all right. I am hoping to cover that issue.
Thank you for your answers, Ms McMullen. I hand over to Marie McNair for her questions.
To go back to an earlier point, advocacy is important to those who navigate the criminal justice system, so it is really worrying to hear about the pressures on your organisations. In my constituency, we lost Clydebank Women’s Aid due to uncertainty around funding, which has been a huge blow, especially to those who received its advocacy and outreach support. I know that that has affected women’s ability to raise domestic abuse issues, and it has impacted services in other areas of the constituency because it does not leave us with very many places to refer folk to.
What are your observations with regard to men accessing the Caledonia system? From speaking to women, are you aware of any gaps in support for women and children while their partners are on the programme? In response to your earlier point, I have also heard about abuse continuing while men are on the programme. Can you say a wee bit about that?
We manage victims to the point of sentencing and support them to engage with the Caledonian programme. The benefit of the Caledonian model is the robust support, which lasts up to two years, that is offered to not only the perpetrator in the matter that led them to the programme, but to partners and previous partners of that person. The fluidity of the risk is managed by liaising with other professionals to assess what is happening in the programme versus how the victim feels that is impacting on their life and their safety. It is a solid programme.
The vast majority of domestic abuse sits in the summary court. Justice social work reports are asked for in summary court when a sheriff realises there is a pattern, but there will be many incidents dealt with that do not reflect the totality of risk, so there will be people who are not getting anywhere near a perpetrator programme. There is a gap in provision for addressing offending behaviour at an earlier point.
Is the 24-month support consistent, or are there gaps in it?
It is consistent, but it is led by the women. There will be women who say, “My risk has now stabilised and I have left the relationship. I would like to check in now and again, but I do not want to be constantly reminded of this,” and there will be victims who continue in that relationship.
You also asked about continued offending. Under the previous system, if someone on probation committed an offence, that could result in the probation order being breached. Although I can understand the reasons for that, I cannot understand how it benefits anyone to revoke an order because, two weeks into its duration, the person is caught shoplifting for a reason that is rooted in addiction. Under community payback orders, there will be concerns about someone continuing to commit domestic abuse offences and still being subject to the order, but there is the ability to manage an offender and support the victim if they are staying on an order.
Two of the things that we know work in homicide and suicide prevention are victim advocacy and offender management.
Absolutely. That is all from me.
Good morning. You have both said quite a lot about this question already, but I want to give you the opportunity to fill in any gaps, if there are any.
You talked about receiving more reliable and more secure funding. In answer to one of my colleagues, you spoke about more training for the police as another way in which more resources would make a meaningful difference. Are there any other ways of doing things, in terms of the receipt of funding and the provision of funding, that would make a difference?
We have talked a lot about the need for certainty. We are sitting very close to October, with a funding term that ends in March 2027. The viability of our services does not just involve having access to money, or crossing our fingers and hoping for it to come or lobbying hard to ensure that it does; it also involves our ability to plan for what to do with that money. We place advocacy workers in local delivery centres, which are predominantly local rape crisis centres across Scotland. They are their own organisations, with their own staff and overheads to manage. I understand that we are just one budget line for the Scottish Government, but placing those advocacy workers in those local delivery centres is a huge part of our work, and it is impossible to plan that in a meaningful way without certainty about funding.
We get told that there will be an uplift in funding, but we do not know what that looks like. We get told that emergency funding is available for services that are forced to operate waiting lists, but we do not know what that looks like, either. If we are not likely to find out until December, what are we supposed to do that will be meaningful in March? Will we be able to recruit more people? That does not happen overnight. It is really hard to hire somebody when you tell them that you cannot guarantee them a job past March, because who wants that?
Nicola Love mentioned a standstill budget. This is not a temporary problem, and yet we have temporary funding. That is not to take away from the valuable work of different specialist services. If I had my wish, domestic abuse court advocacy would be permanent; we would know that it would be there across Scotland. We have been operating a model for 22 years that we know works, and yet we are going back on what we can provide every year, at an absolute cost to victims.
On what we get in terms of funding, a longer funding period on a standstill budget just causes difficulty further down the line. We lose funding from attrition. A standstill budget is in effect a cut, so that needs to be addressed.
There is also something to say about supporting the people who do this work in the criminal justice sector, which is predominantly women, and the value of the work. We know that everybody is in a cost of living crisis, and that applies to workers, too. There is something to say about wages that value the work and retain staff. Services routinely have to recruit and retrain people after losing practitioners who cannot afford to work in the sector—that is appalling.
Do you have anything more to say about the support that you provide directly? Do you want to add anything to what you said about training police officers? If the answer is no, and you have said everything you want to, that is fine. I just wanted to give you the opportunity to add to it.
A less well understood aspect of what we do is that delivering a kind of national service gives you the ability to provide regular feedback that has tangible results. For example, we are currently having a conversation with Police Scotland on the point of making an advocacy referral. Currently, the point at which somebody is engaged with a solo officer is the point at which they would engage advocacy. We are talking about making that happen at the point of the initial report, so that at the time somebody met their solo, they would have the advocacy worker there.
Understanding what survivors are telling us about their experiences and being able to make such wee tweaks without waiting years for big, sweeping policy changes to come to light is important, because that is what makes a positive impact on a daily basis.
Having staff there to pick up those meetings with the Crown and with the police is incredibly important. Supporting survivors is obviously at the forefront of what we do, but that work in the background to improve individual responses is an incredibly important part of it
Can I add to that and perhaps widen it slightly? We in Scotland should be proud of our multi-agency and partnership work. People come to visit Scotland and cannot believe that we have fiscals, the third sector, Police Scotland and statutory and non-statutory agencies all sitting around the table.
There is the individual advocacy that we absolutely need to fund, and there are the opportunities for institutional advocacy. Every day we find systemic gaps in our services that people have not discovered and we get really good input from COPFS and Police Scotland. That is at a policy level, but for things to change meaningfully, it takes us back to resources. We need the resources for policy to connect to practice.
I am interested in the possible use of GPS technology for perpetrators of domestic violence. I do not need to tell you about the horrific cases that have been reported. Stacy Hunter’s family has called for the quick introduction of GPS, which the Government has committed to. What is your view on that, and do you think it could make a difference?
I caught the tail end of Stephen Kerr talking about the risk that sheriffs are not in a position to take. It is really important to try to get this right.
I will talk about the issue in general, rather than about an individual case that is very likely to go through the domestic homicide and suicide process.
On electronic monitoring, we do not know what will work unless we are providing it, do we? We cannot say what will make a difference if we do not have it at our disposal. It is positive to think about all the tools that we have to improve the safety of victims, particularly in relation to bail, but also in relation to home detention curfew, which is being used more often in sentences—that is happening more quickly and for longer.
There are gaps in electronic monitoring that the introduction of GPS will not fix, and those are the gaps around involving the risk to victims in the process and sharing information about the process with victims. As it stands, if a tag is put on an offender under curfew and they do not have it on for any reason—they are unavailable, take the tag off or have a review that allows the tag to be taken off to go on a temporary holiday—the victim is not informed. So, we need to do two things: first, introduce what we want to provide next; and secondly, strengthen what we already have to ensure that victims are at the centre of the risk management around the process.
10:30
You said that an offender might take the tag off—I did not think that they could do that.
You can take the tag off. It would take some persistence, but you can do so and it does not invoke an immediate police response; instead, the matter goes back to G4S. The victim is not advised of that breach or its outcome—for example, whether a tag gets put back on or someone is taken into custody. They are not told. Victims cannot safety plan if they do not know where the perpetrator is.
So, they should be told if there has been a breach.
Absolutely. We need to look at electronic monitoring and curfew as a whole and consider how to ensure that victims are informed of those things in the way that we inform them of a court process.
Do you think that GPS could be part of the solution?
Absolutely. I think that we need to use all the tools at our disposal. However, if we are not telling the victim that there is GPS, where it covers and whether an order was breached, that will not be meaningful to them.
That makes sense. Nicola, do you want to add anything?
We see GPS monitoring as an important part of safeguarding, but the key word in that sentence is “part”—it is not in itself a safeguard and it is really important to recognise its limitations when we talk about the use of community justice alternatives for offenders. You might think that a GPS tag means that if there is a breach, all of a sudden a switchboard lights up and there is a SWAT team-style response but, realistically, that is not what happens; instead, it goes to G4S, which reports to the police, who might or might not respond—although you would hope that they would. So, it has its limitations in the round.
To be honest, I think that everybody is aware of that, but I am surprised, because I thought that GPS was available—I thought that that was just about the extent of it—but I realise that we do not have it at all.
It is also about the professional in the middle of that who will help the victim to navigate the situation. We take it up to a certain point—we take it up to sentencing, and then, often, it is a case of saying, “Right, you are on to recovery”. However, the abuse is still very likely to continue, and we need to manage that risk and victims’ safety through the court process and beyond, until the risk reduces.
Lastly, on that question of risk, there are professional people whose job it is to assess risk—the Risk Management Authority does that for certain offenders. Is there a need to have a look at who could make the assessment about risk in those cases? I know that the victim telling their experience to the sheriff could be one way, but that is a subjective viewpoint that the sheriff has to factor in, and maybe there must be more objectivity. Would it be helpful to consider changing the system so that more information is factored in when the case goes in front of the sheriff and they make a decision?
We can risk assess at many points. The Risk Management Authority is an extreme for a certain cohort of offenders, but police risk assess at the time of an incident. It is about that pivot: asking the questions before we go in to take a statement tells victims that we want to look at what has happened and at the totality of their risk. We might get more; we might understand and evidence more. That improvement needs to continue.
When we come to sentencing, we have our justice social work rapport. At the moment, the guidance to justice social workers is to attempt to make contact with a victim agency that might be engaging with the victim to understand the risk. I know that that is subjective, but it is also very accurate because that victim understands and has intimate knowledge of the person who is causing the abuse. We need to strengthen what happens there in terms of how often that information is asked for, particularly in our Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 cases and our stalking cases—anywhere we see a pattern.
That is a practical thing that could be done within the system to make sure that there is a consistent approach across all courts.
That is the sheriff’s aid to sentencing—it is what tells the sheriff what might be meaningful with regard to addressing the offending and protection, which are the two things that victims say that they want from a court outcome.
I go back to the idea of non-compliance. When you are assessing risk and you start to see people breaching their licensing conditions without consequence, that starts to point to increased risk escalation. Those things could be dealt with much more robustly than they currently are.
Absolutely.
We have a couple of brief wash-up questions, if we can be quite tight on time, starting with Ms Chapman.
I want to pick up on a different element of the postcode lottery, if you like, in service provision. Rape Crisis Scotland has highlighted the barriers that are experienced by survivors from different communities, in particular by those from minoritised backgrounds. When we talk about the survivor or victim experience, whose voices are we not hearing? Are there particular groups that we are failing more than others, if that makes sense? I will come to Nicola first.
There is probably a huge gap with regard to the people whom we potentially have the ability, but not currently the capacity, to support. People currently tend to come into contact with an advocacy service through a referral from a justice agency or by coming directly to a rape crisis centre.
The work on who naturally turns to a rape crisis service, or to a justice agency to then be referred back to a support service such as Rape Crisis Scotland, is hugely important. While we are stuck managing who we have, we do not have the ability to try to reach out to communities that may be naturally distrustful of services or may not understand the independence aspect of these advocacy services.
Would you say that the justice system is, in effect, particularly unsafe or inaccessible for certain communities?
I would recognise that, yes. We see that.
We can acknowledge that there are additional barriers, but I think that it would be helpful for the committee to hear from some of the services that provide such support. There is Amina—the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre—and Shakti Women’s Aid, and there are other excellent services. We support black and minority ethnic victims who are coming through a court process, but they have already identified that they are experiencing something. A lot of preventative work goes on that is nowhere near the reporting stage. Those organisations would give you the context around both aspects.
Thank you—that is helpful.
I promised Mr Kerr that he could come back in on DAPNs—you can come back in briefly, Mr Kerr.
It is now more than five years since the Domestic Abuse (Protection) (Scotland) Act 2021 was passed, but domestic abuse protection notices and domestic abuse protection orders have still not been brought in. My question is simple, and I would like you to give as full an answer as possible in the time that is allowed.
We are five years on, and there are still no notices and no orders. What protection does a victim not currently have that they would have if those provisions were enacted?
There would be an opportunity for some victims who are perhaps not going through a criminal justice process to have that protection, which would mean that they would avoid potentially having to go down a civil court route that would be costly or would mean getting legal aid, if they were able to find a legal aid lawyer.
However, to go back just a bit, that work has been around for a long time and it needs to be resourced, but it cannot take away from what we already have and are trying to improve. That draws us back to the legislation that makes it mandatory for a sheriff or judge to consider a non-harassment order in almost every domestic abuse case. That is not happening—
It does not happen?
We record that in our own service. Although we see that there is absolutely an improvement in that regard, we still see some cases in which a victim has expressly asked for such an order and it has not been granted. It is free to the public purse—ultimately, if it is breached, there is police and court time involved, but it is free. The onus is on the justice system to provide it, which helps to manage the risk of having to ask for it in a civil arena, and it is really effective, and yet we are not using it as much as we could be. That also links back to the point about sheriffs and judges knowing that a victim is in favour of that.
To sum up, then, we are not using what we already have—
We need to better use what we already have.
—and we have not enacted parts of the legislation that the Parliament passed five years ago, as a further set of tools to support victims.
What I would add is probably quite a shameless hijacking of your wider point, which is about the dangers of not implementing legislation that we already have. We have the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, which will be close to being implemented, having been rubber-stamped about a year ago. Although we are seeing progress in some areas, we are not seeing progress in others. I would hammer home the point that these things are not any good if they exist only on paper. If we do not see the reality of them, and we do not understand when we are likely to be able to see the reality, we cannot hold the Government to account from our end, and you cannot hold it to account from your end.
Exactly.
There is a bit of a collective shrug in respect of the good will to develop these policies.
Do you have a checklist of all the issues?
I do, and I will certainly provide it to the committee. If I started to list them now, I think that I would be booted out.
Please send it to the committee—thank you.
I want to ask a couple of questions, and if we have time, I would like to bring in Yi-pei Chou Turvey.
To go back to my earlier questions, Ms McMullen, we talked about the postcode lottery that exists and the deserts in certain parts of the country. Can you give me an idea of the top five worst places where you are really in trouble?
It is difficult to say. We now have some form of domestic abuse court advocacy through the accreditation programme and the existing services in 20 local authorities, but in those local authorities there will be vast differences in who they are able to provide for. I have said already that we are currently supporting nearly 900 victims with multiple court cases; we would usually have 1,250 at any given time. We are in a poor position in the west because we are not offering the service to everybody.
There might be another service that can only go up to a certain forum of court, so it would not go to the High Court, and another service that can work only with women. We need a consistent approach, and it is difficult.
I suppose, to answer your question, that it would be the places where there is nothing at all—the local authorities where there is no domestic abuse court advocacy and we would have to say that we are poorer in that respect.
That is helpful.
My final question touches on a point that Mr Kerr raised, to which Ms Love responded. I invite you both to comment on this. The First Minister—to his great credit, I think—has, in the programme for government, made it clear that tackling violence against women and girls is a priority for the Government, as well it should be. The most significant and fundamental message that I am hearing today is that, while those intentions are good, there is a lack of resource. I am not wrong there, am I?
Absolutely not.
No.
I am sure that the First Minister and his ministers will be hearing that loud and clear.
I hand over to Yi-pei Chou Turvey for a final, very brief question.
I thank both witnesses for coming to speak to us. I have a question arising from all the people who I have talked to since I became my party’s spokesperson for justice and criminal justice. Those are people who are fighting in criminal court and in family court. One thing that I have heard over and over is that because the courts do not have access to each other’s information, and social workers and different organisations do not have access to information from different courts, the police do not have a full picture of what is going on, and that can be weaponised by abusers.
One issue that was cited was that information from one court cannot be used for the sake of the victims in another court, because it does not work like that.
Do you see that there is a pattern there, and that it is a problem in our justice system? What should we do to make changes to ensure that critical, life-changing—or life-saving—information is made accessible to the police and to your organisations in order that you can support those victims?
We absolutely see that we have a criminal court process and a civil court process often running alongside each other, and the civil process might be continuing the abuse in respect of child contact and so on, with the perpetrator continuing to operate from a position of power.
We have talked for a long time about recommendations for civil court. There is no advocacy in civil court. There are special measures for speaking, but they are not automatic, which they are in criminal court. We do not have mandatory training of bar reporters and oversight of contact centres and so on. There are a number of things on which we have to get better in the civil court, and that includes the two systems talking to each other.
We have cases where something is applied in a criminal court, and a civil court sheriff says, “We’re not adhering to that here, because I’m in court, so forget those bail conditions—I’ll protect you while you’re speaking to this perpetrator.” That is a sheriff who has no understanding of the dynamic of abuse. Children are handed over, despite real concerns about safety from the non-abusing parent. We have a long way to go in the civil court.
Can I go on—
I will bring in Ms Love, and then I will bring the session to an end.
Fiona McMullen put it probably much more eloquently than I will. There is a huge disconnect between the criminal justice system and the civil justice process, despite there being an incredible overlap. There have been people who have been convicted of child sex offences but are able to lodge family court actions, and those have to kick off before we can even start to intervene and make that clear. There is a gap where survivors are dragged into a civil justice process and there is a lack of advocacy and support; that is particularly glaring in the civil justice process.
I thank you both for the evidence that you have given. On behalf of all the committee members, I thank you sincerely for the work that both your organisations do to support victims and survivors. I do not underestimate the scale of the challenge that you face in the context of what is currently happening in society, so please accept the committee’s most sincere thanks for the work that you do. We have heard loud and clear the message that you have given us this morning—talk from this place is important, but resources are far more important.
I suspend the meeting to allow for a short comfort break and for the second panel to arrive.
10:46
Meeting suspended.
10:54
On resuming—
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