Hannah Power, Camden and Haringey Socialist Party
The Tories are introducing a law which will allow violent domestic abusers to be added to the Sex Offenders Register (SOR). It is being seen as one of the first steps to show that the police consider violence against women “a national threat”. With this new law change, domestic abusers convicted on a sentence of over a year will be added to the SOR, which will allow the police, prison and probation services to jointly manage the rehabilitation of abusers and, it is hoped, protect domestic violence victims from further repeated abuse.
However, there are serious doubts about the government’s willingness to properly finance this law change. Nicole Jacobs, the domestic abuse commissioner for England and Wales, said monitoring convicted domestic abuse perpetrators would require large-scale investment, adding: “We need to make sure that this is properly resourced and that is not in this announcement today”.
Previous anti-abuse policies in recent years have not been given sufficient backing, and Jacobs warns of the risk that after the announcement “the attention and ongoing commitment is dropped”. Ms Jacobs also highlights a major flaw in the new scheme, that “the vast majority of all perpetrators are not known to the police and may not have a conviction”, meaning they would not be subject to the new requirements.
This announcement also follows in the wake of several high-profile cases of violence against women, of which many involve police officers themselves. In the Metropolitan Police alone, the force is investigating 1,000 sexual and domestic abuse claims involving about 800 of its officers.
In recent months, the two high-profile convictions of police officers David Carrick and Wayne Couzens show the public that there is a serious lack of accountability within police forces around violence against women. But this new policy expects victims to trust the police to protect them from domestic abusers! Even public figures like singer Mel B have said that they didn’t believe the police would have taken her report on her domestic abuse ‘seriously’, and that she would only report it if “the whole entire system” of justice was reformed by the government.
That is why the Socialist Party not only calls for fully funded services and support for all women affected by domestic violence and other associated crimes, but says that these services must be specialised, publicly funded and democratically controlled by service workers and users, and open to all women.
Trust and faith in police institutions is shrinking, and it is becoming apparent to many that police priorities mainly serve capitalist interests. Which is why we call for the police, alongside the legal system, to be democratically controlled by the working class.
This would mean giving real control, including over firing and hiring, and policing priorities, to democratically elected representatives of the trade unions and local communities, so that the police would be accountable to the areas and the people they should be protecting. This would be the only way to begin to tackle the institutionalised racism, sexism, and the class interests that the police ultimately represent.
