 I welcome to the eighth meeting of the Criminal Justice Committee in 2023. There are no apologies this morning. Our first item of business today is to agree to take item 6, which is our review of evidence on today's agenda in private. Are we all agreed? The next agenda item is consideration of evidence on an affirmative instrument, the Crime International Cooperation Act of 2003, designation of participating countries Scotland Order of 2023. I welcome to the meeting Keith Brown MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans, Vivienne McCaw, Policy Manager at the International Justice Cooperation Unit and Ruth Swanson from the Scottish Government Legal Directorate, who is joining us remotely, so welcome to you all. I refer members to paper number one. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak to the instrument. Thank you, convener, and thanks for the invitation to give evidence today in relation to the Crime International Cooperation Act 2003, designation of participating countries Scotland Order 2023. With your permission, convener, I would like to make a brief statement about the order and the mutual legal assistance. The order mirrors the Crime International Cooperation Act 2003, England and Wales in Northern Ireland Order 2022, which, in this area of law, allows collaboration across the UK jurisdictions to support cross-border operation and co-operation. In an increasingly interconnected world where crime operates with its borders, it has never been more important to ensure robust international co-operation to promote justice and to help to maintain public safety. The order before the committee will therefore enhance our international judicial co-operation framework, specifically in relation to mutual legal assistance. Before I explain the contents of the order, it may be helpful if I outline the context in which it is made. Mutual legal assistance is a formal name for how states request and obtain assistance in other jurisdictions for the investigation or prosecution of criminal offences. The UK as a whole is a party to the Council of Europe's 1959 European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters and its additional protocols. Those form an essential part in our fight against crime and their co-operation with other contracting parties in relation to criminal proceedings. MLA, as it is known, is an important tool in both domestic criminal proceedings and against transnational and international crime. The second additional protocol to the 1959 Convention broadens the scope of available mutual legal assistance amongst contracting parties. It includes specific provisions about requests for hearings by video or telephone conference, joint investigation teams and the temporary transfer of prisoners. As a member of the Council of Europe, the UK ratified its additional protocol in 2010. Under our domestic framework, mutual legal assistance is governed by the Crime International Co-operation Act of 2003, referred to as the 2003 act. That act states that, for us to request and facilitate certain types of mutual legal assistance, the country in question must be designated as a participating country, as defined by section 51 in brackets 2. The purpose of this order, therefore, is to designate as participating countries the following. Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, the Republic of Moldova, Switzerland, Turkey, Armenia, Chile and Ukraine. All those countries have ratified the second additional protocol to the 1959 European Convention on Mutual Assistance in criminal matters. Designation of those countries will allow us to cooperate with them in relation to specific types of mutual legal assistance. That order only establishes the ability to provide or seek certain types of assistance to or from the reference countries. It does not create an obligation to do so. Incoming mutual legal assistance requests from a designated participating country are reviewed by the Crown Office in line with existing practices. That includes a human rights assessment provided by the FCDO. I will now detail the specific effect of the provisions for which those countries are to be designated. First, designation for the purposes of section 31 of and paragraph 15 of schedule 2 of the 2003 act enables us to assist and request for a person within Scotland to give evidence by telephone in criminal proceedings before a court in a participating country, where that witness gives their consent. Secondly, designation for the purposes of sections 37 and 40 of the 2003 act enables the Crown Office on request from a participating country to obtain customer and account information to assist an investigation in the participating country. Designations for the purpose of sections 43 and 44 of the act are the reciprocal provisions, which enable Scottish authorities to make requests for similar information to a participating country. Additionally, designation under section 45 provides that requests for assistance under sections 43 and 44 must be sent to the Lord Advocate for transmission unless the request is urgent. Finally, sections 47 and 48 make reciprocal provision for the temporary transfer of prisoners to or from a participating country to assist with an investigation provided that the prisoner has given their consent to the transfer. In summary, this order will help strengthen our ability to investigate and prosecute criminality at home and abroad. Mutual legal assistance is a key tool in combating cross-border crime and ensuring justice for Scottish victims of crime. It's important that Scotland as a good global citizen plays its part in facilitating international justice co-operation to combat criminality. Being a good global citizen also entails standing with her friends to defend the rules-based order. In that vein, I should also like to emphasise that this order deliberately does not designate Russia. Following the invasion of Ukraine, the Council of Europe expelled Russia, a decision that is unprecedented in its 73-year history. Although Russia ratified in the second additional protocol in 2019 on 18 January this year, the Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he had begun the legislative process of terminating Russia's participation in 21 international agreements associated with the Council of Europe. That was with a retrospective effect on 16 March 2022, the date that Russia was formally excluded from membership of the council. We understand that nothing has been lodged formally as yet, and my officials are waiting for formal confirmation. However, Russia's unprovoked, premeditated and barbaric attack against Ukraine, a sovereign democratic state, removes any basis for the mutual trust and respect for international law that is essential for international judicial co-operation, and therefore we are not seeking to designate Russia at present. We remain committed to improving the provision of mutual legal assistance across borders, and this order will enhance the level of co-operation that we can offer to and seek from other countries. I hope that those remarks will be helpful to the committee and happy to try to answer any questions. Thank you very much indeed, cabinet secretary. We will just now move to questions. I will open it up to members and receive Pauline McNeill and then I will bring in Jamie Greene. Good morning, cabinet secretary. Thanks for that summary of the instrument in front of us. I do not have any particular issues in terms of not supporting it and do welcome what you said. UK and Scotland are not recognising Russia in the provisions for assistance, so that is to be welcomed. I was trying to ascertain from the paperwork as to what level of crime this would cover. Would it be all crime? Given what you are saying, if the Lord Advocate is involved in certain proceedings, I am assuming that it would be more serious crime. Since there would also be provisions in relation to bank account information, is that really where it is serious to an organised crime? I just wanted to understand the parameters of the powers that the instrument would give. I will ask the officials to come in, but I am not aware of any area of crime that is not covered by it. You have mentioned quite rightly that I have done customer account information, so that is obviously due to financial aspects of potential crime. However, it does rely on the witnesses' co-operation in this case, but I am not aware that it includes any crimes that have been done. So that there is shoplifting theoretically in that it would cover it would be? Yes, we cannot tell other countries what they might want to come to us and ask with the Lord Advocate and ask for witnesses too, so any level of crime is possible yet. I just wanted to ask some questions about section 4748 of the 2003 act, which I believe this amends, and I am not sure if it amends or specifically relates to, but it is around the issue in the policy note states that this means that Scottish ministers will be able to facilitate the transfer of prisoners to and from these countries for assisting with the investigation of offences. That seems probably quite a benign statement, but I wondered first of all if that agreement already exists and it is simply that you are adding these countries to that agreement. Secondly, if that agreement does not currently exist with those countries but will do after this, would that, for example, given that we are hosting a large amount of reunion refugees who have obviously fled the war in their home country and there have been some media reports of some of them already looking to perhaps instigate proceedings of crimes of war, proceedings against either Russia as a state or indeed individuals? If any of those complainants do make a complaint in Scotland, would this be required, for example, to move prisoners from Ukraine to Scotland, for example, for trial, or indeed vice versa? If there was ever to be discovered someone who had come here as a refugee but it was found to be needed back home for investigations, would there be a two-way conversation? Would that also include people who are held as prisoners of war? By specific example, I would mean a Russian soldier who is in Ukraine but maybe has been alleged of a crime by someone who is currently in Scotland. Would that enable or facilitate their removal to Scotland, and how would that happen? I will try to give my answer first and then the officials will give you the correct answer, I am sure, but the purpose of this order is to designate these additional countries. Is possible just now that each of those countries and indeed any country we could ask for that assistance or another country could ask us without them being designated countries and it is possible that we could co-operate on that basis. However, that gives added weight to it because all the countries that are mentioned are part of the international rules-based order and are involved in the protocols in which we have, so it gives more force to that. It would tend to mean in effect, although I have not been involved in those that would go to the Lord Advocate, there would have to be quite good reasons for countries not to co-operate in that way, which perhaps without being added to this list, the designated order, the reciprocal arrangements, you could more easily dismiss it and not go along with that, so it gives that added weight. Having just answered Paul McNeill about the range of crimes that might be covered, I think that international war crimes would be different, I think that that would be a different process that we would have to undergo. Under relation to whether it is people from here who are Ukrainian going back to Ukraine or vice versa, just to bear in mind that it is all, it has to be consensual under this order that the countries would have to agree, and I am not aware that the domestic law within Ukraine is operating, as it normally would do for obvious reasons. If it was about war crimes, I think that there is a different process for that, which has started internationally. That is my understanding, but I do not think that the officials want to add to that. I think that what you were referring to perhaps is more on the extradition side. That is separate from mutual legal assistance. Mutual legal assistance is looking for evidence rather than people, and it is a separate process. The reason that I ask that is that the notes do state specifically that it will facilitate the transfer of prisoners to and from these countries, not necessarily evidence. Obviously section 31 talks about giving evidence digitally or via video or telephony, which may make it easier for someone to participate in legal proceedings in another country. I understand that, but it then goes on to talk about the removal of people, not just information or words. Just to give evidence? Yes, just to give evidence. It is a temporary removal. Oh, I see. And the government doesn't have to consent to it as well. Right. So it is nothing to do with extradition. And just my other question was, in that scenario, would that be a request by ministers to the Lord Advocate or the other way round? Well, MLA is a two-way process. So he would give the offerisation, sorry. That would be the crime. That would ultimately be the crime, not ministers. In the policy note, it says that an instrument in similar terms has been made for the rest of the UK. What are the differences between that and this? Or are there any? So the list of countries is exactly the same. Russia, I think, is also being precluded by the UK government as well. It's just simply that we have a different jurisdiction. So there are no tangible differences. I'm aware of that between ourselves and the rest of the UK. Okay. And there's another one. This isn't more of a kind of curiosity. In page six it talks about it will allow persons in the UK to give evidence via telephone to a court in any of these countries. Is it still by telephone with that with the case? It is. That's what's specified in the order. It's quite possible, of course. Evidence can be given in other ways to video conferencing and so on as well, but this specifies telephone. So that's where it will have an effect. Any other questions, members? No. Okay, thank you. So in that case then I'll invite the cabinet secretary to move motion number 07936 that the Criminal Justice Committee recommends that the Crime International Cooperation Act of 2003 designation of participating countries Scotland order of 2023 be approved. Moves, convener. Thank you very much. So the question is that motion S6M-07936, in the name of Keith Brown, be agreed. Are we all agreed? Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much cabinet secretary and your officials for your time this morning. And we'll just have a brief suspension to allow the witnesses to leave. Thank you. Thank you very much, members. Our next agenda item is consideration of the following negative instrument. That's the sexual offences act to 2003 prescribed police stations Scotland amendment regulations of 2023. And I refer members to paper 2. Can I just ask if members have any questions on this instrument? Thank you. So are members content not to make any recommendation to the Parliament on the instrument? Okay, thank you very much. Thanks very much. So we'll just have a brief suspension to allow the room to be set up for our next agenda item. Thank you very much, everyone. So our next item of business today is post legislative scrutiny of the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act of 2018. And I refer members to papers 3 and 4. So I intend to allow around about an hour for each panel this morning. And I welcome our first panel of witnesses to the meeting. So we have Dr Marcia Scott from Scottish Women's Aid, who's joining us remotely. Thank you, Dr Scott. Dr Claire Houghton from the University of Edinburgh. Professor Michelle Burnman from the University of Glasgow. And Amanda Mason, partner with Harper McLeod. So a warm welcome to you all and we'll move straight to questions. And as usual, I'll maybe begin with a general opening question. So by way of setting the scene, the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act of 2018 aims to improve the criminal justice system's ability to tackle domestic abuse effectively and increase courts capacity to protect victims. And the act created a new offence of domestic abuse against a partner or ex-partner. And the aim was to help enable effective prosecution of behaviour that was taking place over a period of time, which is physical and or psychological abuse. And we know that the Scottish Government's recent report on the act states that at that point there were 420 people prosecuted in 2021 to 2022 using the new offence. So perhaps reflecting a sort of slow burn, so to speak. So I wonder if I could just ask each of you reflecting on the first year of the act being enforced just for your individual perspectives and if you can perhaps give a broad opening comment on the success or otherwise of the new legislation. So I'll maybe come to Dr Haughton first and then I'll bring in Michelle Burnman and we'll start with you both. So Dr Haughton. Thank you and thank you for inviting me today. So after reviewing 22 closed cases alongside victims and child witnesses, I would say that the definition within the act that you mentioned, the huge shift to recognise psychological abuse and ongoing abuse over time, certainly reflects their experiences, which was one of the main aims of the act. However, implementation of that definition is still a long way to go in terms of capturing psychological abuse especially. Victims felt that wasn't represented fully in their case in terms of ongoing abuse rather than focus on specific physical incidents. Even in out the cases, even in the DASA cases, the ones that were under the act, there was still felt to be a focus on two incidents or a small number of incidents rather than the whole story being captured. Lastly, one of the main issues for parents and child witnesses was that we attempted to capture the harm to children through the child aggravator and the NHO's covering children, and we have a long way to go in relation to that. I can speak more about that later. Thanks very much. So I'll come to you now, Professor Burnman, and then I'll bring in our other two witnesses. So, over to you. Thank you and thank you for inviting me along here this morning. I think that, convener, at the beginning you talked about the slow burn and the relatively limited use of the legislation. I think that that, whilst it's increasing slowly, year on year, most charges of domestic abuse in Scotland continue to be under the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm Act. I think that this really reflects the complexities of domestic abuse and the challenges of the posed by the legislation in determining a course of conduct. It does require a real quantum leap in thinking and in police investigation from moving from a very kind of traditional incident focused approach to domestic abuse to understanding at the course of conduct. So, I think that that's one of the reasons why there has been a very slow uptake of the legislation up until now, because it does require a different way of thinking. And drawing on some work that my colleagues and I at the University of Glasgow did on front-line policing of domestic abuse, just at the time that the legislation was introduced when police were undergoing domestic abuse matters training and then undertaken a second sweep of interviews two years, just over two years later, it's clear that the operation and the effectiveness of this legislation is dependent on policing interpretation and implementation and the ability of the police to identify coercive controlling behaviour and elicit information on a series of abusive behaviours is absolutely crucial and I think that we are still some way from the basis of our research of getting to that point where there is a recognition of sometimes the subtle and quite nuanced behaviours that are sought through this legislation. Thanks very much for that. I'm going to bring in Dr Marcia Scott now and then I'll bring in Amanda Marston. So, Dr Scott, over to you. Good morning everybody. Happy International Women's Day, especially to the women in the room. What is it? A good cause marks a strong arm. I wanted to, I'm possibly a little blunter than Michelle, but I totally agree with everything she and Claire said. There's an article published this morning by Andy Myhill from the College of Policing and colleagues around dash risk assessments, which I think really supports what Michelle was saying, although I don't think they're subtle and nuanced behaviours, I think they're actually very easy to see when people are properly trained. I'll go back to the beginning. I think what we have seen with implementation of the act is a quite enthusiastic and positive embracing of it by the Crown Office and a real commitment to making it work. They're just one piece of the puzzle and I think that we have some really big paths to do. The implementation was always going to be a slow burn, if you will, I agree with that, but I think that it's not a slow burn in the sense that its progress is guaranteed. And also, I'm sorry, but women and children can't wait for people to get around to figuring this out. We need to do it much more quickly than we have been. The point I think that illustrates this is that of all of the domestic abuse reports to the Crown Office, both in 2021 and in 2021-22, a really tiny percentage of the more process, and these were domestic abuse reports, a tiny percent. So in 2021 it was 4.7 and in 2021-22 it was 5.5 percentage of the more prosecuted under the section 1 DASA act. I think that we are absolutely confident that that is quite an under-identification of DASA cases. I think what the Crown Office fiscal would say to us, we can only prosecute with the evidence that we've got. I'm somewhat sympathetic for that, but often the police will get them the evidence if they're asked for it. So I think that across the whole piece there is work to do on implementation, but the most critical, and I agree with Michelle, the most critical place is with evidence gathering and the front line policing. The thematic inspection of the police really confirmed our concerns about the understanding of gender and course and controlling behaviors by police, some of them are excellent, really excellent, and I want to underscore that. However, the inspection and Andy Myill's research and everything that survivors have been telling us is that it's a lottery, a postcode lottery, about whether the police officer who a woman and or a child talks to understands the course of controlling behaviors. This is really important because course of controlling behaviors are one of the single biggest indicators of lethality in domestic abuse cases, so it's not about, oh, this is a lower threshold of risk, this is the highest threshold of risk. I have last to say about other things and Covid and the response under Covid, but I probably will just draw a line under there because I suspect you would like me to. That's very, very much a comprehensive response, as always, thank you. So I'm now bringing Amanda Mason and then I will open up to other members for more questions. Good morning everyone and thank you very much for inviting me to participate. I would just like to sort of endorse what my colleagues have said so far this morning, but offering a perspective from the liciters standpoint, my sense is that, whilst there's certainly much greater understanding of what course of control means, it is still a reluctance on the part of clients who might consult me in a family law capacity to accept that this is something that's happening to them. It may well be that there is still a reluctance to accept that behaviour is not necessarily violent to be coercive, to be controlling, to be abusive. I suspect that there is also still a perception that domestic abuse is something that doesn't necessarily affect certain socioeconomic groups, and, from my perspective, there is certainly a lack of understanding of how these behaviours can affect children. Certainly in my child welfare report practice for the court, there's very, very little said about the effect that witnessing behaviours can have on children. My sense is that when it comes to the marac assessments, there's very, very little being said about coercive control. The focus is still very much on, I suppose, the more, for one of the better words, conventional assessments involving physical violence. From my perspective, it's the public perception really that needs to change. It's about raising awareness of what coercive control means. Okay, thanks very much. Amanda, a number of really interesting and relevant points made there. I know the comments made about the policing response, and we will be hearing from Police Scotland in our next panel. I'll now open it up to members. I've got a few members wanting to come in. I'm going to start with Pauline McNeill and then Collette Stevenson. Thank you very much, and I'd like to also say happy international women's day as well on the record. We've read from the papers and I wasn't involved at the time, but I'm fully aware of the significance of the legislation that Scotland passed. I identified as world leading, so we're proud of that aspect of it. I'm not really familiar with the detail, so this is what I want to get into. How can we then fix what I suppose Amanda finished off by saying, which is that you've got people, clients, reluctant to even raise the question, and we've got the issues that I imagine, which is what I want to get into. How are we going to do better at creating the understanding and proving these cases in court? I mean, I guess when we pass the legislation as legislators, we do this, we think this is what we'd like, and then the agencies then have to work out the practicalities on the ground. I am sympathetic, I have to say, to Police Scotland in that regard. I don't know what guidance they were given, I don't know what the act says in terms of when they see something that might be regarded as coercive behaviour, psychological damage to a woman or indeed a man. What should they be looking for? Is the act clear? That was my first question, is the act clear about what needs to be shown? Of course, the police will hand that over to the prior office for final decision on that. Anything that the witnesses could tell me what they think is the act clear enough, and if it's not, what do we need to do to provide the relevant evidence or understanding of those provisions? I think you wouldn't mind a comment from everyone if that's the key. You reminded me of one of the victims we interviewed and an example of really good practice, and this is a woman who said, I just went in and told what was going on. I was really just saying how frightened I was because of the baby and the behaviour and how confused, so I did go right back to them with them, and this was first of all a health work and then the police to the very beginning and lots of pieces of the jigsaw came together. The act itself, the detail of the act, especially when we're talking about the relevant effects in relation to fear, alarm and distress, talks about monitoring, controlling, surveillance, being in fear, as well as adverse effects on children, which we'll come back to later. There is a lot of detail, but also what then can evidence that is quite tricky, and I would say it's not necessarily a reluctance on the victim survivors part, but sometimes they do need support and identify that it's a criminal course of behaviour, and they felt that they didn't know, but also that some people, unlike the police officer and health worker here, didn't know the details of the act, and therefore they couldn't apply it to that case, and they would just look at more physical abuse and physical harm than more conventional, as Amanda said, kind of evidence. Other victims were very clear that they were being psychologically harmed and surveilled, being tracked to work, things like that, and felt they had lots of evidence in their view, such as printing out lots of emails or showing lots of texts, lots of online abuse, but then they felt that that wasn't taken fully on board and that only a small piece of their jigsaw was actually revealed in court, so when they tried to build their own case, and they did want to collaborate more with the police and the procurate fiscal in terms of their case, they still felt that psychological abuse, the non-physical harm, which was the kind of groundbreaking part of this act, was hard both to speak about, to talk about manipulations, really difficult things like that, but also then to evidence. The details are there, up to a point, but then how do we evidence that? How do the police officers support a victim to speak about abuse over years as well, which is quite a skilled level of approach, I think. I absolutely agree with what Claire has just said there. I think that the legislation is clear. There is clarity in the legislation about what is sought, but it is about the implementation and application of that legislation, and evidencing things like emotional abuse, psychological abuse can be very difficult to do. I think that it comes back to the interaction between the police and the survivor at that particular time, in order to determine the wider context, how the different incidents might be linked, how the history might be linked. It does rely on a particular kind of development of a different sort of relationship, if you like, between the police and the survivor, in order to elicit that information and in order to support the survivor to be able to feel that she, because it is usually she, can talk about that and gain the trust of the survivor to be able to speak about that. For me, it comes back to the implementation of the legislation and the degree to which the police are equipped to interpret and implement that legislation at that point of discussion. One thing is that, in Scotland, usually it is tier 1 response officers who are called out. We have three tiers of response in relation to domestic abuse, and it is usually the tier 1 who go out onto the scene. They are not specialist officers like tier 2 and tier 3 police officers. As officers in our research have told us, tier 1 response officers are slaves to the radio. That means that they may have umpteen different calls in the course of one shift. Investigating domestic abuse cases, they can be complex. They require longer time. They can be quite protracted and quite lengthy because of the detail and the nuance that needs to be determined. Often that poses a challenge to the first response tier 1 officers who have got other calls coming in that they need to go to in a resource constrained environment and a lot of paperwork to do. There is an issue there about the reliance on the tier 1 front-line response officers at that point, and that is where I see that there is room for more training, more trauma-informed practice training and more training around, specialised training around the legislation itself at that point, because that is often the first and the most important interaction. I think that both our witnesses online would like to come in, so I will bring in Marcia first and then Amanda. If I can just ask for fairly succinct answers just so that everybody gets an opportunity to come in with questions. I know that that is not my best thing, but I will be very succinct here. I actually think that the law is fine. I think that the law, in part because survivors contributed so much of the language especially in the guidance about freedom and autonomy and fear and distress. I think that language is fine around what is course of control look like and feel like. I agree with what was said before, so I won't repeat it, but the other area, and I think that Claire would back me up on this, that the law needs work on is children. We failed to get the language in the bill to designate children as cold victims if there was a conviction of one of their parents, obviously, usually their father. We are really concerned that the aggravator, even if it were applied in all of the cases in which it could be, which we cannot get that data because the Cynon Office does not collect data in a way that we can, would do the trick. It is really clear to us from multiple sources of evidence that civil cases that follow criminal cases of domestic abuse are not reflecting our much broader understanding now of the impact and harm and trauma that domestic abuse visits on children. We are unhappy at the time that the bill was passed that this was true, and I really think that this is an issue that is really critical to be taken up possibly in an amendment process. The law is absolutely fine. I really do. From a petitioner's perspective, it is well drafted. It is clear. I do not think that it could be clearer. Science certainly understands what it means, and I think that is the important thing. I would agree with other comments, so the issue is with the implementation and the gathering of evidence. I will make it quick to Amanda. Thanks for all those answers. What I would like to follow up on is that the law is clear, and I think that Michelle made an important point about who is going out to visit when a crime is reported. I am wondering at what stage in the process you would start to gather the relevant information to show that coercive behaviour was being committed. Is it more practical that the initial report is done by the police and someone in between needs to look at—I imagine that you need to gather or you will fail in court, because at the end of the day the person is still, the accused is still not convicted until you prove the crime against them, and that has to be substantial. I am just wondering where in the process would make sense to gather the relevant evidence about fear and alarm over a long period of time, or I presume that is what you are looking for, and that someone is not free to make decisions in the relationship, and all of these things need to be proved. Where do you think in the process it would make sense for someone to gather that information for the court? I can think of three private cases that I have had in the last year where it has been clear to me that there has been an issue of coercive control. The evidence has come from friends and family. Practically this could be done on not entirely sure, but I wonder if when police who ideally would be specialist responders are first faced with those reports, do they say to survivors, give me the names of your sister, your friend, your colleague who you have talked to about this? That could help to create the body of evidence that is needed. In those three cases that I can think of, what has happened is that the survivors have simply said, I want out of this relationship, help me to get divorced, and for them that is how they get out of it, but often reports have been made to the police that there has been that lack of co-operation. I think that the time to gather the evidence would really be shortly after the first approach that has made Police Scotland. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I can't bring in Collette Stevenson and then I'll bring in Rona Mackay. Thanks, convener, and good morning, and happy international day to everyone as well. Women's Day, sorry. I just wanted to ask about the impact that the act has had on the consideration of victim safety, where an offender is actually sentenced, including through the non-harassment orders as well, or the use of them. The other thing, as well, from the wealth of evidence that is being taken, is how it is, that the NHOs haven't been extended down to the children and the impact that that has had as well in terms of coercive control. If I put that to Marcia first, thanks. Absolutely. I think that the issues with NHOs covering children goes back to what we were saying before about people not really understanding, courts not understanding the impact of domestic abuse on children, and thinking that there's some threshold of harm that they can identify. I also think that the difficulty with the system is that we're improving the front end of it, and the policing is a problem and everybody has identified that. The dash risk assessment research that I was referring to before about the previous question, there's lots of evidence about, and that should be done in every front line. Tier 1 police visit in a domestic abuse case, they often, I think they are pretty much, the research is telling us that the way officers use it is often unfortunate and minimises and discounts evidence around coercive control. That's a separate issue. In terms of what happens in court and sentencing when there's a conviction, we hear so many stories from women that essentially the vast majority of sentences are community disposals. There is no evidence in Scotland that that has a protective effect for women and children. Forget about the rehabilitation-supposed aspect. Nobody really wants to open this really difficult box. I would ask that somewhere or someone has the appetite to say, where is the evidence that community disposals actually encourage convicted offenders to desist in their offending? Do women and children feel safer? No. I mean, there's a whole lot of problems with it. Thank goodness for the NHO element in the new act. If it were used more consistently, then it would actually provide more protection. We do hear pretty consistently from women and children that it's that element that provides them some breathing space, that makes them feel safe. Not all perpetrators will pay attention, but the majority will. When they do, there is a demonstrable improvement in how people feel about the application of the law. There's been a whole lot of issues with breaches of conditions that haven't been responded to appropriately. COVID exacerbated that terribly. In the grand scheme of things, sentencing is the elephant in the room as far as we're concerned. I would agree with everything that Marsha has said. For me, children are really missing in this process. That's partly because we worry about children giving evidence. It's almost an instinctive thing. We don't want to interview children, we don't want to talk to them, we don't want to place them under the pressure, perhaps, of perceiving that they're talking against a parent. When I talk to children in a slightly different context, in the separation context, they often have lots to say. They say it clearly, they say it well. There's more that can be done. Children's first are currently doing really, really good work in relation to safe places for children to give evidence. It might be useful for that work to be linked in with what the Justice Committee is looking at. For me, that's the key to involving children in giving evidence, making it safe for them to do so and, again, changing that perception of their role. Of course, we want to protect them, but they might be key to providing the evidence that we need in those types of cases if their evidence can be taken safely and comfortably for them. First of all, I want to say that it's erroneous to think that abuse will stop once the perpetrator has left the family home. Physical abuse may stop, but there are other forms of abuse, particularly emotional, psychological and financial abuse. Often, child contact or child custody is an arena in which that abuse can continue. What is very important is a proper, adequate risk assessment to ensure sufficient safety planning around the non-abusive parent and the child. I think that we have yet to see that robust safety planning here in Scotland. It's not as developed or as foregrounded as it is in other jurisdictions. On the question of non-harassment orders, I think that signposting to the civil justice process for NHS is not an effective means of identifying risk, especially given the legal aid crisis impacts. I think that that needs to be done and determined at the criminal court. Finally, I would say that when there is a civil case that is a subsequent to a criminal justice case involving domestic abuse, there is no mechanism for information about domestic abuse feeding into that civil justice process. This is entirely up to the parties to inform the lawyers that there is a background of domestic abuse. It's serendipitous the way in which that information is fed from one system through to another. I agree with that, so I will take a slightly different tack. I have researched with children now for 30 years on domestic abuse and they want to be heard and to have a say. Some want to be witnesses, but I agree with Amanda in a safe place and quickly. Hence the moves to pre-recorded evidence and Barnahouse. We need to think of that approach in terms of both the adult and child victims, this pre-recorded safe quick given of evidence so we don't have the delays that we have just now. I know exacerbated through Covid, but they were there already and the trauma that victims are experiencing both adult and child for lengthy delays or duraments and also when they come to give evidence and there is a late plea of guilty and they're actually, for example, a child outside in the car with a support worker crying and nervous about giving evidence but ready, but then there's a plea of guilty and we heard that again and again and again. There were 10 child-sighted witnesses though saying that. There were 10 child-sighted witnesses in the cases that we talked about, but only one child aggravator and only three NHOs involved children. So we have still got an issue even when we are trying to hear children and all of the victims and witnesses talked about the sentence not in any way capturing the full story of their abuse, but nor the severity and course of behaviour. In terms of NHOs, because we only looked at closed cases, which was our remit, some of the victims were coming to the end of their NHOs, like one or two years NHOs, so the length of NHOs is the real issue. Also, we've been asked how do we lengthen this without recourse to civil law and that didn't seem an easy way either. They were absolutely in fear and they hadn't received the mental health and trauma support they needed in that whole of two years. Can I quickly just come back in? The impact from the evidence that you took, has there, in terms of NHOs being lifted as well? Have you seen a dramatic effect of that? Because there were so few closed cases, they were at the point of being lifted. All I can say is that they are out of fear and how frightened some of the victims were, so they were already seeking their own redress, talking to the Scottish Women's Rights Centre, the mum was talking to a lawyer like Amanda, so they are trying to find different ways to protect themselves and several, at least five, were talking about moving after two years, after the NHOs, not after the court case, not immediately after the abuse, but because the NHOs were about to expire, they were talking about moving country, moving hundreds of miles to try and feel safe. One victim in there talked about not being able to go out without her adult son there to protect her, so there was real issues about ongoing NHOs and I know there are some lengthier NHOs that have been passed which obviously offers more protection and again several of the victims were involved in separate cases about breaches of NHOs already and because they weren't closed we couldn't speak to them about that but they were very much unskeptical about them being taken seriously, which is one facet of the new act. I'll bring in Rona Mackay and then Russell Finlay. I'd like to start with Michelle. I was interested in what you said about abuse not stopping when NHOs were issued etc etc. You'll be aware that in the last session we passed legislation for domestic abuse protection orders and domestic abuse protection notices. That hasn't started to be used yet, so I'll be interested to ask the police about that. It was good legislation generally and it links in with something I was proposing or I'm proposing as a member's bill, which has been put on ice in that stocking protection orders, where the police can go directly to court and ask for a protection order for the complainer. I just wanted to get your opinion on how relevant that legislation that we passed was where the perpetrator would be removed from the house. I do think that that is a very welcome development and I think that it will make a difference in some cases but perpetrators can be very inventive in the way in which they are used particularly digital means increasingly to continue or restart the abuse, even when they are some distance away, even when the family have moved to flee. There are still ways in which perpetrators can continue and restart the abuse. I think that it's a very positive step, but I think that we have to be realistic about the inventiveness of perpetrators. I was interested in what you were saying about the tier 1 responders and how they were so caught up with calls they probably didn't have the time to spend. Do you think that it's an argument to have specialist domestic abuse police officers? I do. I think that there should be enhanced specialist training probably for all police officers given the volume of domestic abuse and the likelihood of different officers being called out. I think that we already have specialist officers at tier 2 and tier 3 at the divisional level and also at the national level with the task force. I think that the issue with the tier 1 police officers from our research is the time available that they have to spend at that point when they are, as I said, slaves to the radio, when they are being called off on the course of a shift to a range of other different things. I think that we need to see this within the resource constrained context of criminal justice generally and policing within that. I think that more time and more enhanced specialist training is trauma-informed training. I think that's very important. We have had the domestic abuse matters rolled out at a wonderful feat with many thousands of police officers undergoing that training, but it needs to be continued and reviewed. One-off training is not as effective as if it's constant and at regular interviews. Thank you. If I could direct my next question to Amanda, please. It's about victim awareness. We talked about that. I wonder if I can just come in. I'm aware that Marcia Scott wanted to come in on that first question. Marcia, do you want to come in? Just to come in on the domestic abuse protection law and legislation, I know I won't be in the next panel. I know Sam Falls will be. Another police have really big concerns about implementation of the law. We've been involved in multiple meetings and conversations about the problems of implementation. I would just like to say for the next panel discussion that our perspective is that there may well be problems. We're very happy to talk about solutions, but the reality is that we can't pause until and somehow think that harm is not happening as we speak. The other issue is that we have a commitment under Istanbul, which has now been ratified by the UK Government to have emergency buying orders in place. Scotland does not and has not ever had those that would comply with Istanbul Convention. We are unlike many, many European countries. This cannot be an unsolvable problem. Other people are doing it and have been for decades. Can we stop pointing fingers about how much it's going to cost and start figuring out how to implement it? I just need to say that. The other issue for us is there needs to be protection all along the system. From the first time that a woman discloses, that's unlikely to be to police. We all know what the figures are, and the reasons for that are not because she hasn't identified that she doesn't like what's going on or that she isn't afraid. Her experience tells her that her experience will be minimized, her harm will be downgraded, and if it's not a physical assault, it's a lottery about whether somebody is going to take her seriously or not. I don't think we need specialist police officers. I would love to have them. 25% of police business is domestic abuse, so I'm kind of with Michelle on that. They all need to be specialists in this, but there is evidence from the research of the college of policing that this can be done much better. We just need to invest in appropriate training and follow-up and implementation infrastructures. Absolutely right that one-off trainings don't work. We said that at the time. I do think it's not rocket science. It isn't this big terrible thing that we can't figure out. We just need to do it right. Just while Marsh is there, can I just ask her—it's something relating to what she said, and it relates to the Istanbul Convention. It's about no recourse to public funds. Dr Scott, which I know that women's aid have been doing a lot of work on, meaning that when asylum seekers or immigrant women come and live in Scotland and are fleeing domestic abuse, they have no recourse to benefits. I appreciate that this is a reserved matter to Westminster, but is there more that we can be doing in Scotland about that? Well, as a matter of fact, there is. The Covid emergency let us think wider about what tools might be available. When we have a public health emergency, which I think domestic abuse is, we were allowed to house women and children instead of making them destitute. Istanbul is really clear that your access to support and safety should not be mediated by your immigration status. I think it's really clear to be fair to Scottish Government officials that they would like to be able to provide more support than they feel like they can under the Scotland Act. I do think that there is room to explore—there's cross-party consensus on this, I think, in Scotland, or most parties anyway. The Scottish Government is committed to coming up with housing pathways, human rights-based housing pathways for women and children experiencing domestic abuse, because domestic abuse is the single biggest driver of their homelessness. I think there's lots of good intentions, but there hasn't been very much practical response. The other thing that I really would like to say—and it's really mundane—is data, data, data. There's such a failure of our system to understand that it needs to collect intersectional, competently collected intersectional data. It is very difficult for us right now to be able to even identify the number of women with no recourse in Scotland and how to model what supporting them would cost. I'll stop, I promise, but the Domestic Abuse Commission in England and Wales has just published a report about a cost-benefit analysis about extending the exception—the domestic abuse exception—that would go a long way to helping women and children in Scotland. Amanda, I would like to ask you about victim impact statements. I understand that, before sentencing in a court, domestic abuse does not come into the list of crimes that is eligible for victims to give statements. It may be clear what it wants to come into. I think that that's a huge omission, and I would like your view on that. I agree. I think that victim impact statements would go a long way to helping survivors to feel heard. I think that it would help to raise public awareness of the issues and how being on the receiving end of certain courses of conduct can make people feel. I think that the benefit would be twofold, as well as the conventional benefit of hopefully helping during the sentencing process. For me personally, the huge positive to be coming from that would really be that people would have an opportunity to say how they felt and be heard. In turn, I would expect that that would help to raise public awareness of what constitutes a course of conduct. When people may well hear those reported on the media, I think that they will get it now. That is something that I have experienced and it's not okay. Just while I was listening to Marcia there, I was thinking about an email that I received yesterday from a client. I can't say too much, but she was saying to me, I told my husband that I was frightened. I told him that's why I had to leave the house. He thinks that I'm having an affair. What can I do? She's come into a family lawyer, she's come into a divorce lawyer before she goes to the police. During the dialogue about what she intended to do, did she have someone to talk to, did she have support? Her response was that the police won't take this seriously. For me there's still an issue around public perception of what the police think constitutes abusive behaviour and how seriously the police would take it. It's maybe public awareness. I remember when the legislation came in, there was a really, really good public awareness media campaign, and then things seemed to go quiet for a while. It might well be that we just have to keep this in the public arena. I completely agree. I don't know how many people have watched the excellent BBC series, The Women Who Changed Modern Scotland, and in that there was a piece, I think it was in the 90s, Zero Tolerance, that did a fantastic awareness campaign, and it was just all over the place. I had forgotten, but I do now remember it at the time. Talking about the honest that's put on a woman to come up with the evidence, an awareness campaign that could almost just tell people to keep a record of everything, so that they're not caught and think, well, I don't know how to explain this, that kind of thing. Public awareness and victim awareness is absolutely huge. Can I just ask Claire, I think, that you wanted to come in on the past statement? That was one of the recommendations from adults and children in terms of public messaging and clear messages from here, from the Parliament, from the Minister, but I'd also say that the public messaging around the act wasn't sustained long enough, but also there was a promise of public messaging towards children, and that didn't happen, so we need to really carefully think about that. But back to your victim impact statements, at the moment we're hearing that we're not finding the means for victims and children to tell their whole story in the investigation, in the case that's led at court, they don't feel it reflects their whole experience in the sentencing, and so we need to look at victim impact statements at one of those routes, as well as the others, and make sure that when we're talking about victim impact, we're also talking about children. We've got about 15 minutes or so left, I've still got some members wanting to come in, so can we be asked, member, if you would be able to target your questions at specific witnesses, and obviously others can come in if they want to add anything further, and, as ever, questions and answers, please, as succinct as possible. I'll bring in Russell Finlay, followed by Jamie Greene. This first question is for Dr Howden. I was really struck by the research you and Dr Morrison and Dr Warrington did that was published in January. You spoke to 22 victims of domestic crimes, and upon reading the key findings section, I think there were 10 key findings, and I think one of them is worth repeating in full just because it seems to encapsulate so much that it's wrong not just whether it be the police element, the prosecution element or the sentencing element, but all of it, and it says, participants had significant concerns that the investigation, prosecution and sentencing for domestic abuse offences did not adequately reflect the sustained level, severity or impact of abuse experience, and that really, I suppose, sums it up. I suppose my question is, were you surprised by what you and your team found when speaking to those women, and have you had any feedback from the Government because they commissioned the work, whether that's from officials or ministers? Given that we've heard that, seems to be a consensus, there's not a legislative need to change anything necessarily, how we fix those embedded cultural problems within the system? Thanks Russell. Was I surprised? No, partly because previous research, for example, the everyday heroes research into children's priorities for justice, but also other research on gender-based violence like Michelle Berman's owner's work on justice journeys for rape and sexual assault victims really reflected the findings of this research. Unfortunately, we also checked off findings because it is 22 victim witnesses with court and advocacy, court advocacy and support workers in women's aid, and they said that this is reflective, unfortunately, of the experience of especially women and children. But I did still find it unremittingly grim, yes, and we in the advisory group, which is full of allies such as Police Scotland, Crown and our lead NGOs, were certainly determined not just to get feedback, but to work with the Government to improve the response. I think we need to look at now how do we do that? Have we got an implementation group? How are we monitoring this? How are we getting the data that's missing, for example, associated children in these cases? We do also need to examine whether there is or isn't a legislative need in terms of children and have a much closer look at child aggravator use, but not only child aggravator, but any associated children with children that have been harmed and impacted by domestic abuse. It was certainly a very difficult and research project to be part of, but an immense privilege that these women and children spoke at length about their experience, partly because they felt that they hadn't had that opportunity in court. I was just, for what it's worth, in contact with one of the participants, and she's very grateful for not just the opportunity, but the subsequent support that she's received from you and your team. I have one more question if that's okay, and it's probably directed to Professor Berman. In some of the earlier evidence, she talked about civil cases and criminal cases sometimes running in tandem, albeit completely disconnected. I'm familiar with cases of that nature where an abuser has used the criminal courts as a means of extending the abuse, prolonging the abuse, using that to almost delay or derail the criminal prosecution and vice versa. I just wonder if there's been any research done into that specific problem, and also whether anyone's given consideration that you know of into a fairly radical fix of perhaps combining criminal and civil matters relating to the same parties, or is that just a little bit getting ahead of the game? In relation to your first question, there has been no research in Scotland that's looked at the way in which a perpetrator might manipulate criminal and civil justice proceedings. There has been research undertaken in England and Wales by Maddie Coy and her colleagues, but that's focused from the perspective of the non-abusive parent, if you like, but we haven't had anything like that in Scotland. Our research on child contact in cases in the context of domestic abuse that was recently published in December found that that was happening, but that was through the perspective of family lawyers rather than through the perpetrators or the non-abusive parents themselves. There is some evidence of that, but we haven't had a clear focus piece of research in Scotland on that as yet. In terms of combining the two—I'm looking at Amanda here—I don't know how feasible that would be. What I do think is that we need to have better mechanisms for communication and information sharing between the criminal and the civil justice systems. As I said earlier, it's really only a matter of chance or luck that the civil courts hear about the background of domestic abuse. We need better communication, we need mechanisms whereby relevant professionals in those systems are tasked with providing that information because it's important that civil justice knows what's happened in the criminal proceedings, that there has been a case in the criminal courts in relation to domestic abuse. At the moment, we don't have that at all. I'm dealing with the cases now in which a partner is seeking legal aid for civil action. She believes that the ultimate goal is to remove the child from the UK. There are parallel criminal proceedings and I've made representation to slab legal aid board to try and point out the background to this, but she feels totally isolated and feels that the system is against her and is facilitating what's going on. I suppose that speaks to that. I think that those cases of legal system abuse, you might call it, are very prevalent. We've heard lots of stories of that in our research in this area. Thank you very much. Before we move on, I think that Amanda and Marcia are wanting to come in, so bring Amanda first then Marcia, as briefly as you can. Just briefly, yes, I agree. The mechanisms for information sharing are poor. I don't think it's too big an ask to try to amalgamate the civil and the criminal. From my perspective, I'm afraid that I feel obliged to say that the legal aid crisis is having a terrible impact. I have not, in my 20 years of practice, ever known a letter of objection to the civil legal aid board to result in the outcome that I think your constituent is hoping for. I can speculate about the reasons for that, but the way to fix that, in my view, is just to have a better overview and more communication between different agencies. To be aware of what has just been described as the legal system abuse, solicitors obviously represent their clients. That's our professional duty. We also have a duty to recognise where information sharing might have a wider interest, particularly the interests of the children and duties to the court. My practice is increasingly around children who are becoming victims of coercive control via contact actions. That's quite a bold statement to make. It's something I'm very sad to have to say, but it's something that I am seeing happen more and more often. It's very easy to secure legal aid for child contact disputes, but those disputes are not always necessarily being processed quickly enough to take into account the risk of abuse. To respond to the question about what should be done if it's not legislative, Russell, I think it was your question. We've suggested that a domestic abuse Scotland act implementation group be reinitiated. We were not invited to sit on the first one. That was only statutory partners, but we think we could have improved it, and we would like to see that happen again to look at the landscape and make a plan. Secondly, really quickly around information from criminal and to civil cases. At the time of the crafting of the domestic abuse legislation, we brought evidence from a Supreme Court in New York judge who had done a lot of work on that. He suggested that one case would ensure that information would travel automatically in the brain of the sheriff from the criminal case to the civil case. I checked with a number of sheriffs and judges in Scotland. They thought that there was much to recommend that model, but there doesn't seem to have been any appetite on the part of leaders to take that up. I don't think that it's too little to ask, frankly. Jamie Greene, I'll bring in Fulton MacGregor, Jamie Greene. Can I start with Dr Scott at the risk of opening up a Pandora's box with his question, but I'm going to ask it anyway? You made a comment, slightly off the cuff comment earlier in the session, about the elephant in the room. I'd like you to elaborate on that, because I think it's very relevant to the conversation, and I think that's specifically around the issue of sentencing as a deterrent. Could you just briefly share your thoughts on that? I can be brief on this. We have long said that we didn't think community payback orders or community sanctions were effective. We're not suggesting that everybody gets thrown in jail and left there forever. What we are suggesting is that people look at more effective sanctioning, and that would probably require a significant expansion of the use of electronic monitoring, other kinds of mechanisms, more custodial sentences perhaps, but because we don't want to throw more people in jail, which I totally support in other cases, who's carrying the risk here? It's the women and children experiencing domestic abuse, so we need to be willing to talk about alternative sanctions. On that, you'll be aware of the report that was produced this week by this committee on proposals to bail and release. You spoke earlier about the volume of offenders breaching their bail conditions and the effect that that has on their victims. Have you had a chance to have any initial review of our in-depth report and our recommendations or anything that you wanted to comment on in relation to that? We've respected domestic abuse. We submitted a significant consultation response in response to the bail bill, but we're not invited to provide evidence, so I would have been happy to do that. No, I haven't had a chance to read your report yet, but I would be happy to come back to you on it. We look forward to that. I wanted to pick up other issues that haven't been touched on, because we've covered quite a lot of ground already. First of all is the issue of regional disparity and the prevalence of domestic abuse in Scotland. I know from our papers that areas such as Dundee, Western Bartonshire and Glasgow City have a much higher rate per 10,000 of the population than other parts of the country. I just wondered what you think more could be done in terms of either education, policing or where the problems lie. That may be even a question for our academic friends in the room, because I'm slightly concerned that it affects the proportion of the west of Scotland, which is an area that I represent, and why there is such regional disparity and the prevalence of domestic abuse cases. Maybe we'll start with... well, Marsha, as soon as you're online, we'll come to you first, if that's all right. Also, I have to go soon, so I'm really apologetic about that. Edinburgh Women's Aid is celebrating International Women's Day and is 50th birthday, and I promise that I'm stupid. It's really important not to take the prevalence data too seriously. It's really dodgy. We know that what it represents is police calls, and we know that most women don't call the police, so I would raise questions about whether we actually... what we do know is that there's more police activity in those communities, and my analysis of that is that poorer women, you know, women, many of the reasons for why they do not have resources to get themselves and their children safer, more likely to be involved in the system and to call the police. And I think if you look at the poverty rates in those areas and then you look at the prevalence rates of... well, they're not prevalence rates, but reporting rates to police of domestic abuse cases, I suspect you will see quite an interesting correlation. Thank you, Dr Scott, and I should add my congratulations on your organization's birthday, and also, as one of the minority token men on the committee, a happy International Women's Day to you, Dr Scott. In that case, I think you've raised a few, yeah, fist pumps all the way. I think you've raised a few interesting points there. I probably won't labour that because we haven't got time, so therefore I won't come to our panel on that issue. And the last point I did want to discuss, and it's probably bad timing because it is International Women's Day, is that domestic abuse also suffers men. There are male victims of domestic abuse, both at the hands of female and male abusers, and that's something that's very... I find it very hard to get statistical data on, actually, although I know the HMIC who's in the next panel had some data on that. But I just wondered if there's... You know, there was a concerted campaign a couple of years ago, I think, in a mixture between charities and the Scottish Government and some organizations in London to try and offer more support to deal with some of the stigma around, I guess, male domestic abuse. I wondered... You're nodding your head, because I wonder if you might want to comment on that. Yeah, we interviewed just two male victims in our research, so obviously you can't generalise from that. But I would say that the one male victim in particular felt that his gender did impact on response from services and from the police, particularly because it was an ongoing psychological abuse. He did feel a little like people thought he should man up both his friends and family, but also the police response, but also that it wasn't taken seriously, even though it was a considerable amount of abuse over a long period of time. Mainly online, which we've discussed is really tricky in terms of evidence, but also when he was asked when does this become a crime, this ongoing psychological abuse, he was told it wouldn't become a crime. So this was really a difficult case, so I do think we need to look at that, and he was very aware that very educated man, the majority of victims were female, but he did feel that gender impacted on his response. The other male victim was quite different from a female partner, and again we can't generalise from that, but what struck me was despite the two occasions according to the act that was used in his case, he had wanted it dropped and he wasn't in ongoing fear, alarm and distress as all of the other, including the male, were. So we do have wider research and support services for male victims, but I also think we need to think about our messaging. I agree with you. I've had boys and the everyday heroes talk about not being believed when they've talked about rape or domestic abuse because it doesn't apply to them. So I do think it's an area worthy of consideration, as well as looking at the disparities across the country in terms of services for everybody, particularly women and children. Court advocacy support came out as the most important service for everybody, including the men in this study and yet the geographical disparities, and we're only looking at standardisation for adults and not children. So yeah, thanks for raising that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Dr Scott, I know that you have possibly to leave us, so please feel free just to log off when you need to. I'll now bring in Fulton MacGregor and then Katie Clarks of Fulton. Thanks, convener, and good morning to the panel. It's been really quite interesting. I was one of the committee members in the last term who took this bill through along with Rona Mackay. I think it's fair to say that when it was passed in the chamber and other colleagues were here as well, it was one of the highlights of the previous session, and it's good now to be in a position to be doing the post legislative scrutiny on it. I wanted to actually ask questions around an area that has a wee bit of coverage. In Amanda, you raised it first, and it's about the information on the legislation for victims in the wider public as a whole. I think that often as parliamentarians, when we're taking the bill through, we kind of forget that. We're working on, we don't forget it, but we're working on more. How will the police implement it? How will social work services react to it? How will the third sector react to the courts, everything like that? We sometimes forget what is the public's perception of this, and Amanda, you put it really well when you said that people would come to you and think, well, this isn't an offence, because I've not been physically assaulted or physically hit. This is the way he's always treated me, this sort of thing. I suppose my question then is, how can we make it more clear to the public that coercive control is an offence, what it is, and change the culture around it? I'm not expecting this to happen overnight. It's clearly not happened, even in the four years since the bills been in, which isn't that long a period of time, but is there more we can do to speed up that process? Since I've mentioned you, Amanda, I can come to you first and then. It's a really difficult one, because my perception of this is that I'm a family lawyer, so most of the people who talk to me about this behaviour have been in fairly long relationships, and as you say, this is just the norm. This is just how he or she has always been. I think if we can continue the dialogue that this behaviour does constitute a criminal, I do think that public awareness is key, because I do remember really well and clearly that the last public awareness media campaign really did start conversations. Amanda, we're having just a slight problem with your sound coming or going. I'll maybe suggest that we bring in another witness in the room and then we'll maybe try and sort that out and come back to you. I was involved in a public awareness campaign on domestic abuse with children with the Voice Against Violence in the Government, a joint campaign, and I felt that was a really effective campaign. It wasn't about the act, and we haven't had one since the act in relation to children, but there was a 200% increase in traffic to childline whilst that was on. It was produced in, well, they were part of the team, the media team, with the Government, with the media people and these young survivors, young experts in life, so I would really recommend that approach when we're talking about it, but it needs to be more than advertising. We need to look at education, look at schools, and just to say the victims and witnesses, even those who had DASA cases didn't fully understand the act. Back to Pauline's point earlier about do we know the detail and does everybody know that they didn't know that, and those that were subjected to domestic abuse aggravated crimes when they heard the detail of the act felt affronted that it wasn't applied in their cases and couldn't understand why. I would support a wider public message and this is the key recommendation from the victim survivors, but only with a more robust response. Just before I bring the end, Michelle, of course, just to save time, I suppose, based on the previous two answers, maybe when you answer and you could think about this, do you think that even one thing this committee could take away today from this session would be, in going back to the Government, be able to say in public awareness? Yes, I do. I absolutely agree with what Mandarin Clair has said. I think that public awareness and messaging is really very important, although one has to be quite careful with the nature of messaging because it can have a triggering effect for survivors and we found that in the research that we did during Covid where there was a lot of messaging around domestic abuse and coercive control and the women that we spoke as part of our research found that to be very difficult and very triggering, so we have to be careful about that. But what I would say is that we need more radical reform. We can't simply rely on the criminal justice system to sort this out. This is a deeply entrenched problem. We need much more ambitious shifts across all of our public bodies. We need a co-ordinated and bespoke multi-agency response involving the police, involving the health, involving education and social services, to develop an early intervention and public health-focused approach to domestic abuse, so I guess that that would be my main message. I think that, Amanda, there was nothing more that you were wanting to add to your previous response, so on that note I'll just hand over finally to Katie Clair. Yes, thank you. It may be that the next panel might be better pleased to answer this question, and I have been going through the papers to see if I could get the information I'm looking at, but really what I was interested in is specifically around the course of control, to what extent you have been able to get information on conviction rates and the difficulty in securing convictions. I know that at the beginning of the evidence session there was a lot of discussion around about police interpretation and guidelines, and whether we have case law to really evaluate how well the courts are able to decide on those cases. It may be that Clair might be best placed. I know that you have done some research. I don't know to what extent you were able to look at that and how many cases you had to consider. Yes, thank you. The next panel will be about the place, because I couldn't work out from the statistics where it was non-physical abuse only, but certainly the victim survivors felt that where it was mainly psychological abuse and for some the stalking and non-physical abuse only, that was even more difficult and more likely in their view to lead to either very minor sentences in their view or actually the three non-guilty that we found. So, in their perspective, this was a lot more difficult and the coercive control wasn't their parlance either. I know it's not used explicitly in our act for many reasons, which is fine, but it's not part of how people are speaking. There was some mention of control, but psychological abuse and fear, alarm and distress certainly resonated, so it's just an interesting point compared to other laws in other countries that are coercive control only, which I think are limited compared to ours. I don't know if any of the other panel members want to come back, but I'm quite happy to leave it there and to pick it up with the next panel, unless any of the witnesses had something that they felt would add, because I don't think we've got the data. Okay, thanks very much. I think we'll just pull things to a close on that note. Thank you very much indeed, panel members, for coming to join us today on International Women's Day, and we'll now have a short suspension just to allow for a changeover of witnesses. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much indeed. So, I welcome our second panel of witnesses this morning. So, we have Craig Naylor, His Majesty's Inspector of Constabularies in Scotland, Detective Chief Superintendent Sam Falls, Head of Public Protection with the Specialist Crime Division of Police Scotland and Moira Price, National Procurator Fiscal for Domestic Abuse, and Head of Victims and Witnesses Policy Team at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. So, a very warm welcome to you all, and we'll just move straight to questions, and I'll come to Sam Falls and then Craig Naylor to begin with. We've heard in the first panel session this morning fairly extensive commentary from witnesses regarding the key role of police officers in using the new legislation. I can only appreciate just how big a change it will have been for police officers to use a different and quite novel piece of legislation, if you like. Now, we know that from the written evidence that was submitted in terms of the training process for officers, there has been disruption around that arising from the Covid-19 pandemic and the potential impact of that on, and I think that it was referenced as, the sort of confidence of police officers in using the legislation. So, perhaps I can come to you first, Sam, just to ask a bit in and around what work is on going to address the training requirement and in the particular context of operational or divisional tier 1 officers who are at that front end of the policing response. So, I'll bring in you first, Sam, and then Craig. Thank you, convener. At the outset, when the legislation was implemented, we obviously undertook a real significant operation to train the numbers of officers that were trained at that point in time. We have retained the training licence for domestic abuse matters through the College of Police and so that will continue, and that is the plan. However, it would be remiss of me not to comment on the fact that we had Covid, we had the public health crisis, where police officers remained front-line, and domestic abuse was one of the types of call where they always still got a face-to-face response, and we also had COP26 in Scotland. Over the last two years, there's been significant impact on training. We also recognise that we have had a number of officers who have left the organisation for various reasons, retirement, et cetera, and we've had a number of new recruits come in, so it's important that we continue that training regime, but it has been significantly, not just domestic abuse training across a broad spectrum of public protection, which is the one that I'm usually fighting for, but it has been impacted across the board, and we're hoping now to start to pick that back up. Thanks very much. Do you have timescales for that? I know that there are often unforeseen abstractions for, in particular, divisional officers, but in terms of timescales for training, can you comment further on that? Some of that is still impacted upon by backlog of training that has to happen and to build cadres of specialist officers back up. We have a programme of refreshing training more so for probationers, which is what our academic colleagues refer to as the tier one front line response, and the new officers that have come through, so that gets picked up during probationer training, but the central team who review all of those training materials and products are currently looking at that to see how we can improve that. That's currently on-going, but it's a rolling programme and I don't have specific timescales for you. Thanks very much. Craig, I'll maybe just bring you in on the issue of training and, in particular, timescales, just from some of the work that you've already been doing around this. Thanks, convener. Yes, it was one of the recommendations that we made in the report that we published in January. We don't see it as a one-off event and I think that was mentioned earlier that this has got to be something that is continuous that is repeated on a regular basis to update on things like new and emerging legislation and how that matters, things like stated case law, how are things changing and how do officers become competent, maintain that competence and go on to provide an excellent service. However, there are challenges with that. There are over 11,000 front line officers in Police Scotland and undertaking the domestic abuse matters training that they did during the pandemic, I think, has been quite exceptional. But I think that it's a good starting point. The bit for me is, so what next? The issues that Sam has mentioned about continuing that training, making sure that it's relevant to the officers, learning from the experiences from our inspection, from the academic inspection work that's been done as well, to understand what a victim needs is absolutely where we need to be addressing the training. But we also need to address what the offender needs and how do we more effectively address that offender's needs? Thanks very much. I'm sure there will be some more questions around training from members later on. I'll probably ask much the same question around the way in which understanding and knowledge of the new legislation is being developed within the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, in particular across your Procurator Fiscal Body. Have there been challenges around that? Perhaps you can comment on specific training that's been delivered as well. CUPFS carried out significant training for not only our legal staff, but also our victim information and advice staff within the prosecution service in advance of the act being implemented, so that staff were fully aware of the nature of the new legislation and how we would investigate and prosecute it, and so that staff had a very clear understanding of the type of evidence that would be required to be able to prove this new type of offence. The training comprised face-to-face training for all prosecutors, plus specifically designed e-learning for prosecutors, and new members of staff also undergo that training when they join CUPFS. In addition to the training in relation to the DASA legislation, though, as an organisation, as a matter of routine, we provide accredited domestic abuse training to all members of legal staff who will be involved in the prosecution of domestic abuse and to victim and information staff. That includes for legal staff a three and a half day training course on domestic abuse, which includes half a day spent with specialist support agencies who provide external support to victims of domestic abuse, so it is very extensive training. Craig mentioned the need for training to be updated as new case law is developed, and we have provided those updates to staff because, in the last couple of years, there have been significant cases and reports issued by the court, particularly the High Court, in relation to the application of DASA, so we have kept our legal staff updated on those cases as they are produced in order for our staff to have as full a possible an understanding of how to prosecute and the proper investigation required for offences under the new legislation. I know that it is difficult for you to speak on behalf of other organisations within the court environment. Are you aware of any other training being delivered to, for example, defence solicitors via staff and so on? I am not aware of training for defence, but in relation to other organisations, the police and the COPFS have worked together and provided mutual training to each other. In fact, the police participate in our domestic abuse training to prosecutors. We are, however, both involved in provision of training about the criminal justice system to independent domestic abuse advocates. Thank you, that is helpful. I will bring in other members now, and I will hand over to Jamie Greene and then Katie Clark. I note that perhaps all of you sat through the last session and saw you will have heard some of the issues that were raised from the organisations that support victims of domestic abuse. I wanted to focus more on perhaps some of the procedural issues about how we get to, from a point of someone reporting an incident through to a successful conviction in the pathway that that incident will take. The first is perhaps an overarching question, and it is really just to get a feel for your view on this. About 20 years ago, there were around 33,000 domestic abuse incidents reported to Police Scotland, given that it is nature at the time. 20 years later, that number doubled to 65,000, and there has been a lot of conversation around whether that is good, bad or indifferent. There is obviously a school of thought that, through a series of educated campaigns and public awareness and a shift in social concepts, it is good news that people are more willing to come forward and report incidents, say, to two decades ago. Equally, there could be a concern that there is an increase of incidents themselves, which is the issue that I tried to raise with Dr Scott. Do you have a view on that? There has been a trend, and the number has been on the rise. There was a short decrease last year of 1 per cent, but overall, especially over the last seven to eight years, it has been rising quite considerably. That clearly is a concern to us as a committee and to those involved in that. Do you have a view on that? I have just gone along the panel to make life easy for you. My next question is on the reverse order. My view is probably based on 30 years on policing and having seen the changes in attitudes towards domestic abuse, both within the police and within the communities that we work on. I see the increased reporting as a positive simply because I do not believe that it was not happening 20 years ago. I think that it just was not recognised as abuse. It was not recognised as a criminal matter and people did not necessarily report it. It seemed to have been dealt with very much as a private issue. The police have become better at recognising it and recording it. The increase for me is a positive, but I think that it needs a societal and generational cultural change that is going to take a long time. The decrease might take a long time as well, if that makes sense. The number is still quite high, though. Even if it is an improvement on reporting, it is still a high figure. It is a high figure, but the academic research shows us that we have a huge number of individuals in Scotland who do not report it. There is a lot of un-reported abuse as well. That is a very good question. I echo Sam's points. Having lived through the last 35 years in policing, there has been a significant change in both the governance of how we record those matters and the encouragement of officers to treat them much more seriously than they were when I joined the police. If it happens behind a closed door in a private place, it was not really our business. Since 2007-2008, when there was an HMICS report on this, there has been concerted efforts by policing in Scotland and Police Scotland to change that view, to change the view of every officer that serves as a victim no matter where the crime occurs. As we say in our report, the progress has been quite remarkable, but I still think that we are in a position where the majority of victims will not report it at the first time that they become a victim. They will not report it at the second time, and very often it will be the fourth, fifth, and maybe the seventh time before they come forward and tell a family member, a friend and eventually a police officer about that. As DCS Falls has said, it is vastly under-reported. The fact that we have jumped with double the figures in 20 years is indicative of the efforts that have been put in by Police Scotland to more accurately reflect what is going on and address the problem. However, we tend to focus very much on the victims, and that is as it should be. However, we need to recognise who else is around them—the children in the family situation and other family members—but, most importantly, the person who is causing the harm. I do not think that we focus enough in our society on the people who are causing this dreadful crime to the people that they allegedly love. As we move to the crown's position on all of this, perhaps it would be a good point to look at the data. I will cherry-pick a year, because it is recent, the year 2020-21, of the 65,000 domestic abuse cases that were reported to the police. Under DASA, my understanding is that 1,600 crimes were recorded. I need to check. Be careful about my terminology here, because it is crazy to confuse statistics. 1,600 crimes recorded of those 1,200 charges reported of those, as the convener said in her opening comments earlier, 420 individuals were proceedings against and of those 383 successful convictions. I am guessing at the ratio of that. If you start with 65,000 incidents and under DASA, your 383 convictions were lost. Every one of them are very welcome convictions to the victims. It is 0.5 per cent of the total. It does not seem great. I know that it is a journey and a new piece of legislation. The direction of travel seems to be okay over the last couple of years, but it still seems to be underwhelming. What is the crown's role on all of this? First, I agree with Sam Falls and Craig Nailer about the fact that the increase in reports hopefully reflects an increased confidence in victims' witnesses that, if there is a report to domestic abuse, it will be taken seriously. When the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service received reports of domestic abuse from the police, we will assess the evidence and we will assess whether it is appropriate to raise a prosecution in terms of the new DASA legislation or whether it is more appropriate to raise a prosecution under an existing common law or statutory offence with a domestic abuse aggravator attached. I think the fact that there is a relatively low number of domestic abuse offences recorded as reported in 2020-21 reflects the fact that this was new legislation but, more importantly, it is a course of behaviour offence. For a course of behaviour offence to take place, there has to be a start point and it may take some time before there is sufficient evidence to establish a course of behaviour and that may be reflected in the number of reports received over that period. However, what I would emphasise from the statistics for 2020-21 is that, when these cases were reported, prosecutors took an initial decision to proceed to court in 92 per cent of them. The principal reason why proceedings were not taken was due to insufficient available evidence but that reflects the fact that prosecutors exercise proper professional judgment looking at the facts and circumstances of an individual case in determining whether there is sufficient evidence in law to proceed. The court that we have is that we can analyse statistical data and take a view on that. Equally important to us is the anecdotal evidence and we have taken a lot of that. I refer to a blog that women's aid recently penned where it makes it very clear that survivors of domestic abuse have significant concerns that the investigation prosecution and sentencing for domestic offenses do not take into account the sustained levels of severity or the impact of the abuse of the experience. It is very clear to a lot of us through case work that we do, through evidence that we take, in private and in public, and through the organisations that work with these survivors that so many people in Scotland still feel really let down by the whole system. That is not to say anything disparaging about the officers who deal with the tier one reports or the advocates who are then picking up the cases or the judges who are facing the evidence before them or indeed the juries if it comes to it. Clearly there seems to still seems to be a whole system let down of so many where they are not being supported. How would you respond to that sort of criticism, if you like, and is criticism? I do not think that it is possible or appropriate for me to comment at all in relation to sentencing, which is a matter for the independent judiciary. What I can say though is that in relation to the investigation of domestic abuse, the police and fiscal service have established a very clear joint protocol to set the best standards of service to be provided in the investigation and prosecution of crime. That sets out very clearly the various avenues of inquiry that should be pursued and the information that prosecutors need to properly consider domestic abuse cases. We work very closely with the police to make sure that we do receive the appropriate information that we need as prosecutors to take decisions in those cases. I would emphasise that we need to consider each case on the basis of its own individual facts and circumstances. Again, we consider that there is sufficient evidence in law and public interest in prosecuting. We will apply a presumption in favour of prosecuting in all cases of domestic abuse, whether that be an offence under DASA or any of the other statutory or common law offences to which a domestic abuse aggravator can be added. We take a very proactive line in ensuring that we raise domestic abuse prosecutions where that is possible, based on the available evidence. As we go back to that line, unfortunately, I will add in the issue of sentencing, because Dr Scott was quite clear with us that sentencing could be tougher. It is all very well passing it on to another element of the judiciary who is not here to defend themselves. It is not just decisions by individual judges and sheriffs. We know that there is a sentencing council involved in all of this, and that is often underpinned by legislation itself, which dictates the direction of travel. Perhaps you could, in your answer, respond to that school of thought that it is not proving to be a deterrent at all for some individuals? I would turn it around in its head a bit. I echo the point that I made. I do not sit in the sentencing council. I do not have a view on that, and it would be inappropriate for me to take a view. What we need to look at is that 65,000 victims have come forward and have trusted the services that they get. Some of the services that they have got have been outstanding, and some have been much less so. Trying to fix those at the lower end of the service provision is where we need to focus on, so that a victim comes forward and can trust the police service to deliver a service to them, can trust the support mechanisms, can trust the fiscal service to get to a point where we would get the best chance of not just a conviction, but allowing them to move on with their life in the way that they want to do so. That is the really tricky bit here. These are individual cases, 65,000 plus 1,000 of them, and it is very difficult to manoeuvre through their life and help them to face the challenges that they will face, whether that is financial accommodation, caring for their children, caring for other people around them. That is a very tricky position. We are also trying to navigate a criminal justice process that is very adversarial and can be very daunting for a victim to come into contact with for probably the first time in their life. So the bit for me is how do we support them through that process and get the outcome that they deserve. Especially if we have had the guts to come forward and pick up that phone, make that call to the police possibly for the first time in years, and at the end of a torturous three-year journey to find that the perpetrator has given a community sentence or a fine. There is no wonder why so many people are feeling let down by the system. Is there a sense of palpable frustration in the place that you are seeing repeat offenders as you are coming out to households that your officers have been out to before in that level of frustration that there is not enough being done to support those victims? As my colleagues have said, it is probably not appropriate for me to comment on sentencing as such, but we do see repeat offenders. Domestic abuse is one of those crime types where the risk of recidivism is really high. That is why we proactively try to target individuals that we know are repeat perpetrators. It would be wrong if I did not recognise that we certainly do not always get it right, but we do work very closely with CLOPFUS to try to improve evidence gathering and sufficiency of evidence for police officers to report and to improve the quality of reporting to the fiscal service to enable as informed a decision as possible for the part that we contribute to. We also work with other statutory partners and third sector organisations. We take victim feedback very seriously, we take academic research very seriously and we try to learn from that. We have a number of forums where victims and survivor groups can engage with us and give us feedback around the police response, and we try to take that and improve from it, but it is not an overnight fix. I want to ask about the issue that I raised with the previous panel in relation to coercive control and maybe just to get a little bit of information about your experience to date about how possible it has been to bring cases, what kind of conviction rates we are seeing, if maybe there are not many cases and it is difficult to give a lot of data on that, but we as a committee have not got much data, but also anything that can be said in terms of how easy it is or how difficult it is to secure prosecutions and convictions, and if there is any information in relation to that, the committee would be very interested. I do not know if there is any case law or whether you are able to give examples. As the committee has heard, coercive controlling behaviour is a common form of abuse perpetrated against victims. In the past, as prosecutors, we were limited in what charges we could bring to properly reflect that abuse because we were limited to proving effectively single incidents or single offences. The new legislation has enabled us to present to the court the far bigger picture of what a victim has suffered and also to provide evidence to the court about the context of individual incidents within that wider course of abusive behaviour. I could give you some examples if it would be helpful of the types of abusive behaviour that were not previously criminal and which we are now able to prosecute within the body of a section 1 DASA charge. That includes monitoring a victim's movements, restricting whether they can leave the house, isolating them from family and friends, monitoring their use of the phone, looking at their messages on the phone, constant accusations of infidelity, commenting on or controlling a victim's appearance, whether they wear certain clothing, wear makeup, making demeaning comments, all of which were not previously criminal but can now be encompassed within the body of a section 1 DASA charge. The act has also allowed us to include within the body of a section 1 DASA charge incidents that we might not previously have been able to libel because we couldn't corroborate them as individual stand-alone crimes. For example, provided that we can establish that there is a course of abusive behaviour in that we can corroborate that course of abusive behaviour because we can prove two distinct separate elements of it, we can libel other incidents of abusive behaviour within the body of the DASA charge even if they would not be able to be proved as a stand-alone offence and there have been two recent high court convictions because DASA can carry up to 14 years imprisonment for offences which incorporated what would otherwise have been significant sexual offending, possibly which could have amounted to rape. So we have been able to achieve justice for those victims in those cases by application of the new legislation and the approach which prosecutors have applied has been approved in recent judgments from the High Court. I appreciate what you said previously and all the witnesses said in relation to sentencing and that it's not your role to set sentencing guidelines but you do have a role in terms of the consistency of sentencing and on occasions I appreciate it may be rare you will lodge appeals in relation to sentencing. So do you think there is a consistent approach across Scotland in relation to those cases or have you had to, if you like, mark appeals? As prosecutors we apply a consistent approach to all cases of domestic abuse but I can't comment on sentencing at all I'm sorry. All right you can't even go that far and also just very briefly you'll be aware the committee is looking at new bail proposals at the moment. Has there been a change in practice as a result of this legislation and could you outline whether that's had an impact in terms of bail in relation specifically to domestic abuse? We're aware of the section 23 provisions but has there been an increase in the use of remand in relation to domestic abuse cases as a result of the various new offences being brought in? We will consistently apply the same approach to consideration of opposition to bail or consideration of whether special conditions of bail should be sought from the court in relation to all cases of domestic abuse and to a large extent that considers the risk of harm to victims and to children but whether or not an accused person is remanded or special conditions are imposed is a matter for the court. In terms of your marking of cases though has this changed? No we will apply the same approach and we continue to apply the same approach in relation to marking focusing on the public interest and particularly the aspect of risk and safety of victims and how that can be dealt with through seeking special bail conditions or opposing bail where appropriate. So the existence of the new offences shouldn't really have made a significant difference in terms of the numbers being remanded? The new offence is another tool which prosecutors can use in that it's another charge which we can use to address domestic abuse but it doesn't fundamentally change the approach that we take to domestic abuse. Thank you, that's helpful. Thanks very much. I'll bring in Collette Stevenson and Dane Russell. Thanks convener and good morning. I'm going to go with the same thread as the last panel before in terms of the victims and witnesses experience and we heard as well that children going through the system have had an adverse impact in coming forward and whatnot as well and even within the report that they touched upon with the everyday heroes there was one quote and it was you get trauma from the bad person then more trauma from the people in the system and that was from a child saying that. Can you tell me what wider work you're involved in in terms of aiming to improve the experience of victims and witnesses in domestic abuse cases and if I can take that to Moira first of all thanks? All victims of domestic abuse and all children in all court cases are deemed vulnerable witnesses as such they are automatically entitled to use special measures when giving evidence in court. They are also automatically referred to our victim information and advice service within COPFS who will provide information about the case and also make links for the witness or the child to specialist support agencies to help support them and help them to remain engaged within the criminal justice process. I think the prosecution is taking the steps very seriously in terms of ensuring that victims and other witnesses are protected in court. It is a very difficult situation because you often are dealing with the parent of the child or the spouse of the victim. Providing support through third sector organisations can make a huge difference. The difficulty that we've got in Scotland is that these third sector organisations are often locally based and very often not national organisations or nationally replicated across the country so ensuring that there is an equivalence of service right throughout the country can be difficult. We did recommend that Police Scotland should implement changes to enhance the response at the first point of contact for more complex areas of work such as public protection and that's looking about how do we provide wider support to people going through this. It's not just about seeing the police officer not just seeing people doing the investigation but it's who else can provide support in the community and in the wider world around the individuals that are involved in this. The other thing is that even just from the evidence that we were given from the sample interviews was the lack of support and signposting as well from when the reportant tried to report to the police and actually being taken serious. I just wonder if he could maybe say more about that. Are you speaking in general terms about victims or about child victims? Particularly children. I think that the police approach to dealing with children is not in the nicest way to put it but how we engage with children has changed significantly over the last few years. We very much have a risk based approach. We try to adopt a trauma informed approach. It's very much multi agency so you'll be aware that we are developing and we're rolling out the Scottish child interview model in cases of domestic abuse. We are using visually recorded interviews for children who have been witnesses for significant cases of high court cases for domestic abuse and we're engaged with other organisations who are looking to roll out the Barnahouse model, including the Scottish Government and Children First, who were mentioned earlier. We do try to seek children's views and we take on board all the research that shows that children need to feel included and they need to feel heard in this. So where it's appropriate we will try to seek their views but for an actual interview of a child there's a very very careful approach to that. The Police Scotland written submission was really detailed and helpful. I'm page nine of that. It makes reference to two cases in which my price has already been referred to. These are cases in which DASA was used to prosecute successfully rapes within a DASA charge which otherwise would have been uncorroborated and not prosecuted. These are both subject of appeal and I'm not going to ask you to predict the outcome of that but what I would like to ask is, it's a two-part question, have these appeals had any bearing just now on current DASA cases specifically, I suppose, or any of them on pause that incorporates a rape charge, a rape element because of the appeals and in the worst case scenario, if these are successfully appealed, does that fundamentally derail DASA for that purpose? That's a question for yourself. I'm not aware of any pause being put in relation to the way we apply DASA in light of any appeals that may be on-going but in fact there's been a recent case from the High Court of CA against Her Majesty's Advocate which actually endorses the approach which the Crown has always taken to the interpretation of DASA and confirms the approach which the Crown takes. So that's an appeal that's been through? It's a concluded case and a decision issued by the High Court. Okay, so I don't know what may be that that case is the same of these two referred to in the police submission but... That case doesn't relate to an allegation of significant sexual offending within the body of the charge as far as I'm aware. Right, but it's more about the application of DASA. Right, so these is a kind of question of what's the space and as to whether this could derail DASA potentially if these were successfully appealed? I don't understand that the appeal cases would, if cases are being appealed when necessarily derailed DASA particularly given the fact that the High Court has recently issued a judgment which appears to confirm the understanding and interpretation of the legislation which the Crown has always applied to the legislation. Sure, okay, thank you. My second question is for DCS Falls. Now the Edinburgh University research that was referred to in the earlier evidence in which 22 victims talked about their experiences was quite critical in fact Dr Houtham who I think is still with us described it as unremittingly grim and in relation to police it talks about the process being inconsistent and victims and witnesses being required to proactively collect and push for particular evidence to be considered and evidence of that nature which I'm sure you're aware of. Now I completely understand that everything revolves around funding. The chief constable has already stated that the current policing model is unsustainable in the basis of the funding model that is available to them but what I'd like to ask is in your written evidence there's talk of 13,000 officers having had the core training and 600 having had the what's called champion training and in reply to the convener earlier I think she asked about what was happening next or if any deadlines or any targets. Can you give an indication as to whether that training is now back on track what the targets are where you're likely to go from here? So we have been working with Safe Lives who obviously helped us to deliver the dams training in the first place and there are six continuous professional development modules have been developed and signed off with Safe Lives for delivery to the champions and the intention then is that the champions who are distributed across the organization will help to support front-line officers or officers within contact command and control division if you like around that whole decision making for them and to support them with additional training and information and to try and cascade that out so that training is due to commence just shortly but forgive me I would need to check the timeline and come back to you on that but I can't remember the timeline for it but the six modules are ready and we will be pushing them out to the champions. I was going to ask a very quick supplementary of Mr Nailor about that does HMICS have any remit around training and targets and can you hold the police to account in certain ways? Certainly we made a recommendation in our last report about training and we would be expecting within three months of publication of the report an updated plan from Police Scotland on what the training is. I've no reason to believe we won't get that but they're usually very good at following up on the recommendations and actually making a significant difference when they do so we would expect to see the details that DCS Falls has mentioned there on the nature of the training, the champions training and we've talked about the champions in our report and how they need to be empowered to do more. So we'll see that within three months? It will come to us within three months I suspect it will come to the SPA at some point. And a very quick question we heard from the previous panel about civil and criminal cases where domestic abusers use civil courts to sometimes prolong the abuse or play one criminal off against civil and vice versa. In particular case of dealing with the individual has been frustrated that the legal aid board appears blind to what's going on. There's an organised crime element to it, there's previous convictions, there's the hiding of assets allegedly but it looks like this individual is going to get legal aid. I wonder if there's any mechanism at all that the police have for feeding into legal aid decisions of that nature. Is there any protocol or memorandum or understanding or sharing of information specifically around the granting of legal aid applications? Cases where you may be aware that individuals are seeking to obtain legal aid and they're not being honest. There's serious organised crime or convictions of a domestic nature that are influencing us all part of this culture of using civil legal aid to prolong or to continue the abuse that's criminal. Just if there's any mechanism that the police have of talking to the legal aid board. So firstly I wholeheartedly agree that the civil process is often used manipulatively and to continue to perpetuate abuse against victims but I'm not aware of any structured feedback process or information sharing protocol or memorandum between us and the civil courts or the Scottish legal aid but we do have a lot of engagement with them but I'm not aware of that anything particular to that. So it may be potentially of value to consider. If I can maybe just ask members to keep questions focused on the domestic abuse act that we're looking at today. So I'm going to bring in Rona Mackay and then Pauline McNeill. Thank you convener. Good afternoon. Can I ask DCS Sam Falls first really in the previous line of questioning that I had to the other panel about domestic abuse protection orders and possibility of stalking protection orders. I'm not sure how much you can say about any kind of discussions you've had with government about the implementation of these or even just where what your view of it if what difficulties might exist. So we've had significant engagement with Scottish Government colleagues and with our partners in the justice system around the legislation. I think it's fair to say that it's not just the police who have raised concerns and our concerns are not simply financial concerns or around resource demand. We've had concerns around risk and how the legislation might be implemented which we have fed back and we've had a number of very productive meetings between all the justice partners and the Scottish Government to highlight all of the issues that we are collectively seeing but it's not seen as an unsolvable problem and we are actually really frantically working towards a solution for domestic abuse protection orders so it's not that we are we are certainly not trying to put a barrier up. We're asking how can we overcome these challenges and we're not we're not trying to point fingers we're trying to overcome the hurdles that we can see in front of us and it's not a good one. I do appreciate that and it is good to hear and obviously it has to be right. You can't embark upon it if there are certain issues that haven't been ruled out because the benefit to the victim would be that they don't have to go down the civil route and they can avoid the expense and the stress of having to do that. If that can be worked out that would be that would be excellent. Can anyone else in the panel like to have a view on it? Anybody? Mr Nailor, who are you? We haven't been involved in these conversations because we would look at the outcome and how the police service and justice would be developing the capability and improving it but more philosophically very much in support of new powers and legislation to protect people if we can do that and do that effectively in a way that balances budgets and challenges that are in resources and gets the best outcome for victims and their families then very very supportive. I mean I personally think it would be a game changer if it can be done effectively and all parties are able to do it without a great deal of hassle. Moira, would you have a view? As an organisation, we are equally supportive of anything that can be done to further protect victims of domestic abuse though in relation to this particular legislation the involvement of prosecutors would really come in in the event of a breach of such an order which would be a crime. Prosecutors would not be involved in seeking these orders in terms of the legislation. Can I just ask a very quick question to you, Moira? I may have missed this when Katie Clark was speaking. How do you differentiate between DASA legislation and other legislation? What is the criteria that you would say, well that's clearly DASA and that isn't? Is there anything concrete you could tell us? It really comes down to the facts and circumstances of the individual case. There are certain legal rules that we need to be able to comply with to prove a DASA charge, namely can we prove that it's a course of abusive behaviour? Does the behaviour meet the criteria set down in the legislation? If it does then we can prove a DASA charge, we will generally prosecute in terms of DASA. Sometimes we can prove a DASA charge but can prove individual incidents under the existing common law or statutory provisions. It will depend on each case, and each and every case is considered on its own individual facts and circumstances. Thank you for that evidence so far, I find it really helpful. I found it really helpful Moira, your responses to Katie Clark and the coercive behaviour. It's just kind of following from that and also to ask Sam's view on it as well. We've previously heard evidence that Tier 1's response officers tend to get to domestic violence abuse cases and that they're not specialist, naturally, because they're on their front line, whereas Moira is more specialist or officers who are trained to identify. I'm particularly interested in the coercive behaviour side of things. I imagine that by the very nature of that crime it's always going to be difficult to identify or indeed provide the evidence on a course of conduct. Do you have anything to offer the committee on what you thought about how better we could identify coercive behaviour issues on the front line? I think that we still have a long way to go in terms of training and understanding and awareness of officers of what constitutes coercive control and that whole to be able to get them to recognise the impact across the relationship and not just taking incidents in isolation. Tier 1 response, there was a comment earlier about them being slaves to the radio, so if I can put that into context, not every domestic incident call to the police will result in a crime being established. There is a big percentage of them that are no crime incidents. Overnight we'll see anywhere between 140 and 150 calls to the police for domestic abuse, but you'll also see an excessive 400 calls for concerns for people. You'll see an excessive 100 missing persons overnight etc. That's the demand that's on front line officers and I don't think it's fair if we don't recognise that they don't always get the time to sit down and build enough of a relationship with victims. Where a crime has been established and it's not evidence immediately, that's where the Tier 2 will pick that up. We do have specialist officers in Tier 2 to give a platinum service. Everybody would be a specialist domestic abuse officer but we just don't have the resources to do that and that's why we have domestic abuse champions. That's why we have, within each division, specialist domestic abuse officers to pick it up the following day, to do safety planning, to do perpetrator management planning, to engage with the victim and obtain fuller statements, but to send a specialist officer out to 150 calls a night is... We probably just don't have it. Thanks for that and I wasn't suggesting that. I totally accept that we need our front line. I want to ask you a follow-up one from that, so I guess you can answer it. Did coercive behaviour tend to go along with physical abuse or is there any patterns? Is it a standalone crime? I'm trying to visualise, also based on what Sam said, it obviously can be a standalone crime. That's the point of the act, a course of conduct over a long period and coercive behaviour. It's not physical abuse, it's mental abuse. I wouldn't have thought, it's just my perception of it, I wouldn't have thought that you're going to lift a phone at some point and say, I think that there's been a crime against me because I'm trying to visualise how then would you capture coercive behaviour. Does it tend to coincide then with physical abuse, if you could help me in that way, that would be helpful. Each incident of abuse will be particular to that accused and to that particular victim, so some courses of behaviour might well include violence, threatening and intimidating behaviour, all of which would be crimes anyway, but some might not. What we've learned from the academic research and from the voice of experience provided to us by victim support organisations and the task force is that, often with coercive control, it's not the use of violence, but the threat of violence, which can be as powerful and have as significant impact on the victim. So yes, in some cases we might see violence alongside coercive control type behaviour, but in other cases we won't necessarily see violence. I thought that's what you'd say. I am trying to work out where there's no violence then, how are you picking it up, how could you possibly pick up cases where there's been, because you've mentioned that you knew there's been a couple of cases already and that the judgment has endorsed a current approach to this, which is good. How would they be picked up then if there's no physical abuse? I'm really struggling to see how we get into the system. Through a victim reporting crime? They just simply report that like any other crime, and they say, I think, yeah, okay, thank you. Greg, you look like you wanted to say something there. Could it, this is something that we struggled with in our inspection report about trying to understand the intersection between people who are victims of sexual crime, people who are victims of domestic abuse, victims of coercive control, and how they almost like a Venn diagram layer on top of each other. Understanding the individual journey to get a point of reporting is really important, because sometimes you'll get the reporting of the sexual crime, sometimes domestic, rarely coercive control on its own, but generally what you will find is when you start exploring into the deaths of the victim's journey, you will find more than just one aspect. You may find an initial physical assault as domestic abuse. You then find that phones being controlled or bank accounts being controlled. You may find, I think, as you described in these two cases, elements of sexual crime that you would struggle to prove a standalone sexual crimes, but because they sit within a DASA framework, that elements of the DASA legislation can be used on that. So it is very difficult, it's very complex to try and peel it apart and say you will always see, for example, on this occasion this is what you'll see. It doesn't work like that. It needs to understand the victim and how you deal with that victim and build their confidence, build their trust and get to a position where they tell you the whole story, because very often that will take weeks, months to do that. Thank you very much. I wonder if I could just before I bring in Fulton MacGregor to pick up a bit on that and maybe come to yourself more in terms of proving a DASA charge that requires proof of on-going behaviours with her. However, while I suppose hypothetically Crown Office is potentially waiting on such sustained behaviour, in the meantime we've got a victim who's potentially still living at risk of harm and potentially quite high risk. So would Crown Office potentially prioritise single charges on other offences in the interim? There is a difference between summary procedure and solemn procedure. If an accuser is reported and placed on a summary complaint, the charges are effectively crystallised at the point that the accused appears in the summary complaint, though we do have power to raise subsequent proceedings or to move to amend the complaint if further information comes in. Whereas if we raise solemn proceedings where the accused initially appears in petition, that period will then be followed by investigation, which would enable us to receive further information and perhaps change the charges before the accused is finally served with an indictment, but generally will base the charges based on the available information. If there appears to be scope for further investigation, we will instruct that of the police. Every case will depend on its own facts and circumstances. We would certainly not be waiting for the victim to suffer further abuse before we raise proceedings if there is sufficient evidence to enable us to raise proceedings and to seek, for example, protective bail orders in the interim. That's helpful. Thank you very much for that. Fulton McRyrobyn. Thank you, convener, and it's actually following on from Pauline and yourself's line of questioning. The line of questioning that I had for the previous panel on that is about, I suppose, victim confidence in the legislation, or not even victim confidence, that's probably not the right word, it's the public confidence, public realising that there is a new offence there and that this is as wrong as a physical assault. I suppose there's probably, there is probably, mirror images between the two because, from all the evidence that we've heard, the historically speaking domestic violence wouldn't have always been seen as an offence several decades ago, but I think now most people do understand whether the reporter or not is completely a different matter and there's control issues around that, but we now know that most people do understand that an assault on them is an offence. How do you think we can get to that same place with this offence in the wider public, because I'm assuming that you use both the police in terms of, in the crown, we'll have heard of situations where you've maybe went out and your officers have maybe said this is potentially an offence and maybe the victim's been, is it? Is there anything more we can do? Is there anything more this committee in the Parliament can do to promote that? I'm quite happy with any order. I completely agree that the increasing public understanding and public awareness of the offence and of domestic abuse in general is essential to us being able to tackle it as a society and, as Sam and Craig have both said in different answers, it's so important to effect a societal and a cultural and a generational change in how we deal with domestic abuse. I think that the more that victims have confidence to come forward and see that they achieve justice, the more that's reported, the more the public in general will understand just how seriously criminal justice agencies treat this type of offending and have the confidence to report if they themselves are not the victims, report what they see happening to friends, neighbours, relatives so that the organisations who can take action are able to take action. I remember taking the legislation through in the last parliamentary session. As I said before, I was on the committee and there was a lot of talk about the legislation that, while bringing in a new offence, was also trying to change the culture around it. I remember MSPs from all parties speaking about that in the debates. Do you think that we are changing the culture, Sam and Craig and company yourself, and do you think that we are on the right track, if you like? I think that it's maybe started, but there's still a long way to go. It's not just about public awareness about the new offence, because domestic abuse is an umbrella term, and it captures the whole spectrum of abuse, whether that's physical, sexual, or non-physical abuse or psychological abuse of victims. For me, to get ahead of the curve, we really need to start early with education. For us, we've developed just one programme among many, the You Me Together programme, which we would hope to get pushed out into as many schools as possible. That's for boys and girls, because the definition is not gender-specific. That's about that education starting at as young an age as appropriate and as possible, but I can't dictate what's on the educational curriculum, but I do think that we need to start with education and get start to get ahead of the curve for that societal change that we all know is needed, because policing and isolation is not going to solve this. Yeah, I'd agree with that. Maybe some wobble up there with the education, can I? I just want to know if Craig wants to start anything to that. Yeah, I absolutely agree with what Irene Moira and Sam have said. That seems to a common theme, but maybe pulling from a slightly different field, I was delighted to be present when Sam and her team got an award recently for the That Guy campaign, which is about sexual offending and dealing with the offender. I think there's some really good parallels for this and I think there's some really good opportunities to pursue how that is done to tackle wider understanding about DASL legislation, to tackle the offender and how they think, and I know there's been work done by forces in England and Wales about tackling offender behaviour, particularly understanding what the people around the offender see and understand to see the development and the spiral of the increase in domestic abuse through coercive control, et cetera. I think learning from that and understanding it more widely and then taking that back into Scottish Government and understanding the responsibilities of the Parliament and pushing that forward will be fantastic, as well as policing education health and all the other statutory bodies that will need to be involved. Thank you, and I'll bring in Jamie Greene to finish things off. Thank you. The two short supplementaries. The first call follows on nicely from the conversation that we've just had. Of course, the best way to deal with domestic abuse is prevention rather than cure, and on that, I wondered if the panel was confident and comfortable that the delivery of what is known as Claire's law has been effective in Scotland through the domestic violence disclosure scheme. First of all, if Police Scotland had any statistical data on how many people have applied through that scheme for information and been granted information in the positive since its launch. Secondly, whether Police Scotland's data systems are up to scratch in terms of very national register and pull together information relevant to be able to feed into those requests. The disclosure scheme for domestic abuse Scotland obviously was introduced as Claire's law down south, but DSDAS, as it's known up here, has shown that the applications to the scheme—there are two routes and so a victim or a concerned family member—can make an application for us the right to ask. Police officers and other professionals can make an application via the power-to-tell scheme. What we've seen consistently since 2016 is an increase in applications to the scheme. We've seen an increase in disclosures. Not every application will result in a disclosure. It's very much a risk-based multi-agency decision whether or not we make that disclosure, particularly during the pandemic and during Covid. We saw a real increase. I can come back to you on writing with figures if that's helpful with the statistics for that, but we saw a real increase in applications to the scheme both in the right to ask but also in the power-to-tell scheme, which gave me a bit of confidence that officers were still responding to domestic abuse during the pandemic, still recognising risk and making applications themselves for potential victims to be given the right information for them to make informed decisions about their own relationships, their own lives. I can come back to you with statistics. It's really pretty high. I would have said somewhere, and I might be wrong, but it's around 9,000, but not applications, but not all of them have resulted in a disclosure. Certainly, when we compared it to Claire's law, the use of the scheme in Scotland was much better. That's really what I was trying to unearth, is how successful that scheme has been comparatively. Obviously, we know that there are six offenders registers, but there isn't a centralised domestic offenders register as such, but there are other datasets out there that people can access through the scheme, which may be helpful to them. I think that what's really important to remember is that the six offender register is conviction-based. The disclosure scheme for domestic abuse in Scotland is based on relevant information and intelligence. It's not based solely on conviction data, and that's important because not everybody gets prosecuted, not everybody gets convicted, so we have to take all the information into account to allow somebody to be empowered by that info. It's not conviction-based, and that's a real positive of the scheme. I presume that there are safeguards to ensure that people aren't obtaining information maliciously, for example, for false premises. That's a helpful safeguard to exist. A very considered scheme obviously takes into account human rights provisions, et cetera, and whether we've got a lawful basis to do that, but it's very much a multi-agency. There's a decision-making forum before we will go to that individual and give them information. I've kindly requested, and if you do have any more information on that scheme to write to us with any data that you have, I'd find that really helpful as we get post-legislative scrutiny. While you're on the line, you'll be aware in my last session that I asked about male survivors of domestic abuse. What is your gut feeling about how Police Scotland deal with reports of that? I know that you're going to say lots of positive things about good work that is done on the front line, but is there any sense at all that officers deal with these types of reports differently, or are you comfortable that everyone is fully trained to deal with a man reporting domestic abuse and that he'll be dealt with in the same way as anybody else? I think that I already mentioned that our definition is inclusive. It's not gender specific, albeit that we recognise a disproportionate impact on female victims. The officer's training is to include every victim. It doesn't exclude male victims of domestic abuse, it's inclusive of it. Certainly, the specialist training has lived experience. We engage with Amos, which is part of the national forum. We take feedback from Amos all the time around what we could do to improve. I would quite like to do some media work with Amos, but there are some budgetary restrictions around what I can and can't do. I have to target campaigns and message them to the biggest audience that I can make a difference with, but we do recognise that there are male victims. That brings us nicely to the end of our session. Just before you leave, you've obviously been answering our questions this morning, and we're grateful for that. I wonder if any of you would like to make a final comment around what we need to be thinking about, specifically that perhaps it's not being articulated this morning already. As we continue our post-legislative scrutiny of the act that perhaps hasn't been reflected already, if there's just any final point that you would like to raise. I'm coming to Moira Craig. From the prosecution perspective, this has been a very positive development. The use of this legislation has allowed us to lead evidence from witnesses in a way that lets them tell their full story. Whereas before, we would have had to artificially stop them partway through the story to ask them about the next incident. Our perspective is that the legislation works well and represents the fact that it was based on very good collaborative work from a number of criminal justice agencies in advance and was designed and developed based on experience of investigating and prosecuting and the lived experience of domestic abuse. There's nothing further that I could add to the committee in relation to changes to be proposed. Thank you, convener. I would echo those comments. I think that it's a good piece of legislation. I think that the training that's been done in both organisations has made a huge difference, but I don't think that we can arrest our way out of this problem. I think that this is a wider societal issue that we need to be thinking more about prevention. Where we do get to the point of cure, I think that we're getting better at that, but prevention has got to be the next target on the list. Indeed, and Sam finally. This is probably a very tactical comment, but previously, as the leader of the tier 3 response, I've really seen the benefit of the legislation because officers investigating domestic abuse with repeat perpetrators, multiple relationships, etc. Often, we're very frustrated that they were capturing evidence of abuse that wasn't criminalised at that point in time, so the legislation for us has made a huge difference particularly on these tier 3 with repeat perpetrators or perpetrators with multiple victims. For us, it has really made a difference on the ground, but as Mr Nailer says, we recognise that we still have a long way to go. That concludes our public session this morning. Thanks again for joining us and we'll now move into private session.