Jacqui – a list will not protect battered women and a database is not punishment

By Laurie Penny

The women who attacked Home Secretary Jacqui Smith over her proposals to create a database of domestic abusers and refer women to that database were right to do so. Smith’s brilliant new strategy for reducing the numbers of men who abuse their partners and children is – wait for it – to keep a big list of their names, so that women can be warned away. No refuges for battered women and their children. A list.

What, precisely, will a database of serial domestic abusers acheive, apart from shifting the onus of preventing domestic violence even further onto the victims? In fact, women are most at risk of being harmed or killed by partners after they have left the relationship. The IPCC are currently investigating the case of Katie Summers, who reportedly rang the police repeatedly before being murdered by her ex-boyfriend in October. As Joan Smith points out on Comment Is Free today, there are already too many women who know perfectly well that they are in a relationship with a violent man, women who are asking for help and not getting it.

That a database of listed offenders will necessarily be inadequate to the scale of the problem, because not all abuse incidents are even reported, is only one of the reasons that the scheme is frankly barmy. This isn’t just a question of trying to shoehorn feminist apologism into the quest for a database state. This is about civil liberties, and it’s about how we conceptualise violence against women.

It is also about a culture of victim-blaming. If a woman is hit by her partner, even if she knew or suspected that he had done so in the past, it is his fault, not hers. Last month, when Rihanna was ‘allegedly’ assaulted by her boyfriend, Chris Brown, the international press was quick to make slurs that the 20-year-old singer had, in some way, ‘asked for it’. The logic behind this sort of offenders’ database is exactly the same: men can’t help themselves, so women should take the responsibility out of their hands. Male violence cannot be confronted, so women should know better.

What happened to a criminal justice system that believes not only in convicting and punishing criminals, but in the notion that those criminals can be reformed? What happened, for that matter, to the idea that violence against women is just as much of a crime as violence against men? To make the comparison clear: what would our reaction be if the Home Secretary’s new solution to lager loutery was to compile a massive database of suspected or convicted violent fans, and advise people not to the pub with anybody on it?

The law of the land states that if a person abuses his partner, that person should go to jail or be fined. His victims should be offered concrete support, and he should receive a criminal record. If the criminal justice system, along with the social care system, is not working adequately, if not enough abusers are being convicted, then we need to look at why, rather than putting headline-grabbing gimmicks in place to fill the hole.

Labour has to understand that there are some problems that can’t be solved with a database. There are some problems which need serious time, money and manpower spent on them, and if Labour is serious about protecting women from violence rather than merely appearing to do so, it has to put its cash on the table. A database won’t fill the service gap left by a diminishing number of domestic violence refuges and rape crisis centres – after Labour cut rape crisis funding, for example, London’s only dedicated centre faces closure this month. A database won’t stop men abusing their partners. All it will do is shift the onus of tackling this problem onto those least equipped to do so – the victims themselves.