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Proposed changes to legal aid and immigration rules are at odds with the government’s action plan on domestic violence and could put more women at risk The director of public prosecutions issued a timely warning against complacency this week. Domestic violence was “serious and pernicious”, Keir Starmer reminded us . “It ruins lives, breaks up families and has a lasting impact. It is criminal. And it has been with us for a very long time, yet it is only in the last 10 years that it has been taken seriously as a criminal justice issue.” The DPP applauded the good progress that has “undoubtedly been made since those administering criminal justice woke up to domestic violence”. “But even if domestic violence remains a priority for the Crown Prosecution Service, there remains the wider issue of complacency.” According to the CPS, nearly 1 million women experience domestic violence every year and 750,000 children witness it. Two women die every week as a result of it. Legal aid has a vital role to play in creating an escape route for many battered women and children from bad relationships. “I left a controlling and abusive ex-husband who it then transpired was a child abuser, something for which he was later prosecuted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment,” said a mother of two young children in a recent report published by the Rights of Women group. “I had to spend about six years fighting his various applications for contact with our children, despite the severity of the charges he was convicted for.” Without legal aid, the woman could not have afforded to see a lawyer. “This would have placed my two young daughters at very real risk of future abuse.” “No level of violence against women and girls is acceptable in modern Britain or anywhere else in this world,” declared the government in last month’s Action Plan . It was launched by Theresa May on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day and expressed the government’s commitment to helping victims come forward. It’s not an original observation, but not all parts of the government machine listen to each other. Certainly, the Ministry of Justice’s green paper on legal aid appears to have been drafted without cognisance of May’s desire to protect battered women. Its proposals on domestic violence need to be binned. For the past 35 years Rights of Women has provided legal help to the victims of domestic violence. Its response to the legal aid green paper, which seeks to remove much of family law advice from the scheme, is a powerful testimony to the value of publicly funded legal advice at its most effective (and includes the comment from the mother of two above). It is all the more persuasive for being an evidence-based response drawing on a survey of 336 women: more than half experienced violence (58%) and the vast majority described that violence as domestic violence (81.6%). Just under half (46.6%) had reported that violence to the police or applied to the court for a domestic violence injunction. That last statistic is critical in the context of the MoJ’s proposals. Women experiencing violence will only receive legal aid if there is an injunction or conviction for a domestic violence offence. The mother who successfully fled her child abuser husband wouldn’t have qualified because she was not able to demonstrate evidence of the risk he posed to her children until after she separated. Lucy Cohen is a partner at the Bradford firm Williscroft & Co and reckons they take out injunctions to protect clients on average half a dozen times a week. “A lot of those that are vulnerable and need legal aid don’t have convictions or injunctions precisely because they’re so vulnerable. A lot of women we come across over issues of contact and finance have been victims of domestic violence but they don’t want to get an injunction, they don’t want to air their problems publicly, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t need help.” All the women respondents in the RoW research were asked for their reasons for reporting and not reporting violence. “My partner was emotionally, physically and sexually abusive. He would tell me that the police would not take me seriously and it would be his word against mine,” said one woman. “He made much of the fact that husbands are never convicted of rape of their wives in this country.” Cohen argues that ministers are paying lip service to the issue. She points to their definition of domestic violence, which excludes “emotional” violence. Such a view is strikingly at odds with other parts of the government, the supreme court and, frankly, a commonsense understanding of domestic violence. “It has long been known that psychological abuse within a domestic context can cause at least as much long-term harm to the victim as physical abuse,” said Lord Brown earlier this year . Apparently not in the MoJ. As I blogged recently , the issue topped the list of concerns expressed by the Alan Beith-led select committee. Finally, May – despite her declaration – is planning to change the domestic violence rule in the immigration rules. It enables people who are on a spouse or partner visa and experiencing domestic violence to be able to leave that relationship and apply for indefinite leave. According to the immigration minister Damian Green, 700 victims of domestic violence rely upon it every year. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association tells me the figure could be as high as 1,500. In a letter to the ILPA, Green says the UK Border Agency will continue to provide leave when needed to help protect women and girls “but settlement will not be automatic”. “For the very small number of cases of minor unspent criminality which would lead to a refusal under these rules, we will take a case-by-case approach.” Well, the numbers might be small, but that misses the point. “One person remaining in an abusive situation is one too many,” says the ILPA’s Alison Harvey. She believes it is “nothing short of astonishing” that a part of the Home Office is “allowed to rewrite the immigration rules” creating a risk for those in abusive relationships. “UKBA may say that it will look carefully at applications, but to no avail. The way the rules have been rewritten means that those survivors will not make the applications in the first place.” Joined-up government? I don’t think so. Jon Robins is a freelance journalist and director of the research company Jures , which runs the Justice Gap series examining different aspects of justice. It will publish a collection of essays with the Advice Services Alliance on public legal education next month Domestic violence Keir Starmer Legal aid UK criminal justice Women Jon Robins guardian.co.uk