Donna Tinker, a 32 year-old mother of three, this month successfully appealed against her murder conviction. In June 1999 she stabbed her husband with a vegetable knife as he held her by the neck in their tiny kitchen. He had usually made her look down as she walked so that she couldn’t look at another man. He didn’t allow her out or let her wear make-up. He kicked in the house windows and punched holes in the doors. On the night of the killing, he had given her a black eye, broken her tooth and punched her on the jaw. In spite of that, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. At her trial her defence of provocation was rejected.
Police receive a 999 call about domestic violence every minute. One in four women suffer abuse. But few women turn on their abuser. They tolerate much; persistent brutality reduces women to helpless inertia about their situation. Police attend domestic violence calls as if they are routine. Few know that by the time a woman asks for help she will already have been assaulted 35 times. Many believe that domestic fighting is a private matter, better mediated by the parties than dealt with as crime.
One in three homicides is a domestic killing and 90 percent are committed by men. The rare women, like Donna, who kill their abusers are always asked why they didn’t leave; women who stay are judged to have exaggerated the violence. If she tries to leave, he will probably kill her; if she stays, the violence cannot be serious enough to be provocation. Yet, men who kill their wives frequently plead provocation because their partner only threatened to leave.
Living Without Fear, the 1997 cross-departmental policy document, the ministerial group and, this year, the dedicated domestic violence unit in government will all come to little if the myths which pervade this part of the criminal justice system, and which undermine women both as complainants and defendants, are not exposed. Fawcett, the UK’s leading organisation campaigning for gender equality, is planning a year-long commission, of which I am chair, to investigate women’s experience of the system.
The home office recently announced legislation to change the defences in rape trials to help women. One in four women suffers rape or sexual assault at some time in their lives. Only ten percent of them complain. Out of those, the conviction rate is seven percent. Thus, overall, less than one percent of men who sexually assault women are ever punished. Not surprisingly, rape continues to occur. One in fifteen teenage boys thinks that it is acceptable to force sex on a woman. It is essential, as the government has recognised, to encourage more women to prosecute their assailants.
The likelihood of rape complainants going to court increases in direct proportion to the support and advice they receive at an early stage. Yet seven of Britain’s 45 rape crisis centres have closed in the last six months because of lack of funds. The biggest, CREATE, which advises over 1,500 rape victims a year in my own county of Cleveland, is fighting for its life. Half the remainder exist on less than £20,000 a year, have no paid workers, and raise their funding entirely from donations. These groups are treated, consistent with the criminal justice system’s myths, as if they are dispensable. But the new legislation will not work without them.
If the criminal justice system’s domination by one gender is going to continue to be allowed to undervalue women’s suffering, women are going to wonder why they bother to vote in the hope of change. We know that new laws will not work unless attitudes alter and that, until the government tackles the judges who set out the framework of trials, they will be legislating while Rome burns.