Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220
- 237)
TUESDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2008
MS JO
TOOD, MR
MARK COULTER
AND MR
BEN JAMAL
Q220 Chairman: A note would be very
helpful.
Ms Todd: We are very willing,
not quite able yet, but with capacity building in the voluntary
sector, we will be.
Chairman: Thank you, that will be very
helpful.
Q221 Margaret Moran: One of the key
things is evaluation of what works. Could you tell us a bit about
what you think would help us to really be able to evaluate both
effective sentencing and interventions, as you indicate? Would
reconviction rates, for example, be helpful in tracking, monitoring,
or should we be looking at profiling perpetrators and seeing if
their lifecycle, if you like, is involved?
Ms Todd: There are all kinds of
quantitative data that is collected by various agencies that I
think can be very useful for those individual agencies to look
at performance, but if you are looking at what is effective for
women and children experiencing domestic violence, an increase
in their safety or a reduction in harm, however you want to phrase
it, is the most important thing and to get that information you
need to use qualitative measures, you need to be asking women
and children themselves whether or not their lives have changed
for the better, whether the violence and abuse has increased or
decreased, not just about their satisfaction with services. They
may have found a very helpful police officer, CPS prosecutor,
they may be very pleased with the personal relationship they have
had with an agency, but they still might not be safer, so we are
very concerned that, as well as qualitative data that is good
for internal monitoring, safety is the key thing that is measured.
I am a bit heartened that the CPS in their recent consultation
paper seem to have taken that on board and are mentioning safety
now as a key indicator, I think, around the way they move forward.
That seems crucial to us. You mentioned profiling of perpetrators.
I think there have been moves within the Probation Service looking
at cryogenic factors to do with perpetrators and trying to get
the idea of what is a perpetrator. I would say, go into your local
shop, your local pub, walk down to the tube station and pick a
random sample of men. The problem is, if you could profile them,
women and children would be a damn site safer, because most women
would steer very clear. Unfortunately it is very hard to do.
Q222 Margaret Moran: You have already
mentioned that feedback from the victims is a key element, so
I will not mention that, but we have heard a lot in the papers
over the weekend, indeed, about the non-attendance rate on perpetrator
programmes. How should we address that? Do you think that compliance
hearings might help, as they have in the US?
Ms Todd: Attrition is a key issue
throughout the whole of the criminal justice service, and for
perpetrator programmes that is true as well; there are drop-outs
from programmes both in the Probation Service and in the voluntary
sector. A lot of the research looks at completion as being a key
target, and that is true. If a perpetrator completes a programme
it is certainly a significant step towards being safer. It shows
that he is motivated to change, he is engaged with the process,
but it does not in and of itself tell us that he is safer, and
so that is where you come back to—I am sorry to keep going
on about it—the victim reports are the key thing. I am afraid
I am going to contradict the written evidence that I gave you,
based on a piece of research that has come out this year, so it
is subsequent. Compliance hearings, we think, sound like a good
idea. What they are, basically, is that if a perpetrator is sentenced
to a perpetrator programme within the Probation Service, part-way
through that process he is called back to court to account for
his progress, with obviously a variety of people reporting back
on that—probation officer, offender management teams, the
people working with him on the group—and if he is not progressing,
either because he is not attending, he is not compliant with the
process, he is not engaging with it in some way, then other sentencing
options can be considered. That all sounds like a great idea;
we did recommend it in our written evidence. There is a piece
of research that we have only got the synopsis for at the moment
but it is being published, I think, this month.
Q223 Chairman: Would you send it
to us?
Ms Todd: I will. I need to get
hold of the actual copy of the research. It looks like a small
study in the US but it is suggesting that it has not made a much
difference. I will write you a note on that once I have read it.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
Q224 Bob Russell: A question to Jo
Todd and a follow-up to Mark Coulter. In your evidence you state
that the Metropolitan Police Service public information campaign
in 2005, aimed at male perpetrators, had a high recognition rate
amongst men. What do you think were the most successful elements
of that campaign?
Ms Todd: To start with, it was
a campaign that was run by the police and it was talking directly
to men and directly to perpetrators actually about what the police
will do. Thinking back 30 years, that is a huge cultural shift
to "it's just a domestic", which we are all aware of.
Anecdotally, I have heard from various people that they have witnessed
men looking at these tube posters. I do not know if you have seen
them.
Q225 Bob Russell: I have heard about
them.
Ms Todd: I have got a few copies
here that I can pass round. They are basically saying, "If
you are perpetrating domestic violence we will find you, we will
track you down and we will charge you and you will be prosecuted."
Q226 Chairman: Can you speak up a
little? We are having difficulty hearing you.
Ms Todd: Sure. I am sorry about
that.
Q227 Chairman: It is the acoustics;
it is not you.
Ms Todd: The campaign seemed to
grab the attention of men because it spoke directly to them, whether
or not they were perpetrators. Most domestic violence campaigns
have been targeted at women and more at the general public, and
they need to continue. We are not at all saying that that should
not happen, but we need to have some that are targeting men and
making them think, either as a preventative measure or make them
stop in their tracks and be concerned, be worried, be afraid that
they will get caught and something will happen.
Q228 Bob Russell: Thank you for that.
That was three years ago. That was the Metropolitan Police. Mr
Coulter, who do you think would be best placed to develop and
run a similar campaign and which media outlets would be best suited
following on that last answer?
Mr Coulter: I would like to see
things in men's magazines, specifically aimed at men, with a positive
message that actually you can do something about your behaviour
or, if you have concerns about the quality of your relationship,
before it becomes overtly abusive and you become either a perpetrator
or a victim, there are people here who will provide support and
help and direct you to appropriate services.
Q229 Bob Russell: The last campaign
was focused on London by the Metropolitan Police, and you are
suggesting it should be national. Who, in your view, ought to
be running it if it was a national campaign?
Mr Coulter: Obviously we need
to combine police forces, we need to combine Respect and Men's
Advice Line, and one of the things we are examining at the moment
is having a formal referral process to Relate nationally, because
for men who are experiencing domestic violence as victims in some
form, I think it is wholly unfeasible to expect specific services
to exist in every town. What I am looking at with Relate is a
way of developing a formal referral process so we can refer men
from the helpline to individual Relate branches: because Relate
is seen as a relationship agency, it does not carry the stigma
for men of either a victim or a perpetrator, and both of those
labels do carry stigmas around self images of what it is to be
a man and notions of masculinity.
Ms Todd: I think there are two
different types of campaigns. One, like the Metropolitan Police
campaign, that targets perpetrators and makes them afraid of doing
it again, and that is probably a Criminal Justice Board level
of delivery, and one that is about trying to engage perpetrators
and make them think about changing their behaviour, stopping,
and that I would like to see. The Respect phone line and our service
would like to be very much involved in that.
Q230 Bob Russell: If this campaign
was so successful three years ago, why has it not been continued?
Ms Todd: I think you would have
to ask the Metropolitan Police that.
Q231 Mrs Cryer: Can I address Ben
Jamal. DVIP literature says that 70% of men who complete the programme
stop using physical violence. How is this assessed and what elements
make this programme so successful?
Mr Jamal: That figure comes from
a number of sources. It comes, in the first place, from an external
evaluation that DVIP had some time ago, in 1998, undertaken by
the Child and Women's Abuse Study Unit. It is replicated in findings
elsewhere, in projects similar to ours, from research done in
the States, in particular Gondolf multi-site evaluation came up
with similar figures. We also conduct our own internal evaluations
on completers and through questionnaires with partners of completers,
and again we are coming up with the same sort of figures; but
in terms of answering the question more broadly, I think I would
echo what Jo said earlier. We are cautious about using outcomes
in terms of completers as the sole measure of effectiveness, and
part of that is recognising, "Yes". Obviously part of
what we are trying to do, our overriding aim, is to increase the
safety of women and children. An essential way we try to achieve
that is through affecting behaviour change with perpetrators,
and the extent to which they complete an evaluation upon completion
is part of that process. What we are also doing is engaging a
wider risk management process and there are two key elements I
would emphasise in that. We undertake risk assessments particularly
with men who have children and who are referred through social
services departments. For all of those men we undertake a risk
assessment, and if the men do not complete the programme, what
we believe is that that process, the information we are able to
gather that is passed on to other agencies, helps them form better
care planning for women and children through those wider agencies
and, more broadly, we think, through our process of monitoring
men for the time they are on the programme and, importantly, through
our integrated women's support service, we are able to increase
safety through the safety planning work that we do as well.
Q232 Mrs Cryer: Do you happen to
have a figure for how much it costs to turn round each perpetrator?
Mr Jamal: There is a number of
ways of measuring that. Our community team, which is the front-line
staff of four workers, two workers working with the men, advanced
prevention programme workers, two women support workers with associated
support staff, managerial staff, we expect that team to deal will
200 referrals a year. The budget for that team is £219,000.
So, in terms of what it costs to work with each of those men,
the figure is fairly low, it is about £1,095. If you look
at what is the figure, what are the hours that go in working with
someone to complete the programme—so the hours of work with
the man and the hours of work with the woman—you come up
with a figure of between five and six thousand pounds, and the
differential depends on the route by which they are referred,
if they come from social services, our risk assessment processes
and the feedback in places like child protection conferences.
Chairman: Thank you, Mr Jamal. That is
very helpful. One final question from Mr Prosser.
Q233 Gwyn Prosser: Mr Jamal, how
important are the follow-up sessions which are put in place and
can you point to any other perpetrator agencies, whether it is
voluntary or non-voluntary, which have that same element?
Mr Jamal: The second part of the
question I am probably going to leave to Jo, in terms of the range
of community perpetrator programmes around the country that have
a follow-on group. We see it as important for a substratum of
the men that we work with. A small proportion of the men who complete
the programme will then move to the follow-on group. For those
men who require it, it is an important part of the process, and
I think the reason for that is that we operate under a belief
that one size does not fit all. There will be men who come off
the programme where the 32 weeks (and it is an intensive programme)
is not enough to address some of the more persistent behaviours.
What the group also does, it operates in a less structured way
and it gives an opportunity in a more therapeutic setting to address
some of the other range of issues that inform the behaviours as
well. It is an important part of the process and, for those men
who need it, we have had individuals at DVIP who we continue to
be involved with for periods of up to seven years, they continue
to attend the programme.
Q234 Gwyn Prosser: To what extent
are you able to incorporate multi-agency work? Everyone tells
us that multi-agency work is so important in these matters in
preventing reoffending. Are you able to incorporate that into
your projects?
Mr Jamal: We are. There are factors
which mitigate the extent to which we do that. We are starting
to feed into that; so we are attending MARACs in a number of boroughs.
Where we work in a multi-agency process, most importantly, is
through our work with referrals where there are child protection
concerns. So, we liaise closely, feeding back with referrals from
social services into child protection processes, working as part
of the core group of agencies working on the child protection
plan. One of the things I would say more broadly, we think that
we work best when we are were working as part of a co-ordinated
community response, and I would echo that I do not think you can
have an effective co-ordinated community response unless you have
a community perpetrator programme as part of that process. One
of the factors that does prohibit that wider involvement—so
not just on a case by case basis but also at a strategic level
feeding into planning within boroughs—is getting mainstream
funding through local authorities. Can I briefly say, as a model
of how I think our services can work best, we have recently established
a project in East London.
Q235 Chairman: Would you write to
us about that project? It sounds fascinating and it would be very
useful to have that.
Mr Jamal: I will.
Q236 Chairman: We had a figure earlier
on from the other witnesses about the number of women who have
committed suicide. They said ten a week in respect of domestic
violence. Do we have any figures for men: the number of male victims
of domestic violence who have committed suicide?
Mr Jamal: I do not.
Mr Coulter: No.
Q237 Chairman: Does anyone have these
figures?
Ms Todd: Not that I am aware of.
Chairman: Can I thank you all, Mr Coulter,
Mr Jamal, Ms Todd, very much for coming in to give evidence. We
would be very keen to have a written note on all the matters that
we have raised with you. Thank you very much.
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