Examination of Witnesses (Questions 326
- 334)
TUESDAY 4 MARCH 2008
MS DIANA
BARRAN
Chairman: Can I welcome you to this latest
session in the Home Affairs Committee's deliberations on domestic
violence and forced marriages and refer all those present to the
Register of Members' Interests. We are very grateful to you, Ms
Barran, for coming to give evidence to us. We have one more session
after this in this inquiry, when we will be hearing from the entry
clearance manager from Islamabad about those who come from abroad.
Margaret Moran has the first question to you.
Q326 Margaret Moran: Hello.
Some of us went to Wolverhampton—I think it may only have
been me actually—to sit in on a MARAC, and we have heard
a lot of evidence from various witnesses about the effectiveness
of MARACs. There has been criticism that the MARACs only deal
with the highest level of risk and, thus, there are many survivors
of domestic violence who are not being dealt with. What would
you say to that? The other criticism is that the measurement for
effectiveness is only related to repeat offences, which may be
severely misleading, since many victims and survivors contact
agencies a number of times before getting appropriate help. How
would you respond to those two criticisms?
Ms Barran: On the point about
high risk victims and the MARAC process only being accessible
to high risk, just to put it in context, we know that about 1.5
million people a year suffer domestic abuse. The MARAC is targeted
at the top 150,000, so we are talking about the top 10%, so it
is quite a big universe of high risk. That is the first point.
Secondly, we are in a country with limited resources, and so,
in terms of how we prioritise our resources, I think it is only
defensible to look at those who are most at risk of being killed
or seriously injured or whose children will be damaged by the
abuse. Finally, in terms of information sharing, we can only share
information legally without consent where the victim survivor
is high risk. These legal and practical resource issues are the
reasons for only taking high risk victims today. In terms of your
point about repeat victimisation, I think it is a common misunderstanding.
The whole point about MARAC is, you are absolutely right, victims
of domestic abuse may not go back to the police a second time
and that may not be a good indicator of its success, but the way
that we measure repeats at MARAC is repeats to any agency. The
whole point is, if she does not go back to the police but she
does turn up at A&E, any incident that the police, had they
known about it, would have defined as a crime would come straight
back to MARAC—whether it is complaining about stalking to
the health visitor or attending A&E with an injury or reporting
to a refuge worker, or whatever it might be, that would come straight
back to MARAC—and so the definition of repeats at MARAC
is not a criminal justice definition, it is a safety definition,
and that is very important. I think it is quite widely misunderstood.
Q327 Mrs Cryer: In your report you
said that if we were to have a full network across the country,
1,200 IDVAs and 300 MARACs, it could well save the public purse
£250 million in direct cost. First of all, what is the evidence
of that? Also, you suggest that your running costs would be £15
million per annum for this national service. This is more than
twice the budget of any other national agency. How would you be
able to justify that?
Ms Barran: I will take the second
point last. I think it must be a typo, because our running costs
are currently £1.2 million and next year are forecast to
be 1.5. They would obviously increase if the network multiplied,
but it would be nothing like 15 million.
Q328 Mrs Cryer: I am sorry; I should
not have said 15 million: five million.
Ms Barran: That is not just for
CAADA support. As I say, CAADA today is 1.2 million and next year
we are budgeting on 1.5, and we are expecting the network to triple
and our costs to roughly double within that; so there will be
some economies of scale, but, obviously, there is more training,
there is more support and there is a whole lot of additional work
outside this programme that we are looking to develop in relation
to the accreditation of services so that we get consistent service
provision. I can talk about that more if you want.
Q329 Mrs Cryer: But you are saying
it would definitely be less than five million?
Ms Barran: Yes. Shall I take your
other question in terms of the evidence for the £200 million?
Is that all right, Chairman?
Q330 Chairman: Would you, please.
Ms Barran: The evidence for that
comes initially from Professor Sylvia Walby's research, which
she did in 2004 for the DTI, on the cost of domestic abuse, and
within that she separated out three categories of cost: direct
cost, which is obviously the cost of individual police officers
or A&E staff, or whatever, attending incidents of domestic
abuse, and then indirect costs, which relate to the emotional
suffering borne by victims and survivors of domestic abuse and
their families. We have excluded all of the indirect costs and
we have broken her analysis down and done some analysis from other
evaluations to look at what a typical MARAC case might be costing
our society today before it gets to MARAC, and we have looked
at the number of times somebody might call the police, the number
of times they go to their GP, et cetera, and we have taken
a pretty, relatively speaking, uncomplicated case, and I will
not bore you with the details, but the figure that comes out of
that is £10,000 per case in terms of direct cost. We have
multiplied that by the number of victims who would get support
from the MARAC and then we have taken an assumption on how many
of those would access safety as a result of that multi-agency
intervention, and we have said that 30% of them would, and that
is about half of the figure that we are actually seeing today.
Let us just say, these are ball park numbers that we are trying
to work with, so let us put in a big cushion for where we might
be over-optimistic, and that gives you £300 million and,
if you subtract from that the cost of the IDVA network, the MARAC
co-ordinators and additional support costs, not just our own but
other organisations in the sector, that gives you a net figure
of £250 million. I hope that is clear.
Q331 Mr Streeter: Do you think that
the MARAC system should be put on a statutory footing? Do you
think that would help the participation of other agencies, or
do you think it would just encourage more of a tick-box culture
that is already out there quite widely in the public sector? What
do you think?
Ms Barran: I think that what we
want to get in place systematically for the MARAC, and you would
know better than I would whether the statutory footing will achieve
that, is absolute standard behaviour for all organisations who
are involved in MARAC to share information appropriately and feel
that they are safe in doing so. At the moment we get, particularly
among health professionals, very, very, diverging practice around
the country and we need professionals not to feel that they are
taking a risk to share information, they need to be absolutely
clear about the limits of it and the boundaries, but also, where
it is appropriate, to do so. That is one key thing, I think, that
is missing today. The whole quality assurance exercise for MARACs
needs to be absolutely accepted and standard, and obviously the
resourcing of MARACs and all these services needs to be reinforced.
We have come an incredibly long way in about 18 months since this
process started, but most MARACs are massively under resourced
in terms of IDVA. The capacity in Wolverhampton is fortunate in
having decent IDVA capacity, but the IDVAs will do up to 80% of
the work from the MARAC, so if you do not have enough of them
it puts a huge burden on existing agencies. If we achieve that
through statutory means, fantastic; if we need to get it another
way, then we need to get it another way.
Q332 Gwyn Prosser: We know that work
is underway to adapt or use MARACs for helping to deal with forced
marriages. During the course of the inquiry we have met a number
of victims of forced marriage, or second victims, and it is clear
that there is a huge barrier of resistance amongst these young
women, mostly young women, about approaching the police directly.
Given that MARACs are primarily driven by the police, do you think
it is an appropriate way forward and what work has to be done
to make it work?
Ms Barran: I think two things.
In some places the MARAC is primarily driven by the police, but
what we are seeing in the data that we are getting back from MARACs
around the country is that, as they mature, so other agencies
feel more confident to refer in, and so in the more established
MARACs about 30% of referrals are coming from non-police sources.
That is the first point. The second thing is to say that MARACs
clearly are not a magic wand for forced marriage or anything else,
sadly, but they are a very helpful tool in the toolkit. I think,
in relation to forced marriage, they are more relevant, obviously,
for those people who are at risk of forced marriage rather than
those who have already been through a forced marriage. Thirdly,
obviously, in most cases, where appropriate, MARACs will look
at young people aged 16, 17 and 18, but, clearly, younger than
that, it would be a child protection matter rather than a MARAC
matter; but I would come back to the key thing, which is that
there is a whole heap of work to do about awareness as a result
of forced marriage in the education system and elsewhere and making
sure that the MARAC is accessible for other agencies to refer
into is absolutely critical. It is not going to be a quick win,
but it is really important that we work on it now, because we
are hearing of MARACs trying to deal with forced marriage today
without necessarily the tools do it, and we have updated all our
materials to accommodate elements of forced marriage and we have
had help from Karma Nirvana in doing that, so we are doing our
best, but we are all having to run very fast.
Q333 Gwyn Prosser: Your current risk
assessment assesses risk to women from male abusers. How useful
is it for identifying the risks for male victims, victims of same-sex
forced marriages, and other so-called honour-based violence?
Ms Barran: We have been working
very closely with ACPO in relation to including honour-based violence
and forced violence into the risk assessment, and we are going
to be publishing a revised version of that, and we are hoping
that ACPO will be doing the same, although it is slightly more
complicated for them than for us (they have got a few more hurdles
to jump) in April of this year. The whole language of that will
focus on potentially multiple abusers and will address honour-based
violence specifically. As to the issue about male victims, are
you asking me specifically in relation to forced marriage or more
widely?
Q334 Gwyn Prosser: More widely. Forced
marriage and honour-based, so-called honour-based violence?
Ms Barran: To date there are various
areas where the MARAC has not been successful. As I said, it is
early days, but one of those is certainly in relation to victims
from gay relationships, where there is just a tiny percentage
of cases, nearly none, that have come in so far. Certainly in
our training the risk tool that we have is valid in same-sex relationships,
but we have an additional screening tool that we recommend practitioners
use where it is harder to assess who the primary aggressor is.
In relation to heterosexual abuse where it is a woman abusing
a man, I know that other people are doing work on that. We do
not do anything ourselves at the moment.
Chairman: Ms Barran, thank you very much
for giving evidence to us today, it has been very helpful, and
we will send you copy of our report when we publish it.
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