But what about me eh?
What am I supposed to do for food and shelter if I’m exiled from my own home?
I mean how can I black my wife’s/girlfriend’s eye if me tea’s not ready if I’m not allowed to go back home?
Plus she might start getting ideas about leaving me, we can’t have that now can we?
She might even start up a new relationship with someone who doesn’t beat seventeen shades out of her just cos they’ve been out drinking and pissed all their money down a fruit machine, can you imagine the horror!?

Besides how do you know that wimmin ain’t just making up these stories about beaten up like they do with rape, that I’m always reading about in the Mail and Express?
I could be completely innocent as far as you know, I’m not, but I COULD be.
Better just to let this legislation die now, so that I can get back to slowly killing my partner, as it should be.

I’m sure Watchman and Tim J will be right along to back me up about how this legislation is a gross infringement on my rights won’t ya lads?

@THE MENZ

I should say, right from the outset, that polarising this particular debate on gender lines will only prove to be counterproductive. If nothing else, we should be mindful of the fact that data from the British Crime Survey suggests that two out of every five adult victims of domestic abuse are male, so some of the issues here aren’t quite as clear cut as some may be inclined to believe.

Neither Tim nor Watchman was, in my view, out of order in raising concerns about due process, albeit that neither seemed to be that well informed about exactly how these orders are supposed to work or the interim nature of the notices that can be issued by the police. For that, blame the media for creating something of a false impression of how these orders are supposed to operate, not Tim or Watchman for reacting strongly to unbalanced and rather misleading reporting of this issue..

I especially like how your defence of Tim and Watchmen kinda began petering out toward the end there, along similar fashion to damning with faint praise.

I’ll just leave a quote from the male privilege checklist for further digestion:

31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

I don’t think anyone was claiming that domestic violence should not be a crime. It is just that everyone (men included) should have the protection of the rule of law, including not being penalised until proven guilty. It sounds like these go orders would be better as a measure for convicts than for suspects. As it stands, the go orders are a kind of asbo, which are just now being abolished. Unless I am misreading how they will be applied.

Cylux:

I can see that’s a need to explain this for the hard-of-thinking, so…

Media coverage of DVPO’s has been uniformly poor to date and has conveyed the impression that a DVPO lasting up to fourteen days can be issued by a police officer.

This is [incorrect] interpretation of the legislation to which both Tim and Watchman were quite evidently responding, hence their concerns about the civil liberties implications of these orders.

This, if you bother to read the legislation, is not the case. What can be issued by a police officer is an interim notice that, in theory, should last a maximum of 48 hours, by which time an application for substantive order, which can last for between 14 and 28 days, must be made to magistrates court.

Tim and Watchman have both been around for long enough for me to reasonably infer that neither would find the actual process for issuing DVPO’s particularly objectionable, provided that the system were to run to the timescales expected by the previous government. However, as the link to the parliamentary debate in main article indicates, significant and, in my estimation, reasonable concerns were raised by opposition MPs about whether thsoe timescales would genuinely apply in practice and that is a issue with the current legislation that merits further consideration.

I’ll just leave a quote from the male privilege checklist for further digestion:

Thanks. but I’ve never much been inclined to try and digest stereotypes, least of all when they’re offered in lieu of considered commentary by someone who would, no doubt, complain bitterly were I, or anyone else, resort to the use of female stereotypes in debating this issue.

As it stands, the go orders are a kind of asbo, which are just now being abolished. Unless I am misreading how they will be applied.

Slightly – they’re more of an interim restraining order/injunction that, in practice, would vary in effect from a legally enforcable ‘cooling off period’ to a precursor to a substantive non-molestation order, depending on the precise characteristics of individual cases.

Where the DVPN/DVPO differs from standard restraining orders is that they can be issued irrespective of whether the victim consents to the order, although the victim’s views do have be taken into account when issued both the DVPN and DVPO.

The more that I read about DVPOs, I become convinced that ministers and civil servants woke up to the unforeseen consequences of them and did an about turn.

If X is removed from a home, where is X supposed to live? If X share parent responsibilities, what are the new access rights? If X has the keys to the family car and Y needs the car to take the kids somewhere, how is that managed? If X is the wage earner, how does Y get any money?

These are problems that social workers deal with on a daily basis. They can be fixed quickly. But I don’t see £700K (for the trial programme) being sufficient to meet social service costs on top of court and police expenditure.

As noted by Nick and Unity, DVPOs are Court Orders. The recipient has not been found guilty of an offence and has been removed from a home for a finite period. The DVPO recipient is not a criminal, and with the exception of any order provisions, has the same rights as any other citizen. Recipients can also sue if they are wrongly accused.

The economic argument against DVPOs: the cost is incorrect because they impact other departments; the restoration cost in the case of a false negative will be expensive.

The moral argument against DVPOs: false negatives damage family relationships; prosecute violent people rather than ordering them away from immediate victims.

The practical argument against DVPOs: restraining orders (of which the DVPO would be a new kind) are breached by recipients; victims of domestic violence do not always talk in court.

So I’ll be happy for the government to ditch this. I expect them to prosecute more people (ie allowing juries rather than prosecutors to determine whether a case is worth hearing). And to come up with a violence prevention strategy based equally on social services and civil prosecution.

From what I can see of this legislation, it’s a means of redressing the situation whereby it is usually the victim of the violence (male or female) who tend to get removed from the home, there’s nothing like victimizing a victim. This tends to happen in homes where children are the victims of abuse from either parent, it is the children who are then removed. Refuges were an excellent idea for (mainly women) but it is not an ideal environment and, more importantly, I believe that there have been cases where courts have resisted removing (usually male offenders) where the violence has been proved. But it has been determined (usually by a male judge) that the women are in a safe place, therefore the offender doesn’t need to be removed from the home.

“For that, blame the media for creating something of a false impression of how these orders are supposed to operate, not Tim or Watchman for reacting strongly to unbalanced and rather misleading reporting of this issue..”

TBH if somebody who has been reading blogs for a while hasn’t yet figured out that the media reporting of an issue is often misleading, unbalanced and creates a flase impression then there is little hope for them.

What can be issued by a police officer is an interim notice that, in theory, should last a maximum of 48 hours, by which time an application for substantive order, which can last for between 14 and 28 days, must be made to magistrates court.

Which is certainly more reasonable than what was reported – which was that if a police officer had a reasonable suspicion that domestic violence was likely, but did not have sufficient evidence to obtain a court order, could remove someone from his home for two weeks.

It is a little odd, though, that on this site in particular, where the general attitude towards the police is that they are a law unto themselves, and where criticism for their handling of Stop and Search on suspicion has been (rightly) pretty strong, that a law where, on suspicion, they are entitled to bar people from their homes for 48 hours gets so much approval.

Instinctively, I dislike coercive powers being given to the state without the need for court sanction.

Unity,

Thanks for the defence of my position. It amuses me that there are people around here who seem to think I am opposed to equality, presumably because I do not agree with certain measures suggested or opposed.

That said, I will take the risky step of questioning your use of the figures. £700 000 is for two pilots, in a large urban area and a quite small rural constabulary. This means the cost of running the scheme nationally would be much greater, which is what would be cut (let us assume West Mercia and Cumbria Constabularies and the Metropolitan Police join up, with a combined population 5-6 times that of the existing pilots – an annual cost we can make an uneducated guess at being something like £2 million (annual cost of £40 000 multiplied by 5 – smallest possible multiplier selected as likely there will be economies of scale). Now add in Manchester and Scotland; Northern Ireland, Wales and Bristol etc. I think the running costs would have been substantive. Set up nationally would presumably have been in millions also.

And if you are looking to save money, ignoring all the small costs is not a good way to do it. It is amazing how much you can save on a budget by cutting down on all the little things you don’t really need; or may in this case – my point here is that it is incorrect to argue that cutting a scheme for the sake of relatively small amounts of money is not a way to save money.

Yes, the direct costs of rolling out DVPOs nationally will be significantly greater than the cost of the pilot, but there is more to the question of whether DVPOs are a cost effective measure than simply the direct costs.

As I noted in the main article, there are significant costs to the public sector associated with domestic violence beyond those incurred by the criminal justice system and, therefore, significant scope for savings if DVPOs were to prove effective.

Whether those savings can be realised in practice is one of the key questions that you hope the pilot would go some way towards answering, which is one reason why it would make sense to proceed with the pilot, but defer the national scheme, allowing a final decision on the full roll-out to be informed by the evidence gained from the pilot.

This would also allow time for the development of at least some case law, which is a crucial element of our own legal system and exerts a considerable influence over how measures of this kind operate in practice. Sadly, this is a consideration that is seems to be too often lost on modern legislators – new laws need time to ‘bed in’ before it becomes clear whether they will indeed function as parliament intends.

Has no-one noticed that the specialist domestic violence sector is strangely quiet about this? The best journalists have been able to muster in terms of a statement is from a children’s charity which hasn’t been involved in the discussions about these orders. My contacts tell me that they largely agree with the Government’s actions as they feared the police having that much extra power because they don’t trust them to use it wisely.

And for all those on this thread worried about someone losing their home without being convicted – what do you think a civil occupation order does? True – this involves judicial oversight rather than being a police decision – but it only requires the civil legal standard to be met.