Baroness Barran (Con)

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, for securing this debate, and my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead for her long-term leadership on this issue. I also thank Her Majesty the Queen for the compassion that she has shown on this issue, including by becoming patron of SafeLives, the charity that I founded almost 20 years ago. I want to share with the House three things that I learned during my time at SafeLives. First, one of the principles to which we worked was: what would you want for your best friend if she was experiencing domestic abuse? We decided on a dedicated specialist who supported her, whatever the issues, be they criminal justice, housing or her children, and for that person to be the linchpin in co-ordinating other agencies to meet her needs. Secondly, we too had the ambition of halving high-risk domestic abuse, so I share the Government’s ambition here, and you cannot do it if you do not work with perpetrators. We worked with two other charities and founded the Drive Partnership, which worked with the most high-risk perpetrators of abuse. One of the first young men we worked with had already had 10 partners by the age of 24 and had multiple children by those earlier relationships. Without working with him we can make his current partner safe, but we must make his future partners safe by changing his behaviour. Thirdly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hazarika, said, we are all thinking today of the tragedy of Sara Sharif. We must keep children central. Even the press coverage of her death talked about her parents having a volatile relationship. The child was killed, and we can imagine what happened before that. We did a big research study which found that 60% of the children that we looked at had lived with domestic abuse since they were in the womb, with everything that meant for their futures. I will close with two other thoughts. First, please let us not forget health in all this. We piloted putting domestic abuse specialists in A&E and safeguarding settings. Women who would never talk to the police were able to disclose what was happening to them. Finally, as others have said, we learned more by listening to survivors and families who had lost their loved ones than by doing anything else.