Thursday, July 21, 2011

'Clare's law' offers nothing but empty empowerment | Libby Brooks

Proposals for warning women about violent partners exploit online anxieties and do little to actually protect potential victims

The brute cynicism with which the Mail on Sunday last weekend called for a "Clare's law", to warn women about a partner's violent past, should come as no surprise: any resemblance to campaigning tabloids living or dead was doubtless entirely deliberate. The proposal – modelled on Sarah's law – was officially launched this week by Hazel Blears MP and Michael Brown – the father of Clare Wood, who was murdered in 2009 by a man she had met online. It later emerged that Wood's killer had a history of violence against women, including harassment, threats and kidnapping at knifepoint.

Domestic violence is at epidemic levels in this country. Resources for those escaping it are badly funded and under-imagined. So there is a temptation to greet any mooted improvement with a better-than-nothing shrug. But this particular suggestion deserves critical consideration, not only because of what it reveals about society's systemic failure to address domestic abuse. It also highlights how technology has altered what the public believes it has a "right" to know.

The specifics of the scheme – which home secretary Theresa May has said she'll consider over the next few weeks – remain fuzzy. It appears partly pitched at offsetting the "stranger danger" of online dating, as though introductions over the village pump were inevitably more salubrious. The new national police database certainly makes public access a more practical proposition, though a bespoke domestic violence register was shouted down by the charity Refuge and others as at best barely workable and at worst dangerous when it was first suggested by the then home secretary Jacqui Smith.

Information could be released in response to people raising concerns about an individual, as with the child sex offender disclosure scheme – prompted by the News of the World's "naming and shaming" campaign in the wake of the murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne – which allows parents and carers to formally ask the police to tell them if someone who might have access to their children has a record of child sexual offences. More controversial is the possibility of the police proactively alerting people if a new partner has a flagged history of violence, regardless of whether a formal approach for information has been made.

The fact is that plenty of women already know they're at risk of domestic abuse but don't get the help they need. The violent history of Clare Wood's killer was, after all, revealed by an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation, which criticised the way Greater Manchester police had handled Wood's previous allegations that he had harassed, assaulted and threatened to kill her. Regardless of the vocal commitment of senior officers, too many women encounter unsympathetic local police.

Aside from the obvious risks of data mismanagement, a disclosure-by-request scheme seems peculiarly inappropriate given what we know about the process of domestic violence: perpetrators isolate their victims, control and violence builds slowly over time, and only 23% of victims ever go to the police. If a woman is warned, but the relationship is in its early stages and she convinces herself that things will be different this time, how much more vicious will the national sport of victim-blaming be when she finally reports an assault? Worse, what happens when she confronts her new boyfriend with the information she has received?

This shift of responsibility from police and perpetrator to potential victim may be couched in the language of empowerment. But in essence it is a distraction, not only from failure to enforce existing legal protections, but also from the coalition's devastating cuts – to refuges, housing benefit, legal aid, jobseekers' allowances and the rest – that will trap women in violent relationships. And this is not a theoretical assertion – it's happening across the country right now.

Beyond this, it is curious that May should be entertaining such a scheme when, pre-election, the Conservatives were so critical of the number of agencies holding personal data; currently, the government is loosening vetting restrictions as part of its war on red tape. But that's politics for you. It would probably be churlish to add that Sarah's law pilots and the longer-standing Megan's law in the US show no demonstrable effect on reducing offences against children.

It is also curious how, in making reference to internet relationships (Wood met her killer on Facebook), a wider anxiety about online dissemblance is exploited, as though concealing a history of violence against women and fudging one's smoking habits have a moral, or at least technological, equivalence. For we are all caught between the increasing centralisation and commodification of an individual's data and networked lives, where sharing personal information with virtual strangers has become the norm. A law that allows certain people access to data must operate in a context where information spread, exaggeration and de-contextualisation is viral. And the consequences are too fresh to map.

The "Googleability" of almost everyone has been changing the way we relate to others for more than a decade. It must also have changed what we think we have a right to know about other people. Ultimately, though, it is worth stressing it was neither the existence of the internet nor the absence of a database that killed Clare Wood, but a human being.


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James Ball, Charles Arthur 22 Jul, 2011


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/21/clares-law-violent-partners-online-victims
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