Successive governments, from both sides of the aisle, tend to employ a similar approach to crime prevention. When a particular offence or type of crime causes either fear or outrage in the voting public, government tend to introduce new categories of offence and increase the maximum sentences that can be handed down by the courts.
Locking people up is a retroactive measure; punishing those that have committed crime, after having failed to protect victims. If imprisonment were an effective strategy for protecting the public, rehabilitating offenders and dis-incentivising criminal behaviour, we wouldn’t be experiencing reoffending rates of 60% among those leaving prison.
Similarly, increasing sentences does little to deter people from crime – especially crimes like violent domestic assaults that are fuelled by emotions. Regrettably, I know from first hand experience that when emotions are running high, there is little cognitive ability to consider the consequences of our actions. My crime was a spontaneous, explosive and violent assault – even if I were to risk facing the death penalty, it would not have prevented my crime. At that time I was not thinking rationally, and in the months before my crime I was wilfully unaware that I or my partner were at risk of harm.
Based on my own experience I believe that domestic violence can only be effectively reduced if it is treated as a societal pathology or disease – not unlike obesity. Interventions need to be made to address current cases, while a comprehensive educational campaign must be launched to reduce future incidences. Allow me to elaborate.
The NHS can and do intervene in cases of obesity employing strategies ranging from referrals to dieticians and health trainers through to surgical interventions like gastric bands in the most extreme cases of morbid obesity. The Criminal Justice System also intervene in case of domestic violence by employing restraining orders, curfews, behavioural orders or imprisonment as neccessary.
But when the NHS identified that both the incidence of obesity and the severity of the cases they were encountering were on the increase they faced a choice. They could plan to increase the frequency of interventions in accordance with the increased demand OR start to educate the public to reduce the future incidences of obesity, therefore reducing the demand for interventions. This two pronged approach – treat the current cases while educating to prevent further cases has prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed.
Not only are the NHS managing their future workload, but they are saving people from facing serious health problems and often dangerous interventions. By educating people and helping them to make small changes there will be fewer interventions needed and there will be fewer victims of obesity.
The Criminal Justice System has opted to focus exclusively on increasing interventions (the prison population more than trebled between 1990 and 2010), doing little to address or prevent the increasing incidences of domestic abuse. The result is police forces that are no longer able to cope with the volume of domestic abuse calls, courts that are overwhelmed and a prison system that is stretched to breaking point.
Domestic abuse is an insidious and horrific crime, and perpetrators of abuse and assault should be severely punished. But such retroactive measures do little to protect the public and they certainly aren’t protecting the future victims of domestic abuse.
In order to prevent people from becoming abusers, they need to realise that they are at risk of becoming abusive. Who better to elucidate that point than the men like myself who have committed horrific crimes against women. Furthermore, potential victims of domestic abuse might identify some similar patterns of behaviour emerging in their partner (or in their relationship) and make an intervention to change the course that they are on.
Domestic Violence needs to be viewed as a disease – where prevention is better than cure.
