Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee — hearing of 18 June 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 01:55

Speaker 2

3, 2, 1. Welcome everybody to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 post-legislative scrutiny committee. We're very grateful this morning to welcome Professor Michele Burman, who's Professor of Criminology at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Mark Kebbell, who's Professor of Forensic Psychology at Griffith University in Australia. So we're grateful to you for extending your day to be with us. I know it's the evening for you.

We've got, as you know, a series of questions that we're going to go through. We've got about an hour in total. A couple of people here may have to dip in and out because of other parliamentary business, but please don't be distracted by that. We'll just plow on. So I just wondered if I may, obviously our focus is on the Domestic Abuse Act as it applies in England and Wales in particular, but we're very interested to learn from what's worked and not worked in your own jurisdiction.

So perhaps starting with you, Professor Burman, you could talk a little bit about the main features in the approach in Scotland and whether there are things that you think we can learn from from your approach, and then if I may, I'll come to you, Professor Kebbell, with the same question. Thanks so much. Over to you, Professor Burman.

01:55 - 03:14

Speaker 1

Well, thank you very much for inviting me here. It's a real pleasure to be here and speak to you all about the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act. I think it's important to stress from the beginning that a key aim behind the introduction of the Domestic Abuse Scotland Act, which I'm going to refer to as DASA for short, was to expand legal understanding of domestic abuse in order to reflect the true experience of victims and provide recognition of the cumulative impact and consequences of all types of abuse, physical, emotional, and psychological, including patterns of coercive and controlling behavior. DASA also aimed to encourage a shift away from an incident focus on individual incidents or episodes of violence towards this recognition of the ongoing patterns of abuse which many survivors are subjected to, and hence better reflect the impact that domestic abuse has on survivors' psychological and emotional health. So essentially what DASA did was it created a distinct gender-neutral offense of domestic abuse against a partner or an ex-partner, which requires that the perpetrator subjects the victim to a course of abusive behavior.

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