Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee
21 May 2026
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Domestic Abuse Act 2021 Committee House of Lords
00:05 - 01:40
Speaker 5
Good morning, and welcome to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 committee. We're delighted this morning to welcome doctor Nicola Sharp Jeffs, was formerly CEO of Surviving Economic Abuse and works as an independent expert in that area, and to Jen Reid, head of policy, gender, and tech research at UCL. And also online joining us, professor Lisa Oakley, who's the professor of safeguarding and knowledge exchange at the University of of Chester. So very warm welcome to you all. We're going to go through a few questions.
And just for Baroness Kahia's benefit, we were suggesting you might do question two if you're happy with that. But if I can kick off just briefly with all three of you, perhaps you could provide just a short definition of the area of abuse that you specialize in and how you see manifest itself in cases that you work with. And professor Oakley, maybe you'd like to start, if I may.
01:40 - 03:04
Speaker 9
Thank you. So my work is in the area of spiritual abuse. We would define that as a form of emotional and psychological abuse characterised by a systematic pattern of coercive controlling behaviour within a religious or spiritual context or with a religious or spiritual rationale. So that might include a spiritual institution, a home, whether it's a faith belief or a place of education. And we see things like control through the use of sacred texts and teaching, the use of God sometimes is complicit in the abuse that is experienced, censorship equated to your relationship with, God, a sense of divine position so you can't be questioned, and sometimes spiritual threats.
We did some research with broken rights and restored within the Christian faith community and in that research we found that those who had experienced domestic abuse, sixty percent of them are still so experienced spiritual abuse. So there's a so there is a really integral link for people who have a faith often with both of these experiences. That might include using faith and belief to justify the abuse. It might include, as I've said, the use of messages such as forgiveness to stop people from being able to speak out or teachings on, the role of men and women. Spirit abuse can be perpetrated by anybody in that research I've just mentioned.
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