Expert reveals abusers’ early years may play a crucial role in how they respond to women

The early years may play a crucial role in shaping how abusers respond to women, one expert has said.

Professor Liz Gilchrist, chairwoman of the Scottish Advisory Panel on Offender Rehabilitation and a member of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, says a child who is raised to see the world as a positive place, and who learns to manage their temperament, set goals and discover interests on their own, will have greater resilience and empathy for others.

Those who aren’t may seek to control the world around them with coercive, or even “clingy” behaviours as a result of poor early development.

This may go some way to explaining why younger people are continuing to commit domestic offences despite changes in social attitudes.

Prof Gilchrist is involved in work to improve rehabilitation prospects for perpetrators and believes some could be nudged in the right direction early on with the support of their peers and education in schools.

Some Scottish councils have introduced the Mentors for Violence Protection scheme, which encourages pupils to intervene in situations of gendered violence.

Prof Gilchrist said: “A lot of bystander interventions in schools or universities, even if it’s just approaching the victim, or challenging directly, can change cultural norms.”

Viewed through the lens of the criminal justice system, the majority of domestic abuse cases occur in areas of greater deprivation.

However, Professor Gilchrist says such statistics only tell part of the story.

“There’s more of a culture of violence in the working class,” she said.

“The middle classes are more manipulative – carrying out financial, economic abuses – which we weren’t really able to prosecute until recently.

“Obviously we have the new domestic abuse laws, which means we might see a change in the background of the people coming through the courts when we start prosecuting people for that on its own.”

The likes of “Clare’s Law” – the Disclosure Scheme for Domestic Abuse, which gives individuals the right to know if their partner has previous convictions for domestic offences – and the new Domestic Abuse Act introduced last year have ensured abusers are more likely to be prosecuted, and their partners more likely to be protected from harm.

In 2018-19, just under a third of reports named a man under the age of 30 as the alleged perpetrator. Half of those involved a male aged 26-30.

An average of 59,000 reports of domestic abuse are filed by police in Scotland every year – and that number continues to rise as more victims come forward and the problem is better defined and understood.

Despite this, Lesley McMillan, a criminology and sociology professor at Glasgow Caledonian University, says gender-based violence remains “hugely under-reported” – because many partners do not realise they are victims of abuse.

She said: “We still know that a lot of people who experience it don’t feel able to come forward or to name the experience for themselves about what’s happening.

“It might take some time for them to make sense of the difficulties they might be experiencing in a relationship and to be able to name it as abusive behaviour and they might not always know where to go.

“But at the same time we are increasingly trying to make young people aware, as well as older generations, that actually these coercive controlling behaviours aren’t acceptable – they don’t need to be part of a relationship.”