Domestic abuse offenders ‘should be made to sign a police register’

DOMESTIC abusers should be required by law to sign a register like sex offenders and tell police when they have a new partner, a report recommends.

They would be monitored in the same way as rapists and paedophiles, so police would be able to give greater protection to victims who might be living in fear of offenders, says the report by the London Assembly, published today. The assembly says the current legislation – known as Clare’s Law – only gives individuals the right to ask police if their new partner has a history of domestic violence or abuse.

It says that as a result, many abusers slip through the cracks because it is dependent on the individual to ask about an offender’s history.

The call comes just days after Dame Vera Baird, the victims’ commissioner, warned that Britain faces a domestic abuse epidemic during the lockdown.

Yesterday, more than 25 organisations helping domestic violence victims reported an increase in cases since the pandemic began. One group, Chayn, said analysis of online traffic showed that visitors to its website more than trebled last month compared with the same period last year.

The proposal would create a register of all abusers which would be updated when an offender was released and restarted a relationship, or started a new one, enabling police potentially to prevent further crimes.

Those who failed to alert police to any changes in their circumstances or relationships would be breaching the law.

“A domestic abuse register would give the police the tools to be more proactive in its response to domestic abuse, rather than only responding to its devastating impact,” said Unmesh Desai, head of the assembly’s police and crime committee. The move has been backed by the Greater London Authority and the Government is being urged to include it in the new domestic abuse bill currently before Parliament.

It follows an investigation by the assembly which found domestic abuse offences in London nearly doubled from 46,000 in 2011 to 89,000 last year. They now account for one in 10 of all crimes in London.

However, the number of prosecutions has fallen below 15 per cent for the first time, partly because many victims are too frightened, or refuse to proceed with a complaint. Only 6,896 domestic abuse related convictions were recorded in 2018-19 in the capital, down 25 per cent from 8,625 in 2017.

Nationally, the number of domesticabuse related crimes reported to police in 2019 rose by 24 per cent on the previous year to a record 746,219, according to the Office for National Statistics.

But ONS’S survey of people’s actual experience of crime found only 17.5 per cent of victims said they reported domestic abuse to police because they thought the incident was “too trivial or not worth reporting”, was a private family matter, was embarrassing or did not believe the police could help.

This is despite the investigation saying the different types of domestic abuse have increased with advances in technology. These include digital methods for offenders to track victims through CCTV or Skype.