The assisted dying bill still doesn't do enough to protect domestic abuse victims
4 min read
MPs have one more chance to make sure that the assisted dying Bill adequately protects victims of domestic abuse.
Last week, the assisted dying bill completed its Committee Stage and moved another step closer to becoming law. MPs now have one final opportunity to add greater safeguards to this piece of legislation — and it is an opportunity that they must take.
The bill as it stands does not adequately protect victims of domestic abuse. It needs more protections to prevent MPs from creating a new and legal way for perpetrators to abuse — and, ultimately, kill — their victims.
The Bill Committee did accept amendments that would require the medical practitioners and panel members involved in the assisted dying process to have undertaken training to help them identify domestic abuse. However, this does not go far enough, and the broader issue of how this bill will impact the lives of domestic abuse victims has been under-discussed.
New data out this week from the National Police Chiefs Council shows that suicide following domestic abuse has overtaken homicide as the primary cause of domestic abuse-related deaths. We know from research by the women’s organisation The Other Half that 88 per cent of unlawful assisted suicides in the UK currently are perpetrated by men against women. These deaths are all too often romanticised as ‘mercy killings’, but given one woman is killed every week by their male partner and one in four women experience domestic abuse more generally, many of these suicides are likely in fact manifestations of abuse and control.
We also know from years of working with Domestic Homicide Reviews that professionals across public services, particularly in health, often miss the signs of domestic abuse, sometimes with fatal consequences. Investment in policy and practice is needed urgently to resolve this. Research by Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse with Macmillan Cancer Support indicates that many domestic abuse survivors disclose their abuse in healthcare settings, yet these disclosures frequently go unrecognised or unacted upon by medical practitioners. Research from the Pathfinder project found that 80 per cent of women in violent relationships seek help from health services, usually from GPs, at least once, but the response is often inadequate, with many survivors not receiving the support they need, leaving them vulnerable to continued abuse.
This bill gives those most at-risk of abuse the means to end their lives, at a time when we do not have systems in place to identify their abuse and support them to live well. Older people, disabled people, severely ill people — these are some of the most vulnerable to abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour.
Training is not enough to solve this issue. Training is better than no training, but no amount of training will prevent victims of abuse from slipping through the net. Domestic abuse can be incredibly subtle, to the extent that even victims are unaware of it, and it seems inevitable that victims will be coerced into an untimely death, regardless of what safeguards are in place.
The bill cannot detail what ‘training’ will actually mean in practice, and instead delegates that to the Secretary of State to produce. We are concerned by the possibility that we could follow Australia, where domestic abuse training for assisted dying providers makes up only part of a single module of 40 to 60 minutes of self-guided e-learning. Domestic abuse training must not just be a box-ticking formality — it has to be specialist, continuous and proportionate to the scale of the risk involved in this process.
We believe that one wrongful death is one death too many, but as this Bill progresses through Parliament, it is the responsibility of MPs to ensure that this Bill’s new assisted dying process leads to the fewest number of wrongful deaths possible.
As such, we would like to see MPs amend the panel element of the process to introduce a multi-agency consultation with domestic abuse specialists and safeguarding leads to help identify coercion, as well as a rigorous review process to assess caregiver relationships (which can also be abusive) and financial dependencies. It is also important that there is ongoing research and monitoring of those requesting assisted dying, to identify gendered patterns and help detect potential misuse.
This government has set an ambitious pledge to halve violence against women and girls. We must be careful that this Bill does not have the opposite effect by undermining other efforts to achieve this manifesto commitment and putting women and girls in greater danger. MPs must first start by acknowledging the risks. Only then can they safeguard against them and ensure that assisted dying is not misused as a fatal weapon of abuse.
Jess Asato is the Labour MP for Lowestoft and Cherryl Henry-Leach is CEO of charity Standing Together Against Domestic Abuse.
