The assisted dying bill treats professionals as infallible – they aren’t
4 min read
Anyone who has dealt with domestic abuse cases knows professionals often fail to spot it. My amendment to the assisted dying bill will require all medical practitioners involved in the process to be trained in doing so.
When creating new laws, it is the duty of every MP to consider the worst-case scenario and to think through how the application of that law – either through mistakes or malice – could have negative consequences.
For legislation like the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which will introduce a system to allow assisted dying, the potential consequences of failure could not be more severe.
Proponents of the Bill argue that all possible safeguards are in place to prevent people from being coerced into ending their own lives, but through personal experience, I remain sceptical. Given my background working in domestic abuse, I believe this Bill places far too much faith in the infallibility and competence of professionals like doctors, lawyers and social workers to identify coercive and controlling behaviour. Anyone who has dealt with abuse knows that that faith is sadly misplaced.
The reality is that abuse is widespread – one in four women and one in seven men experience domestic abuse – and for 85 per cent of victims of domestic abuse, it takes an average of five attempts to get support from professionals before they are finally able to access the help they need.
Professionals often don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to dealing with domestic abuse. Training for medical practitioners to spot coercion is patchy and largely inadequate, and despite the best efforts of many charities and campaign groups, little progress has been made to improve the situation.
A review of a domestic homicide in Camden, for example, found that both the perpetrator and victim had told their GP of the abuse before the victim’s death, but nothing was ever followed up. Likewise, a study in Scotland found that all of the victims it interviewed had tried to access help on numerous occasions from doctors, psychiatrists, marriage counsellors and even the police, but none had been referred to specialists.
Professionals regularly fail people, and systems do not function perfectly. We have seen it with various miscarriages of justice – from Horizon to the contaminated blood scandal – and we must be conscious of it when examining all legislation, let alone a Bill that is a matter of life and death.
We also need to be mindful of the fact that this Bill will largely apply to older people – the group perhaps most let down by professionals when it comes to abuse.
People tend not to think that older people experience domestic abuse, and that perception pervades the work of professionals. Domestic Homicide Reviews have consistently found that a range of professionals disregard the possibility of domestic abuse in older victims. And yet, almost one in six people over 60 experience abuse; older victims are far more likely to live with their abuser, more likely to be abused by a current partner or a family member, more likely to have a disability, more likely to feel locked-in to an abusive relationship, less likely to leave and also more likely to hide abuse from others.
I’ve spoken to domestic abuse specialists who have been at the bedsides of older people at the end of their lives who are glad for the release of death after a lifetime of being abused. We should not compound the failure of our system to detect domestic abuse with a failure to prevent a person’s wrongful death by passing this Bill without serious amendment.
We need to do much more to spot abuse, and that is why I have submitted an amendment to the Bill that would require all medical practitioners involved in the assisted dying process to have been trained on issues of domestic abuse, including coercive control and financial abuse.
Training like this would provide the bare minimum of protection to one of the most vulnerable groups within our society.
To do otherwise would be to treat some of the most vulnerable and voiceless people in communities up and down our country as guinea pigs in this Bill’s new assisted dying system.
If this happens, people will die who have not freely made the decision to end their lives, who were coerced into that decision or who, after years of abuse, want an escape. And we will have played a part in that final act of abuse.
Jess Asato is the Labour MP for Lowestoft.
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