This was the headline of an article published in The Observer on Sunday May 9th. It reports that a quarter of police forces fail to disclose information under Clare’s Law/ The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS), within the recommended 35 days. It expresses the view that bringing this initiative under statutory regulation will require police forces to meet with these deadlines and thereby enhance women’s safety. The question is: will it?
The data produced by The Observer is not new. McClenagan (2018) made much the same observations. This concern with a speedy response process rests on the assumption that an ‘early Clare’s Law is a good Clare’s Law’. Indeed, personal communication with one police force suggests that, having introduced a more proactive approach to their information processing system, they succeeded in reducing their response time from 44 days to 7 days during 2018. As laudable as this achievement is, the speed of the disclosure is a moot point, since this focus begs the question of under what circumstances Clare’s Law might be useful and for whom, especially in the eyes of the women who ask for information.
Since Clare’s Law was introduced in England and Wales in 2014, its popularity as a policy initiative has travelled across the globe with conversations concerning its efficacy occurring in Canada, and Australia alongside its implementation in Scotland and Northern Ireland. But what is a scheme like this intended to do? Prevent violence? Protect women from violence? Empower women?
It was certainly the belief of those who campaigned for this initiative that it would have protected Clare Brown (after whom it is named), based on no evidence to support such a belief at all. But does giving women knowledge about their current partner’s previous history of violence do this? Does it empower them to make informed decisions about their life with their partner? Does it precent further violence happening to them?
Well, the answer to these questions is that the jury is still out. What we do know however is that Clare’s Law costs. Each right to ask/right to know carries administrative costs, time costs, and information delivery costs, not solely for the police but for others also involved in the delivery process. It also carries costs to the women asking for, or subjected to, such information. For example, Duggan (2018) has highlighted the ways in which practitioner assumptions about ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ victims can operate in the spaces between policy and implementation. In this space victim hierarchies can flourish. So, what happens to the woman, having been given information, if she chooses not to act on it?
Existing research has shown that there are more problems with initiatives like Clare’s Law related to the speed of policing responses. (see Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon 2018 https://bridges.monash.edu/articles/online_resource/Understanding_Domestic_Violence_Disclosure_Schemes_Clare_s_Law_/8379074). Although our research exploring victim/ survivors’ experiences of the scheme has identified speed of disclosure as an issue in some cases, for many there were other notable issues unrelated to this issue. We will be sharing these findings in due course.
The consultation concerning the DVDS statutory guidance is due to be announced shortly. It will be interesting see what shape that consultation takes and its subsequent outcome. The failure to listen to women’s voices and experiences is at the heart of the shortcomings of this initiative, and we thank the women who have come forward to share their experiences of Clare’s Law as part of our project so far.
Duggan, M, (2018) Victim hierarchies in the domestic violence disclosure scheme. International Review of Victimology 24(3): 199-217.
McClenagan, M. (2018) Huge disparity on how police use law to protect women from violent partners. Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 9th