Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): I welcome Rachel Powell, the women's sector lobbyist, and Elaine Crory, who is a representative from the Women's Resource and Development Agency (WRDA). You are both very welcome to the meeting. It will be reported by Hansard, and we will publish a transcript of the evidence on our Committee web page. I will hand over to you at this stage to give us an overview, and we will then follow up with some questions.

Ms Rachel Powell (Women's Resource and Development Agency): Thank you so much. I will attempt to share a screen. Hopefully, that is OK. Can you see it OK?

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Yes, that has come up.

Ms Powell: Perfect. My name is Rachel Powell. I am the women's sector lobbyist in the Women's Resource and Development Agency, and I also chair the Women's Policy Group (WPG). I am joined by Elaine Crory. I will let Elaine introduce herself before I go on.

Ms Elaine Crory (Women's Resource and Development Agency): Hello. I am Elaine Crory. I work at the Women's Resource and Development Agency, too, and I also work on the Raise Your Voice project, which is one of the organisations involved in the submission.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Thank you.

Ms Powell: Thanks, Elaine. For those who do not know, the Women's Policy Group is a platform for women working in policy and advocacy roles in different organisations across Northern Ireland. We share our work and speak with a collective voice on key issues. It is made up of women from trade unions, grassroots women's organisations, women's networks, feminist campaigning organisations, a wide variety of LGBT organisations, migrant groups, service and support providers, NGOs, human rights and equality organisations, and individuals.

We have quite a broad range of expertise on a range of different matters. The Women's Resource and Development Agency was invited to submit evidence to the Justice Committee, and, because WRDA is the secretariat for the Women's Policy Group and the lead partner of the Raise Your Voice project, we decided that it would be best to do a joint submission alongside a number of women in our sector whom we work closely with.

Ms Crory: We submitted a comprehensive evidence response to the consultation on 16 April. The joint evidence submission was a collaborative piece of work by a number of different organisations that were involved in the Women's Policy Group, specifically, WRDA; Raise Your Voice; Women's Aid Federation Northern Ireland; Alliance for Choice; HERe NI; Cara-Friend; Transgender NI; Northern Ireland Women's European Platform; Rape Crisis NI; and the Women's Support Network.

A number of those organisations submitted their own consultation response. All of them collectively have substantial experience in matters relating to women, LGBTQ+ people and violence against women and girls and gender-based violence generally. The evidence that we are submitting today is on behalf of WRDA and the Women's Policy Group as a collective.

Ms Powell: Given the prevalence and seriousness of stalking and the lack of Northern Ireland-specific data on its prevalence, we decided that it would be appropriate to conduct our own primary research, as we wanted to support the evidence in the submission and ensure that the voices and lived experiences of victims are central to the development of a robust Protection from Stalking Bill.

The Women's Policy Group, Raise Your Voice and our collective members put out a call for evidence on 30 March 2021. We created an online survey that asked people to anonymously submit their experiences of stalking and their opinions on how they could be better protected. That call for evidence was shared widely across the broad voluntary and community sector, and we had to close the survey on Tuesday 13 April.

We normally like to have our surveys open for longer, but, as I am sure everyone on the Committee will appreciate, there has been an unprecedented level of public consultation and evidence submission. We would have liked to have it open for longer, but we nonetheless received 38 responses from victims and survivors in Northern Ireland, and it was some of the first research of its kind in Northern Ireland.

Ms Crory: In asking people to submit evidence, we included a range of qualitative and quantitative questions. We allowed respondents to answer anonymously and to leave questions out if they chose — none of the questions was compulsory — and we finished with signposting to support services for anybody who needed them.

The questions that were included should be on your screen. They asked for things like demographic information, gender identity, disability status, ethnicity and so on. We also asked people these questions:

Ms Powell: Can I just double-check that the slides are moving on for everyone else and not just on my screen? Are they not moving on?

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): No, they are not.

Ms Powell: I wonder whether one of the Clerks will be able to share it. It is moving on at my end, but not for you.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): We have them in our tabled pack, Rachel, so we are able to follow it through our electronic devices if it does not work on the kind of screen that you have for us to broadcast. We are following it on our electronic devices.

Ms Powell: Great. Can I just check, do you see the screen now?

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Yes. It is on "Key Findings" —.

Ms Powell: Is it on the slide on key demographics?

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Yes, that is up.

Ms Powell: OK. Just to test it, let us move to the next slide. No. I am going to stop the screen share, and we can just provide this evidence orally, because you have it in your packs.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Great, thank you.

Ms Powell: To summarise the demographics of the respondents to our survey, 92% identified as female; 5·2% as male; 2·6% as non-binary; 18·4% as LGBTQ+; 21% as disabled; and 2·63% as being from an ethnic minority background. Therefore, while we had an open call for evidence, we received responses from a wide range of intersectional identities and protected characteristics. The prevalence of stalking towards women, the LGBT community and, in particular, disabled women was concerning given the population sizes. We also received two responses from people who did not identify as female, with one male and one non-binary. We were able to work out, based on the responses, that 97·4% of the cases disclosed to us involved a male perpetrator and 5·26% a female perpetrator.

Ms Crory: Following on from that, when we asked the question:

in the responses, the majority of respondents seemed to understand the question to be asking, "How many different people have stalked you?", rather than, "How many individual instances of stalking did you experience?" Therefore, we explored that more through the qualitative responses that came later. Crucially, 55·4% of respondents said that they were victims of stalking more than once, meaning by more than one person. That really highlights the prevalence of the issue. The fact that people can fall victim to the crime more than once in a lifetime might be indicative of the fact that, once people experience it and recognise it for what it is, they will recognise it should it happen again later in life. Some 44·7% said that they had experienced it once, but everybody else said they had experienced it twice, up to five times or up to 10 times. That means individual perpetrators, rather than incidents.

Ms Powell: When we asked respondents whether their stalker was known to them, 71·1% said that, yes, they knew their stalker well, and 13·2% said that they knew them as an acquaintance or as a friend of a friend. Zero per cent of respondents knew them only online, and 21% of respondents did not know their stalker at all.

That is of great significance to us, because there are often a lot of myths about stalking, such as that it really happens only to famous people or that it is done by some random stranger. Stalkers, more often than not, target somebody they know, whether that is an ex-partner, classmate, colleague and so on. We found that, in total, 84·3% of our respondents were stalked by someone they knew compared with 21·1% who did not know their stalker at all.

For those who knew their stalker well, generally it was because they were in a previous relationship with them, and, more often than not, it was one that ended in abuse. Many of the others had an acquaintance with the perpetrator through school, university, work or socialising and often described their stalker as pursuing them for a romantic relationship in which they were not interested. That was the motivation in most of the cases that were reported to us where the person did not know the stalker either.

Ms Crory: The next question was:

and, as you can imagine, there was a wide variety of responses.

The vast majority of respondents disclosed their relationship to their stalker when answering that question. Overall, 79% said that their stalker was an ex-partner or someone whom they had previously dated, even for only a short time. Some 23·7% referenced being stalked by an acquaintance or a friend of a friend; 10·5% referenced being stalked at school or by someone whom they knew from school, even if that had been several years previously; 18·4% referenced being stalked by a stranger or random person; 2·6% by an employer; and 2·6% by a colleague.

In addition, 52·6% of respondents referenced being stalked at their home; 31·6% at their workplace; and 10·5% at their school or university. Worryingly, 47·4% of respondents told us about being physically followed by their stalker, with 23·7% being followed by car. Nearly half of the respondents — 47·4% — also experienced unwanted phone calls, texts or emails. Online harassment was experienced by 21·1% of respondents, and 7·9% received unwanted gifts. Furthermore, 10·5% of respondents mentioned concerns about the unstable mental health of their stalker and referenced ex-partners threatening suicide.

The universal theme in all the experiences was the serious long-term impact on the survivors of stalking behaviour. All respondents — 100% — listed long-term impacts on their mental health because of their experiences. Those included cases where the harassment was ongoing and others where it had ended decades before. Three respondents specifically mentioned that they were now living with PTSD as a result of their experience. Some feared for their physical safety; others have suffered damage to their career or academic career.

Other key themes included the coexistence of in-person and digital stalking; the prevalence of individuals experiencing stalking by more than one perpetrator; the rise of image-based sexual abuse, which is sometimes called revenge porn; the connection between perpetrators' perceived sense of entitlement and their behaviour, and how the gaps in the law before this enabled that; confusion over how best to deal with the issue; and a really wide variety of responses from various institutions that they might have reported to, including the police, the justice system, if it got that far, educational establishments, and workplaces in terms of putting protections in place.

Ms Powell: We asked participants whether they had reported the stalking incidents that they experienced and were told that it was roughly half and half: 52·6% said that they had reported it, and 47·3% said that they had not. When we asked them to whom they had reported it — whether it was the police, employers, teachers, or workplaces and so on — 42·1% said that they had reported it to the police. Close to 8% had reported it to family, friends and neighbours, and close to 8% had reported it to their employers. It then gets gradually lower in number, where they have reported it to Women's Aid or other support providers; their GP; a solicitor; their university; or even reaching out to the perpetrator's family to ask for help in preventing the behaviour.

Ms Crory: Another key theme on the issue of reporting is that some of —.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Elaine, can I jump in at this stage? Are you planning to go through every slide that you have provided to us?

Ms Powell: No, we have a condensed version that we are using for today. I do not think that that has been included in your pack. We are going to finish up on the results and then some key recommendations.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): OK. It is about 10 or 15 minutes for the initial overview, and then we go into questions. We have the details of all the slides; that forms the evidence that we have received. I am keen to get into a wider discussion. If you could bring your presentation to a close shortly to allow us to get on with the business, I would appreciate it.

Ms Crory: OK. Very briefly, people report to the police or other agencies quite late in to the behaviour for various reasons. Employers tend to put practical supports in place at higher rates than universities.

There is an alarming outcome on the issue of the domestic violence disclosure scheme, or Clare's law: about 52% of respondents said that they were aware of it, but almost as many — nearly 48% — said that they were not. Every respondent found it very unhelpful; 0% said that it was helpful. The full 100% said that it was not useful, sometimes because they were not aware of it or because their stalking preceded its coming into place.

The others found that the provisions of that scheme were not in any way helpful in stopping or preventing abuse.

Ms Powell: There have been some key findings, and we have made some key recommendations, the first of which is about understanding the connection between paramilitary involvement and how that enhances gender-based violence in Northern Ireland. That was a recurring theme in our research.

There were also a lot of findings about the growing ways in which perpetrators are using creative technologies to stalk and continue to harass their victims, including through financial abuse by logging into banking apps; creating deepfakes, where they Photoshop the face of their victim on to other images; and even so far as an employer using an employee's personal details, downloading images of them and threatening to out them. A lot of different challenges have come through, some of which are not necessarily covered by the Bill, and we would like the Justice Committee to consider those issues. We also want the Justice Committee to consider some of the unique forms of abuse suffered by different minority groups and the high prevalence of, for example, honour-based abuse and harm and the connection between that and stalking. We also need to consider how LGBT women, in particular, face unique forms of abuse. Disabled women should also be considered.

In general, we have made some recommendations in relation to myth-busting on stalking, such as on the connection between stalking and domestic abuse and how that cannot be separated and, crucially, the gendered nature of this crime and how it is quite often rooted in attitudes of misogyny and entitlement over women's affection.

Ms Crory: We would like to see more preventative steps to avoid this becoming an even bigger issue than it is. Recidivism is a serious problem in this area. That is not based on Northern Ireland statistics, because we have no Northern Ireland statistics. It is a serious problem worldwide, and we would like to see more preventative measures taken and more education, not just among the PSNI and the other agencies dealing with these crimes — that is essential — but among the general public so that people understand what it is, why it is wrong and what we can do to undermine the sense of entitlement that is so often a motivation.

Ms Powell: I have one final thing to mention. Given the prevalence of stalking in people's workplaces, we stress the need for guidance for employers and for educational institutions, particularly as the response from universities was quite poor in our research. We stress that the gendered nature of this crime should be recognised in line with international mechanisms, such as CEDAW, the Istanbul convention and the International Labour Organization, on tackling gender-based violence in the workplace.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Thank you for that. We really appreciate the extensive research that has been carried out. We will be able to draw upon it.

Rachel, you mentioned honour-based abuse, and, having looked through your submission, I am keen to explore that a little bit with you. Do you want to pick up on the nuances of honour-based abuse and how it could relate to stalking? Have you picked up that it is prevalent in Northern Ireland?

Ms Powell: Yes, members of the Women's Policy Group who work with women from various ethnic and religious minority groups spoke to us about cases of women who are victims of stalking connected to motivations behind honour-based abuse. It is an issue that is not widely understood in Northern Ireland, and it is deeply connected to all our measures to tackle gender-based violence. We made recommendations on engaging with groups that support victims of honour-based abuse.

There are various groups, including the Belfast Multi-Cultural Association, and the women working with Belfast Islamic Centre are, in particular, experts in this area. We stress that, to understand the nuances of this and the motivations behind it, we recommend that the Committee engage with women from those organisations. It is about understanding how the misguided sense of ownership and entitlement involved in a lot of stalking can sometimes be exacerbated in honour-based abuse. We have to support people who are in that position.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): OK. Thank you. I have one more question. In Ireland, there is new legislation that is known as Coco's law. Could we do with that law in Northern Ireland?

Ms Crory: Yes, I think that we could. We are a little slow on the uptake on that kind of thing, as are a lot of other jurisdictions, because technology often moves faster than laws can keep up with it. It would certainly be useful, however. Serious damage can be caused by image-based sexual abuse, often known as revenge porn. Any legislation that can be put in place to protect victims from it would be really useful. It is also worth looking at what is going on in the Republic of Ireland and in other nearby jurisdictions, because those things can so easily cross borders. Last winter, there was an instance where a large database of intimate images was being collated. It happened south of the border, but it involved women from all over the island. Working with other jurisdictions on that sort of thing would be really useful.

Ms Powell: To strengthen that, it should be connected to broader relationships and sexuality (RSE) education. In the previous conversation, there were discussions about young people being involved in that sort of crime. As technology advances, we need to educate our young people about the harm of deepfakes, revenge porn and all the other growing issues. We recognise that a lot of the legislation, dealing with social media in particular, is UK-wide. There needs to be wide reform. We have made recommendations in relation to hate crime and all forms of online abuse.

Ms Dillon: Thank you, Elaine and Rachel, for your presentation. I will try to stick to the stalking Bill, but there was some brilliant stuff in the presentation that we should pick up on separately, not least the violence against women and girls strategy. We need to see that move forward.

Can you give me more detail on the suggested amendment to clause 14. on the notification requirements needing resourcing and training?

Ms Powell: I can start on that, and then Elaine can come in. We made recommendations that we also made in a recent consultation on domestic abuse protection orders and notices. It was suggested that we expand this clause to require the subject to give their name and other names that they might be known by; their current and their last address, if they lived there less than three months ago; whether they are in a relationship and, if so, the name of the person they are in a relationship with; any children or other people living at the property; and other information relating to addictions and poor mental health, because of the escalation that can happen with those.

We wanted to make that recommendation to ensure that a stalker could not continue to stalk the victim under a different name or by changing their address so that they could not be found by the police, and to recommend that failure to notify the police of any of those bits of information should result in a breach of the stalking protection order. We took guidance from other organisations that deal with similar protection orders. In the evidence that we received, a lot of women told us about partners who had moved house. They could not find out where they had moved to, but the partners were still able to find them. The orders need to be more robust.

I do not know whether you want to mention anything about that clause, Elaine.

Ms Crory: I have nothing extra to say, except that that relates to the general joined-up approach that we take when talking about the kind of protections that need to be in place. There is not full overlap in understanding the connections between stalking and domestic abuse, but there is a strong link. That means that the kinds of protections put in place for one of them should be extended to the other, whenever possible and relevant. We have almost the same recommendations in relation to new domestic abuse law, because the same loopholes are known and the same protections need to be put in place.

Ms Dillon: I appreciate that. Thank you. We should raise that with the Department, Chair. The Committee should look into it.

You said that the feedback on existing domestic violence disclosure through Clare's law showed that many people found it unhelpful and thought that it took too long or that there was not enough follow-up support. Chair, can we speak to the Department about that and forward it this section? I know that it is not directly linked to the Protection from Stalking Bill, but it has an important link. Can we also ask what the Department's intentions are on addressing that? It is the same point that we are making about this legislation: it is no good if it is not effective and is not used properly. Can we highlight that? Is there the potential, given the recommendations and the update, for a relaunch of the campaign?

We need to find out the Department's plans to address that, given that there is now evidence that it is not having the desired effect. We put a lot of focus on the domestic abuse legislation, and we will do the same for this legislation, to ensure that it is effective. Were you going to say something, Elaine?

Ms Crory: I was going to add that that was one of the most alarming findings from the research: that 100% found it unhelpful. One of the things that has come up a lot, which is detailed in our longer response, is that, after a relationship has ended, the scheme no longer applies. You have to be in a continuing relationship with the person in order to find out any relevant information. The disclosure itself is limited for all sorts of data protection and privacy reasons. It often gives people enough to know that they should be worried but not enough to know exactly what they should be worried about. The police's hands are tied to some degree. A robust look at how it works in practice would definitely be valuable for victims of domestic abuse, stalking, and any other related crime to whom the scheme might be relevant.

Ms Dillon: Yes. It is important that we highlight that, even as a separate issue, to the Department and forward this section of the presentation. The presentation was comprehensive, so there are not a lot of questions to ask. I just want to say thank you. It is appreciated and is very helpful in our ongoing work on the Bill.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Thank you, Linda. We will take note of the need to raise it with the Department.

Ms S Bradley: Thank you, Rachel and Elaine. To be fair, you have covered this, and I know that it is in your written submission. Rachel, you mentioned RSE and the age profile for some of the offences.

At the start, you talked about the Bill not containing a definition of stalking. I am not going to go over that, because it is detailed in your submission. You said that it is important that the grounds on which an order can be made are wide enough so that things like drones, for example, which you mentioned, can be included, given that we cannot account for everything. Are you content with how it is worded, or should there be a direct intervention to keep it open?

Ms Crory: Our recommendation is to ensure that, in the list of behaviours associated with stalking, there is explicit mention of the fact that the list is "not exhaustive". That is particularly important because of technological advancements and because perpetrators find new ways of harassing victims that you would not think possible. There needs to be flexibility and the option of continuously reviewing the legislation so that, if we come across new evidence of other ways of stalking, we can account for them in the legislation in future.

Ms S Bradley: OK. I take that on board. It is worth pulling out, Rachel. I wondered whether it was a stylistic thing by the drafters. If it is not stated, can it not be presumed? It is certainly worth exploring further. Thank you to you both.

The Chairperson (Mr Givan): Thanks, Sinead. Next is Rachel Woods, please.

I think that the technology has produced a little glitch. She may come back in a second.

No joy. Apologies for that.

Rachel and Elaine, thank you both very much for joining us and for your submission. It is much appreciated. Thank you.

Ms Crory: Thank you.

Ms Powell: Thank you very much.