Centre for Women’s Justice are disappointed that the government have sat on Clare Wade’s review into domestic homicide sentencing, completed last June.
Harriet Wistrich, director of CWJ and solicitor in appeal of Sally Challen stated, “Announcements today to increase sentences for domestic homicides where coercive control or overkill are an aggravating factor are welcome but they must not be implemented alone or those, like Sally Challen, driven to kill as a consequence of being a victim of coervice control will suffer greater injustice. This partial response could lead to even longer sentences for women who kill their abusers.”
CWJ welcome the government’s announcement to ask the Sentencing Council to review the manslaughter sentencing guidelines to explain to judges that cases where deaths occur during rough sex should be punished with longer jail terms.
Wade Review publication
The review by Clare Wade KC was commissioned by the government following a joint letter from the then Victims’ Commissioner and Independent Domestic Abuse Commissioner, in which they called for action to address a culture of misogyny throughout the criminal justice system.
Wade has delivered a thorough review with 17 recommendations. She puts forward a comprehensive new model for ensuring that sentencing for domestic homicide takes proper account of the harms caused to victims, incorporating the concept of coercive control as an aggravating factor (where perpetrators of coercive control kill their victim) and as a mitigating factor (where victims of coercive control kill their abuser). The approach she recommends is carefully designed to address gender disparities to ensure that women who kill their abuser are treated fairly and have the context of abuse fully taken into account in sentencing. Wade has also recommended a comprehensive review of the defences to murder to ensure women who kill their abusers have access to effective defences.
Instead of embracing the opportunity presented by this review to modernise the law and improve how the concept of coercive control is used to inform both defences and sentencing decisions, the government’s cherry picking response fails to address the gender disparities faced by women who kill their abusers and could in fact lead to greater unfairness.
The proposal to raise the starting point for sentencing in domestic homicide cases involving coercive control risks overall sentence inflation without any consideration of the gendered context of domestic homicide and the particular implications for women who kill their abuser.
Wade’s review, buildson a detailed study of homicide cases, insight from feminist, practioner and academic legal expertise
It is disappointing that the government has not committed to implementing Wade’s other recommendations, including for example:
· Introducing a system for collecting all relevant data on these cases
· Mandatory training for lawyers and judges on understanding and applying the concept of coercive control
· Making strangulation, a form of killing almost exclusively used by men and not women, a statutory aggravating factor
· Ensuring use of a weapon is not necessarily an aggravating factor (women who kill their abusers are likely to use a weapon because of disparities in size and strength and knowledge of the violence their abusers are capable of).
· Establishing a comprehensive review of homicide defences.
As Clare Wade KC has stated in response to the government announcements, “I fear that making overkill a statutory aggravating factor in the absence of adopting the other recommendations I have made will lead to injustice. In relation to controlling and coercive behaviour, there should be training across the criminal justice system and controlling and coercive behaviour should mitigate the seriousness of murders committed by victims who kill their abusers.”
In 2021 CWJ published our comprehensive research on Women who Kill where we found that 77% of women who killed their partner or ex-partner had been subject to abuse from the person they killed. Our report also found that in most cases where women killed an abuser they used a weapon to defend themselves. Increasing the starting point for sentences for those that use a weapon in the home could lead to greater injustice.