Violence has no place at home

Published on Monday 30 April 2007 00:25

THERE was a defining moment in her early career when Helen Hughes realised just how sheltered her own life had been. As a 22-year-old not long out of law school, one of her first clients was a woman who had been told the exact time - and the precise, graphic nature - of the assault she could expect from her husband that night.

"It was a Friday and he had told her, 'Tonight at nine o'clock, I am going to try and strangle you and then I am going to stub out a cigarette on you,'" recalls Hughes, who was horrified that her client decided to go home to face such an ordeal.

"She came back the following week, and we got an exclusion order and got the guy out. But on Friday night at nine o'clock, that's what was done to her."

Not surprisingly, this early experience of trying to help a victim of domestic violence shaped Hughes' perspective of the law. While she had been interested in family law during her time as a student at Glasgow University, she realised the how valuable her legal skills could be for vulnerable clients.

"You have lawyers who love the law - I find it interesting, but it is not abstract to me, it is a tool," she says. "It is what I need to help my clients sort out some fairly horrendous situations. That lady was just the tip of the iceberg. For me, hearing that at 22 was very, very difficult. To feel that someone was going home to that was terrifying."

Hughes, the chairwoman of the Family Law Association (FLA), started working with Paisley Women's Aid in 1989, advising the organisation and acting for women without legal representation. She quickly found she was suited to this type of work, realising how many other women needed urgent help.

"I am by nature very patient and I think clients find it very easy to have a rapport with me," she says.

"For a while, I acted for a lot of women who had been sexually abused. I don't think you can underestimate the amount of terror going on behind closed doors."

Hughes, who is a partner with McAuley, McCarthy & Co in Paisley, has noted that relationships often become violent after a period of time, perhaps when a woman tries to resist her partner's controlling behaviour: "You are not dealing with weak-willed women here. It cuts across all strata of society. The abusive person is very skilled in reducing the abused person's self-esteem and self-worth."

But she adds that the patterns of abusive relationships are complex. "These men are not 100 per cent bad. When you are with someone, you will fall in love with the best side of them. What you have got to understand is you become emotionally and perhaps financially dependent on this person."

Over the years, Hughes has been pleased to have seen domestic abuse get a higher public profile, but says that much remains to be done to tackle the problem. "The nature of domestic violence hasn't changed - it's become more publicised. What has changed for the better is the ability of reasonably resourced Women's Aid organisations. What has also changed is the police response. Now it is automatic that they will attend and will remove the perpetrator of the abuse."

She now believes that a "multidisciplinary approach" is needed. "I don't think any one thing will change it. We have to look at (a) what makes people do it and (b) what makes someone think that it's acceptable. We need to be educating young people. And I mean five, six and seven-year-olds, not waiting till they are teenagers."

Hughes hopes the impact of domestic violence on children themselves may persuade the Executive to pay more attention to issues of access to justice those experiencing domestic abuse. She recently met the Children's Commissioner, Kathleen Marshall, who has asked the FLA to provide more information and statistics to back up anecdotal evidence of lawyers stopping civil legal aid work.

She adds: "Kathleen Marshall's concern is the impact this is having on children. Invariably there is one or more child in domestic violence situations. If people are not accessing interdicts they are usually having to leave the area. That means children are having to be uprooted."

The major issue occupying Hughes' time as the FLA's chair is the campaign to increase legal aid rates for civil work paid through the controversial block fee system, introduced in 2003. Hughes says family lawyers, not known for being particularly outspoken, are increasingly frustrated.

Subject to this week's election results, the Executive has said it will review rates for civil legal aid, but Hughes is far from mollified. "That doesn't go far enough for us," she says. "We have had it since 2003 and we were told that there would be regular reviews, and there haven't been."

Hughes decided to take over as chair of the FLA because she felt so strongly that family lawyers' concerns were being ignored: "The representations that the FLA had made in 2003 had fallen on deaf ears. I felt that we as an association had tended to be quite reactive in the past - I was keen for us to take a more proactive stance."

She adds: "I think family lawyers are, by their nature, very hard-working and get on with what they have to do. They appreciate doing family law work is not the type of work where you become a millionaire."

She argues the situation cannot be left unresolved for much longer without serious consequences for people who can't afford to pay for legal representation: "It is becoming critical for access to justice for vulnerable people. One possibility is that they won't be able to get help. Another is they will have to travel to get it or they will have to wait longer. I have no appointments available for the next fortnight. What we need is for it to be an itemised fee, set at a realistic rate and reviewed annually."

But whoever ends up in power at Holyrood, will politicians listen to family lawyers' concerns?

"If you value all members of society having access to justice, then this has to be a realistic prospect," she insists. "I find it unacceptable that somebody very vulnerable cannot get access to the best possible advice. What people need to ask is, if this was my daughter or my sister, what is the level of service I would want them to get?"

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