THE Lords were urged today to make non-fatal strangulation a specific crime in the Domestic Abuse Bill, which is making its passage through Parliament.
The push to make it a specific offence is being led by former victims’ commissioner Baroness Newlove, a Tory peer who is campaigning for the change via an amendment, which has cross-party support, as the Bill returned to the Lords.
She told peers it would be “an unforgivable missed opportunity” if the Bill did not address the issue of strangulation and suffocation.
Addressing peers via videolink, she said: “Attacks of these kinds leave little or no marks and they are treated less seriously than other violence — yet this is a terrifying crime.
“Many victims testify that they genuinely felt that their head was about to explode and that they were about to die during such a violent assault.”
More than half of victims of recurrent domestic abuse experience such abuse: about 20,000 women a year, the equivalent of 55 women every day, Baroness Newlove told peers.
And victims of non-fatal strangulation are seven times more likely than other abuse victims to go on to be killed, she said.
Non-fatal strangulation is “the ultimate domestic terror tactic” against women that urgently requires a change to the law, according to Baroness Newlove’s successor, Dame Vera Baird QC.
The victims’ commissioner for England & Wales said the crime of was undercharged and that a new law was needed help police tackle the magnitude of the threat.
“The data shows us that this is urgent, it’s very dangerous, very prevalent and, currently, it is often ignored,” she said.
The Ministry of Justice has said it has no plans to change the law and that non-fatal strangulation can be charged under existing legislation for common assault and attempted murder.
But Dame Vera said that common assault minimised the seriousness, while strangulation was often used as a means of control and “terrorising into submission” rather than as an attempt at murder.
Nevertheless, strangulation or suffocation was the second most common method of killing in female homicides, accounting for 29 per cent of women, according to the 2018 Femicide Census, compared with 3 per cent of male homicides, according to Office for National Statistics data.
An inquest into the 2016 death of Anne-Marie Nield, during a sustained assault by her partner Richard Howarth in Rochdale, found that he had strangled her on previous occasions.
