Mr. Gary Broderick:

If a woman decides to act on the domestic violence, she is much more likely to enter into a problematic phase of substance use afterwards, yet we do not support her in that, therefore putting more families at risk. We have to start thinking more creatively. With the national drug strategy, we have moved away from criminalising but we may not have moved away from an abstinence focus to our responses. We need to be a lot more comfortable with the fact that, sometimes, people will use substances but we can support and help them and keep families together. Before the kinship care is necessary, keeping that unit together is the best option. That is also highlighted in to the sentencing guidelines. I thank the Deputy for bringing us back to that issue. The number of women in our prisons for what are usually non-violent crimes, and very often crimes that have roots in domestic violence, is utterly preposterous. If we can think differently and more creatively, we can keep that woman in the community so that she can be supported as a mother rather than putting her in prison where she then has to come back out and may have lost her home and may not be able to bring her children back together. One woman we worked with had her children in care and she was ready to take them back, but she had a one-bedroom apartment and three children, so she could not bring them back. Her housing situation has been in that limbo for a lengthy period. We need to think about all of that differently.

One other element linked with families and impact has to do with Dad going to prison. In the north inner city, there is a social obligation on the partner to support him while he is there, yet their finances have halved because he is now in prison and everything else that goes with all of that for families.

All of this is alongside the kinship care issue. To go back another step and thinking of young people programmes in particular, if we start moving away from the abstinence focus and start thinking about belonging, connection, a much broader sense of intersectionality and all of the other issues that come in when there is addiction, we can put the focus on the young people, what they need and the intersectionality of all their issues instead of on the drug use.