Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Senator Martin for bringing the Bill forward. We in the Labour Party are proud to be signatories of this important legislation. I also thank the Senator for organising an excellent briefing earlier in the audio-visual, AV, room, which covered both the legal perspective and the lived, practical perspective and demonstrated the impact this legislation could have.

I do not need to go through all the statistics but it might be useful to put some of them on record. In Ireland, one in four women who has been in a relationship has experienced domestic abuse by a past or current partner. That is a high figure. When I think of the multitudes of friends and families we all have, one in four is a worrying figure. Due to Covid-19 we saw a massive rise in domestic abuse with a 38% increase in calls to the 24-hour national freephone helpline in 2020 compared to 2019. In 2021, we saw 33,831 disclosures of abuse and 26,906 contacts with Women's Aid. Those are very big numbers and we know they are unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg. We are not capturing all the people who experience this. According to Women's Aid, 43 women aged between 18 and 25 have been murdered in our State since 1996. Of the resolved cases, 52% of victims were murdered at the hands of a current or former partner. Altogether since 1996, 249 women have been violently murdered, of whom 55% were killed by a current or former partner and 63% of the murders occurred in the women's homes. We know women are much more likely to experience domestic violence at the hands of a partner or an ex-partner, making domestic abuse and its rise since the pandemic, an urgent matter we must act on. Research by Midwifery Mattersshows that pregnant women are 60% more likely to experience physical domestic violence. What a stunningly alarming figure that is. It is alarming that midwives know about that and have to be on the lookout for it. These statistics are astonishing. They are only a few among many that could be talked about in detail.

As we know, domestic violence can happen to anyone regardless of gender or background, but we also know that women are at the centre of 90% of domestic abuse cases. In many domestic abuse cases, norms escalate into further power dynamics which lead to emotional, coercive and physical abuse. All of these are addressed in this Bill which considers how they can be tackled or dealt with in a way that will protect victims in a court setting. The level to which we continue to see cases of domestic and sexual abuse, domestic violence and coercive control shows why this Bill is so important. We must protect women and children and provide as much help as possible in order to get where we want to go as a State, namely to attain gender parity and other things. I will not go overly into the technical elements, but it was noted at the briefing earlier, that the language "shall" was being used to protect children. The word "may" is used further on in the legislation and in relation to children the language is "shall" in order to protect children and to take away the terror they may experience in the court setting. That is important. I welcome the use of the word "shall". It was also noted at the briefing, that we need awareness training and understanding of trauma, sexual and domestic violence and the impact these testimonies in our adversarial court system have on survivors of these horrors. Implementation of this Bill will reduce the retraumatisation of victims who seek justice against their abusers. We must have some kind of protection for victims of domestic violence to ensure the trauma they have endured is not caused to resurface when they seek help from the justice system. I welcome this Bill and we are proud to support it.