Video / audio #416 from our archives: Domestic Abuse Bill, House of Commons, third reading (2020)
We’re linking daily to selected video / audio video files from our YouTube channel. Today’s file is here (video, 5:18:39).
—————————-
If you’d like email notifications of our new blog pieces, please enter your email address in the box near the top of the right-hand column and click ‘Subscribe’.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who reads this gives us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. You can support our work by making a donation here.
Justice for Men & Boys 
The “progress” of this Bill was an object lesson in the successful tools used by feminists to get our institutions to follow their ideology. Though in a sense these failed in this bill. Their aim was to get the “gendered definition” into to the Bill (ie. domestic abuse is always patriarchal and therefore always perpetrated by a man). To do this the feminists worked assiduously throughout the many boring stages of the Bill process to get this in. This was difficult because over the last 20 years Bills and Acts have been written in “gender neutral” language. In the event they failed. However in the process they got a promise that the “guidance” that usually accompanies new Acts would include the “gendered nature” of Domestic Abuse. Which it did. And of course it reinforced the VAW&G Strategy which has been supported by successive Governments for two decades.
The very fact that readers of this comment with think this boring and arcane shows the success. For trundling through the various committees and “debates” etc. is tedious stuff. Yet it is this detail that the “devil” gets through and consistently we find similar successes for clever and sustained lobbying. Little of this requires “public support” and as we know in general the products of our Parliament have little relationship to the population or electorates priorities. It seems 30 years ago feminists realized that the general population was not sympathetic to many of their ideas, and rather than waste time campaigning their energy and resources would be better spent within the political and professional institutions that actually formulate legislation, guidance and policy. The Violence Against Women and Girls strategy being a huge success for them as it enshrines the “gendered definition” in the work of Gov. Departments as varied as Education, Home Office and Science and Industry. Similar work ensured that the UK signed the “Istanbul Convention”.
In the UK our institutions are centralized and so “capturing” key institutions HQs delivers all the services in the nation that will rely on Gov. Guidance and related Guidance from Quangos (such as ACPO in this case of Domestic Abuse). Supporting those who oppose this lobbying in these institutions is crucial.
LikeLike