All Island Media news editor Christie Bailey, who has guest-edited today’s edition, sat down with UK solicitor Harriet Wistrich, the founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, and a founding member of the UK campaign group Justice for Women…
UNLIKE the overt discrimination of the past, today’s gender biases often lurk beneath the surface – so it is shocking to hear a leading solicitor describe parts of UK law as “specifically sexist”.
Harriet Wistrich is the founder and director of the Centre for Women’s Justice and a solicitor who specialises in human rights cases, particularly those involving women who have been sexually assaulted or who have killed their violent partners.
She has also authored a book called “Sister in Law: Shocking true stories of fighting for justice in a legal system designed by men”.
When I ask her to explain how the legal system is “designed by men”, I expect her to speak of the subtle sexism and internalised misogyny that is so prevalent in modern society.
But Ms Wistrich does not hesitate in schooling me in her “best example of a law which is specifically sexist in the way it operates” – the partial defence for murder known as provocation.
“The idea of provocation was that you mitigate the seriousness of a killing offence because you were provoked,” she explained.
“The way that the law was framed was that, if you suffered a sudden and temporary loss of self control in response to words said or things done that caused you to lose self control, that would mitigate the seriousness of the offence. It would make you less culpable. It would reduce a murder offence to manslaughter.
“That defence, and the way it works, is really providing sympathy for somebody who explodes in anger – and that’s a very male response.
“A woman who’s subject to a drip, drip, drip, drip, drip of abuse and violence responds more slowly – and then that defence doesn’t work for them.
“That’s probably one of the strongest examples of a law that’s really designed on the basis of male experience.”
In her book, Ms Wistrich writes that “it was a law designed for men who kill in anger, not for women who kill out of fear”.
The loss-of-control defence replaced provocation in 2010, partly in response to concerns about the way it prioritised male manifestations of anger – something which Ms Wistrich believes is still prevalent in the new defence.
And this has real-life consequences.
Ms Wistrich recalls the case of Emma Humphreys, a 17-year-old girl who killed her pimp after years of rape, abuse and exploitation.
“She didn’t really feel that she could talk about her experience,” said Ms Wistrich.
“She remained silent. She was convicted of murder, and it was many years later that she sought help.”
Years later, Emma’s conviction was overturned – but only after she had spent over ten years in prison.
Emma was assisted in her defence by Justice for Women, a feminist law-reform group founded in 1991 by Ms Wistrich and her partner, Julie Bindel.
Three years after her release, Emma died, aged 30, of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
But her case remains emblematic of how the justice system misunderstands the realities of domestic abuse survivors.
“At least 60% of women in prison in England and Wales are victims of domestic abuse,” said Ms Wistrich.
“For most women who offend, the circumstances of the offending are often because they are victims of abuse or violence.
“It’s very commonplace and sadly I don’t think the criminal justice system is responsive to their experiences.”
She added: “The society and culture in which these laws exist pre-determine a lot of that.
“In order to really understand how a woman can become entrapped in an abusive relationship, you can’t just look at it as a single act of violence. It’s about understanding the whole dynamic of the violence and also the power differential that exists in wider society.
“If you examine the actual act of killing in a homicide trial, you’re not necessarily going to get to the bottom of why that happened unless you understand the whole history.
“And I think one of the big challenges is having a criminal justice system that works to be able to explain that otherwise, because people make all sorts of assumptions.”
Beyond legislative gaps, Ms Wistrich is concerned about organisations that are responsible for implementing the law failing to do so.
“Often, the laws exist and the laws are reasonable in themselves, but it is the way in which they’re implemented which is the problem.
“That’s partly to do with how these laws are policed, partly to do with how decisions are made about prosecutions, partly to do with the way in which our court system operates, and a number of other features.
“We need to look at ways to make the criminal justice system much more effective and to hold all those bodies to account if they’re failing to implement the laws in the right way.”
Victim testimonies in Jersey’s Violence Against Women and Girl report revealed that a lack of trust in institutions has become a “barrier” to reporting – with concerns that “emotional abuse isn’t seen as serious enough for the police”.
Ms Wistrich said: “Trust is only going to build up when you can see police are dealing with things sympathetically and urgently, and are asking the right questions and doing their job.
“But unfortunately you don’t always see that. One of the things that we do see is that there are a lot of police perpetrators in abuse.
“If you’ve ever come across a police officer who is – not simply no good or incompetent – but is actually the perpetrator, you’re never going to trust the authorities.”
This is something that Ms Wistrich is all too familiar with.
She has been fighting for justice and compensation for eight women who were tricked into relationships – some even having children – with undercover police officers from a unit set up by the Metropolitan Police.
A public inquiry that began in 2015 into undercover policing spanning more than half a century was intended to take three years, but has yet to deliver its final report.
Ms Wistrich warns that the adoption of the so-called “Spycops” act in 2021 means that further victims of undercover cops could be denied the right to seek compensation.
In her book, she writes: “Most of the women had devoted years to nurturing a relationship that was never going anywhere and some had spent many more driving themselves mad searching for a man who did not exist.”
But while undercover policing might not be common in Jersey, Ms Wistrich acknowledged the unique challenges Islanders face in reporting abuse due to the tight-knit nature of the local community.
“It must be quite a challenge here because, if it’s such a small place and everyone knows everyone’s business, it is more difficult to report abuse,” she said.
“I don’t know whether there are opportunities to report outside of Jersey, or to have some kind of reciprocal agreement where investigations could be done by people who you are sure aren’t related to or don’t know the person you’re accusing.”
And she also had a solution to offer for recent discourse around Jersey’s domestic abuse law.
More than 500 Islanders have signed a petition arguing that the law needs to recognise historic offences.
But Home Affairs Minister Mary Le Hegarat highlighted that it is a “strongly established principle of justice that new offences are not applied retrospectively on the basis that it is fundamentally unfair to criminalise someone for conduct which was not at the time of that conduct a criminal offence”.
Ms Wistrich acknowledged the difficulty in applying laws retroactively: “If they suddenly introduced a new law saying that you’re not allowed to use mobile phones, and then they suddenly started prosecuting people for using phones when it wasn’t against the law, then that would be obviously unfair.”
But she explained that creative legal approaches could still bring justice to victims whose suffering predates the law.
“Sometimes there may be ways around it, depending on what the offence is and whether there’s a way in which you can interpret it, or build it into a pre-existing law,” she said.
“I have actually had a case of a victim of coercive control – and it was before the law came in.
“We can’t then prosecute that man for coercive control, because it wasn’t an offence, but coercive control can also be broken down in some ways.
“Perhaps there were certain acts, like an act of violence, that was a standalone offence.
“Sometimes it might be impossible, but with some creative thinking, there may be a way.”
On the same day I interviewed Ms Wistrich, an annual ritual was unfolding in the UK Parliament.
For the tenth year in a row, MP Jess Phillips read out the names of women killed by men in the UK in the last 12 months.
“While it’s the extreme end of this situation, it shows how serious the threat is and how it ought to be met with the appropriate response,” said Ms Wistrich.
The Femicide Census has recorded over 2,000 such cases since 2009 – a grim reminder that failures in the justice system can have fatal consequences.
