In the last fortnight, in my capacity as one of the Law Officers of the Crown, I visited the charity ‘Standing Together’ which works to protect the thousands of women and men who are subjected to violence at home.
The charity has three main aims:
- keep survivors and their families safe,
- hold abusers to account and
- preventing and ultimately ending domestic abuse.
These aims are achieved by supporting public services that were not specifically designed for dealing with domestic violence. Their system of treating and preventing domestic violence, called Coordinated Community Response, has received international recognition for the positive impact that it has on the local community.
At the meeting I met and talked to two women who are survivors of domestic abuse and we talked about working with people within the criminal justice sector to improve the way we deal with and prevent domestic violence. Indeed, it is clear that Standing Together have an extremely good record carrying out these important functions.