Islanders should be offered the opportunity to report abuse outside of Jersey to ensure investigations can be carried out by people who do not know the accused, a leading UK women’s rights solicitor has suggested.
Harriet Wistrich acknowledged that it is “more difficult to report abuse” in small places like Jersey where “everyone knows everyone’s business”.
She suggested that the island could enter into a reciprocal agreement with another jurisdiction to allow investigations to “be done by people that you are sure aren’t related to or don’t know the person you’re accusing”.
Ms 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 was speaking to Express before her keynote speech at Freeda’s International Women’s Day breakfast this morning.
It comes after 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 explained: “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.”
The top lawyer also had a solution to offer for recent discourse around Jersey’s domestic abuse law.
More than 500 islanders 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,” she said.
But the solicitor 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.”