Reform domestic violence laws

The Scottish Government has been urged to expand its domestic violence laws, which currently only recognise violence perpetrated by males against females as domestic violence.

University of Dundee law lecturer Brian Dempsey said the law as it stood rendered other victims of domestic violence invisible.

“The overwhelming emphasis on presenting domestic abuse as something that men do to women means that people such as accident and emergency nurses or GPs or housing officers just aren’t picking up on the signals that an LGBT client might need help,” Dempsey said.

“For LGBT people themselves, it’s often not worth the risk of raising the issue in an atmosphere where you don’t know if you will be taken seriously and where services all seems to be geared to female victims of male abusers. To say ‘I’m a male victim’ or to say ‘My abuser is female’ is often just too risky.”

A Scottish Government spokeswoman said its policy did not “exclude or deny other experiences, but does focus on the majority experience — that 83 percent of domestic abuse incidents recorded by the police in 2009-10 involved a female victim and male perpetrator”.