Content warning: this blog post contains discussion of domestic abuse. Please read with care – information on where to find support is listed at the end of this blog.
Police Scotland recorded 63,000 incidents of domestic abuse in 2019/2020 with women making up the majority of victims – the highest figure in twenty years.[i] However, researchers continue to estimate that it is widely under-reported and that the true extent remains unknown. The under-reporting of domestic abuse is not new. The 1988 Scottish Crime Survey of crimes not known to the police found that domestic abuse was common, gendered with under-reporting likely to be common: women were the victims in a third of all violent incidents, a quarter of which happened in the home; 80% of offenders were male; with 40% of offenders either husband/ex-husband, current/former boyfriend, a male relative or other male member of the household.[ii] Women’s reasons for not reporting was a key focus for my oral history research into domestic abuse in post-war Scotland. Answers were found in the narratives of women survivors, police, social work and voluntary sector professionals. Women’s reluctance and fear of approaching public agencies was mirrored in professional practices which were largely hostile to them. Moreover, these had remained largely unchanged from the 1960s until the 1990s and were compounded by a long-standing mistrust of the police and social workers in many Scottish working class communities.
Even that night when I did fear for my life…I never thought about phoning the police. (Woman survivor 1980s)
I don’t remember women ever calling on their own behalf. (Police officer 1980s)
Nobody calls the police. Nobody ever called the police. (Woman describing 1970s)
The previous blogs in this series have provided evidence that late twentieth century Scotland was still a highly patriarchal society in its laws, religion, education, social and economic policy, employment, and social norms. The patriarchal male provider/female homemaker family structure was woven into the British post-war welfare state. Customs protecting family privacy remained strong. Women ‘made their beds’ and what went on between couples behind closed doors was no one else’s business. Police and social workers were reluctant to intervene when men were violent towards their wives/partners; attitudes were also characterised by anti-women bias and blame with violence ‘a rational, if not legitimate, aggression, when it is used to chastise a wayward wife’. [iii] Interventions aimed to keep couples together and maintain the family as an economic unit. Investigations were reserved for cases of severe violence, murder or where children were being harmed.
Policing domestic abuse
Police forces in Scotland turn a blind eye to wife beating. Police attitudes to domestic violence were very unfortunate, both from the point of view of the women involved and for society as a whole. It seemed that Scots lived in a society which accepted the use of violence by a husband against his wife.
Dr Rebecca Dobash quoted in The Scotsman 6/11/77.
The Parliamentary Select Committee on Violence in Marriage – 1975, recommended that ‘Chief Constables review the police approach to domestic violence’. However, I found evidence that the police response to violence against wives remained minimal, consistent and unchanged from the 1960s until the late 1980s.
Domestic abuse lacked the recognition of the serious nature of what it was at that time. It was an epidemic. (Police officer 1980s).
In the 1980s, police training in non-interference was standard,
“See before we go in here son? This is between a man and a woman and we’re no’ getting involved in this.” That was actually before we arrived at the front door. Aye keep it in your own house, keep it private, this is what you do (Police officer 1980s).
The preservation of family privacy in front-line policing reflected policy and practice in the criminal justice system more widely.
Leave it alone, it’s a private family matter.”…it was kind of “better not, it was up to them to sort it out”. (Civil Servant, Scottish Office Justice Dept. 1970s)
Causal links were also drawn between alcohol and ‘wife beating’ with repeat visits considered a tiresome and timewasting feature of working class life. One criminal justice social worker recalled being told by police officers in the 1980s,
“We’re fed up going to this address every Saturday night. He comes home, she calls the police, we go, both drunk and then Monday morning she comes and says she wants to change her mind or we take him away and keep him in the cells overnight…what good are we doing and how much good public money is being wasted here?”
The attitudes of individual officers were also important,
We have observed the unhelpfulness of police when called into a battering situation. Things seem to hinge on the attitude of the officer involved, and the way he [sic] chooses to make use of the power he [sic] has. It would help if women were recommended to WA by police on the spot, but this seldom occurs.
(SWA Annual Report 1980)
Police officers minimised their interventions in ‘domestics’ and focussed instead on stopping couples fighting, reducing the impact of drinking and restoring calm. Men were verbally reprimanded, often removed temporarily, and released without charge. Violent husbands could be provoked into assaulting the officers then charged with breach of the peace – a ‘stairheid breach’[iv].
I was fighting with this guy and him lying on top of me and I’ve got his hands behind his back and I’m saying to my neighbour “Cuff him!”. That was a domestic incident an’ he was getting arrested in effect because he lashed out at us when we arrived.
Domestic abuse cases remained a low priority for police in Scotland into the 1980s with investigations reserved for cases of ‘severe’ violence, murder or where children were being harmed.
In the eighties, we were chasing drug dealers and guns and robbers and Starsky and Hutch an’ a’ that stuff… I was in the CID pretty young… I didnae want tae go tae domestics. (Police officer 1980s).
For women, reporting to the police made their experiences public and was also regarded as shameful, a waste of time and could lead to violent reprisals by aggrieved husbands.
They’d lock him up for the night but he was always back in the morning, fighting furious because I’d shopped him. (Woman survivor 1960s)
Women’s lack of knowledge of the Scots legal system and the requirement for corroboration, made prosecution difficult while successful convictions, fines and imprisonment could leave women financially disadvantaged and stigmatised. Women often withdrew their complaints.
A particularly violent case, which included medical evidence of severe injury, did not proceed further because the accused’s wife had to identify her assailant in court. She never spoke up and it got kicked into touch. He waved tae us in the court. I always remember him waving to us. (Police officer 1980s)
The police and criminal justice system remained male-dominated professions into the late 20th century despite the provisions of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act.
There were still calendars up on the wall… it was quite misogynist there’s no doubt about that aw aye. (Police officer 1980s+)
Sexist attitudes permeated all levels of the criminal justice system and often trivialised male violence against women.
Some of these women might well deserve the batterings they get from their husbands.
Nicholas Fairbairn Scotland’s Solicitor General 1979-1982
With no policies to address domestic abuse perpetrated by their own staff, there were times where fellow police officers dealt with the matter unofficially.
Male colleagues of a woman officer whose officer husband was violent towards her took matters into their own hands and four of the senior cops went up and leathered him. (Police officer 1970s+)
Signs of change emerged in the late 1980s. Following the Glasgow Rape Case (1980), studies[v] found that police responses to women reporting sexual assault were belligerent with an institutional presumption that the complainer was falsifying facts. In an effort to address this, Female & Child Units (FACU) were established in every police division to deal with incidents of rape and sexual assault, indecent exposure, cot deaths, wife assaults, child cruelty, missing persons and absconders. In a radical departure, the units were: ‘staffed by specially trained female officers who assist both CID and uniform personnel in the investigation of crime and incidents involving women and children and emphasised the support needs of women and child victims’.
Social work responses to domestic abuse
As soon as you mentioned social work… that was it, you wouldn’t have seen that woman again.
(Women’s Aid Worker – Scotland 1980s)
Women’s fear of social work involvement in their lives in late twentieth century Scotland was neither uncommon nor unfounded.
Until it was overhauled by The Social Work (Scotland) Act of 1968, social work was the responsibility of a number of voluntary sector agencies, parish/church organisations and municipal authorities. The Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC) for example, had an extensive national network of Inspectors -‘Cruelty Men’. Interventions were designed to support the patriarchal family, prevent family breakup and creating an additional financial burden on the public purse. By the 1960s, a new vision of social work emerged influenced by contemporary sociological and class-based analyses of society. The Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 broadened the purpose of social work in Scotland beyond a focus on poor and working class families, and undertook to ‘promote social welfare‘ across whole communities. Social work education was professionalised and new local and national government organisational structures and accountability mechanisms were introduced. However there is evidence that the legacy of class-based, patriarchal attitudes to marriage and domestic abuse in social work practice continued into the late 1980s.
Like the police, social workers regarded domestic abuse as a private matter strongly linked to excess drinking and violence in working class communities with solutions clearly focussed on preserving family unity.
The focus of the work, the meetings and everything we had was to try and reconcile the family, but the focus of the work was definitely around her alcohol consumption. Unwittingly we were overlooking the fact that her alcohol consumption might be related to the life she was living. We weren’t ignoring it but we were overlooking it. (Social worker 1980s)
I was a newly qualified social worker and was taken to task by my Senior for supporting this young woman to have left her violent partner because marriage was a special institution and I shouldn’t have been encouraging this young woman to be leaving her marriage behind. (Social worker 1980s)
. Women faced a hostile social work response,
The social work response in those days were really, really punitive and was almost about policing the household. If this man was thought to be dangerous, then it was this woman’s responsibility to keep her children safe and at that time the piece of legislation of the Children’s Act, the grounds for referral to the Reporter, would have been about a failure to protect. So women not only had been beaten and abused but were then accused of failing to protect their children and sometimes that was used in a very directive way. Women were faced with a treacherous double bind. It’s every woman’s nightmare, she’s been assaulted by her husband, hit by plates and we’re gonnae take that child off her into care unless she leaves this man.
(Social worker 1980s+)
Direct interventions with abusive husbands and fathers were largely confined to severe cases and threats to remove the children from the home. Carried out by senior social workers in some cases, these could be hyper-masculine, highly punitive and often aggressive.
The manager would speak to the perpetrator and say, “enough’s enough, this has got to stop, we’re watching you. If this continues…”. And there was always a kind of a veiled threat of “We’ll be taking these children away, we can’t put up with that.” I wouldn’t say it was as strong as machismo, but there was certainly a degree of eh… masculinity it was like ‘you’d better stop that.’ That was the approach, it was terrible to say that but it was. (Social worker 1980s+)
Social workers had extensive statutory powers of intervention. However, deep-seated nervousness around family privacy and challenging male dominance in the home compounded by a lack of training prevented workers from directly asking about domestic abuse even when they were aware that it was going on.
I had discomfort about asking that direct question. That discomfort came from a notion of intruding in someone’s private life – I didn’t feel comfortable about it; and also the idea I suppose that the person might be experiencing a bit of shame and by opening up that dialogue I suppose some of us felt that we were eh…it was easier, it was easier to say “are you ok?” and leave it at that. (Social worker 1980s)
My research showed that Scottish police and social work retained a role in enforcing patriarchal norms until the 1990s. Their lack of effective intervention and prevention in cases of domestic abuse played an important role in the private and public oppression of Scottish women and upheld the dominant role of men in the family. Professionals’ reluctance to intervene, their indifference and often hostility to the plight of abused women did nothing to encourage women to seek help. For women, the twofold dangers of reporting – from their husbands and from public authorities – ensured women’s continued silence.
Signs of change
By the early 1990s signs of a change in the public mood and in professional responses to domestic abuse began to emerge. In addition to the introduction of Police FACUs in 1987 there was increased media attention on the lives of ‘battered women’ due to the campaigning of the Scottish Women’s Liberation and Women’s Aid Movements. The recommendations of the Select Committee on VAW back in 1975 on the need for women’s refuges led to an expansion of the national network of refuges in Scotland in the 1980s through public funding. Women’s Aid groups and Scottish Women’s Aid employed dedicated workers focussed on improving legal, policy and practice responses to women and children experiencing domestic abuse. Research by the Dobashes’ in 1970s contributed to academic and professional understanding of the nature and extent of the problem and the shortcomings of legal, policy and practice responses. Their work also informed the creation in the 1980s of Scotland’s first court-mandated group-work programmes for domestic abuse perpetrators. In 1992 the first public domestic abuse prevention campaign was launched by Edinburgh City Council and was very quickly replicated nationwide. In the final decade of the twentieth century, the Zero Tolerance campaign marked a turning point in Scotland’s long domestic abuse story.
This is the fifth in a series of essays being posted in spring and summer 2021 to accompany a webinar series hosted by Scottish Women’s Aid during April and May 2021. The final essay in the series:
- Why she didn’t just leave. Getting free – the impact of domestic abuse and leaving an abusive relationship in the c1960-1990.
*This research is also featured in the BBC Radio Scotland Time Travels Podcast ‘Women, Witchcraft and Violence’.
Dr Anni Donaldson
Twitter: @AnniDonaldson
Website: www.glasgowanni.com
If you feel scared of your partner or ex-partner, or if you are worried about someone you know, get in touch with Scotland’s 24-hour Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline on 0800 027 1234 for support and information. You can also email and web chat from www.sdafmh.org.uk. There are translation and interpreting services available.
[i] https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/19390267.domestic-abuse-incidents-recorded-police-scotland-reach-shameful-20-year-high/
[ii] Kinsey, R. (1992). Crime and the quality of life : public perceptions and experiences of crime in Scotland : findings from the 1988 British Crime Survey. Edinburgh], Edinburgh : Scottish Office, Central Research Unit.
[iii] Maynard, M. (1985). “The response of social workers to domestic violence.” In Pahl, J. (1985), Private Violence and Public Policy: The Needs of Battered Women and the Response of the Public Services.
[iv] ‘Stairheid’ – colloquial pronunciation of ‘stair-head’ in the west of Scotland, the landing outside flats in tenement properties. ‘Breach’ – short for ‘Breach of the peace’ an offence in Scots law.
[v] Chambers, G. A. and Millar, A. R. (1983). Investigating sexual assault. Edinburgh, Edinburgh Scottish Office, Central Research Unit.
Chambers, G. A. and Millar, A. R. (1986). Prosecuting sexual assault. Edinburgh, H.M.S.O. for the Scottish Office Central Research Unit.
