#38 

Sally Jackson from FiLiA meets: Domestic Abuse Commissioner Nicole Jacobs on Day 1 of her job.

Sally:  I'm Sally, one of the volunteers with FiLiA and I'm really excited today, on the day that it's been announced, to be joined by the new Domestic Abuse Commissioner, Nicole Jacobs. 

Nicole: Thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here and I'm a huge admirer of FiLiA and all that you do. So really happy to do this.

Sally: Thank you. And perhaps we should do a little disclosure to start with. The reason we are able to do this so swiftly is I work for a fabulous organization called Standing Together and you happen to until very, very recently been the Chief Executive of Standing Together. 

Nicole: Yeah. So we're very good friends.

Sally: So, thinking more widely. So this is a designated Domestic Abuse Commissioner.  Perhaps you could just talk a little bit about your background. I know some of the things that you've been involved in that's led you to think, actually this is an exciting place I'd like to be involved with. 

Nicole: I've worked all of my working life in domestic abuse in some fashion or another. So, you can tell for my accent I'm from the US. In my last years at university, did internships at rape crisis and that really shaped my views of what I wanted to do with my day to day life.

I did some traveling and some work in Latin America, but very quickly came back to the US and started working at a state coalition against domestic abuse. In the US, each state has an entity that represents all of the programs. I think the most similar would be like Women's Aid here.

After a few years I really wanted to move to London for personal reasons and found my way to Standing Together, which was a very new initiative and it was kind of just being talked about in the late 1990s. So 1998 Standing Together was just getting started in this notion of wanting to create a coordinated community response.

So there were some leaders in Hammersmith and Fulham who were very unique in that they were pretty visionary, fairly senior, and also from lots of different walks of life. And they came together and created an entity to really hold them to account about how much they wanted the systems to change and services to change.

And one of the very first things they did is they set up an advocacy. What we would call an IDVA service now, Independent Domestic Violence Advisory service. It wasn't called that then it was just called an advocacy service. 

And one of the first things I did was work there for a couple of years, and then it was Standing Together for another couple of years and then to make kind of a long story short I've worked in several other organisations that are national organisations or service delivery and domestic abuse but came back to Standing Together about six years ago to be the Chief Executive, because I am a true believer in the coordinated community response. 

So essentially my view is, we need to fight for a specialist services and they need to be very much at the centre of things as survivors’ voices should be, but we need to expect a lot more from any range of service that should be, you know, in the environment where they could be helping identifying early appropriately supporting people subject to domestic abuse. 

And that's exactly what I know you do, Sally. So I'm preaching to the converted with you, but that's really a huge driver as to why I wanted to take this role or try to get this role is that as it stands, the role is really about mapping of that practice. So it's, where are the specialist services? Where are they not? What about making what we call good practice, a lot more common practice. So to me, it's kind of a lifelong journey of figuring out, well, where do you want to put your time and energy to really have a concrete effect?

So that's, yeah, 20 years in two minutes. 

Sally: Yeah. And I think I was thinking about the work that we do at Standing Together, sadly, we were involved with a lot of the domestic homicide reviews and they really pick up that point that you've just made that actually there might be a really good piece of work in one area of the country but that doesn't mean that that work and that knowledge is being shared somewhere else. 

Nicole: Exactly. And we would've seen just last week an increase in domestic homicide rates being reported on widely, which is good. We should all be aware that that was happening and you're right. There's a lot of effort in reviewing what lessons there are to be learned that you could argue are we really learning the lessons? Are we seeing to it that some of the lessons are really genuinely implemented? And it is the postcode lottery. We use the phrase a lot I know in our day to day work, but it is about being very clear. It's just not a similar case across the country in Wales as well. Wales has better legislation, but I think the implementation arguments are the same, we don't have the same provision of service that we ought to have. And one of the things I really am motivated about this role, the Commissioner's role is to help define what is the breadth of service?

So we often read in the paper, cuts to refuges, or we need this, but we should be really clear what's an adequate provision of service that includes prevention, services for children, something beyond crisis. Sometimes people call that step down or further support, we need to have a higher ambition about what we should see and then name one area.

Sally: And one of the things I think today, it's been quite exciting in the office. Twitter has been going a bit bonkers.

So tell me, you’re made commissioner of such a huge and important area of domestic abuse. What happens on that first day? What sort of a day have you had today?

Nicole: Well, first of all, you wake up and you feel very intimidated. You feel super, super intimidated, partly thoughts running through your mind are about, you know, reactions of people in the sector who you really, really respect, survivors, what will people who've had experience of domestic abuse or subjected to domestic abuse, what do they feel? When they hear something like this, and will they feel kind of like, is that too removed from my day to day? 

So it's quite intimidating, but the oddity is that you kind of show up like I did this morning, my day was kind of listening. First thing on the radio of hearing my name as the Commissioner, um, seeing what people react to.

So I was really pleased that some of our colleagues were saying, we want this Commissioner to have more power. We want this Commissioner to be able to work more because it was advertised at a part-time role. Of course there'll be a whole office of the role. Lots of people who fully very soon will be working full time, but it was good to hear those things in a lot of ways.

And then I went off to a roundtable at Downing Street. And there were lots of Cabinet Ministers there and there were all of the commissioners. So there's a Children's Commissioner, there's a Victim's Commissioner, a Modern Slavery Commissioner. And then people from the Government made some announcements today related to sexual violence. So an additional £5 million pounds for sexual violence services. 

So there were a lot of stakeholders from rape crisis in various services for both men and women in sexual violence and then some of our colleagues from women's aid, they're all colleagues, but, you know, domestic abuse related kind of predominantly related services.

So it was a great discussion. And what I think is interesting to reflect on is how much there's kind of a shared view and a real honesty in those discussions about what the problems are. But I think it is about how do you implement, where is the adequate funding? And some of those things do come up.

I think people would be a little bit heartened to hear this truth spoken to power in those settings. It does inspire you to think a lot of this, it's like with anything it's in the implementation and the delivery and that's why I like the idea of the Commissioner's Office being very independent of Government and really set up by Government to hold Government to account though. And so I think it's important for the Commissioner to be really, really clear on independence and those things. And there's some great people, Vera Baird is our Victims’ Commissioner, fiercely independent and she will be a great model and someone who I'll really want to work closely alongside.

Sally: I think a lot of people will be aware over the last year, 18 months we've had consultations around the Domestic Abuse Bill and some concern whether or not it was going to go ahead and now we've had some reassurance around that. It would be interesting to know your thoughts about that, so what do we mean that it's going ahead? Is it as it is? Will it look different? Can people still get involved around what they feel is important? 

Nicole: Yes. In fact, for anyone listening, it would be great to turn your attention very carefully to the next few weeks, because what's essentially happened is the Bill was tabled in Parliament in July after a huge amount of consultation over the past year and then with the prorogation of Parliament, it essentially died. It wasn't far enough in its process to be carried over. And so it fell I guess, the term used and amazingly, there was just a lot of lobbying of government, both sides of the political aisle and also, individuals, services, all sorts of people, really lobbed the government about their outrage about that.

And so Boris Johnson did something which was a little bit unusual and that he pre-empted the Queen's Speech and he's given an assurance that it's in there and that it'll be re-introduced mid-October so I think for anyone listening, all eyes should really be on that Bill when it's reintroduced, is it reintroduced as it is, it still has some progress to make, there's amendments people would like to add to the Bill for example, there's a lot of push within our sector to add amendments to the Bill related to migrant women, women with no recourse to public funds.

So it, the Bill as it is, is good to re-enter, but then we need to even improve it a bit further. There's a lot of debate to be had about what statutory duty should the local authority have about the breadth of services. So, it's going to be a busy time and certainly anyone listening should get in touch with their MP and make sure that they are really clear how much they want their MP to be supporting and making sure that this Bill continues.

Sally: So even though Parliament isn't currently sitting, that doesn't mean that people shouldn't be just as involved in writing and speaking because they may be back in the constituencies and easier to access.

Nicole: That's such a good point, Sally, it would be better in a way to go ahead and contact now because you're right. I think in a way they're in this odd lull and one of the things that I heard quite a few cabinet ministers say today in this roundtable is they're all still constituency MPs. They all will have surgeries. And they do hear about domestic abuse and violence against women and girls in their constituency. And that's in some ways possibly how they know best about what happens to people. And so I think it is a perfect time to get in touch and make sure that everyone's supporting the legislation.

Sally: So, I mean, that's obviously a huge chunk of the work coming up and some of the things that are mentioned in the Bill.

But looking forward for you, what are the things that are kind of like at the top of your priority list? What are the things you want to start looking at early on? 

Nicole: One of the things, if I were just blatantly honest about the Bill, that it would give my office. So I'm a Designate Commissioner, which I think is a bit odd in that it kind of runs before the Bill. So the idea is as the Bill passes, I would essentially drop the term ‘Designate’ and just become the Domestic Abuse Commissioner and in the Bill that would give my office quite formal powers.

So it would allow my office to seek information from public bodies and they would have 56 days to respond, which is quite a significant power. It would give me more formalised powers to scrutinise practice. So there's some real teeth in there that will be important. It's one of many things in the Bill that are important, but it's just good to point that out, that there's a reason why for the office it's strengthened in the Bill.

 But for right now the real focus, I think is going to be this idea of mapping. So it may sound a little bit boring, but some of what we need to establish is where the services are for domestic abuse and to some extent, wider issues related to violence against women and girls, where are they not? And I would say this because you and I are both real Standing Together, coordinated community response people. But what I want to map is: Where is housing involved and not involved in our, our health trusts, mental health trusts, hospital trusts. 

There's all this kind of really great, but patchy, good work happening. And I think part of my role that that could be quite constructive is just mapping out where that is.

We at Standing Together have coordinated for years and years, specialist, domestic violence courts or domestic abuse courts. And we know how that helps support people if there's a case proceeding through the criminal justice system. And yet we don't actually really know where the rest of those courts are anymore. 

And so that would be one thing in any direction I'd love to just map and be really, really clear and have some consensus because sometimes what happens is in our specialist services will differ in our views from what the Government says is happening. So I think the role of the office that could be really constructive would be just to establish where things happening, where are they not and even without those formalised powers in the Bill, I think there's a real ability to push entities to get going on improvements that really need to be underway right now.

Sally: And I think one of the other concerns across the sector is, and you've talked about the mapping of processes are such like what health's doing, what housing's doing, but also our specialist sectors. So we mentioned migrant women before. But you know, we have lost quite a lot of our specialist BME staff so will that be part of that mapping? 

Nicole: Definitely, definitely. it's interesting, I was getting quite a few questions on that in the last couple of days from journalists. And I was saying, obviously I have the, the utmost trust in the reports that some of our colleagues have put out in terms of cuts to services.

and I think to some degree, what I would like to try to do is shine a light on that and really strengthen that argument.

One of the things that struck me just even this morning, sitting in this round table, there was a woman who was from the Manchester area and she was a survivor of sexual violence. And she talked about how the entity that really helped her was this very small charity in her local area. And I think quite a few people missed this one comment she made, which was the women in that charity who were using those services were fundraising themselves for the service. And I think it went over some people's heads, but I mean, essentially what she's saying is, that service is not adequately funded and that the people using the service are going out doing their own fundraising, which is all great. However, you know, they should have some core funding and so many smaller charities are rooted in particular communities. I think it's kind of easy to think, oh, we could get some of these larger charities and come in and do this quite blanketed approach, but that's really not what works for people. We need to really cherish and really invest in smaller charities rooted in communities.

And often that would be our BME specialist services as you know, as part and parcel of that. So I would definitely want to do that. Please be in touch anyone who's interested in that 

Sally: So I'm just kind of thinking in sort of wrapping up, we've got the FiLiA conference just a few weeks away. Which we are really excited about. It would be really great perhaps in a year's time to have you at FiLiA talking about your first year. 

Nicole: Yes. It'd be amazing. I'd be really honoured. Of course. Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Sally: Fantastic. Well, I think, you know that one of the things that's come across for me on Twitter today, which has been lovely, we, as an organisation are so proud of you and so pleased that it's someone like you that's in the role, but obviously we are biased, but it's been really clear throughout the sector today how this sector is supportive of the appointment and I think what will be most helpful in the months going forward is that we have got someone who listens and puts survivor’s voices first and understands the nuances around domestic abuse, so we wish you every luck in the post I know you're absolutely the right woman for the job. 

Nicole: Just today I was in this Millbank studio going around to these different interviews, which is not something I'm used to doing as you know, and I was very intimidated about it.

There was a woman helping me with my microphone and I ended up kind of being in and out of her studio a couple of times. And she said to me, as we walked out, about her own experience of domestic abuse, being subject to domestic abuse and how it had affected her health, in her long term health. And I was just really grateful that she felt she could say that. And it was very grounding. So in the middle of all that, if I had forgotten temporarily, it's not about me, trust me, that got me right back to my feet on the ground because I just thought, I hope in some ways that really helped her today realising there is momentum and there are things moving forward. I was just really thankful she was able to share that with me. 

So definitely feet on the ground, ready to get working and thank you for the opportunity to just communicate to the network and FiLiA and I, again, just love, love all of what you all are doing. And I know there's so many volunteers behind the effort, so anything I can do to help ever, ever, ever, so you've got it on tape. Thank you very much.