The enactment of the Domestic Violence Act needed to be followed-up with a national plan to tackle domestic violence and the allocation of sufficient funding to the agencies which came into contact with this problem, Opposition social affairs spokesman Marie-Louise Coleiro has told Parliament.

Ms Coleiro said that despite the social yearning for the bill, it was important to consider it as just a part of the framework that needed to be brought into effect to tackle domestic violence. Other elements included preventative measures such as education at schools and close cooperation between the police and the departments of education and social security. The more the government spent on pre-empting social problems now, the less problems there would be to solve later.

Ms Coleiro said victims of domestic violence should not only be given shelter and help, but assistance should also be given to the aggressors. Various NGOs were doing sterling work in the sector, as were Church institutions.

In calling for a national plan on domestic violence, Ms Coleiro said reports by the proposed Commission on Domestic Violence should be discussed by the House Social Affairs Committee since parliamentary discussion helped to ensure that action on domestic violence would not be sporadic but ongoing.

Ms Coleiro asked what sort of budget the commission has. Would it be some sort of small secretariat within the Ministry of Family and Social Affairs?

What coordination would there would be between the commission and the organisations already working on domestic violence?

Ms Coleiro said the people manning Supportline 179 were doing very good work, but they should have more access to practical solutions at any time of day or night. There was no doubt that this system needed a superior infrastructure to what was currently available.

It was commendable that the bill raised incidents of domestic violence to the level of criminal offences. But while domestic violence was being defined, there was no specific definition of harassment. It was disturbing that the bill spoke of "particular circumstances" without specifying them, creating problems of interpretation.

It did not make sense for the bill to set a penalty for harassment without specifying what constituted the crime itself.

The concept of protection orders introduced in the bill was important, she said. But what would happen once the protection order lapsed after its six months and the case was still being heard in court?

Anglu Farrugia, Opposition spokesman for justice, said that more people were becoming conscious of the need to report cases of domestic violence.

In 1988/89 the number of domestic violence court cases numbered 83, but 69 of them were withdrawn, often because of threats by the aggressor or by third parties.

In 1996/97, 321 cases of domestic violence were reported. In 1999, there had been 290 reports of domestic violence on women and 15 on men.

A 2001 report by Dr Savona Ventura had found that among 339 pregnant women that 11.7 per cent were violently attacked by their husbands.

Dr Farrugia said that the Labour government had immediately set up a committee to discuss the problem, and a white paper had been drawn up.

The committee had done a lot of work, so why had it taken so long to move a bill on such a national problem ? Domestic violence was frequent. There were women who had to give all their earnings to their husbands, who left them deprived of income. There were also cases where women were not even allowed to contact their friends. This was also a form of violence. So the definition of domestic violence had to be as wide-ranging as possible.

The bill was a step forward to better address domestic violence. But protection for the victim had to improve too.

Neither the victim nor her relatives should keep any contact with the aggressor.

Dr Farrugia observed that the definition of domestic violence related to people in the same household. He suggested it should also include people in a relationship who did not, however, live in the same household.

Dr Farrugia expressed his concern with regard to child victims of domestic violence whose evidence would be needed in Court. There should be safeguards for such children when they were required to give evidence.

The Labour MP insisted that adequate funding should be available to the Appogg agency to enable it to care for and protect the victims of domestic violence.

He insisted on the need for a tighter definition of the words "threats" and "harassment" in the Bill.

Noel Farrugia (MLP) said domestic violence would not be solved by legislation alone. Indeed, there were several structures in the country, which, with better coordination, could already have made greater headway in tackling this problem. Local councils as well as the support services could be involved in a network of services to help people finding themselves in these circumstances. There could also have been better training for the police. All this could have been done without waiting for new laws. Unfortunately care services did not feature much in the agenda of local councils.

It was unfortunate that most health centres were no longer open at all hours, and this exacerbated the problems for victims of domestic violence.

The government had to understand that the voluntary sector was limited in time and money, and it was necessary that the bill being debated would also be reflected in proper funding in next year's budget.

Nationalist MP Franco Galea said children were a mirror of the environment they lived in. There should be coordination between teachers and social workers to look into the causes of unsocial behaviour, such as bullying.

Cases of domestic violence needed to be decided quickly by the courts in order to ease hardship. The minister should commission a study to see what factors led people to become violent and to see what was being done now to protect children from becoming violent adults in time.

One had to look at IT and television and impose, if necessary, some form of control on what children were being exposed to.

He said gambling was leading many children and families to suffer; it led usury people to resort to domestic violence too. Other results were drugs and alcohol abuse.

Michael Farrugia, opposition health spokesman, spoke of the need for psychologists to be involved in cases of domestic violence.

In many cases, aggressors should be referred to psychologists before social workers or the police became involved. In that way the professionals could reveal any underlying problems which may have caused violence.

On the other hand, aggressors also caused psychological problems to their victims, and these, too, needed to be addressed professionally. Threats, for example, were much more serious than physical violence. Therefore it was good that the law envisaged situations of threats under domestic violence.

Children too may need psychological help to get over the trauma of having witnessed domestic violence, lest they became violent themselves when they grew up.

Dr Farrugia referred to the proposed Commission on Domestic Violence and asked whether its advisory and coordinating role could be handled by Appogg instead.

He underlined the drugs problem as a potential source of domestic violence, resorted to in order to extort money from the household for the purchase of drugs.

Dr Farrugia concluded by calling for a greater number of trained social workers and for victims of domestic violence to be given financial assistance to bring their cases to court.

Justice and Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg spoke on various innovations in this law and in other laws which had preceded it but which were related.

For example, he said, legislation was amended a few years ago so that the victim could be present in court during the hearing of evidence. Before that, only the accused could stay in court throughout the proceedings.

Legislation had also been amended so that witnesses did not necessarily have to face the alleged aggressor when they gave evidence.

Another major milestone had been the creation of the Family Court, which had improved facilities and expertise for family-related cases.

Turning to the bill, Dr Borg said the setting up of the commission had been criticised. Yet this was not a body corporate, an institution or an entity but a group of professional people who would have the main responsibility of educating the people in general.

He said police officers were being trained on how to tackle problems of domestic violence and the perception of the people vis-à-vis the police force had to change. Domestic violence was being given due importance like other crimes.

One had to be cautious, because not all households incidents should be considered domestic violence.

Dr Borg said the new law would provide that when the police received a report they could act ex-officio, without the need for a formal application through a lawyer, however serious the case was. To date it had only been in serious cases that the police acted immediately.

Furthermore, in terms of the bill, once a case ended up in court, a magistrate could decide that proceedings should be continued even if there was a request for discontinuation. The court could decide that it would not be in the interests of the children that a case was discontinued. There may also be cases where the victim was threatened by the aggressor and forced to request discontinuation. But the court could, for example, decide for discontinuation, if, say, there was reconciliation.

Another reform involved harassment, which went further than stalking. There was no clear definition of harassment in order to allow the courts to decide whether harassment would really have taken place.

Interjecting, Joe Brincat (MLP) said molestation would be a better word than harassment in terms of this bill.

Continuing, Dr Borg said that to date, following a person from a block away was not considered a crime yet it could amount to harassment and psychological violence.

The bill was introducing safeguards before incidents, during court proceedings and after. The courts may issue restraining, protection and treatment orders. The Protection Order could be issued on reasonable grounds to protect the victim or other persons, such as witnesses. The accused may be ordered not to approach or speak to such people. Such conditions may be imposed even if the accused was not arraigned when under arrest. And such protection orders would be transformed into restraining orders for a maximum of three years once judgment was handed down.

Perhaps in time, this regime could also be made applicable to other crimes as well, such as anti-social behaviour.

The court may also issue a treatment order for the aggressor, another innovative feature which would be extended to other crimes.

Gavin Gulia, opposition spokesman for home affairs, said Dr Borg had mentioned three reforms as if to show that the government had been doing something about domestic violence. These included that the aggrieved party could be present in court during procedures, that victims of sexual abuse would not be in court in the presence of the accused and that the Family Court had been set up. But none of the reforms had anything to do with domestic violence in actual fact. And it was Labour that was the originator of most of those ideas anyway. But Dr Borg was now claiming credit without giving due credit to Labour.

Dr Borg had chosen to mention the Family Court only in its criminal capacity, wherein it could hear cases of domestic violence, without people having to go from one hall to another. Dr Gulia invited Dr Borg to visit the Family Court and see how alleged victims of domestic violence were treated to more of the same in the corridors of that court. Psychological violence was much worse than physical violence sometimes. There was no such thing as confidentiality in these circumstances.

Dr Gulia said he was looking forward to working with the government on hammering out a clear definition of domestic violence in the bill's committee stage.

Giving the term the widest possible scale of meaning by leaving that meaning vague would be counter-productive.

By contrast, the white paper prepared by the Labour government had sought to give domestic violence the most specific meaning possible by including all possible scenarios. What needed to be done now was to go back to the "Labour" meanings and amalgamate them with the current bill's provisions.

It was a good thing to increase penalties as a deterrent, but this left real doubts as to the treatment given to both victim and perpetrator of domestic violence, concluded Dr Gulia.

Michael Asciak (PN) underlined the importance of training in cases of domestic violence involving children. There was a particular case where inhabitants of a block of flats used to call him and say they could hear a co-inhabitant sexually abusing his partner's children. But whenever a social worker visited the family she reported back that it was a normal family. It later transpired that the social worker was afraid even to enter the home, and reported on her impressions from the front door. This showed the pitfalls inherent in the present system.