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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I will write on this matter, but I think that here the noble and learned Baroness is wrong. As far as I understand it, the Supreme Court did not accept the ACPO definition of domestic violence. If the noble and learned Baroness will bear with me, I will come to that point in the brief—there is a part that deals with this. Any consideration of the definition in one paragraph should not be undertaken entirely in isolation from the others, lest confusion should result. The definition should also be seen in the light of the Bill’s structure and the purpose of the paragraph where it appears. I want to know—““like most normal people””, I was going to say—why on earth, if there is a perfectly good ACPO definition, we do not use it. The Supreme Court held that domestic violence could extend to psychological abuse but did not adopt the ACPO definition. However, the majority of the court indicated approval of the approach of what is now Practice Direction 12J, supporting the Family Procedure Rules 2010. For its purposes, it defines domestic violence as, "““physical violence, threatening or intimidating behaviour and any other form of abuse which, directly or indirectly, may have caused harm to the other party or to the child or which may give rise to the risk of harm””."