A Million Women Rise march in London, 7 March 2026. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images View image in fullscreen A Million Women Rise march in London, 7 March 2026. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images Opinion Domestic violence What kind of society fast-tracks early release for domestic abusers? This is gambling with women’s lives Joan Smith Andy Burnham inherited the crisis in our prison system – but the solution cannot be to further endanger the women and children who have survived violence
I t’s time to be blunt: the government is about to expose hundreds of vulnerable women to the risk of death or serious injury. Survivors of domestic abuse, including women who have suffered years of physical violence and intimidation, are now preparing for the moment in October when 5,000 prisoners begin to be released early . What are these women supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go? Their abusers know where they live. They know where their children go to school.
Following an outcry, rapists and some child sex offenders have been excluded from the early release scheme. But by refusing to exclude men convicted of domestic violence, this government is sending a message that this category of crime – serial in nature and implicated in the deaths of one woman every five days – is simply not a priority.
In 2023, Keir Starmer promised to cut violence against women by half in a decade. It was an eye-catching pledge, although not obviously assisted by his proposal, when he became prime minister, to allow thousands of convicted criminals back on to the streets. No one denies that Andy Burnham has inherited an overcrowding crisis in UK prisons, but his solution – in effect, accepting the previous government’s plan with a few changes – involves taking a huge gamble with women’s lives.
For eight years, I was co-chair of the mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board. I saw the devastating extent of intimate partner abuse and the chronic shortage of resources to support victims. I studied domestic homicide reviews with a shudder, seeing how one opportunity after another to save women’s lives had been missed. Now, in the midst of a justified furore, Burnham and his justice minister, Alex Norris, can’t claim they haven’t been warned.
View image in fullscreen The domestic abuse commissioner, Dame Nicole Jacobs, says the decision not to exclude domestic abuse perpetrators from this scheme “puts victims’ lives at risk”, adding: “These are individuals who are fixated on their victim and will stop at nothing to control and cause harm.” Intimate partner violence has special characteristics, including the fact that men seething with resentment towards former wives and girlfriends are all too likely to reoffend.
The data is limited – reoffending rates among men convicted of domestic abuse are not listed separately but hidden among other offences, including violence against the person, criminal damage and arson. Recent incidents of public disorder have confirmed that men who abuse partners have a wider propensity for violence; most people arrested for violent protests after the sentencing of Henry Nowak’s murderer had previously been reported to the police for domestic abuse, for instance. In my book Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists, I pointed out that many men who commit public acts of extreme violence have histories of first abusing their families.
What we do know is that the proportion of released prisoners who go on to…