Mouthpiece: No excuse for abuse laws

If you're very lucky, you will never have been affected by domestic abuse.

Chances are, though, that even if you haven't experienced it yourself, you will know someone who has. Around one in five women in Scotland has experienced abuse by an intimate partner. The police recorded 53,681 incidents of domestic abuse in Scotland in 2008/9.

Nearly 20 per cent of those incidents ended up being charged as breach of the peace.

That covers a wide range of behaviour - "conduct severe enough to cause alarm to ordinary people and threaten severe disturbance to the community".

Often, when the police are called to a domestic abuse incident, they find the woman scared, distressed, but with no signs of obvious injury. In these cases, standard practice would be to charge her partner with breach of the peace.

Following an Appeal Court ruling earlier this month, however, breach of the peace may no longer apply to situations within a private home.

It doesn't matter how much a man terrorises the woman; if it happens indoors, and the neighbours don't complain, it's not a breach of the peace because no-one in "the community" has been disturbed.

The Appeal Court did not dispute that the woman may have been very distressed by what happened. Their concern was that it was not "public" enough to be a breach of the peace.

For me, this raises a very big question - whose peace are we talking about? The message this decision sent to women who are abused by their partners is - "not yours".

When I heard about this decision by the Appeal Court, it felt like a door had slammed shut on all those women.

The Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010 will introduce a new offence of "threatening or abusive behaviour" which won't be as limited. It will be small comfort to the women concerned.

• Lily Greenan is manager of Scottish Women's Aid