Finally, the law is catching up to domestic abusers who target their victims online

Twenty years ago, the idea of angry spouses using social media platforms to vilify former partners would have seemed outlandish. Now, under new sentencing guidelines on domestic abuse, people who use sites like Facebook to attack current or former partners are likely to face prison sentences.

It’s part of a new policy of treating domestic offences more seriously than similar crimes that don’t involve partners or family members – and a very welcome example of the law catching up with technology. The new guidelines recognise that domestic offences involve a ‘violation of trust and security’, while advances in technology allow former partners to pose a continuing threat to victims’ safety and peace of mind.

The law in this area is changing fast. No one had heard of 'revenge porn' until high-profile women and vulnerable teenagers alike discovered, to their horror, that private sexual material had been posted online. In a previous shake-up of the law in 2015, revenge porn became a specific criminal offence and now carries a sentence of up to two years in prison.

Now that most adults are on Facebook, however, it is all too easy to post abusive comments and outright lies about former partners. Some women say they have had to remove themselves from social media sites altogether to avoid children and friends reading distressing posts from ex-husbands or boyfriends. Women aren't immune either, with a small number of men complaining about similar behaviour.

The new guidelines will address the problem, but it also shows how fast abusive behaviour - and our understanding of it - is changing. As recently as 12 years ago, sentencing guidelines warned that domestic offences should be seen as ‘no less serious’ than other crimes, reflecting that fact that many people still talked about violence in the home as ‘just a domestic’. 

Also in 2015, the law took a big step forward when a new offence of coercive or controlling behaviour came into effect, recognising extreme psychological and emotional abuse for the first time. This month, the Court of Appeal will hear the case of Sally Challen who, after decades of abuse at the hands of her husband of 31 years, killed him in their home.

It was designed to help victims whose lives are completely controlled by a dominating partner. Such behaviour is now taken so seriously that it carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. But while no one doubts the good intentions of ministers, there is a question about how widely new laws relating to domestic abuse are being used.

At the end of last year, it emerged that only 532 charges of coercive or controlling behaviour had been brought in England since 2015, despite the fact that more than 4,000 offences were recorded in England and Wales in a single year. 

Police forces have a raft of new powers to deal with domestic abuse yet the take-up of mechanisms such as domestic violence prevention orders (which allow senior officers or magistrates to temporarily ban dangerous offenders from their homes) has been disappointing.  The reasons include poor training of front-line officers and, in some egregious cases, a failure to appreciate how much danger individual women face from ex-partners.

In one recent case, a woman was murdered by a former boyfriend after police took her mobile phone to look for evidence against him, leaving her with no means of calling for help.

But there is also a significant problem of resources, especially after a period when police numbers were cut. Police numbers fell by 21,500 while Theresa May was Home Secretary, a response to big falls in recorded crime since the 1990s. In fact, crime has fallen in some areas but it is rising in others - recorded rapes in London rose by 19 per cent in the 12 months to September 2017, for instance.

National figures released in January confirm the trend, showing that the number of violent and sexual crimes recorded by police forces in England and Wales rose sharply in the last year. The cuts have been heavily criticised, along with calls for more money to be made available for policing. 

In the specific area of domestic abuse, a more sophisticated understanding of what it entails has increased police workloads, requiring officers to spend more time building up cases under new laws they might not fully understand.

That is why some campaigners will respond to the new guidelines relating to abuse via social media with two cheers - or a weary sigh. Updating the law is a good thing but it raises expectations of victims, some of whom may not get the response they were hoping for.

It is an important principle that when the behaviour of offenders changes, the law should change in response. Of course people should be held to account if they use technology to abuse ex-partners. But victims need to know that the police will get the training and resources they need to put all these new guidelines into effect.