"Anyone intimately involved in a situation should be able to access information through the life of the issue.... even (as long as proper controls were in place) a good Samaritan who stopped to help." I respectfully disagree with that specific point for a great many reasons. The main one being that there are already organisations who will help domestic abuse victims, but the last thing people who have survived that situation need is to have a permanent record that can be accessed by any "good Samaritan" which discloses this information - information which many women find deeply shaming. Given that some women who are badly abused change their identities, anything permanent that can be accessed by anyone puts their lives, and often the lives of any children they have, in immediate and real danger. Not to mention that allowing wider audiences to know which women have a long history of abuse amounts to a kind of Argos Catalogue for abusers themselves. I don't have the details to hand but I read a few years back about a man who deliberately initated an (abusive) relationship a woman he'd met after seeing police called to her house - it flagged her up as "victim material" and as I recall nearly cost her her life.