Domestic violence in England and Wales

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (12) ◽  
pp. 169 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 174889581988094
Author(s):  
Paul McGorrery ◽  
Marilyn McMahon

The offence of controlling or coercive behaviour came into effect in England and Wales in December 2015, and related offences have since been enacted in Scotland and Ireland. To date, there has been almost no empirical evaluation of the operationalisation of the new English and Welsh offence. This article fills that gap by analysing media reports relating to 107 individuals convicted of controlling or coercive behaviour, providing a profile of offenders and victims (gender and age), the types of abusive behaviours offenders engaged in and how the cases progressed through the criminal justice system (manner of conviction, sentencing outcomes). Media reporting of these cases is also discussed. The results suggest that the offence is (appropriately) operationalised in a highly gendered manner, that it has captured a diverse range of behaviours that would not previously have been considered criminal, and that media reports of this form of domestic violence have not demonstrated the negativity towards victims identified in previous studies. Further research of primary data is required to confirm these findings.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Walby ◽  
Jude Towers

The article assesses three approaches to domestic violence: two that use the concept of ‘coercive control’ and one that uses ‘domestic violent crime’. These are: Stark’s concept of coercive control; Johnson’s distinction between situational couple violence and intimate terrorism, in which coercive control is confined to the latter; and that of domestic violent crime, in which all physical violence is conceptualized as coercive and controlling. The article assesses these three approaches on seven issues. It offers original analysis of data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales concerning variations in repetition and seriousness in domestic violent crime. It links escalation in domestic violent crime to variations in the economic resources of the victim. It concludes that the concept of domestic violent crime is preferable to that of coercive control when seeking to explain variations in domestic violence.


Author(s):  
Amanda Holt ◽  
Sam Lewis

Abstract This paper draws upon the first national study of local responses to child-to-parent violence (CPV) in England and Wales to examine emergent representations of CPV and consider their implications for children and families. Central amongst these is the Government’s depiction of CPV as a form of ‘domestic violence and abuse’. For many individuals and organizations, that term is synonymous with intimate partner violence. We contend that the resulting conflation of (and confusion between) violence by intimate partners, and by children, towards women is producing dominant representations of CPV that may have negative consequences for families. Our research with over 200 practitioners reveals the existence of subjugated knowledges of CPV, however, that provide pockets of resistance to these dominant representations.


Author(s):  
James Rowlands ◽  
Elizabeth A. Cook

Abstract Purpose Family involvement is a key element of Domestic Homicide Review (DHR), the form of Domestic Violence Fatality Review (DVFR) found in England and Wales. Family involvement is framed as having dual purposes: first, as a benefit to DHRs, enabling a fuller picture of victims’ experiences; second, as a benefit to families themselves, notably as a therapeutic or cathartic opportunity. However, these dual purposes have been little considered. This conceptual article responds to this absence by interrogating the purpose, process and outcomes of family involvement within DHRs. Method To explicate purpose, process and outcomes, we synthesise policy, practice and the extant empirical and theoretical literature relating to family involvement in DHRs. We supplement this by engaging with a broader body of emerging research on family involvement in other review systems, analysing this through a lens of citizenship and participation. Results Family involvement in DHRs is little explicated and there is a need to better engage with how family are involved in DHRs, as a way of increasing transparency for family rights. By way of response, a tentative conceptual framework is proposed which situates family involvement as demonstrative of systems- and relational-repair. Conclusions The article concludes by arguing for greater attention to the Theory(s) of Change underpinning both the place of the family and their testimony, as well as the DHR system as a whole. Such clarity would benefit family, both as the subject of professional interactions but, critically, as agents in the DHR process in their own right.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-69
Author(s):  
Patricia Canning

Between March 2019 and March 2020 in England and Wales (excludingGreater Manchester), there were 1,288,018 recorded incidents of domestic violence(DV, otherwise known as ‘domestic abuse’ or ‘DA’), an increase of 4.2% (51,404incidents) on the previous year (Office for National Statistics 2020). Only 56%of these were classified by police as ‘crimes’ (Office for National Statistics 2020).Additionally, despite the annual rise of DV the charging rate of suspects fell in2019–2020 by 20.5% (Crown Prosecution Service 2020). This raises two primaryquestions: 1) why are almost half of reported DV incidents not considered ‘crimes’?and 2) in spite of rising numbers of incidents, why do prosecutions continue to fall?These questions are central to this paper. A possible factor influencing attritionrates concerns the language used by police officers to record DV incidents. Thispaper, then, explores whether the linguistic choices made by police officers onjudicial reports of DV in a sample of cases collected from the year 2010 reflectimplicit attitudinal biases, that in turn, can potentially pre-empt out-of-court casedisposals within contemporaneous DV cases. If so, this may also go some way toexplaining the gap between cases reported as DV crimes and cases recorded assuch. The dataset under analysis comes from a corpus of 13 police-authored DVcases sent to prosecutors for charging decisions in one calendar month in 2010 (formore detail about the corpus, see Lynn and Canning 2021; Lea and Lynn 2012.All 13 cases were returned with a ‘simple caution’ outcome, which means thatnone progressed to prosecution. Two of these cases are used as representative ofthe 13 that comprise the corpus. The analysis of the data is carried out usingthe model of transitivity (Berry 1975; Halliday 1994) to identify participant roles,actions, and circumstances as well as their syntactic distribution. The analysisshows that officers’ lexical and syntactic choices yield patterns of agency thatdownplay suspects’ culpability on the one hand, and background victims on theother. The paper concludes by arguing that how police present agency, participantroles, and circumstantial elements in reports to prosecutors can encode a ‘preferredoutcome’ resulting in more lenient charging decisions.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document