This paper describes findings from the first phase of a European Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded UK Research Innovation (UKRI) Policy Fellowship examining how to measure ‘harm’ in relation to domestic abuse.

The use of police data to measure outcomes related to domestic abuse is limited by inconsistent practice relating to crime and incident recording. Increasingly, researchers in the UK are applying severity scores to evaluate interventions and assess police performance in relation to domestic abuse. Current methods, such as the ONS Crime Severity Score and the Cambridge Crime Harm Index, use sentencing data to produce a sliding scale of ‘harm’ for discrete criminal offences. Application of these scales to domestic abuse-related offending has been debated as much of the harm suffered by victim-survivors is not represented in traditional crime codes, such as assaults, and would be impacted by the under-recording of course of conduct crimes (e.g., coercive controlling behaviour). Additionally, some associated offences, such as breaches of protective orders, do not attract a length of sentence commensurate with their potential impact on victims.

This research focuses on whether ‘harm’ can be better measured and operationalised using police data beyond aggregated crime codes. The paper presents the findings from interviews with third-sector practitioners involved in supporting victim-survivors of domestic abuse. The results discuss their conceptualisation of harm in this context, the impact of the abuse on victim-survivors, and their perspectives about whether (and how) wider police-held data could be applied to better reflect the lived experience of victim-survivors. The paper also shares the proposed methods, potential benefits, and challenges of analysing data from open-text sources within police case files, such as victim/witness statements and risk assessments, using techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Strangulation of an intimate partner is one of the highest risk factors for future lethality (Glass et al., 2008), and can cause significant and substantial short- and long-term physical and mental health challenges for survivors (Campbell et al., 2018; Messing et al., 2018). Many jurisdictions, including New Zealand (2018), Canada (2019), the United Kingdom (2022), and Northern Ireland (2023) have introduced legislation specifically criminalizing the act of strangulation. While this is an important step forward in recognizing the severity of this form of victimization, there are inconsistences in how jurisdictions have approached the criminalization of strangulation, including the language used to define the act and the possible legal outcomes. Although strangulation has been estimated to occur in up to two-thirds of survivors of intimate partner violence, research suggests there are ongoing challenges with police officer recognition and documentation of strangulation (Douglas & Fitzgerald, 2014; McCormick, 2023; Pritchard et al., 2018), resulting in few criminal charges going forward successfully to Crown for prosecution. Further, while the possible legal penalties for strangulation offences include significant prison sentences, these outcomes do not often occur (McCormick, 2023). The authors will provide a comparative analysis of strangulation legislation as introduced in various jurisdictions and discuss preliminary results from an analysis of case law involving criminal charges relating to strangulation in intimate partner violence files. Implications for training and policy will be discussed.

In the UK, over the past ten years, on average a woman is killed by her male partner or former partner every 4 days following a pattern of abuse and control. Globally, domestic abuse is endemic. It takes many forms including physical, psychological, sexual, financial and coercively controlling behaviour, and while our knowledge of domestic abuse has increased considerably in recent years, patterns of domestic homicide are poorly understood and predictive risk factors for lethality have been difficult to identify. Research routinely shows that coercively controlling behaviours are a frequent aspect of domestic abuse and homicide, of which social isolation is a part, compromising victims’ networks and relationships that may have otherwise been protective. This presentation will consider the role of isolation in cases of domestic abuse and domestic homicide, from both the perspective of the perpetrator and the victim, to offer a fuller understanding of the role isolation can play. We will present findings from a recently completed ESRC-funded study examining domestic homicide in Scotland that sought to more fully understand risk factors for domestic homicide and opportunities for safeguarding. Drawing on our in-depth qualitative analysis of police case files, we will delineate a more nuanced understanding of how a victim’s isolation manifests and the significance of a perpetrator’s isolation in these cases.