This presentation combines the reflections from the 2024 paper ‘Who Lies Beneath? Reflections on Scotland’s Unseen Change Makers’ published in Scottish Affairs with the preliminary findings from a pilot project exploring the experiences of victim-survivors and their support workers in living in remote rural Scotland. For decades, women have worked as volunteers and/or paid staff to support survivors, run refuges, helplines, and campaigns whilst also training local authorities, police, and other agencies. Without them, we would have no women’s support organisations, many more victims would remain in relationships with abusive men, and many more women would be dead at the hands of their partners or ex-partners. Given Scotland’s international reputation as a world leader in challenging and preventing violence against women, our lack of knowledge and understanding of the dynamics of abuse in rural areas is a significant and troubling gap. However, the report ‘Rural Social Work in Scotland’ (2019) highlighted that there is a lack of adequate care and other services due to inadequate staffing and funding, remoteness, isolation, and transport difficulties. In the context of significant inequalities, the challenges of staying safe, escaping or seeking support from domestic abuse or stalking is hard to imagine, however, this is a population that is severely neglected by the authorities, health care providers, and academia. The women who live in fear, daily, for their lives are victimised by both violent and controlling perpetrators and structural inadequacies in policy that maintain the status quo. These challenges pose equally significant issues for those supporting them. Reflecting on these issues, this paper will present emerging findings from a data collected in remote rural Scotland through unstructured, in-depth interviews with victim-survivors of domestic abuse living in rural Scotland and the women who support them.

Victim-survivors’ engagement is a current challenge in policing domestic abuse. Each year more than half of domestic abuse crimes are closed with outcome 16 – i.e., when victims choose to drop the case. Not all victim-survivors are equally willing to cooperate with police. The variability is not only between victims, but also within victim-survivors themselves. Their engagement with police is a dynamic negotiation process resulting from their current circumstances, the police response received and from their cost-benefit analysis of continuing with the case through the criminal justice system. Through the analysis of interviews with victim-survivors as well as crime data and victim satisfaction surveys from an English constabulary, this presentation will cast light on the topology of domestic victim-survivors’ engagement and how the police affect it.

Intimate partner violence (IPV), particularly the historical stereotype of domestic violence as physical assault, has long been associated with economic strain and low levels of education. In recent years, the framing of coercive and controlling behaviour (CCB) in UK legislation has broadened public and criminal justice understanding of IPV to include a range of abusive behaviours which serve to control and subordinate the victim. Through the feminist lens, much of IPV is recognised as CCB - a concerted and deliberate pattern of control, rather than an unfettered response to external triggers and stresses. This paper is part of a larger qualitative study of police responses to IPV and CCB. Critical discourse analysis of in-depth interview data from both officers and victim-survivors explores response officer decision-making in their interactions with victims. In particular, the data were analysed for evidence of historically dominant narratives of IPV and the counter discourse of CCB. A key finding is the difference in officer perception of IPV dependent on socio-economic status. In households with lower socio-economic status, IPV is more likely to be perceived as episodic even where it is ongoing, and as triggered by stressors such ‘chaotic lifestyle’, substance use and resource scarcity. By contrast, in higher socio-economic households IPV is more likely to be perceived as a pattern of CCB, which is associated with higher levels of education and intelligence. This finding highlights the need for police training which unpicks inherited assumptions about the causes of IPV and encourages an open mind in making judgements and gathering evidence from victim-survivors.

Historically, there have been productive discussions on the theoretical paradigm of narrative criminology: how stories can be seen as influencing harmful actions and arrangements, and the narratives with which actors resist patterns of harm (Presser and Sandberg, 2015). Narratives can inspire and motivate harmful action; they are used to make sense of harm and vulnerability; and they are used in the process of surviving harm. This paper takes these assertions as a valuable point of departure to instigate a broader discussion of the power of dominant narratives – systemic and structural narratives that produce and reproduce socio-cultural stereotypes and biases – and why the existence and co-constitution of these narratives should be recognised, and engaged with, in responses to harmful behaviour, in particular domestic abuse. For how we see, react and make sense of domestic abuse often involves drawing on these dominant narratives, and this in turn can silence victim/survivors, minimise perpetrators and perpetuate problematic myths of domestic abuse.

This paper will draw on findings from an Economic Social and Research Council project ‘Domestic Abuse Service Providers and their Stories’ to showcase how entrenched, dominant narratives impact how service providers view and approach domestic abuse victim/survivors and perpetrators. The project has involved focus groups and individual narrative interviews to collect first hand insights into experiences of front-line workers and the narratives which dominate domestic abuse discourse. Specifically, this paper will argue that an understanding of these ‘dominant’ narratives, and their power, should form a crucial part of a comprehensive critical praxis framework in our response to domestic abuse. It calls for us, as academics and practitioners, to recognise how we conceptualise, articulate and employ these narratives if we are to change perceptions and ‘rewrite’ those problematic and persistent narratives of domestic abuse.