19
Examination of witnesses
Helen Millichap and Louisa Rolfe.
Q11 The Chair: Good morning, and welcome to this meeting of the Domestic Abuse Act committee, where we are looking at the impact of the legislation that was introduced in 2021. It brought in a number of new offences and was hoping to create a new culture of response to domestic violence. Here we are taking evidence in the first panel from our senior police officers about the impact on policing.
I would like to first introduce our witnesses for this session. We have Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe. It is very nice to see you. She is on the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Louisa began her police career with Avon and Somerset where she spent 25 years, becoming the head of the CID there, developing specialist units in organised crime, counterterrorism intelligence and many different areas of crime investigation. She moved to the West Midlands Police in December 2016, and on her appointment as its deputy chief constable there was great celebration. She has led on diversity and domestic abuse, and she became the lead on the latter for the National Police Chiefs’ Council. It is really great to have you with all that expertise coming here today.
We also have Helen Millichap. Helen Millichap is the deputy assistant commissioner of this same police chiefs’ council and again, someone with considerable experience in dealing with violence against women and girls. She has really been involved greatly with public protection. It is wonderful to see you; thank you for coming and being with us today and bringing your expertise.
I am going to start off with really the general feeling that you have about the impact of this new law. It introduced new abuse offences, such as “coercive and controlling behaviour” and an understanding that domestic abuse went beyond the use of violence to “psychological and emotional abuse,” “financial abuse,” and the introduction of an offence of “non-fatal strangulation”. I really just wanted to ask you about what the challenges were for the police in facing such a new framework and new set of offences, and whether they really are understood by the police and being used in their responses to domestic violence. I will then ask you about whether there are ways that you would recommend that we might take things forward. I would like to first ask you, Commissioner Rolfe.
Louisa Rolfe: Thank you so much for inviting us here to speak today. The Domestic Abuse Act was hugely anticipated by policing. It was something that we felt privileged to be involved in the development of, working closely with officials in the Home Office. Coercive controlling behaviour legislation came into being in 2015, and so we had had some practice in our work towards understanding behaviour-based crime when it came to tackling domestic abuse, but it has not been without its challenges.
In particular, non-fatal strangulation as an offence was something that policing had been seeking legislation to address for quite some time. I myself have been the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for domestic abuse since 2013. I have dealt with numerous investigators who felt constrained by previous legislation. The limitations for an offence of non-fatal strangulation were that you could often charge a perpetrator for something such as only a common assault because the visible signs of injury following that offence were often minor bruising. However, we know from our research that non-fatal strangulation appears in the vast majority of cases that become a domestic homicide. It is always an indicator of very high risk, and it can have devastating consequences. The work by Catherine White—an academic in Manchester who led on that—shows the very tiny difference in pressure applied to a victim’s neck between a case of non-fatal strangulation and fatal strangulation, and therefore the highly dangerous nature of that offending and its manifestation as a part of coercive controlling behaviour.
We have certainly seen really active use of that as an offence by investigators. It is something that policing sought and we have used extensively, but of course we could use more. In terms of coercive controlling behaviour legislation, we recognise coercive controlling behaviour as very high risk. It is a feature in every intimate relationship case of domestic homicide. I will talk a little about intimate relationships versus wider family violence as we go on today. Many of your questions are relevant to that.
Certainly, in the research that we have been undertaking into every incident of both domestic homicide and suicide where there is a history of domestic abuse, we have seen coercive controlling behaviour feature in the vast majority of cases, and definitely in every case where it is an intimate relationship that ends in homicide or sadly suicide. We know that the number of suicides exceeds the number of domestic homicides. Our understanding is developing all the time.
In terms of use of the legislation, it is absolutely true that our justice system is geared to deal with incident-based crime and really grapples with behaviour-based crime. There has been recent research by Dr Andy Myhill, who is probably the lead researcher in this space at the College of Policing, which has identified that in almost every charge of assault occasioning actual bodily harm where there is a domestic abuse history, there are also signs of coercive controlling behaviour, but they have either not been investigated or they have not been subject to charges or referrals to prosecutors. This is not just about investigators not necessarily grasping or recognising the coercive controlling behaviour.
I know in our work with the Crown Prosecution Service that it sees similar challenges with prosecutors, but we are also seeing this in the court process itself. The successful prosecution rate for domestic abuse cases is around 75%, but for coercive controlling behaviour it is closer to 65%. That is from the 2025 Office of National Statistics data, I think.
We are seeing a steady increase in the use of the legislation. In 2020-2021 there were 33,000 cases of coercive controlling behaviour investigated and recorded by police. In the latest ONS data for 2024-2025 there were 49,000 cases. It is moving in the right direction, but we know these cases are not necessarily being identified. A lot of our training is geared towards the identification of the dynamics of abuse and coercive controlling behaviour. The risk tools that we use for our first responders are geared towards identifying coercive controlling behaviour, because of all the reasons I set out about it being high risk and prevalent in those cases with the worst outcomes.
The Chair: It is often a flagging thing, in that if there is coercive and controlling behaviour there should be something we would like to see going into police computers and so on, flagging it. Even if it does not lead to a prosecution of itself, it indicates that there is this presence and that the police are feeling concerned about it. I wanted to ask you to give us examples of the form that it takes that is recognised by police.
Louisa Rolfe: What form does coercive controlling behaviour take? In terms of notable prosecutions, often there is isolation from friends and family. We see—
The Chair: Not allowing association with family, with relatives, and so on.
Louisa Rolfe: Yes.
The Chair: Is there anything relating to children?
Louisa Rolfe: Yes, absolutely. We certainly see that coercive controlling behaviour can also overlap with challenging issues in family court proceedings around access to children. We also see sinister cases of where you have stalking and harassment-type behaviour. Children are manipulated to provide information about a carer to an ex-partner, or electronic devices used by children—iPads or even the little versions of iPads that children have—have rogue software downloaded that will track locations so that perpetrators will know about the location of their victim.
In the training that is provided to officers on domestic abuse, there is a significant focus on coercive controlling behaviour and particularly understanding the dynamics of abuse. Domestic Abuse Matters, which is the national training programme, was developed in partnership between the College of Policing and SafeLives, a domestic abuse charity. It is then licensed by the college to be delivered to police officers by the charitable sector. The licence requires that there must be expertise from the domestic abuse specialist sector in the delivery of the training, but also victims and the voice of victims must be represented in that training. It is very focused on understanding how abusers operate. It was initially created and then piloted in a number of forces, and the initial evaluation demonstrated a significant increase in the understanding of domestic abuse, or the dynamics of abuse, by officers.
The Chair: I am going to bring Officer Millichap in shortly, but where do you see the problems? There must be some problems in all this. So far, you have told us about the progress that is being made, but where do you think we should be learning lessons and we could be improving upon delivery? I am wondering about postcode lotteries, which we have heard about already. There are questions about rural areas, whether training has been good enough, and whether there is a turning of an eye to certain kinds of behaviour. Is there anything that you would want to recommend?
Louisa Rolfe: Particularly relevant to this committee’s scrutiny is recent research into the use of coercive controlling behaviour by the College of Policing. It has identified that the legislation puts a significant onus upon demonstrating the impact upon a victim, which therefore in itself puts an onus upon the victim to provide evidence of the offending, in an adversarial justice system, which can steer investigators to be spending far too much time scrutinising the credibility of a victim’s account or putting a lot of weight upon a victim to provide evidence of that behaviour. We know from broader research into sexual offending, such as the work of Operation Soteria with academics, that actually officers are often more successful in securing prosecutions for abusive behaviour when they are focused on a perpetrator’s behaviour.
The Chair: Officer Millichap, we do not want repetition of this same analysis that we have already heard from Officer Rolfe. You are both very experienced and are at a very high level in the police force, so help us. What would you say would help deal with gaps? We are looking for gaps because this is a scrutiny of whether there has been sufficient impact from the legislation. Where would you think there would be gaps?
Helen Millichap: May I start by saying that there is an opportunity and a gap in relation to coercive and controlling behaviour, in my opinion. If it helps the committee to understand my role—as compared with the domestic abuse national chiefs’ lead, which is Louisa—I am part of a national centre that is attempting to bring together the variety of threats and harms, including domestic abuse but also wider violence against women and girls, in public protection. This is entirely for the reason you described: to try to make sure that there is an absence of postcode lottery in policing. By bringing all those things together, there is an opportunity to really think about what the right national standards would be to set for chief constables to deliver the most effective impact possible from the DA Act.
I am not going to repeat it all, and I agree with everything that Louisa said. This legislation brings the opportunity for a culture change. That is why sometimes the impact takes time, and it will take time, but CCB—if I may call it that—flips police culture on its head. If we get it right and persevere with the good training and green-shoots impact we have, it could be transformational for policing. It ensures that a police officer is looking at the whole victim and the whole context and attempting to join the dots about what separately might feel like less significant forms of behaviour, but absolutely when taken together is hugely significant, risky abuse.
That means the police learning that actually a coercive perpetrator is likely to be attempting to manipulate the policing system and the wider criminal justice system. They may do so by appearing to not be the offender and potentially even blaming or criminalising a victim or creating a narrative to the police or to the victim’s family that they are the one who is, for example, abusing substances or not believable.
There is the opportunity to see this as a culture change in policing if we really aim to land this legislation ever more effectively. My role is to try to show that, nationally, we are aggregating the policing response in a way that we can be transparent and recognise this real progress. There are green shoots across many forces, but it is difficult at the moment to show that national progress.
The Chair: That was a really comprehensive answer. I am going to take us on to Baroness Gohir, who has the next question.
Q12 Baroness Gohir: Good morning. What issues have the police faced in interpreting and applying the provisions that define how people are “personally connected”? What, if anything, would help the police in this area? For example, is there a consistent approach in the understanding of what “personally connected” means between different police officers and different police forces? If there are multiple perpetrators within the same household, are the dynamics understood there as well?
The Chair: For the general public who might be watching this session, “personally connected” was an attempt in creating this legislation to recognise that wider persons of influence who can be very controlling, coercive and so on actually can be outside the intimate relationships inside a family. It can be a community leader who is brought in, or the patriarch of a family, the grandfather, an uncle, somebody who is highly respected, the imam, the priest, the rabbi or whoever—people in our communities who have influence, who are brought in often and can actually end up being coercive and exercising controlling behaviour. The question is: is that definition too wide?
Louisa Rolfe: It is necessarily wide for all the reasons you describe, but our balance as leaders in policing is ensuring that our workforce is not overwhelmed. Certainly, in talking to investigators I have found that when we have looked at the cases with the worst outcomes—domestic homicides or suicides with a history of domestic abuse—we found a prevalence of suicide or homicide following domestic abuse in an intimate relationship. The vast majority of those were in intimate relationships and then some in wider family. We found some interesting patterns that changed over time during the Covid pandemic, for example, where we saw an increase in broader family-related incidents where other services—support and caring services or respite care—were less available to families.
What we are also finding is that it presents challenges. When so much is domestic abuse, enabling a workforce with finite capacity to focus and identify where the greatest threats are, and to find the greatest risk and ensure that our best investigative resources are focusing upon those threats and risks, is challenging. We know too from the work of Operation Soteria that actually the drivers of poor behaviour towards victims, or victim-blaming behaviour, are closely associated with investigators having overwhelming caseloads and being exposed to trauma.
There is a challenge for police leadership there in offering our workforce clarity about prioritisation. There is some brilliant research from the academic world that will help us and steer us towards the most harmful perpetrators. Certainly, in Helen’s team there is research looking at how you identify the most harmful perpetrators and focus policing activity on those individuals.
The Office for National Statistics data also identifies the fastest-growing group of victims of domestic abuse as being aged 16 to 19. The definition does not currently capture the under-16s. Colleagues are currently working with academics on teenage relationships, and how we ensure we do not unpick the brilliant developments over the years of how policing responds to child abuse investigations and dealing with vulnerable children, but we also ensure those investigators are aware of the dynamics of abusive relationships.
It is a challenge for policing as the definition is broad, but for all the reasons you describe, it is necessarily broad. It is a challenge for police leadership in terms of using what we can to focus our resources on the greatest harm among that breadth of offences.
The Chair: I am sure that, Officer Millichap, your remit being violence against women and girls, this business of what happens to young teenagers who have relationships that are abusive must fall into your patch.
Helen Millichap: Yes, it does, as does wider offending that arguably is an interesting challenge in relation to the definition of personal connection. Sometimes intimate partner relationships that you might feel should be in scope of the spirit of this Act are now handled online, or sometimes they are online and into the real world. To an extent, some of that type of offending, which is new in a digital age, should be caught within the effective response we need to deliver against it, even if it is sometimes outwith the specificity of the Act.
The reason it is a good thing that the unit I am directing exists is because, when we build curricula for policing, when we develop approved professional practice and attempt to deliver consistency across policing in our response, things do not fall into neat boundaries. We have to have the most brilliant possible specific response to DA in the meaning of the Act, but also some ripples around the edge of it absolutely need the same type of attention, response and pathways in policing.
Where my point is going is that sometimes the answer for policing—especially with a fairly overwhelmed workforce, which is a matter of public knowledge—is to make sure that we are not simply adding more and more training into a very cluttered training landscape, but recognising where these golden threads exist. It may be arguable whether an online relationship meets the definition of the Act, but the response should be meaningful and effective in relation to what is required to provide the service to the victim and justice.
Q13 Lord Russell of Liverpool: During the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, we had an amendment that identified that there are about 400,000 16 to 18-year-olds in further education colleges who are not currently receiving any relationship and sex education. The data from some students coming out of those colleges indicated that a high proportion of them who had subsequent problems with relationships were largely in domestic abuse-type relationships.
We tried to argue to the Government that this cadre of 400,000 students should be included. They did not entirely accept it, but there is an element of this that is prevention. To what extent do you feel that the types of education that are imparted to this very vulnerable group are actually giving them the right message about what an abusive relationship is, what the signs are, what to look out for, and what to do if they feel they are getting drawn into one?
Louisa Rolfe: It is hugely, hugely important. When we have looked at the scale of violence against women and girls and domestic abuse within that, we know from the work we did looking at broad data sources—working with the National Crime Agency for its data about online abusive imagery, but also more broadly from police data—that one in 12 people are victims of violence against women and girls, and one in 20 people are perpetrators. When you look at the latest data regarding 16 to 19-year-olds, 18% are estimated to be victims of domestic abuse. That is a huge proportion of young people.
We work very hard in this space to look at where we apply justice outcomes but we do not want to criminalise a whole cohort of young people. We absolutely must identify the most harmful behaviour, but also our preference would be to prevent it and to work with other government departments as much as we possibly can to prevent offending and ensure people are aware. This kind of offending needs a whole society response in terms of increasing understanding, particularly the dynamics of abuse. One thing we often find is that not only police officers might misinterpret or miscategorise coercive controlling behaviour, but victims themselves do not always recognise it.
There are some brilliant academic studies out there, and the charitable sector that works in this space does an awful lot of work in terms of raising awareness. There are some brilliant schemes around tackling misogyny with young boys in school and talking about toxic influence online, but nowhere near enough. Anything more that we can do we should because by the time it gets to us, the harm has often been done and the trauma has been suffered. We would much rather work with others on preventing this.
Q14 Baroness Gerada: These have been amazing and excellent responses. I do not know whom to address this to, but what issues have the police faced when responding to children as victims and what, if anything, would help the police response?
Louisa Rolfe: We did some work back in 2014-15—around the time of the coercive controlling behaviour legislation—with the directors of children’s services nationally, to seek to define the criteria for referral to social care and the support that should be available when police identify a child who may be affected by domestic abuse. That has stood us in good stead to some extent but we know that not every investigator or first responder is recognising or identifying the impact upon children.
Of course, the 2021 Act made it very clear that children are victims in their own right. We have adjusted police policy around attendance at incidents to identify children in a household, even if they are not present, to ensure that, where appropriate, referrals are made to other agencies. There is also a brilliant scheme called Operation Encompass, started as a charity led by a headteacher and her husband, who was a police officer. They recognised that police appropriately notifying a school that children at the school have been affected by a domestic abuse incident can ensure children receive support.
Baroness Gerada: I am sorry to push at this. Do you require consent? If it is a victimless crime, so it does not go any further, do you require any consent to inform the school and I assume the GP, or do you do it automatically?
Louisa Rolfe: I would have to go and check. My understanding at the moment is if it met the criteria around a safeguarding referral, you would not necessarily have to obtain the consent. I will go away and check and provide an answer in writing.
The Chair: That would be very helpful because one of those areas that we are really looking at is other professionals who interact with a family feeling inhibited because of data protection and so on, and whether they actually are informed. That goes for teachers, headteachers and so forth.
Q15 Baroness Rafferty: Thank you for your excellent and comprehensive answers. My question really is around the criminal justice issues that arise from how police and courts interact with perpetrators. What sense do you have of that? Can you give us a bit of a steer on where we might focus our attention?
Louisa Rolfe: In terms of interactions with perpetrators in the courts, certainly we work closely with the Probation Service on understanding—in all the cohorts of offenders it deals with—those where there might be domestic abuse but it may not be the primary offence for which they are dealt with. The Probation Service has developed work in recent years to ensure that for anybody it manages who may be released from prison on licence, it will work with policing to understand if there is a domestic abuse history. This is to ensure that it is not only managing licence conditions that might be relevant to the offence for which they were serving a sentence, but also that that management is relevant to domestic abuse.
In terms of the work that we do, as you heard earlier, there is a relatively high conviction rate for domestic abuse, but that is for the very low proportion of cases that make it through the court process. In recent years, we have been working very closely with the Crown Prosecution Service on what is called a joint justice plan to look at how we can ensure that we achieve justice for more victims of domestic abuse. Slightly less than half of the domestic abuse cases reported to policing end up in an arrest, and then a small proportion end up in a charge.
We have done work with the Crown Prosecution Service on how long it takes to get a charging decision, and we have seen that time reducing. We have seen the number of cases that are charged increasing. We have seen a reduction in the number of cases that result in policing being asked to complete an action plan. We have done some work with prosecution teams around reviewing those cases where there have been numerous action plans issued to investigators, and seen some positive outcomes.
What we have found has been most successful is where investigation teams and prosecution teams work more closely together. Through the joint justice plan, we have been encouraging a much closer working relationship between leads for domestic abuse in police forces and leads for domestic abuse within Crown Prosecution teams. Some areas have been really pushing ahead with notable progress: Merseyside, Cheshire, and South Wales Police in particular. There is more to do, and we meet regularly with leads from the CPS to progress that work.
The development of protective orders and the use of the domestic abuse protection order has also been piloted. I understand that the pilot schemes will extend until November of this year and then there will be a decision as to further rollout of the scheme. The difference between the domestic abuse protection order and the previous domestic violence protection order is that the DAPO includes an opportunity for the specialist sector to identify positive requirements for a perpetrator that are geared towards prevention, which is a huge opportunity.
There is also the brilliant work of the Drive Partnership, which is a partnership between SafeLives and Respect. Respect is the charity with specialist skills in managing perpetrators, and SafeLives does specialist work in domestic abuse. It has been subject to evaluation, and it has shown brilliant outcomes in terms of reducing offending by perpetrators. We know that Government are rolling out that scheme nationally this year, which is really good news.
What we have seen from the domestic abuse protection order pilots is that there is a bit of work for policing to do to adjust its approach to the use of protection orders. We know the enforcement of them is not what it could be, but we also know that policing is quite geared towards enforcement. Certainly, Greater Manchester Police has been exceptional in the domestic abuse protection order pilots. It has issued more than 1,000 orders in its participation of the scheme, but it has been very geared towards enforcement approaches to managing perpetrators.
We know there have been some teething issues around the positive requirements, but there is also a broader issue around the availability of perpetrator programmes and schemes. We know from some work that Avon and Somerset Police has been piloting around applying the Operation Soteria methodology—the academic methodology—to domestic abuse identified in its force area that there is a ratio of something like one perpetrator programme available for every 650 incidents it dealt with. There are some real challenges in terms of the availability.
The rollout of the Drive programme will increase that availability nationally, but we know from that work that the good schemes are labour-intensive; they require specialists from the sector, and it is a sector that is under pressure. There is lots for us to do in policing in improving our approach to enforcement, but we also know that we need to work really closely with the sector in terms of the best outcomes for perpetrators and victims.
The Chair: I am going to bring in Lord Polak in a minute, but that interface between policing and prosecution is of course vitally important. It should work really well because, as you have said, the conviction rate looks pretty good, but the number of cases that actually end up going before a court is pretty small. There is still a problem in that.
We are concerned also with data. We can talk about data as we go further on, and data collection—making sure that computers speak to each other and that there is record-keeping, the flags are there and so on—is vitally important here. But are police prosecuting where a victim says, “I don’t want to go to court. Life is going to be hell for me because of my in-laws, because of his friends, because I am frightened of the consequences of this, or my own family, or the children”? They give reasons that mean that they do not themselves want to engage with the prosecution system. Is there evidence of an increase in the police taking cases where they have evidence but the victim is not wanting to participate?
Louisa Rolfe: Yes. Certainly, we have been working for a number of years on what prosecutors will call evidence-led prosecutions, which are not reliant on a victim’s testimony. We also know from work by academics that there is a fine line to be drawn here. A lot of the learning from work on sexual violence by academics has shown that you might create greater trauma and harm to a victim if you completely disregard their wishes in this way. We must ensure that we get that right and look at every opportunity to manage a perpetrator and bring them to justice without exposing that victim to trauma.
The Operation Soteria work described this as taking an effective context-driven approach. This means being very suspect-focused, victim-led and context-driven in the approach to your investigations, not entirely disempowering a victim by disregarding their wishes, and really understanding as investigators the harm that they may be describing. There are examples, and we have provided guidance and support to investigators to pursue those cases without a victim’s consent, but it is a difficult balance. A lot of academic research is coming to the fore and saying to us, “Do this very carefully”.
Lord Polak: During your answer there, you picked on Merseyside and Cheshire, and you said that positive things are happening there. One of the things that we are very interested in is finding where those positive things are. Have you actually understood why they are doing well? Is it individuals? What is it that then can be rolled out across the country?
Louisa Rolfe: The work in Merseyside and Cheshire and in South Wales is about a very close working relationship between the leads for prosecution of domestic abuse in the CPS, and the leads within policing for domestic abuse. They have developed a close working relationship and agreed approaches to progressing cases, and there is close working day to day. The arrangements in terms of advice to investigators by prosecutors are well understood. We have promoted replicating that approach nationally in other areas. As we have done that and we have seen the charge rates start creeping up. We are tracking this. It is moving in the right direction, but it is very much about those—
Lord Polak: There is hope for Derbyshire, then. The learning experience is really important.
The Chair: I am going to bring in Lord Russell here because you were dealing with protection orders: the old ones, the pilots and so on. I know that that is a source of interest to him, but it might also be about preventive work with offenders. Perhaps you would like to come in, Lord Simon.
Q16 Lord Russell of Liverpool: I am very familiar with what Dave Thomason and Cheshire have done on stalking and the effectiveness that that has. One of the aspects of stalking is there is a well-defined academic model of stalking, as you will know, which defines five different types of perpetrator. One of the results of effective training of the front-line police officers who specialise in it is being able to triage very quickly, understanding what type of perpetrator they are dealing with, which tells them how to react, what to expect, what advice to give the victim, et cetera.
When it comes to the range of behaviours in domestic abuse—let us take coercive and controlling behaviour for one—is there a similar template, if you like, which either front-line police or independent domestic violence advisers can use to triage very quickly and understand, much earlier than is often the case, the nature and degree of harm that is being inflicted and the danger of that escalating? To what extent is that approach followed anywhere, and is that replicable?
Louisa Rolfe: Yes. We did work with Cardiff Women’s Safety Unit a number of years ago now to look at the tools that front-line officers and first responders in particular were using to assess the risk in domestic abuse cases. There is a tool called DASH, which is used very well by independent domestic violence advisers and used reasonably well by police specialists and domestic abuse investigators. However, we found that it is highly dependent on those individuals having quite a sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of abuse. Our first responders in policing are often our least experienced; it is often the first role you go into when you join a police force as a young officer.
Therefore, we worked with academics to develop the Domestic Abuse Risk Assessment, the DARA tool, which is less dependent on that sophisticated understanding. It drives officers to ask more open questions, and it drives more professional curiosity. It has been subject to a number of evaluations now, and it has been proven to better identify coercive controlling behaviour and higher risk domestic abuse. It works with the DASH risk assessment. In police forces, in many cases a first responder might use the DARA tool, but they will refer to an IDVA who would use the DASH tool with victims, or their specialist teams might use the DASH tool with victims.
At the moment, 21 forces are using the DARA tool. Some are still using the DASH, but 19 of the other forces will soon be using the DARA. Of the 43, the vast majority—40 of 43—will soon be using the DARA. There have been some delays in rolling it out that have been more about the compatibility of police technology that officers use for recording initial attendance at incidents. We continuously work with the College of Policing on the evaluation of tools that we use.
On stalking in particular, I absolutely agree with you about that specialist triage response. Helen and I both worked in the Met in London, where you have the partnership with health and the support to have a sophisticated triage working with specialists within health—particularly in the world of psychiatry—and it was really, really effective in identifying those cases. As you say, often the categorisation of that very dangerous, obsessive, fixated stalking behaviour can be a little different from the breadth of domestic abuse.
The Chair: Officer Millichap, you have your experience in this area too, certainly on the stalking front. Is there anything you would like to add?
Helen Millichap: I would like to just add a different dimension to that, if I may? We have talked about risk assessment tools in the hands of officers who are dealing with a live case in front of them, and obviously the triage you mentioned for stalking is a similar approach. We know how many cases make prosecution, and therefore how many perpetrators are potentially in our communities, unmanaged by the criminal justice system yet risky and harmful. As we know, domestic abusers are likely also to be offenders in other ways because their controlling and coercive behaviour is likely to play through in other offending. Therefore, the other thing we are trying to do is to make sure that we use all possible tools to identify the risk posed by perpetrators, regardless of whether there is a live case going through the system or a live triage going through a stalking case, for example.
We obviously have 43-plus different forces arguably doing things in a divergent way in how they use systems to identify harm. The one thing we are working with chief constables to do now is to create a single way of identifying the most harmful perpetrators from the top down: taking algorithms and/or tech-enabled work and methodology to identify the most harmful from the set of things that policing already knows about them. That could be a number of cases that have never made it to the point of charge, or never made it to the point of a criminal justice—
The Chair: It is a bit like algorithms being used for very rare diseases that have very strange symptoms. In the same way, you have to therefore have officers taking very careful evidence and statements from the victims and those around them in order to piece together the algorithmic assessment of danger. It must involve getting a really full picture at that early response stage from those who know.
Helen Millichap: It relies on that, but it also relies on us just using the data we have at a high level really well. If a single perpetrator has been accused by a number of different victims across a number of different forces in a number of different ways but never brought to justice, this kind of work can start picking that up and apply the Act, going right back to the subject of today.
What we are trying to do is make sure that whatever is used by forces to try to each find their most dangerous is the same so we can start aggregating a national picture of danger. We must use the tools in the right way to identify things such as coercive and controlling behaviour. We need to make sure that the methodology reflects our clear intent that sometimes it is the non-physical, less visible forms of abuse that are the most harmful and the biggest risk factors, for example, in domestic abuse, suicide, homicide cases and many others.
The Chair: I once did a case where there was evidence of the perpetrator having abused seven different women he had relationships with. They were all found and traced and some were on record, but some stepped forward to say how he had behaved and how he had behaved towards their children.
Q17 The Lord Bishop of Derby: I want to move in a slightly different direction, and it might be that Helen is able to respond to this. Are there specific issues faced by minoritised victims and survivors which the police might find more or less difficult to respond to? What effect has the Act had on how police respond to such minoritised victims and survivors of domestic abuse?
Helen Millichap: We know very clearly that minoritised victims and survivors will face so many potential barriers and obstacles before even feeling able, potentially, to call the police about what has happened. Some of that could be to do with immigration status and a perceived response that might happen from policing or the system if they disclose. There are also very many other things that go to general trust and confidence in the police to be the fair, equal service that we need to be for everybody, including minoritised women and girls.
Having grown up in the Met and done lots of work on violence against women and girls in the Met, some things that work really well are making sure that chief constables and every senior leader who is responsible for place-based responses to VAWG is consulting with grass-roots organisations that represent the views and issues facing minoritised women and girls. This way we start actually scrutinising our casework and approach to make sure that at every point we have built the confidence and trust that the report is going to happen in the first place.
It is absolutely the case that the current NPCC guidance in relation to immigration status is clear on the irrelevance of that fact to the investigation and to the response that a woman or girl coming forward should receive from the police. It is a very real issue, though. I know that our data is not always good enough to even know our victims well enough in terms of their nationality, ethnicity or anything else might require us to see the response we need to give them through an entirely different lens. We are working really hard to try to improve police data, specifically in relation to ethnicity and nationality.
The Lord Bishop of Derby: Over these recent years, have you seen any impact—positive or negative—on being able to be better in these environments as a consequence of this Bill?
Helen Millichap: The Bill directs us to consider all these less obvious things that might prevent us achieving justice for victims. I do not know if I can link it directly to the Act or the Bill, but I know that policing minds are much more focused on variation in need than ever before. Whether that is because we have grown up with this Bill now over the last five years or not, I could not say.
Even in forensic photography, for example, they are recognising that in traditional ways of collecting evidence through photographs of a victim’s skin, sometimes it is easier to see an assault on white skin than it is on non-white skin. The Met has worked really hard to try to develop photographic responses that more clearly identify bruising on black skin, for example. It is in the minds of police leaders, it is in the minds of our scientists and all our investigators, trying to make sure that we do not have any gaps in service such as the one I have just described.
Louisa Rolfe: I agree. The charitable sector has been brilliant in this space, in particular the “by and for” service providers in diverse communities. The charity Imkaan has been very clear about the barriers to women reporting; they are related to isolation and lack of specialist support, pressure from family and community, fear of police and lack of trust—so a fear of losing children and fear of immigration enforcement. As Helen says, we are very clear in our policy around sharing information with immigration enforcement that the primary purpose of the police response is to deal with the victim as a victim of domestic abuse. It is not to look into immigration status. However, we know that perpetrators abuse victims’ lack of trust.
There are also charities such as Sistah Space, which is lobbying for Valerie’s Law to increase officers’ understanding of the needs of minoritised women and what might be particularly important to them if they are leaving a family home. There are also charities such as Karma Nirvana that has worked with policing on training for a specialist response to honour-based abuse. Lots of credit is due to the sector, which has held us to account in this space and really pushed for us to develop our training.
The Chair: It is important that we recognise that we learn from each other, particularly in this area.
Q18 Baroness Barran: I am not sure whether I have to declare a conflict of interest, having been leading SafeLives at the time we developed Domestic Abuse Matters training. Louisa, you mentioned already the impact in understanding of the dynamics of domestic abuse, so I had a few follow-on questions. My memory was that there was a programme for front-line officers but there was also a supporting culture change programme for leadership. I just wondered, with the rollout, are both elements still happening or is it just the front-line bit?
When Amanda Robinson gave evidence last week, she gave us some information from Bright Light saying that over 50% of cases are now being held by front-line officers rather than specialists, in part perhaps because of the broadening of the definitions. I just wondered, is the training still fit for purpose if we have front-line officers holding cases that historically would have gone to specialists?
Lastly, in the very distant past when I was allowed out to deliver some training, I do not remember a single time when we did not have at least two disclosures of domestic abuse from front-line officers who were taking part. I know this is easy to say and unbelievably difficult to do, but very often in relationships with more senior male officers, if forces cannot deal with the issue in-house, how can they expect their staff to deal with it well out-house? Sorry to bombard you with all that, but I would be grateful for your answers.
Louisa Rolfe: On the Domestic Abuse Matters programme, yes, it includes other elements. Certainly, the leadership element quite close to the front line—not the most senior but certainly sergeants, inspectors and staff equivalents leading those teams—participate in the training, but also those involved in call handling and specialist investigators. The programme also always involves the team delivering the training providing an evaluation report for the force about the culture they have observed among those participating in the training, and then you have a session with the leadership of the force. I vividly remember the session with the team that delivered this to 7,000 officers in the Met; it was really impactful.
You are absolutely right about disclosures from officers. This goes back to the bit about how victims do not always recognise they are victims of coercive controlling behaviour: perpetrators do not always recognise they are perpetrators. Interestingly, the Domestic Abuse Matters training rollout has consistently had a number of officers disclose that they believe they are a victim and they had not recognised it, or even people saying, “I believe I’m a perpetrator. I need some help”. That has been consistent through delivery of the programme. The college is currently looking at what the next stage is because, as you know, so much has changed in recent years in our greater understanding of teenage relationship abuse and the overwhelming impact upon officers.
In terms of the Bright Light findings, Bright Light is the work by a brilliant cohort of academics who have been working alongside investigators. They initially developed the work around rape and sexual offences. Because consistently a third of cases of rape and sexual offences occur within an abusive relationship, for some time they have been keen to look at domestic abuse. Their study was limited to Avon and Somerset Police. My understanding is that Avon and Somerset’s investigative model does not have a specialist domestic abuse investigation team, which might account for that finding. However, I would need to check. In the vast majority of forces, domestic abuse cases would go into a specialist team, but some are still held by first responders. It is not entirely unique to Avon and Somerset, and we would need to look at that. It is certainly a live conversation at the moment.
On the point about police perpetrators and police victims, we know that there are some people attracted to the profession of policing for the wrong reasons. There is this prevalence of domestic abuse, as we have already talked about, and this is an occupation that—despite our best efforts for many years—is still seen as quite a male profession. When we talk about the prevalence of perpetration in the community and the fact that this profession is sometimes characterised as about power and control—police officers have extraordinary powers available to them—we know there is this reality. Nothing can be more concerning than a perpetrator who knows the system.
We have worked very hard, on the back of the awful experiences both in London and more broadly across policing, with our professional standards investigation teams to ensure they have an understanding of the dynamics of abuse. We want to use our data effectively to ensure that we are identifying that perpetrating behaviour, but also to support victims. It is a profession where people work closely together, and many of the victims are officers themselves or staff in policing. We want to ensure that they have support available to them.
There is a lot more work to do in that space. We also know that when perpetrators understand the system—particularly when, for all the reasons we have said, the justice system is geared to incidents and not behaviour-based crime—it is really concerning that a perpetrator can find it easier to almost present their victim as the person doing wrong. Through extreme manipulation, they can almost set them up to do something that is easier to prove. That is a very live issue that we are very focused on addressing.
The Chair: It is also important in training to be speaking to men in the force about the possibility that as children they may have witnessed, and themselves been affected by, the violence that they witnessed between their parents.
Baroness Barran: I have a request. I wonder whether it would be possible to check up how many prosecutions there have been of officers for domestic abuse, over any period you care to choose. How many charges and how many prosecutions? We could have a sweepstake guess.
The Chair: Yes. In other male environments too.
Q19 Baroness Porter of Fulwood: You mentioned as an example how you work with the Probation Service. Could you please say a little more about what you see as the benefits and challenges of multiagency working, for example between domestic abuse charities and the police? Could you say a little about what is being done to identify best practice around that, and then the process for rolling that best practice out nationally?
Helen Millichap: The benefits of good multiagency working are obvious and might not need to be restated in detail. What we know is, given what Louisa said earlier about the data that shows how many perpetrators can actually access a programme, the same can be said sometimes of how many victims are able to directly and swiftly gain the advocacy and support they might need from the specialist sector. We know it is a significant issue across the sector at the moment, how it is able to support victims and the level of need required.
The Chair: So much of it is about resourcing: housing, alternative housing and real problems in finding the funding to make these things work well. I know you recognise that.
Helen Millichap: Part of it is making sure that every officer, whether they are a first responder who is holding a case or whether they are in a specialist unit, is absolutely committed to signposting and understanding how best to work with the specialist sector in their area. That is not only to do with how officers in those units on the front line, so to speak, are building those relationships; it is also about the relationships that chief constables have with their safeguarding partnerships and the specialist sector at that level. Sometimes that is what we miss in policing: making sure at every level that those secure multiagency relationships are very solid, so that all the advantage you can possibly gain from the multiagency environment is realised.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: We know there is good practice. You mentioned there are certain areas where multiagency partnerships are working extremely well. Have you reverse-engineered those to identify the key characteristics that are making it work in such a way that it is then intelligible and can actually be transferred as good practice to other forces or agencies more quickly than seems to be the case at the moment?
Helen Millichap: Operation Soteria is quite a good example. I am using “multiagency” in the widest possible sense of the word. That was born out of a local force environment with academic investment, and very close working with the specialist sector and all aspects of the criminal justice system. That led to a deep understanding of the things we would need to do as a system to improve the response to rape and serious sexual offences.
Although it is not rapid—why would it be when it is utterly transformational?—several years later we are now in a position where every force, without needing to have been mandated by the use of a power, is implementing Operation Soteria, the national operating model. This is the extent to which we have really high confidence that the green shoots we are seeing in relation to the charges for rape and serious sexual offences are shifting positively in every single force. Victims—
Lord Russell of Liverpool: How can we do the same for domestic abuse?
Helen Millichap: We are starting, are we not? I would go back to the work of Bright Light, which is specifically trying to see how you would apply Soteria principles to a domestic abuse theme, which is different but in some ways similar. We then work out what it is that frames an operating model that we could scale up nationally. My job as part of the national centre is to build our understanding of how we now recognise and build on that early work, understanding—as we must—that this is going to take resources, investment and commitment across policing to deliver something of the same scale that Soteria had—
Lord Russell of Liverpool: What do you need to be able—
The Chair: No, Lord Russell. I am sorry, I am going to have to cut across you because I know that we will be asking about what will be needed, and the answer is going to be resources.
Q20 Lord Polak: I shall be very short because it looks like what you are doing in the work that you are doing works. You have just had the National Police Service announcement in January. Listening to you, it just seems to me that you are the epitome of making it work. It said there that the idea is to bring together existing national bodies to deliver specialist capabilities. That is what was announced by the Government in January. Either they were watching you or they understood that this is the way forward. Is the effect of what was announced in January going to be positive or negative? How can you use that to then expand and build upon what you are doing?
The Chair: I have to tell you that your answer to this has to be brisk and speedy because we are at the end of the session.
Helen Millichap: I am super optimistic because violence against women and girls generally, and specifically domestic abuse, has volume and seriousness of harm that is commensurate with anything you can describe as terrorism or serious and organised crime. However, we do not have the national capability to deliver in the same way against it. I know it is very different. The National Police Service has a huge opportunity to bring the standard-setting powers of the college together with the operational reach of the chiefs’ council and—whether it is the local configuration or the bigger regional forces—make VAWG and public protection one of the reasons you are building the response in that way. It could allow us to place VAWG as a national threat meaningfully, for the first time.
The Chair: Assistant Commissioner, do you have a last sentence for us? Are you optimistic about this? We have 43 police forces in England. Can we get an overarching umbrella of pulling all this together so that standards are improved?
Louisa Rolfe: Yes. I am hugely optimistic for all the reasons Helen set out, and about having a singular voice in policing for how other government departments can work effectively to drive a response to reducing VAWG. On your earlier question about multiagency responses, we know the Drive programme has shown that if you address addiction, mental ill health and other wider issues of housing for victims and perpetrators, you reduce the harm. At the moment, 43 separate voices are just not coherent enough in that ask.
The Chair: That is wonderful. I really want to thank you both for coming because it has been a really important session. We have learned an enormous amount from you both. It is great to see that these issues are in the hands of two such capable and impressive leading police officers. Thank you very much for coming. I am now drawing this session to a short pause as we change to the second panel.
