27
Examination of witnesses
Professor Amanda Robinson, Professor Michelle McManus, Professor Geetanjali Gangoli and Professor Sundari Anitha.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to our witnesses and the public, who will be attending this session. This is a Select Committee of the House of Lords that is looking at the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. The committee is looking at the effectiveness and impact of that legislation and whether it is doing what Parliament had hoped it would achieve. It is what is called a post-legislative scrutiny of this piece of legislation, the Domestic Abuse Act.
The focus of this session is to be really looking at how effectively the police are enforcing the various provisions of the Act. I want to welcome two distinguished experts here with us: Professor Geetanjali Gangoli is a professor of sociology at Durham University. I want to welcome you, thank you for coming. It is very nice to see you here, and we recognise the great expertise you bring to us. Professor Michelle McManus is also a very well-known expert in the field. She is a professor of safeguarding and violence prevention at Manchester Metropolitan University. Thank you again for coming. We know that you have expertise in multi-agency safeguarding and prevention.
Let me ask you a general question. Could you provide us with a very short headline overview of what you consider to be the significant issues affecting the police as they try to enforce this legislation. What are the challenges? Geetanjali, perhaps you might start.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: I am going to be talking mostly in the context of my work with racially minoritised women because that is the expertise that I bring. Maybe Michelle will be able to talk about this.
The Chair: We should start the other way. Professor McManus, perhaps you would like to start. How do you think the police are managing this new piece of legislation?
Professor Michelle McManus: First, thank you very much for inviting me here today. It is an absolute privilege to be here and speaking to you all, so thank you. Through the evidence we have gathered over the years since the Act has been implemented, from a policing perspective, that legal framework has certainly strengthened the approach. It has given those powers and being able to utilise some key aspects of that has given a bit more confidence in terms of policing. We will probably go into a bit more detail on that as we go forward.
Because of the way the police have to respond to domestic abuse, which is mainly hidden behind closed doors, the key challenge is around victim disclosure and the onus on how victims and survivors disclose their crimes and how much evidence is required around that. It is a real challenge, which has implications for risk assessments, police training and specialisms around how the police are responding to crime.
Really importantly, the onus is on victims to engage with a system that may not actually align with what it is they want as outcomes from a safeguarding perspective. That is the biggest challenge—that rub between criminal justice outcomes for policing and safety outcomes for victims and survivors. That is the key challenge we are seeing at the moment.
The Chair: I am going to invite in my colleagues who would like to ask you more detailed questions. But in general, are there places where they really are just carrying on as before, or are most police forces engaging with this with a different commitment? Do we have any measure of that?
Professor Michelle McManus: That is a really challenging question, but a very good one. Particularly if you look at things such as more personal connections, from a policing perspective that has allowed them to really understand a bit more of the legacy, family connections and wider family connections around that. We are certainly seeing more police officers who are recognising the myriad ways that personal connections can now happen from a relationship perspective. That certainly helps.
Regarding the coercive control element, that comes back to the various different forms of abuse. The legislation has obviously now made a lot clearer the different forms of abuse that can happen. The challenge still comes around the CPS and the prosecution thresholds that are needed. Excuse me for looking at my notes, but I am looking at the recent data. In terms of going out to a domestic abuse incident and recording that crime, if you look at police recorded crimes for the end of March 2025, it was 816,493 crimes.
The Chair: Oh, let us have that number again. That is shocking.
Professor Michelle McManus: It was 816,493 police recorded crimes at the end of March 2025 for the year. I promise I will get to my point, but when I go through a couple of bits of data, what the data will tell us—this is the official data extracted from the ONS data—is that there are 44.6 arrests per 100 domestic abuse crimes. The key aspect is that 9.4% of those DA reported crimes from policing go on to a charging decision from CPS. That is where you lose most of your cases. That is still a problem.
The legislation is really struggling to enact how we move from going out to a crime to a charging decision because if you look at all the data after a charging decision to CPS is made, they are relatively high. That is the threshold that we are struggling to get through—a charging decision from the police after attending a domestic abuse incident.
The Chair: The police are turning up, they are responding much more actively to calls, but it does not actually lead to the bite of prosecuting someone.
Professor Michelle McManus: Absolutely.
The Chair: My colleagues will ask you more detailed questions, but one of the things that has been raised with us already is the issue of a postcode lottery. There are parts of the country where the police are responsive, and we have moved on a long way on that front, but there are still places—particularly where there are large rural communities—where the police do not seem to be as responsive. Understanding coercive control is a serious challenge, and they do not know what it is they are looking for. Is there anything you would like to say about that?
Professor Michelle McManus: Yes, I will say a couple of things. The challenge that we have in policing is trying to understand and work with our data systems. Often what we find is that it is very hard to extract anything on the cumulative effect within that household in police systems. What we know from lots of different evaluations I have been involved with—whether looking at perpetrators of domestic abuse or looking at evaluations of various intervention programmes—is that there are lots of different types of domestic abuse relationships, often with the highest frequency perpetrators.
We did a piece of work for the Home Office on this. The challenge that we have with the postcode lottery and that demographic issue is trying to see incidents as part of a series or collection of behaviours and trying to understand the myriad different types of harms and vulnerabilities that might exist within that household.
That is one of the challenges. We have had this in focus groups with front-line police officers before. Often, they do not understand how much they should be taking into account previous incidents at that first response. There is still a lack of clarity for some police officers—not all of them, because some are fantastic at this work—around ensuring that they are looking at previous incidents and looking at harms within that household to understand the wider risks that are potentially happening within that environment.
That becomes much harder to do in those places where you are more remote. You might not have as much of a police presence or intelligence from other safeguarding partners, such as education, which we know often have intelligence around harms for children who are in domestic abuse settings. That is one of the key challenges around that: how do we ensure that our police officers are considering the wider context of harm? Isolation is a key part of that, particularly in rural environments.
Q2 Lord Russell of Liverpool: This question follows very neatly from what you have just been talking about. One of the things the Act tried to do was bring into common currency some particular forms of domestic abuse, with terms such as, “Coercive and controlling behaviour”, “Psychological and emotional abuse”, “Economic abuse”, et cetera. To what extent are those definitions understood with a degree of clarity and consistency? How are they being interpreted in the field?
Professor Michelle McManus: The challenge comes back to your front-line police officers, and what many would say is the high churn that we have within our front-line police officers. It will exist within some more senior specialist teams. What I would say in response to what good practice looks like is that, when we have specialist domestic abuse teams, it certainly works much better. They are recognising and ensuring that this is captured within their data. Then it comes back to the challenge of how we are recording those different types of harm within our data.
As someone who has downloaded and accessed hundreds of thousands of domestic abuse incidents, it is not that easy to access all the different types of harms. Often what you get when you speak to police officers is that they may tick the first few factors; if they have their Samsung device, they may immediately tick off whatever is at the top because of the pressure of their work. They still may not be accurately capturing some harms in the way that we would want to understand how the Act is actually responding to them.
The challenge we have is being able to show that there is something happening around those harms. You will often find reference to them in some more qualitative written responses within wider safeguarding systems as well. There are two key aspects of that. First, how are we recording those additional harms to be able to show the Act is improving and widening our response and understanding? Secondly, our evidence would still tell us that, because of the high churn of police officers, you need those specialist teams to be able to really understand those different concepts that are actually experienced in DA.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: If you look at the specialist domestic abuse teams you said are doing a much better job, what are the common and key characteristics? What can we learn from those particular small pockets of expertise? Is that transferable?
Professor Michelle McManus: Yes, that is a great question. One of the evaluations we have done in particular, which has been identified by the National Police Chiefs’ Council as best practice, looks at co-responder models of domestic abuse. This links back to what we know from a huge evidence base, which tells us that around 70% of survivors and victims do not support further investigation or co-operation with criminal justice outcomes. We know that from the data.
In terms of best practice or good practice, we have done a number of evaluations on co-responder models. What I mean by that is, for example, an independent domestic violence advocate going out within a certain timeframe. This is the important part of the work that is being done around this. IDVAs—the domestic violence advocates—exist everywhere, but it is a postcode lottery, as you mentioned before, and often what you find is they are telephone services. We do not actually get that full model of the potential to safeguard that family, that victim, or that survivor.
What we found from the evidence that we have gathered is, when we have a domestic violence advocate who goes out within 24 hours of a police response, using a co-responder model, the engagement of victims in safeguarding significantly increases. They are more likely to have conversations about how they can understand their victimisation and try to make themselves safe.
The Chair: That is really important for us to know. The quick response of the domestic violence advocate going in behind a policing response really makes a big difference as to whether the thing proceeds to proper investigation and a proper complaint.
Professor, could you help us with the issues that affect minority communities. This problem must be exacerbated by the isolation often of women in communities where there is distrust of the police already and so forth. Professor Gangoli, could you let us know what your response is to the questions that have been dealt with by Professor McManus?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Exactly. I share and agree with everything that has been said before. As you said, it is magnified but also complicated. It is not just that the same problem exists, but it exists on a different level of complexity.
For instance, some work that we have been doing recently is looking at why cases are discontinued by victim-survivors. We are not even talking about the police letting those cases go, but victims deciding to discontinue the cases. It is called outcome 16, and a significant proportion of domestic abuse cases that involve racially minoritised women result in early case closure before proper investigation. Some of that is down to that first response, but some is also down to a lack of trust. Some cases come to the attention of the police not because victim-survivors themselves have called the police, but because of neighbours calling or something like that.
Sadly, there has been evidence of institutionalised racism impacting enforcement. That includes reviews that have been done by academic researchers and HMICFRS.
The Chair: HMICFRS. We are not good on acronyms. We like our public to know what they mean.
Professor Michelle McManus: His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Thank you for that. Yes, you are absolutely right, acronyms are not always very useful, but we tend to use rather a lot of them.
The Chair: I am sure that you have to, but it would be useful if we could just remember.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Absolutely. The key issues that racially minoritised women and girls face—particularly women, in this context—is that they are disproportionately misidentified as perpetrators. This is because of cultural contexts that are being misunderstood. I am thinking particularly of mothers-in-law and mothers who get arrested in domestic abuse cases. They are seen as being perpetrators. Very often they are perpetrators, but they are also victims. Consistently what we find in cases involving racially minoritised women, or racially minoritised families, is that the police and perpetrator programmes more generally do not know what to do when somebody is both a victim and a perpetrator. They get treated as one or the other. That then leads to further mistrust, if you like. That is a key thing as well.
There are issues around family dynamics as well. One of the other issues around work with racially minoritised women and girls in policing is that there are issues around immigration insecurity. Some research that we did a few years ago showed that the biggest challenge for racially minoritised women and girls in accessing justice of any kind, whether it is criminal justice or with policing, is immigration status. If they have insecure immigration status, they are much less likely to get a good outcome from the criminal justice system.
I am not going to use an acronym again, but of course there is no recourse to public funds, there are language barriers, and there is just a deep-rooted fear of the police. There is also some evidence that migrant women who have insecure immigration status do not have access to housing or other benefits in the same way, which again makes it more difficult for them and they feel more vulnerable approaching the police.
The Chair: They worry about the sharing of information between the police and the immigration officers.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Absolutely, yes.
Baroness Gohir: In terms of arrests, are police waiting to be called up multiple times before they make that arrest and charge, or will they do it the first time round? Is there any data on victimless prosecutions or taking cases forward? For example, minority women in particular may be pressured not to press charges, but that can happen to any woman really.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: It depends on the context. Again, it is a postcode lottery. In some areas there are immediate arrests that take place and in others there are not. There is the use of the DASH and DARA domestic abuse screening that the police do when they first go to a site, and it depends on how effectively that is carried out in terms of risk assessment. It is not consistent and the data around that is not consistent. We do not know why in some cases arrests might happen immediately but in some cases they do not. That can be really effective sometimes in saving lives. I have forgotten your second question.
The Chair: The second question was about whether there were victimless prosecutions, prosecutions where the victim may say, “I’m frightened to bring this against my husband or my partner because of his brothers or what might be done to me, and so I don’t want to do it”. But there is evidence of broken vases and crockery, and there is evidence that they can see themselves on the victim, so they do not need to have the victim’s presence in order to proceed. But often the police think they are going to get nowhere if they do not have the victim willingly participating.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: There is not much evidence of that. The evidence is very much of victims withdrawing and using outcome 16, and then that becomes the end of it. The police do not want to take a case that they might see as being weak for good reasons. There have been really—
The Chair: The question is, are there records kept of any cases where there is a process but without the victim’s participation? Do we have any record of any of that?
Professor Michelle McManus: Evidence-led investigations are being pushed more through the specialist domestic abuse teams, recognising that there is too much of an onus at the moment on victims to co-operate to actually get the outcomes both from a safeguarding and a prosecution perspective. The challenge that you have in implementing that is that there are thresholds of evidence that are needed to go down evidence-led prosecutions.
We had some questions posed around digital evidence. Often what you see from the comments around the different forms of abuse that are now in the legislation around coercive, psychological, emotional and financial abuse will be in personal records. This is where the co-responder models really work in eliciting that trust. We know from our years and years of looking at DASH—the domestic abuse risk assessments that have been in place for a number of years now—that the highest risk correlates with harm. That is unfortunately the situation that we have been in and are still in: how do we recognise extrinsic, external evidence around that evidence-led prosecution where we do not necessarily need a victim? That is the challenge that we have around that because it requires us to find evidence of those different forms of abuse in personal private data, which then comes down to victim consent.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: You were mentioning how vital IDVAs are. The majority of IDVAs are currently financed—
The Chair: What are IDVAs?
Professor Michelle McManus: Independent domestic violence—
Lord Russell of Liverpool: Independent domestic violence advocates. The money comes from the police and crime commissioners, who are about to disappear.
Professor Michelle McManus: Yes, it is very concerning.
Lord Russell of Liverpool: What is next?
Professor Michelle McManus: More money? This also relates to the questions that have been posed around children. I want to come back to your arrest question in a minute though. We have tons of evidence that says that victims remove themselves from processes. As I said, around 70% of victims will withdraw after that initial response from the police. We have lots of data evidence on this.
The challenge is how we engage them in safety with that criminal justice outcome. We have shown from that evidence of good practice from the National Police Chiefs’ Council that co-responder models work. We do not have the investment at the moment to be able to deliver that in the way we want to or should be doing—to capture the essence of what the DA Act is trying to do and capture these wider harms, because it really relies on consent from the victim, unfortunately, to be able to gather that evidence around that.
Just to go back to the arrest question, this is about the transparency of data around this more widely. We have data where we have analysed a number of police forces. We have hundreds of thousands of data of domestic abuse incidents and crimes, where I have gone to a chief constable and said, “Do you know you’ve gone out to a victim or a household 33 times in one year and actually nothing has happened with that case? We’ve crimed it only twice”. That is the reality of where we are with this.
The other statistic I will give you from one of our studies is that 1.4% of our perpetrators from a large yearly cohort were responsible for 9% of the domestic abuse investigations. Interestingly, we looked at the type of domestic abuse offences they were committing, and they were not just against their intimate partners, they were against their family members. The problem you have is that your system in policing sometimes will not capture—as I said right at the start—perpetrators who are committing 10 or more crimes in two years, who are responsible for 10% of that cohort of domestic abuse.
The Chair: Just for those who are listening from home, or from their offices or whatever, very often perpetrators of domestic abuse against a partner also abuse children in the family, or sometimes abuse other members of the family, the elderly and so on. It is not confined to an intimate partner.
Q3 Baroness Gerada: Just briefly, on these ones that do not proceed, which seems to be the vast majority, what is the status of being able to share data, in particular where there are children present? I am a GP, and we have a family record. We can start triangulating, but are you allowed to share it even though the person—
The Chair: What are the data protection implications on this, and to what extent can there be sharing with other agencies, professionals and so on?
Professor Michelle McManus: If you look at the DA Act and its ambition around seeing the child as a victim, the evidence tells us there is a real challenge around exactly your point. My husband is a GP, and we have this conversation all the time at home, about the records within GP practices in particular. We have done a lot of work on serious case reviews for children and adults, with domestic abuse being a key feature of that. We see GPs and health often at the centre of some of that information. The challenges are how to, first, educate the health system about how you can refer in. Absolutely, if you have concerns, you should be referring that in because that is a piece of the jigsaw as far as multi-agency safeguarding is concerned.
Secondly, there is a real concern around how police are expected to make decisions and put their public protection notice referral in, when we do not necessarily have all the information from education, health and other areas. If there are concerns around safeguarding, you absolutely have a responsibility to share that information. I know from a GP family that the challenge is how accessible that is.
Baroness Gerada: Can you share it with us? That is what I am saying. Would you share that somebody has been 33 times, and there are children in the household?
Professor Michelle McManus: Not to the GP, no.
Baroness Gerada: Is that because of data protection laws?
Professor Michelle McManus: This goes back to multi-agency safeguarding hubs and arrangements, and how health is around the table with that and the real challenges we have, not just from health, but from education and other safeguarding partners. There are some groups that exist. I know certainly in the north-west we have certain groups that try to bring those co-ordinators for information sharing together. When you have a collection of GP practices in an area, in terms of the ICB—you will be able to do the acronym for that one for me—
Baroness Gerada: Integrated care board.
Professor Michelle McManus: Thank you. They are actually putting in those partnership safeguarding responses. That is a really important part, not just for domestic abuse, but for the wider harms that often come with that within the family context as well.
The Chair: Are there any other questions on that? No. I am going to move then to Baroness Barran.
Baroness Barran: I just have one, because I was going to focus on some research that Professor Robinson had done.
The Chair: We had another two witnesses who are both senior academics and were going to be joining you virtually today but unfortunately the technology has failed and we are having technical difficulties in getting them connected to us. It is not an experience that we have had before. I apologise to everyone for that, and I apologise particularly to them because they have put aside time to appear before us. We are working on trying to resolve this.
Baroness Barran has huge experience in this because she really took this Bill through this House. I am sure—
Baroness Barran: No, I did not. I set up a domestic violence charity, actually.
The Chair: But you are very knowledgeable about all this, and you were intimately involved with getting a great deal of change made. Perhaps you would like to ask our experts.
Q4 Baroness Barran: Yes, of course. I am imagining that you both looked at the Project Bright Light research. There is some interesting data in that, some of which Professor McManus has already touched on in terms of shifting cases to front-line officers who are absolutely not set up for all this. It also suggests that this definition of, “Personally connected” in simple terms is just too broad for the police to deal with. I just wondered what your reflections were on that. I am happy to take it in either order, but it would be fascinating to hear from you both on whether you think that is correct, and if so, whether you see a way through that.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: The “Personally connected” thing is very useful. Technically, it is broader than intimate partner violence and abuse. That is a real point of departure from the way that domestic abuse has been understood in the past as involving only intimate partners or people in marriages. It is good. In terms of actual practice, it becomes really difficult for the police to understand it. Some of that comes down to training, and some comes down to the fact that the majority of cases in this country inevitably have historically been intimate partner abuse. Any other forms of personal connection become quite hard for the police to unpack and treat in exactly the same way, even though we can see that actually they should be treated like that.
I want to come back to the issue around data because one of the key problems with the Act is that the data around ethnicity is not collected. It is not mandated: some police forces collect it and others do not. It is not collected systematically. It becomes very, very difficult to understand the numbers because sometimes it is in free text, and there are all the usual issues with a lack of a coherent data collection system across the country.
That then makes it even harder because there is no overall national understanding of what the personal connection means. You might have family members who are not intimate partners, such as parents or parents-in-law, abusing first-generation immigrant women. You might have honour-based abuse by wider family members, sometimes from people outside the family who are not, “Personally connected” in the way that might be understood in the context of this country. You have racially minoritised communities who might have a distant cousin who they say is their brother but actually is of no relation to them.
The Chair: The purpose of the, “Personally connected” concept was really to deal with this issue that—I am sure Baroness Gohir could talk about this much like you can—in relation to minority communities. Sometimes an older relative who has little connection with a young woman is brought in as the authority figure, to discipline a young woman because she is behaving in a way that is considered inappropriate within the family. It was very important to make sure that one had a definition wide enough to incorporate the many different kinds of relationships and connections that could be described as a personal connection, to bring them within the ambit of domestic abuse.
Just for those listening who are not familiar with the fine print of the Act, the purpose was a good one, but the question is, has it become too complicated? Is a former boyfriend who turns up from time to time and behaves in horrifying ways taken into account? Are the police recognising what is involved in personal connection?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: On balance, probably not. As you say, it is a really good—
The Chair: Concept, yes.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Yes, it is a very good concept. It probably comes down to experience and training. That is probably the key thing.
The Chair: We have managed to connect our virtual witnesses, Amanda Robinson and Professor Anitha. Let me just welcome you. We have had terrible technical problems here, and I really thank our technicians for coming in and making this happen. Can you hear us? Professor Robinson, you can. Professor Anitha, can you hear? Yes, you can. Oh, wonderful. Well, let me introduce you to our viewing audience and our panel. We have Professor Amanda Robinson, who is professor of criminology at Cardiff University and specialises in responses to violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence, and is well known to a number of our panel because of her work. We have Professor Sundari Anitha, who is the chair in sociological studies at the University of Sheffield, and is the chair of that specialist unit. She has made significant contributions to policy and practice on domestic abuse, particularly regarding minoritised women and complex forms of abuse. Thank you both for being there, being patient and waiting for us to draw you in. I am really sorry that this happened, but you are with us now and we will have the benefit of your expertise.
We are on a question about whether the police understand and recognise the concept of, “Personally connected”. I was explaining that, “Personally connected” seemed like a rather useful addition in this legislation because it meant that there could be family members who are quite distant but who are an authority figure, who might feel that they are therefore able to discipline younger members of the family—particularly women—if they think they are behaving inappropriately. We also have it in relation to former boyfriends or people with whom there is no intimacy, but who feel that they have some kind of ownership of women and a sense of entitlement. There are a whole variety and range of connections that can fall under the rubric of being, “Personally connected”. That was what we were exploring. Is there a problem for the police in recognising who is covered by this legislation because of personal connection?
Baroness Barran: May I just ask a follow-on question possibly to Professor McManus and to Professor Robinson, on one of the things that came out of the Project Bright Light analysis? Given that Professor Robinson authored it, I hope you do not mind if I perhaps bring her in first. Because the Act talks about a single incident being domestic abuse, and most of us around this table think about patterns of behaviour, that has led to inclusion of a lot of incidents that need to be treated in the same way as patterns of behaviour. Professor Robinson, could you comment on that?
Professor Amanda Robinson: Project Bright Light involved analysis of three years of police recorded incidents and crimes falling under the statutory definition. One of the things that that data analysis showed was that in 2024 there were about 10% of cases that did not appear to fall within the definition. In other words, they were not former or current intimate partners and they were not relatives. Police understand former or current intimate partner, people who have had a child together and are separated, and they understand what a family member is.
“Personally connected” has opened up a bit of uncertainty, at least in terms of how it is reflected in the police data. It is not just Bright Light, but a paper was published this year as well, which draws on analysis of data from an English police force, as part of Operation Soteria. It also showed this problem with flagging incidents as domestic abuse when the victim-offender relationship was one of acquaintances or people in positions of authority, as you alluded to.
It is unhelpful because police and the domestic abuse sector would recognise what intimate partner violence is and what familial violence is. “Personally connected” is expanding it even further and potentially causing some cases to be flagged as domestic abuse, where the victim-offender relationship—in terms of how the police data appear—would suggest that these are not at all, including strangers, acquaintances and people we would not consider to be in a relationship where domestic abuse could occur. It is problematic from that point of view.
The Chair: Professor Robinson, it is not that there is no law that could deal with, if you like, acquaintances who might violate or in some way abuse someone? There is the law, but it is the problem of how it could distort data collection and understanding of the spread of domestic abuse. But you are also saying that it is actually undermining the certainty that you need among the police to make progress on this issue. Is that what you are saying?
Professor Amanda Robinson: Yes. From Project Bright Light, as well as in Operation Soteria, let us say, we know that there are problems with inconsistencies of police applying the Home Office-mandated flag for domestic abuse cases. They are already dealing with a huge volume of a diverse range of victim-offender relationships as it is. If they are flagging relationships that are not domestic abuse and, as you say, there is existing law to deal with those crimes, then that is problematic. Once the flag is applied, it is meant to prompt a whole range of actions on the part of the police—for example, a domestic abuse risk assessment or referral to domestic abuse agencies.
It is a waste of police resources if officers are flagging incidents as domestic abuse because they are thinking that “Personally connected” might apply to that situation. Clarity around intimate partner and familial is sufficient, and “Personally connected” is not helpful according to this aspect of operational policing.
Professor Sundari Anitha: The problem here is that we have had difficulty in getting the police to recognise the diverse forms of domestic violence and its perpetrators, who could be extended family members or people at the fringe of what you might consider family. We have responded to that through creating this category of, “Personally connected,” which has now become too broad.
How do we balance the need to recognise that honour-based violence or forced marriage may not be from partners—it may be from wider extended family or even community leaders may be instigating it, so they are not even family but they are the ones putting pressure on family members—without expanding the understanding of domestic abuse such that it becomes a vague, meaningless category that can be applied to work colleagues?
The Chair: Would you like to come in on this, Professor Gangoli?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: I agree with Professor Anitha. That is what I was trying to get at but she has put it much better than I have, so thank you.
The Chair: It is always useful for people to say they do not need to add to the discussion if they agree entirely. This is obviously an issue; thank you, Baroness Barran, for raising it and for raising the Bright Lights analysis. That is really helpful. Can I then move to Baroness Sugg, please?
Q5 Baroness Sugg: You touched on the operational issues that are affecting police investigating, collecting evidence and progressing the case and, as I understand it, patrol officers are increasingly being designated the officers in charge. I just wondered if you could tease that out a bit. Do you think there are any solutions to how operational issues can be dealt with in order to assist with that investigation? You also talked about DASH and DARA, and I would like just a bit more understanding on how they are supporting—or not—the police in their operational work.
Professor Michelle McManus: I have done a huge amount of historical work on the domestic abuse DASH tool. Obviously, there has been a move into the new DARA tool, which is a recommendation from the College of Policing. There was quite a lot of media scrutiny about six or eight months ago of the evidence that came out on DASH; we had known for a very, very long time in the policing world that there were real challenges around the use of DASH from a front-line police perspective.
The Chair: What were the difficulties?
Professor Michelle McManus: DASH is a good interview tool for IDVAs, the domestic violence advocates. The challenge that we had is that there were 27 questions within a standard DASH form. A key challenge, going back to the incident of 33 times in one year that we had in one police force, was that victim will be asked the same 27 questions 33 times. Some officers will deliver those questions as they are; more trained, more specialist officers will get that into conversations and do it in more of a domestic violence advocate way.
The challenge that we have around domestic abuse risk assessment is also the context of when you do that risk assessment. Going back to what I was talking about before with co-responder models, when we have an incident at night where you have children present, their family dynamics are there, the perpetrator is there and you are trying to get a victim to fill in a risk assessment form, it is absolutely not appropriate. It is also a requirement from inspections to ensure that they are recording and submitting their domestic abuse risk assessment because that impacts the pathway of where that case then goes in terms of support, as Professor Robinson was saying.
The challenge that you have there is the context of when and who should be doing that risk assessment. This is the real challenge. DARA has tried to step back a little from more forceful questions that were yes or no, which was absolutely not appropriate because some questions such as, “How frightened are you?”, are not exactly questions you can answer with a yes or no response. Again, the context is really important around that.
The DARA has tried to improve things. The challenge I have—I will say it in this open room—is there is not enough public evaluation data about how that is improving responses. We know there is a reluctance from some forces to move away from DASH, the current risk assessment tool. That probably has more to do with systems than it has to do with anything else because what we have seen in some forces—it is not a great thing because there is no evidence a lot of the time for this—is they have adapted some risk assessment standardised tools to obviously go out to their own police force area. We do not have consistency in how we are delivering that.
We need structured risk assessments forms because we need police to be asking certain questions, but we also need professional judgment. We also need to go back to your point about previous incidents, and how we are actually logging all the different incidents that have happened before within our assessments of what should happen now. I could talk a lot about this.
Professor Amanda Robinson: It is important to have the background. DASH was developed as a multi-agency tool to feed into the MARAC process 15 years ago[1] when these things were being set up. It emerged from two police-oriented tools, and then it grew to serve many different rationales and reasons. That is how we have come to the 27-item tool.
However, 10 years ago, the research that I did with the College of Policing shone a very bright light on the challenges confronting operational policing by using the DASH in this way, especially with the increasing demand, increasing complexity, repeat victims, et cetera, but primarily it not being the right context for a lengthy tool. On the basis of that national evaluation, we then developed the DARA. It has been 10 years since that work was undertaken. Police have been inhibited from adopting it because of Covid, resources, and the computer incident recording system that many forces use called Niche, which means it is not easy to change a risk assessment tool that is embedded in that recording system.
However, recently, Louisa Rolfe—the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for domestic abuse—confirmed that all but three forces have moved to DARA. They use it in a good way, with DASH preserved for IDVAs or specialist officers who are not conducting that risk assessment at the initial incident context, but at a later context when things have settled down and there is more of an appropriate space to do a lengthier risk assessment.
In answer to the question as it was put—if DARA is supporting front-line policing—it is early days because the shift was prevented from taking place 10 years ago, but the early indications and the research on which it was based clearly showed that operational policing needed a shorter tool. It needed to be a tool that was better able to detect patterns—no more yes/no response options but a range to clearly indicate patterns—and to highlight and foreground the issues of coercive and controlling behaviour.
That tool is an improvement and, as forces start adopting it, we will see improvements. They have been really hindered for a decade by being lumbered with a tool that they know is not appropriate for their professional context and everyday practice. That is an important development to bear in mind. It is also important to bear in mind in terms of research and evidence that is coming out about policing of domestic abuse, and whether that is happening in a DASH force or a DARA force, for example.
The Chair: It would be very useful for us to be given a copy of the 27 questions that are in the old DASH scheme, which still haunts the system, and to look at what DARA is doing. It seems to me that we have to have a look at the business of the domestic violence adviser who comes in 24 hours later and can help make sure that the victim feels supported in making complaints. I am worried about that disappearing with the end of police and crime commissioners. There are some issues that you have raised for us that are very useful.
Baroness Sugg: I am keen to understand how effective the domestic abuse protection orders and notices have been. One change was made to them in the House of Lords yesterday, but it would be great to know how they have been implemented and whether they are helping.
Professor Michelle McManus: There is still a lot of evidence to come out from the evaluations we have done within forces. There is still a nervousness and worries about administrative complexities to do with officer training. We have not gathered any evidence to show how much better they are working just now. I do not know if anyone else on the panel has.
Baroness Sugg: Is that because it is not available?
Professor Michelle McManus: It is more because we do not have the data yet to see how far they protect people. But I come back to the point I raised earlier about victimless prosecutions and how this is, and should be, an opportunity to push on in terms of how we respond to domestic abuse. Certainly, there needs to be myth-busting within police forces to see what is done internally to push on this agenda in the resourcing and training offered. From what we see at a local level, there are still challenges in getting this off the ground and getting pilot data. Other colleagues might have more data on that.
Baroness Sugg: It is a postcode lottery issue, is it not, if they invest in it—
Professor Michelle McManus: Yes, absolutely.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Essentially, the problem is the data quality. Going back to the earlier question, neither DASH nor DARA collect data on immigration-related abuse, so threats of deportation or control of documents, which is a way of coercive control used against first-generation immigrant women. You could almost call it a blind spot because, while there is collection of data and questions asked around honour-based abuse, unless the officer probes beyond the form, these enquiries do not always happen.
Going back to your question on domestic abuse protection notices or orders, they are a great initiative—do not get me wrong—but they also require data on their use. Early evidence shows there has been low uptake, particularly among racially minoritised communities. This is anecdotal because there is no consistent ethnicity monitoring. Professor Anitha will hopefully agree with me: the biggest problem with the Act is we do not have the data so there appears to be low uptake of these things, which seems to suggest there is no need for more resources. That creates a loop where actually there is a huge unmet need, and the most vulnerable women and girls in the community are not protected in the way that they could be.
Professor Sundari Anitha: I have two points to make. First, I want to pick up on Geetanjali’s point about data collection. In our research on forced marriage among other things, we found there is no systematic collection of data on ethnicity and race. This means it is not possible to have proactive policing or recognition of gaps in access to police and other services.
I will tell you a little about a police force that, despite this lack of data, managed to take action on this issue. I worked at the University of Lincoln. There is a big eastern European population in Lincoln, but the police and other agencies hardly saw any women come through to their services. We know from their profile—demographic, age and other information—that this cohort of women experience domestic violence when of childbearing age, for example. The police did a proactive campaign on the back of our research to address very specific barriers among the Polish community.
For instance, there was a myth that social workers are paid a bonus to take white children into care and put them up for adoption. Specific myths were circulating in that community, which prevented women from contacting services. The point is, if you do not map the absence of access to your services against your local population, you do not know there are barriers that prevent groups of communities from accessing police. So this mapping of data is really important in terms of ethnicity and race.
Polish women are hidden under the category of white-other. If you look at homicide rates, the highest prevalence of domestic homicide is among that population. The data often hides information that the police need for proactive policing.
The second point is on the new protection orders. If it is relevant here, I want to talk about the forced marriage protection order, which has been in place for a very long time. Together with Professor Aisha Gill from the University of Bristol, we did the first big piece of research examining how forced marriage protection orders work. These orders have existed for a very long time and are quite unique in that, when they are issued, the victim may still live within the family home. Every other protection order is premised on spatial distance; so you separate the perpetrator from the victim, or you might say someone cannot come within 200 metres of the children’s school. With the vast majority of forced marriage protection orders—men also use them—the threat of forced marriage may disappear, but both parties may live in the same family home, and a whole range of forms of coercive control are still at play.
A very different kind of intervention and safeguarding response is required from the police in order to keep a person safe from honour-based violence, which is triggered because someone dared tell the police or their teachers about what was happening. We have an understanding with our research, but orders are still not implemented differently. The protection order is the start of the process of safeguarding; it is not the end point.
The Chair: That is a very interesting contribution, Professor Anitha; thank you very much indeed. I am concerned about this, and my colleague Baroness Rafferty is very interested in police data and has questions for you to expand upon. But, Professor Robinson, would you like to come in?
Professor Amanda Robinson: I have a quick point to say that police data on ethnicity is a real problem; the proportion that is missing is roughly 40%, which represents a huge gap in knowledge and understanding. We talk about domestic abuse, but the problem is not just in this field; other inquiries in the last couple of years have shown that it is important for police to routinely collect data.
The Chair: Baroness Rafferty, this is your area in terms of a desire for information on police data.
Q6 Baroness Rafferty: Thank you very much, and thanks for your contributions thus far. We have already heard a lot from you about the dynamics of data within the system. Points have been made around the mapping of data, the gaps in terms of ethnicity, and the fact that it is very difficult to connect up a historical trajectory of data to get a broader contextual picture of patterns of abuse over time. Indeed, the data quality issue seems to be at the heart of a lot of what we have discussed, aside from the vagaries or strengths and weaknesses of DASH and DARA, et cetera. In a slight departure from the question, if you were to rank the top three issues you would like to redesign and see improvement in, what might those be?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Sorry, do you mean in relation to data or more generally?
Baroness Rafferty: I mean in relation to data.
The Chair: In data collection, where are the gaps that could be closed and/or improved?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Collecting data nationally on ethnicity would be a huge move forward but having police systems that speak to each other better or a national database, which some European countries have, would make a huge difference, particularly within racially minoritised communities. This is the case for everybody across the board—women and men, victims and perpetrators—in domestic violence cases as people tend to move constabularies and then that data is lost. They can go back and say, “This happened to me”, but obviously perpetrators will not necessarily say they were charged with a particular—
The Chair: They will not offer background information.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Yes, there is no background information. Police data sharing systems are very cumbersome and difficult to get hold of. For years, Liz Kelly has talked of the need for a national police data system. Even if there are several data systems, data sharing becomes much easier. They are the two main things I would like to see happen.
Professor Amanda Robinson: To complement rather than replicate the points made about gaps, another issue with police data is its usability. A main recommendation that came out of Bright Light was that, together with the current flag that the Home Office mandates police to attach to all incidents of domestic abuse, there should be sub-flags to differentiate between intimate partner and familial violence. In many ways, the two are fundamentally different and require different interventions and tools, and there should be different expectations about what police achieve in those cases.
If a suspect in a DA case is an adult son who is mentally ill, that is a very different kind of suspect to an ex-husband who is coercive, controlling, stalking and commits sexual assault, et cetera. Differentiating those within police data would be helpful for operational policing but also for scrutiny over police performance. The people involved expect the police to do different things in different scenarios. Sub-flags are needed to differentiate broadly within domestic abuse and to provide better usability for police themselves.
The current systems are not fit for purpose. I have seen Niche, the primary system, in action; I had to work with it as part of Bright Light. It is a monolith. Many people that police deal with are repeat; they are known to police. If an officer attends a ‘new’ incident, it is very likely the victim and suspect will already have dozens of occurrences within Niche. It would take days and days of work for an officer, who is already pressed for time, to be able to interrogate hundreds of pages on different templates, having to click different tabs and interfaces to find that information. Indeed, even detectives who deal with the most high-risk and complex cases say they do not have enough time to interrogate all of the data held by police on victims and suspects in the case.
So there is a problem about expecting police to collect data and arguing that in some ways they do not collect enough of it. But there is an additional problem, which is that the data that police have is not in a format or system that enables them to get the information they need quickly so they can act on it. That is a major issue for police.
The Chair: Thank you for making it so clear to us. The business of accessibility and the idea there should be a uniform system that works speedily seems to be a priority to get this to work. I will move us on with a little speed because I am mindful of the time.
Q7 Baroness Neate: I want to ask about digital evidence. We know that digital means are used by perpetrators of many different categories of abuse. How well placed are the police in collecting and interpreting digital evidence and then using it to prosecute a case? What could be improved there?
Professor Michelle McManus: My quick response, which reflects what Professor Robinson said, is the police are very good; they are certainly getting better with digital evidence. Body-worn video is key from an intelligence perspective. As Amanda laid out, the challenge comes with accessibility and use of that data, and the overwhelm within the system that affects the ability to extract it out in a meaningful way. However, as I said, data is essential if we look at more evidence-led prosecutions.
I go back to the challenge around using digital evidence that is available to police in their response but also obtaining evidence that exists within a household in terms of additional features of domestic abuse that are now within the Act, as I mentioned before and will not duplicate. Things are happening, but there are challenges in resources, capability, extraction, accessibility and so on.
Baroness Neate: Just to clarify, I also meant digital channels that are used by perpetrators and gathering evidence of that, as well as the digital evidence gathering.
Professor Michelle McManus: Yes, and that comes into the matter. A lot of social media and location tracking is done on personal devices and that presents a challenge. We have gathered a lot of evidence within police forces. Amanda’s project in particular will speak to this. Again, it is the idea of how to access data from a consent perspective with our survivors, when it is a key part our digital evidence to be able to take that investigation forward.
The Chair: There is the other issue of the extent to which there are adequate people with expertise working for the police in terms of the available resource.
Professor Amanda Robinson: Project Bright Light has six pillars of focus. Pillar 6 is entirely based on digital evidence, which was seen as a huge barrier to how effective police can be. A significant chunk of their workload will involve some level of digital evidence, although not in every domestic abuse case. Learning and development was found to be lacking in raising the competencies of front-line officers in digital matters. At a senior command level, there is no ownership or oversight of digital capabilities or investigations. This force is not unique; it is a national problem. The digital forensic unit has significant backlogs, which means that often cases are delayed by 10 to 12 months. If someone has been in a relationship for a month, there are probably hundreds of text messages. If they are harassed or stalked online, giving their phone over for digital evidence to be scraped results in a massive volume of information. The systems and resources available to police are just not up to scratch for dealing with this issue, which will only get worse over time.
The Chair: Professor Robinson, I want to raise this with you because I know the work that you have done on this. When we talk about the great delays in the criminal justice system, it is never mentioned that the resolution of crime nowadays could be greatly improved if we had enough of the necessary expertise to do precisely what you talked about just now: the scraping of information from people’s phones, getting the kind of evidence that is hard to challenge when produced. In talking about expediting the processes, we have not heard about putting money into improving the expertise available to the police for this purpose.
Professor Amanda Robinson: That is definitely true. Research shows that is clearly a fundamental issue that does not just affect the policing of domestic abuse; it affects many crimes. But within the domestic abuse workload, digital evidence is important for adding a source of evidence other than a victim statement, for example. Such evidence is often available and can speak to course of conduct in offences that are more challenging to investigate such as coercive and controlling behaviour, where you need to establish a course of conduct to prove the crime. Often evidence is within phones and computers and, unless it can be accessed quickly as part of the investigative strategy, it can be lost.
Q8 Lord Polak: Before I start, this has been a very educational session. The reason I say that is that we sit around in the House, make laws and try to improve Bills. I was very much involved in the Domestic Abuse Bill/Act, but you do not often think of the practicality of what is suggested or agreed upon. Then you hear about the confusion and difficulty to get anything done. In the end, all we are trying to do is protect a vulnerable woman or children. It is really difficult, and it is an important lesson.
This is a good example: we were very keen to put children on the face of the Bill because of the belief that children who experience or are part of a household where domestic abuse takes place are not bystanders, they are victims. Then, because of the learned experience as a child, these things can be repeated in the future. So that was all added to the Bill; therefore, it means more work for the police. Are the police able to deal with this issue? How successful are they in doing it? What else can be done to make it more efficient?
Professor Michelle McManus: I would love to come in here. I have a very particular interest in children as the director of the Institute for Children’s Futures.
Lord Polak: Where exactly are you from?
Professor Michelle McManus: I am from Manchester, so the Manchester Metropolitan University.
Lord Polak: It is just your accent is very—
Professor Michelle McManus: It is very mixed.
Lord Polak: I am Scouse; it is very close.
Professor Michelle McManus: Yes, Warrington.
Lord Polak: I could tell. Your work really matters.
The Chair: We like having people from all around the country.
Professor Michelle McManus: We love that representation. Going back to policing, we always try to emphasise the presence of children. Previously, there were lots of challenges because of DASH, which had different interpretations of whether a child was present. We have lots of data that tells us one officer would tick a box if a child ever lived in the house—they may not be present or out with grandparents for the night—and another would say, “Well, they weren’t there when it happened, so children were not present”. We have had challenges with that in the past.
First, it is a good move to clearly articulate the dangers, trauma and impact of domestic abuse. The challenge going forward is, what does that mean in reality? From a children’s social care perspective—I am immersed in this type of data—what is the expectation if a child is there? Should there be a referral to children’s social care, bearing in mind around 70% of victims and survivors will withdraw after that first attendance? Is it right—I do not know the answer—there should be a children’s social care referral on attendance of a domestic abuse incident? What is the expectation?
There are great initiatives such as Operation Encompass that do a lot of work around education and whether children have attended a domestic abuse incident. I come back to that cumulative attendance; I gave lots of examples of repeat perpetrators and repeat visits. What are we doing? What is the expectation? Is there a threshold that we need to get to where we say, “Now we need to do a referral to children’s social care”? Does the matter need to go to a multi-agency safeguarding hub? In our experience so far, there is no clarity as to what should happen and when if children are present. There is an understanding of the importance of this, but we need to go further as to what the expectation is.
The Chair: Where is the blue line crossed when you have to involve social services, that will in turn bring in local authority education departments to let people know of a child’s vulnerability when there has been a background of domestic violence? One incident might not satisfy the threshold, but there should be one so that people know and understand that, suddenly, action has to be taken. I see that we have hands up. We will go to Professor Robinson and then Professor Anitha. Professor Robinson, bear in mind that I am running out of time.
Professor Amanda Robinson: To build on the previous point, for an investigation, the police need a consistent standard of crime recording, which then sets a benchmark for what happens in terms of police and multi-agency action on behalf of safeguarding that child. The matter comes up against offences of child neglect. Thresholds need to be set with better guidance for police; otherwise there may be a moral conundrum of victims of domestic abuse becoming suspects of child neglect because the children, by virtue of the Act, are victims in their own right. More clarity and guidance is needed at the interface of child neglect and child victims of the Act for how the police are meant to manage and record this information. The police are aware of this issue and are undertaking work to get to grips with that standard of practice and which thresholds should be applied.
Professor Sundari Anitha: I want to talk about the children of migrant women who have no recourse to public funds. I speak from my research experience but also as a trustee of Southall Black Sisters. Where threshold has clearly been met and there is a social care referral still standing today, social services offer to put children in care because the woman has no recourse to public funds; therefore, they either separate the mother and child, or send the child back to the abusive parent. When contact with the police leads to such responses it becomes very difficult for women to separate out the violence they face from the father of the child, or their partner, and what feels like violence from the state, which offers separation from their children or the return of the children to the abusive partner. We need to think about what happens with very vulnerable categories of women.
The Chair: Thank you very much for that. That is really important and on our list of things to address. I am going to move to my friend Shai.
Q9 Baroness Gohir: This question is for Professor Anitha and Professor Gangoli. When women from minoritised communities report abuse, how well do police handle their reports? There may also be additional layers of honour-based abuse, immigration status and no recourse to public funds. You can focus your answers on things you have not mentioned already. For example, why does the Act appear to not work for them effectively? There appear to be higher domestic homicide rates in those communities.
The Chair: I will ask you to answer that, Professor Gangoli, because you have such specialist knowledge; then I will turn to Professor Anitha.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: The key thing that has not been mentioned yet, though Sundari and I have alluded to it, is we need to find a way to ensure that victims who have insecure immigration status, both for themselves and their children, are not recorded in ways that expose them to further risk from the state and from their family. Sundari and I could give you numerous examples, but we will be here until teatime and we do not want that. That is the key thing. You mentioned homicide, which is a huge issue.
The Chair: Baroness Gohir has a great deal of expertise herself.
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: Women from minoritised communities are at higher risk of homicide, suicide and self-harm. I recently saw work around suicide and self-harm, which needs to be added much more systematically to definitions around coercive control. It was in the context of a recent judgment that I got to thinking about racially minoritised women and girls, who are much more likely to commit suicide than settled white women. It becomes a huge black hole because they are not seen as a risk category. There is a lot of discussion around suicide, but it is not often in the context of women or racially minoritised women.
There are huge issues with regard to young women who are at risk of forced marriage, and first-generation immigrant women who are at risk of different kinds of violence and abuse. Victims of forced marriage, strictly speaking, do not come under the Domestic Abuse Act any more, even if they experience domestic abuse. Some British women are taken to another country, left there vulnerable for months and years, and are sexually abused. Sometimes very little can be done, especially if the women have dual nationality. That again is a bit of a black hole.
Baroness Gohir: If we put to one side forced marriage, honour-based abuse and immigration, what about women born in this country who do not experience any of those issues but are also victims of domestic abuse and homicide? What is the issue there? Why do the police not handle their reports well? Why are these women being missed?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: The data seems to suggest that the kind of immigrants you talk about, second- or third-generation women who have settled status, are more likely to be treated well by the police than first-generation migrant women. Having said that, there are issues around institutionalised racism, which I have referred to as well. I do not know the reason for that but it possibly comes down to how black and minoritised women are treated in general. It is a much deeper issue to do with structural racism.
Baroness Gohir: For black women, domestic homicide rates are higher than those for south Asian women. That is not linked to honour-based abuse or forced marriage. Why does the system not work for black women? I am happy for Professor Anitha to add her comments.
The Chair: Do you have an answer to that? We are talking about women born in this country, whose mothers were born here but who experience policing in a different way.
Professor Sundari Anitha: There is an idea of the ideal victim as someone who is passive and does not answer back. Often black women, if they do not fit into that stereotype, are very easily cast as aggressors as well. There is a rise in the idea that domestic violence is mutually perpetrated. So that is one part of the problem. We know that women with mental health issues, or those who have histories of being in care, find it particularly hard to be believed. When different forms of inequalities intersect, it is very difficult for these women to occupy the perfect victim position and for their account to be believed. If you look at attrition and drop-off rates, they withdraw from co-operation with the police processes because they feel they are not believed. We looked at case files where police made comments and asked, “Why didn’t she do that?” Which suggest there is a layer of disbelief around accounts of women who do not behave in the way we think perfect victims should.
The Chair: Professor Anitha, you are absolutely on the mark. This is about the continuation of stereotypes and mythologies about particular kinds of women, the assumption being they could not possibly be victims because they seem to be assertive and able to look after themselves. Yet we know that that can be a disguise for what is actually happening.
Professor Michelle McManus: Baroness Kennedy, just to give some statistics to emphasise what Professor Anitha says: in two police force areas, one recorded the victim ethnicity in 89% of their domestic abuse cases, but in the other force the figure was 42%. We have data on the point you raise. In terms of risk assessment tools and decision-making about what happens next, we found significantly less DASH risk factors are ticked for minoritised victims. Therefore, that is likely to impact on the outcome; we know that from the risk assessment side of things. Statistically, we have also shown that it leads to minoritised victims being significantly higher to withdraw support and have lower outcomes of charge and summons. There are facts in police data to show that the application of risk assessments does not necessarily map over to the circumstances and context of families. This is true with minoritised victims, but the problem gets even wider when you have adult children in different types of family risk assessments.
The Chair: There are spaces in which discretion is exercised. Unfortunately, these sorts of stereotypes and assumptions about how certain communities act and behave suddenly fill those spaces. I am sorry, but I will move to our final question.
Q10 The Lord Bishop of Derby: This is a concluding question. I am grateful for the contributions you have made today. Is there anything you have not been asked about that you want to make sure the panel hears before we conclude?
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli: I have a couple of points to highlight. The role of specialist services and their relationship with the police is vital. Special services are underused and they often feel like the relationship with the police is quite extractive. There needs to be a way of formalising the process, rewarding specialist services and putting resources in. We need to establish statutory partnership duties that require the police to collaborate with specialist services. I talk about racially minoritised women, but that would probably apply to other specialist services too. We need to ensure long-term funding for these providers as well.
The second point we have not talked about much is accountability for discriminatory policing. We should be rewarding good policing but also making sure that there is accountability where policing has not gone right, particularly in this context around stereotyping and negligent handling of domestic abuse cases where it involves vulnerable people.
Professor Amanda Robinson: From a policing perspective and how operational matters pan out when workload ever increases without accompanying guidance, training, tools and staff, our research shows there is a need to think carefully about implementing law without foundational work to support the practitioners that are meant to deliver it. The coercive and controlling behaviour law under the Serious Crime Act, introduced 10 years ago, was a very good example (in a negative sense) of a law that was introduced without the necessary requirements for professionals that were meant to deal with the issue.
I notice there are now debates about suicides linked to domestic abuse being investigated as homicides, which is another great example of a potentially similar thing happening, as well as children being considered victims in the Act. On the face of it, these are very good, progressive directions of travel; but if they are implemented without training, resources, guidance and tools, then practitioners are unable to deliver the vision intended by the law. So, I would urge a cautionary note about continuing to push things ‘down the pike’ without recognising what is needed ‘at the bottom’ in terms of the front line of policing but also specialist services as well as health. Everyone is affected, and often people are not given additional resourcing to carry out new demands from Government. That is the point I wish to make.
Professor Sundari Anitha: I will pick up on Amanda’s point about implementing new provisions without thinking through what it means in relation to coercive control. With honour-based violence, forms of coercive control are still not understood. Economic abuse is a new one—I was not here when you asked that question—and dowry abuse is very much part of that, but there is still almost no understanding and recognition that it is a form of economic abuse. In risk assessment tools, questions about dowry would not be asked, so it would be missed. It has big consequences for women in terms of loss of their parental inheritance, which the husband and his family will keep.
I do not know if you covered this earlier. A key issue is the need for a firewall between immigration services and police in order to protect women who are at risk of serious harm and death. Discussions are ongoing with the Home Office, and there is a suggestion that data will be shared on the basis of consent with migrant women who are offered support. But consent is only possible from a position of safety, which has to be the priority. Once the immediate danger is over, someone is in a position to consent to any sharing of data, so the priority has to be safety rather than border control.
Amanda, I agree with what you say about femicide. A hurried legislation is a problematic legislation; it opens up these cans of worms. I support a call for an independent public inquiry into femicide that also examines domestic abuse-related suicide and the disproportionate rates of homicide of migrant women. There needs to be a broader inquiry into this, with specific focus on particular aspects such as suicide among migrant women. Southall Black Sisters is calling for that. On one hand, we need to expand the scope of what we look at; on the other, preparatory work needs to be done so that when we conceptualise domestic violence in new, broader ways, which is a good thing, we also think of its impact and implications.
Professor Michelle McManus: I just have one sentence.
The Chair: One sentence is allowed.
Professor Michelle McManus: Victim safety in criminal justice enforcement and outcomes do not always align. So let us always think back to victim safety. We have not touched on perpetrators today. How do we hold perpetrators to account without pulling and dragging our victims through a process that they do not want to engage in? We need to do more work on that.
The Chair: Thank you so much. I want to reiterate what Lord Polak said about how interesting this session has been. I am sorry we had the technical difficulties at the beginning that meant we did not have Professor Anitha and Professor Robinson with us the whole of the time. But the session has been really instructive. You brought information to us that is vital to this inquiry, which is about how legislation works in the practicalities as it is rolled out. You have drawn to our attention many of the ways in which this has to be improved. It has been a really illuminating session. I want to thank our academics and also my panel, who worked so hard in preparing and following the evidence. I call this session to an end.
