Long-term partners – Reflections on the shifts in partnership responses to domestic violence
| Author | Kirsty Welsh |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02697580211059273 |
| Published date | 01 January 2023 |
| Date | 01 January 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02697580211059273
International Review of Victimology
2023, Vol. 29(1) 27 –51
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02697580211059273
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IRV0010.1177/02697580211059273International Review of VictimologyWelsh
research-article2022
Long-term partners – Reflections
on the shifts in partnership
responses to domestic violence
Kirsty Welsh
Nottingham Trent University, UK
Abstract
Whilst pioneering partnership work first took place in the battered women’s or refuge movement
in England and Wales, the response that came to dominate in the 1990s and 2000s mirrored that
associated with crime prevention more generally and Home Office crime prevention in particular.
This reflected the increasing positioning of domestic violence as ‘real crime’ and the moves at this
time to view domestic violence through a ‘crime lens’. In the last 10 years or so, there has been a
clear shift, with the prevailing approach now dominated by initiatives such as Multi-Agency Risk
Assessment Conferences, Independent Domestic Violence Advisors and Specialist Domestic
Violence Courts. These initiatives have achieved considerable success in reducing risks to high-risk
victims. Yet, in doing so, they establish a very particular framework for responding to domestic
violence, positioning and promoting it as high-risk victimisation and moving to see it through an
‘exceptional risk’ lens. This paper examines shifts in the partnership response to domestic violence
in England and Wales. It argues that, not only are the vast majority of lower risk women excluded
from the prevailing framework but, in focusing on high-risk reduction, intervention within this
framework fails to address women’s complicated and often contradictory needs in relation to
abuse. The prevailing partnership response rests on a notion of safety as risk cessation rather than
one which prioritises expansion of women’s space for action and freedom from the legacies of
abuse. It concludes that, whilst partnership has huge practical and philosophical potential as a
response to domestic violence, only by seeing domestic violence through the lens of diminished
possibilities and with a broader conceptualisation of safety can a partnership framework support
women to achieve theirs.
Keywords
Domestic violence, partnership, responses, high-risk
Corresponding author:
Kirsty Welsh, Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK.
Email: Kirsty.welsh@ntu.ac.uk
28 International Review of Victimology 29(1)
Introduction
Domestic abuse
1
continues to be a significant social problem. It is also a gendered problem. Most
domestic abuse is perpetrated by men on their intimate women partners, with these men perpetrat-
ing on these women: higher repeat victimisation; higher rates of domestic homicide; and the most
severe physical injuries (Hester, 2009; Office for National Statistics, 2020; Smith et al., 2010,
2012; Women’s Aid, 2018; see also Hester, 2013; Hester and Westmarland 2005; Lundgren, 2004;
Stark, 2007) For this, and several other reasons, in this paper, I focus on (heterosexual) men’s
domestic victimisation of (heterosexual) women and refer to ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘woman’
accordingly
2
.
Current estimates are that around one in three women will experience domestic abuse in their
lifetime. During the year ending March 2020, there were an estimated 1.6 million women who
experienced domestic abuse in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics, 2020). Since
the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic abuse has worsened, with 60%of survivors living
with their abuser reporting that the abuse they receive got worse from March–June 2020
(Women’s Aid, 2020b). Alongside, around one in five children have been exposed to domestic
abuse (Radford et al., 2011) and 130,000 children are living in households where high-risk
domestic violence is present (SafeLives, 2015b). There is growing concern about levels of abuse
experienced by young people, with one in five teenagers reporting having experienced physical
violence from a boyfriend or girlfriend (Barter et al., 2009) and 41%of girls aged 14–17
experiencing some form of sexual violence from their intimate partner (House of Commons
Women and Equalities Committee, 2016).
The costs of domestic violence are high, with women experiencing a range of immediate and
longer-term consequences. At the same time, as many as two-thirds of children exposed to domes-
tic abuse are also themselves directly harmed (physically or emotionally abused) or neglected
(SafeLives, 2014) and children exposed to domestic abuse also suffer multiple physical and
emotional consequences. Beyond these very personal costs, it is estimated that the financial cost
for a single victim of domestic abuse is £34,015; the total cost of domestic abuse in England and
Wales for 2016/2017 is estimated to be over £66 billion (Oliver et al., 2019; see also Walby, 2004).
Unsurprisingly, then, it remains high on the agenda of both local and national government in
England and Wales. Central to government thinking on domestic violence over the last 30 years or
so has been the partnership approach and successive policy pronouncements have promoted this
approach as the favoured response to the problem. Partnership work on domestic violence was first
pioneered in the battered women’s or refuge movement as women working within developing
Women’s Aid groups started to identify the diverse and differing needs of women seeking refuge –
needs which extended much further than the emergency accommodation first sought. Partnership
first developed in recognition of the complexities of the domestic violence experience and of
women’s needs in relation to this experience (Welsh, 2003).
Very soon, though, partnership working on domestic violence developed into a framework
dominated by local multi-agency groupings between agencies and organisations in an area, gen-
erally called inter-agency or multi-agency fora (see Welsh, 2003). In the late-1990s, Hague et al.
(1996) estimated there to be over 200 such initiatives in existence nationally. This framework came
to prevail in both policy and practice responses to domestic violence in the 1990s and early 2000s
and mirrored that associated with crime prevention generally and Home Office crime prevention in
particular, reflecting the increasing conceptualisation at this time of domestic violence as a ‘serious
crime’ and, particularly, a Home Office crime problem (Welsh, 2008b). Yet, over the last 10 years
2International Review of Victimology XX(X)
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