Changing the story in responding to domestic abuse perpetrators: What can be learned from the language use of criminal justice stakeholders?

• In Event: Gender, Crime and Justice Working Group Panel 15: Contextual variants in domestic abuse (II)

Abstract

This paper reports on interviews with a range of service providers and stakeholders involved in the response to domestic abuse in a major city in the northwest of England (Greater Manchester). It is part of a larger project within the Vulnerability and Policing Futures Research Centre seeking to compare practice in Australia (Victoria) with that of Greater Manchester. The paper will highlight the different and often competing language used among stakeholders in their depiction of perpetrator intervention; including ‘trauma-informed’, ‘evidence-based’, risk and protective factors, and vulnerability based approaches. Whilst these different language uses serve to illustrate the increasing recognition on the part of these service providers to recognise the complex factors underpinning and driving domestic abuse perpetration they simultaneously speak to the challenges in changing the story for perpetrators and criminal justice. These findings echo the ongoing challenges being faced in implementing such changes post the Royal Commission on Family Violence in 2016 in the State of Victoria and point to the ongoing lessons to be learned for the Greater Manchester 10-year Violence against Women and Girls Strategy.

Authors

• David Rowlands, University of Leeds

• Larissa Engelmann, University of Leeds

• Oznur Yardimci, University of York

• Nicole Westmarland, Durham University Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse

• Sandra Walklate, University of Liverpool

• Kate Fitz-Gibbon, Monash University

• Adam Crawford, University of York