Police Policy And Domestic Abuse

Starmer says that “It is only in the last ten years that domestic abuse has been taken seriously as a criminal justice issue. Before that, the vast majority of cases were brushed under the carpet with the refrain ‘it’s just a domestic’” So police policy and practice in relation to domestic abuse has only dramatically changed since the late 1990s and despite, there being no legal definition of domestic abuse, The Home Office (2013), have defined it as, any incident of pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening behaviour, violence of abuse between those aged 16 years or over who are, or have, intimate partner of family members regardless of gender or sexuality. The abuse can encompass, but is not limited to psychological, physical,

Domestic abuse comprises of 18 percent of all violent crimes, accounts for one in six off all violent incidents and a third of all female homicides (the Police Foundation, 2014). The first critical point in the history of policy and practice concerning domestic abuse came in 1986, when the home office issued a circular where more positive activities against domestic abuse, using a ‘pro-arrest strategy’ (Matczak, A, Hatzidimitriadou, E & Lindsay, J , 2011) was introduced. This 1986 circular called for a review of police officer training and record keeping, it also called for safeguarding for ‘victim’s’ and children at the scenes of the domestic incidents, and to provide appropriate information. The home office then went on to publish two more circulars, 60/1990 and 19/2000 which went on to encourage a more proactive and professional approach from the police (Bryant and Bryant, 2014,

This new tool meant that from March 2009 all police services and a large number of parent agencies across the UK will be using common checklist for identifying and accessing risk (dashriskchecklist.co.uk, 2009). Dash was developed from conclusions drawn from many domestic homicides and serious case reviews; including failures in risk assessment, insufficient information sharing and a lack of training in risk identification. DASH allows police officers use a standard set of questions to estimate the level of risk, questions cover areas such as , physical abuse; whether the ‘victim’ is frightened; where there is conflict of child contact and the escalation of abuse(policing domestic abuse, 2014 , p8) . Since DASH has been in the Metropolitan Police Service has witnessed a 58 percent reduction in the number of domestic homicides, serious incidents and repeat victimization (policing domestic abuse, 2014,