Domestic Violence Report Findings
The Foundation decided two years ago that it wished to make a serious investment into aspects of domestic violence.
One in four women will endure some form of domestic violence during the course of her lifetime, an astounding statistic. Two women a week die at the hands of a partner or close associate in instances which are now being described increasingly as domestic violence. With this background we were faced with some interesting choices. We could of course invest money in places of safety for survivors of domestic violence male or female. We already do quite a lot of this through our grant programmes. We could also have looked at programmes for perpetrators. In the end however we decided that out best contribution might be to look at the structures of support and the legal system into which survivors of domestic violence might place themselves and to test whether or not they were being well served by these structures. From this thinking we came to commission University of Sunderland’s International Centre for the Study of Violence and Abuse to investigate the issue of attrition in the Criminal Justice System for survivors of domestic violence.
We were very pleased indeed with the research as it proceeded. We received regular reports from the researchers and preliminary findings began to stack up into something really interesting. We did not of course know at the outset that we would be launching our own report very much in the same week as the Government’s White Paper and the proposal which has happened at the end of May for a register of domestic violence offenders. While there is still much to debate about the prevention of domestic violence and better ways in which to manage violent situations, we are very pleased to be able to play our part. We attach here to the website a summary report of the domestic violence research which we ourselves commissioned which now takes its place in the general debate. We are very grateful to the research team at the University of Sunderland led by Professors Marianne Hester and Jalna Hamner for the extremely conscientious work they did on this topic. We may well wish to follow this up with further activities and if so we will signal them on our own website.
Click here to download the summary report.