Nadine* lobbied South Yorkshire Police to adopt DA Matters and now works with the programme. After years of being coercively controlled, her ex took their children, threatening she’d never see them again. When she called the police, she was told it was a matter for the family courts. “It felt like they’d put a barrier up straight away. No one had asked me what had gone on,” she said. Over the years, Nadine had a lot of police involvement. “I had 999 on speed dial and they always came, but the understanding wasn’t there. In 2017, my ex was standing on my drive, screaming. I called the police but he’d gone before they came. When they came later to take a statement, I had two police officers in my front room and one said, ‘Well, he didn’t bring a baseball bat’.”
An understanding of coercive control – “the nuances, the cleverness of perpetrators, the need to see patterns”, as Morgan puts it – is arguably more critical than ever. With the arrival of national lockdowns, calls to helplines are skyrocketing and the number of women killed by a current or former partner has crept up. Furthermore, this problem won’t dissipate when lockdown lifts, warns Dr Katrin Hohl, senior lecturer in criminology at City, University of London: “Our data shows strong evidence that lockdowns keep victim-survivors in abusive relationships.” But, she says, “Separations are being delayed, not cancelled. This is really significant because separations are a known trigger for escalation in domestic violence, and linked to homicide, particularly in the context of coercive control”. Hohl stresses the role of the police: “forces must prepare to identify and safeguard those at risk”.
National Police Chief’s council lead for domestic abuse, assistant commissioner Louisa Rolfe, told openDemocracy that officers have received extensive training on dealing with victims of domestic abuse. She said that all forces received training on coercive control when it was made a specific offence in 2015 and that 24 forces have undertaken additional Domestic Abuse Matters training, with plans in place to roll it out to others in “the coming months”.
The minister for safeguarding, Victoria Atkins, told openDemocracy she was “pleased to see the positive impact” the training was having, adding that the government would “continue to work closely with police forces to ensure domestic abuse is understood. She added that the government had given more than £27m to domestic abuse organisations during the pandemic and that £25m had been committed towards targeted perpetrator programmes in the next financial year.
After years of cuts to policing, including under Boris Johnson’s London mayoral stint, money is the chief barrier to forces signing up to DA Matters, says Melani Morgan, with many believing the training should be centrally funded. There is another cost issue: the programme is demanding. Morgan won’t commit to delivering the training unless it is in person (even during COVID) and 75% of frontline staff will take part. There is an “abstraction issue”, she says, unless forces have training days built into staffing rosters, which, with the current police shortage, is a big ask. Of course, it is worth pointing out that 24 forces have managed it.
Susannah Fish, the former chief constable of Nottinghamshire Police, recently made headlines for telling BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that she wouldn’t report a crime against her person to the police because of the institution’s sexism. “All the training in the world won’t fix that,” she says. On the subject of budgets she is more forgiving. “Often you’re caught between a rock and hard place and it can be very difficult to do the right thing”.
A fully trained police force, without insidious sexism or the routine undermining of domestic abuse allegations, many suggest, depends on leadership insisting this issue is a priority. Does Nicole Jacobs think the government sees domestic abuse as a priority? There is “ambition”, she says. “And I really believe the government recognises the work is still to be done.”
In recent weeks, the government voted for a Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that gave more protection to statues than to most rape victims, and that in 296 pages does not mention the word “woman” once.
Domestic abuse victims being failed by police is an old story. But effective cultural change programmes, producing real results, is not. As women continue to be abused, controlled and killed, which at times is in part due to the failures of the police, new legislation can only go so far without a fully trained police and criminal justice system. In the meantime, victims are still left waiting for the right person to make domestic abuse a priority.
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Marisa Bate | Radio Free (2021-04-14T00:00:00+00:00) Domestic abuse is rising. Why aren't all police being trained to deal with it?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/14/domestic-abuse-is-rising-why-arent-all-police-being-trained-to-deal-with-it/
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