Trigger warning: This article may contain information that you find disturbing.

Domestic abuse and domestic homicide are highly gendered crimes with women constituting most victims and men most perpetrators. Roughly two women a week are killed by male intimate ex/partners and male family members. Around 30 men a year are killed in domestic settings, mostly at the hands of other men. Domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) are a statutory requirement and were introduced in 2011 to learn from such killings by identifying missed opportunities for intervention and making changes to improve responses to domestic abuse. To ensure that DHR recommendations are implemented, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s office is developing a national domestic homicide oversight mechanism which will be informed by our research. In this blog we focus on recommendations made in DHRs for children’s services.

What did we do in the study?

We identified and analysed 33 DHRs published between 2017 and 2019. We used a mixed methods approach to systematically extract information from those DHRs, such as the recommendations made, areas for development and learning, and examples of good practice. We also specifically analysed how children featured within the DHRs.

Victims and perpetrators

Most victims were female (88%) and most perpetrators male (91%). Regarding ethnicity, the majority of victims (70%) and perpetrators (66%) were White British, with the remainder coming from Minoritised backgrounds (including White Europeans). Victims ranged in age from 16 to over 65 years and perpetrators 18 to 65 years, with the majority in the 16-45 age range.

Victims had high levels of prior victimisation (91%), alongside difficulties with substance use (42%), mental ill health (39%), and socioeconomic disadvantage (33%). Perpetrators also had issues with substance use (58%), mental ill health (42%), and socioeconomic disadvantage (52%), but also with violence (94%) and criminality (55%).

The victim-perpetrator relationship

Twenty nine of the 33 homicides (88%) were intimate partner homicides (IPH), mostly perpetrated by male partners or ex-partners (90%), with over a third (34%) of partners separated at the time of the homicide – a recognised risk for domestic homicide. Three (9%) of the homicides were adult family homicides (AFH), all perpetrated by male family members. Lastly, one case involved a victim killed by the sons of a woman she cohabited with.  In most cases (88%), there had been prior domestic abuse within the victim-perpetrator relationship and in over half of these cases (59%) children’s social care and education had been aware of the domestic abuse.

Children and childhoods

There were forty-three children reported within this sample of DHRs, ranging in age from unborn to 17 years. In some cases, children were injured, or even killed – either as primary targets of domestic homicide, or alongside their mothers or fathers. In other cases, they were witnesses – either to domestic abuse prior to the homicide, or to the homicide itself. The DHRs illustrate the intersection between domestic abuse and child abuse, perpetrators’ manipulation of children as a method of controlling mothers, and perpetrators’ attempts to ‘groom’ and socialise children to becoming future perpetrators.

…and then [perpetrator] had pinned her to the floor and told the children to stamp on her, [perpetrator] had also punched her head several times. (DHR296, p12).

DHRs also illustrate the agency of children, their disclosures of violence to professionals and calling for help – although not always resulting in appropriate agency responses.

[victim’s] daughter was brave enough to disclose the violence to a teacher at her school. It was dealt with as an internal matter and the information not shared with the relevant services as it should have been in line with statutory Child Protection Procedures. (DHR154, p15)

What types of recommendations were made?

Most DHR recommendations were targeted towards Education and Children’s Social Care, most often relating to the need for improvements in multi-agency working and information management (73%), assessments (36%), developing frontline practice (42%), training/development (58%), and policy and processes (79%).

Recommendations focused on the need to take a more holistic and proactive approach to understanding risks and dynamics within families and relationships, alongside the need to recognise separation as a time of particular risk, rather than an endpoint at which supports can be removed:

The fact that [perpetrator] had left the matrimonial home and [victim] had taken legal steps to prevent contact provided a misleading sense of safety that influenced how some professionals, such as children’s social care and the police, approached risk assessment and managed their contact with [victim] and [perpetrator]. (DHR149, p25)

Challenges around balancing child and adult safeguarding was also identified, particularly within the context of children’s social care, where mothers were often responsibilised with changing their partners’ abusive behaviour, for fear of social workers labelling them as “failing to protect” their children. Such framing of mothers can result in their avoidance of seeking help, for fear of being blamed for the abuse they are suffering and for fear of having their children removed.

Policy implications

Our policy recommendations from the project (available in full on the Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s website) include the need for:

• ensuring children’s voices and experiences are fully reflected in assessment processes
• increasing the visibility, responsibility, and accountability of perpetrators
• improving domestic abuse training for social workers and education practitioners – including children as mechanisms of control, and particularly where women have migrated to the UK
• improving regulation/oversight of independent schools who may not have adequate domestic abuse and safeguarding policies
• developing interventions for adolescent boys at risk or perpetration
• and strengthening the support offer for children affected by domestic abuse and bereaved by domestic homicide