Welcome new legislation places a duty on social landlords to identify and act on signs of domestic abuse.
Hidden in coroners’ reports and databases, deaths caused by domestic abuse are so common that they are rarely even reported. Most victims are female and we live in a society that recognise male violence as a norm – watch any episode of EastEnders, witness the recent crass remarks of home secretary, James Cleverly, on date rape drugs.
According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, 1.7 million women and 700,000 men experienced domestic abuse in 2022. The latest Home Office figures, for 2020/21, show 113 deaths from this cause – more than two per week. Three-quarters of victims were female, a quarter male. Close to half of the deaths were caused by stabbing, the second most common method was blunt force trauma.
The public, rightly, is horrified when a baby or child is beaten or starved by those responsible for their care – according to the NSPCC, an average of 58 young children dies each year, due to abuse or neglect. The most horrific cases, like the recent ones of Victoria Climbié or Arthur Labinjo-Hughes are routinely covered on the front pages of newspapers, with heart-rending photographs. The papers demand, on our behalf, “how could we have prevented this tragedy?”.
Adult deaths caused by abusers who are family members don’t seem to prompt the same visceral emotional response and a collective call for action. Its partly because they are so common. It’s also because systems that could facilitate learning what went wrong and acting on it aren’t working.
Coroners’ preventable deaths reports don’t recognise domestic abuse as a category. The main focus of Community Safety Partnership, another reporting mechanism, is on crime and disorder. The Home Office is brilliant at collecting statistics. It captures, chillingly, who killed whom, with that. Legally, it is responsible for collating the data from domestic homicide reviews, which have been in place since 2011.
It is supposed to identify serious failings and common themes and to communicate lessons to the media. These, in turn, should be picked up by public bodies – such as the police and probation services, social services, councils and housing association. But it isn't happening. The Home Office is not culturally suited to such a role.
Wider definition of domestic abuse
In the UK, reporting and learning mechanisms are lagging far behind new and welcome legislation, in an environment which has become sensitised more than ever to gender-based and institutional violence. Instigated by Theresa May’s government, the Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 was a much-needed and long overdue piece of legislation. It created a statutory definition of domestic abuse including emotional, controlling or coercive, and economic categories and it established a Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales.
This act’s influence, and a culture change, can be seen in Social Housing (Regulation) Act of 2023, which followed a white paper in 2020. The act – a reaction to the negligence and stripping out of regulations that caused the tragic Grenfell towerblock fire of 2018, sets out a charter laying out tenants’ rights, alongside a newly-empowered social housing regulator, professional training requirements and the welcome concept of consumer standards.
Section 136 and 137 of the white paper specifically mentioned domestic abuse and policies and practices on domestic abuse are required from social landlords, following a dedicated consultation, in the consumer standards. They are required to protect tenants, not just from physical conditions but from abusers, within a new set of professional parameters.
Domestic abuse expert Dr Kelly Henderson welcomes the fact that this narea of danger has been, albeit belatedly, included within the sphere of housing management. Her PhD research was on the role of housing in a coordinated community response to domestic abuse.
She has worked in social housing management up to director level and now runs a company, Addressing Domestic Abuse, that trains and advises local authorities, housing managers, tenants, police forces and the Home Office. Henderson and legal expert Anna Bennet of Devonshires explained to Inside Housing magazine last year that whereas, before, the focus was on tenants bringing a complaint to their landlord, new standards mean that managers must act on any signs that may be related to domestic abuse.
She stresses: “I think it's important to get the point across that domestic abuse can happen to anybody, regardless of their income, but that you have fewer opportunities to escape abuse if you don't have resources.” Social housing landlords a special responsibility. In the best cases, they have their ears to the ground, they form communities. They are in a good position to identify and help to prevent domestic abuse – if they can’t, who can?
Signs of a problem may be far more subtle than bruising or other indications of physical violence. For a housing manager it may manifest in a non-obvious way, in terms of a tenant’s repair history or in patterns of rent arrears.
She says: “Imagine if there's been three bathroom door lock repairs in a year, that could be a red flag. Does the tenant have control of money and their mobile phone? A tenant might say something in a throwaway comment like ‘you need to ask my partner about this’.”
Of course, such signs may have nothing to do with domestic abuse. The most important skill is listening. She says: “It’s important for you to know about the help services that are available in your area and to explain them. But the worst thing you can do is for the victim to feel ‘I've said no to support once, so I can't ask again’. It's about keeping the door open. So that that when person feels that they are ready, they can come back.”
She adds: “The victim may not want to go down the route of taking legal action. They might just the abuse to stop and to move to a new home and start again.”
Need to tackle causes
Policies should facilitate management transfer for the victim or, in some cases, the perpetrator – too often it is the victim, usually a woman, who loses her home. And they should be proactive and preventive. She says: “The cause of domestic abuse is perpetrators and we need to tackle the cause. What we are largely doing at the moment is picking up the pieces after them and putting the victim in a refuge.”
Frequently, she says, domestic abuse is incorporated by landlords into policies on antisocial behaviour. It’s a topic that requires its own specific response. But merely having a policy doesn’t mean that the duty to protect tenants has been fulfilled.
For many landlords, consumer and rights-focused social housing management has just begun. Inevitably, the cultural change that it signals won’t happen overnight. Arguably, a professional re-set is required, which has far-reaching implications. She says: You can't just have consumer standards, introduce domestic abuse, and then not have domestic abuse awareness as a required skill in professional training.”
Local authorities are resource starved, with many competing priorities, and there aren’t enough shelters. She says: “I think the government needs to invest more money into refuges and to give local authorities ring-fenced funding to provide appropriate services.”
But money and law, in themselves, are not enough. A holistic community response is required. She says: “It's not just one organisation’s responsibility. It’s something that we all have a duty to act on. If you work in the housing sector, you need to know that it's part of your job to recognise and respond to domestic abuse. That's what I would like to happen.”
Will
Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 He was editor of
Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here
are purely his own.