Policing responses to Domestic Abuse and Violence Against Women and Girls. The evidence so far; what’s been tested, what works and what’s promising
Monday 8th to Wednesday 10th April 2024
Challenge: How do we know what works in the Policing responses to Domestic Abuse (DA) and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG)? How can we improve our understanding of risk, our processes and our targeting?
Who should attend: Domestic abuse policy makers, senior practitioners leading teams who target DA and VAWG, plus analysts tasked with understanding and evaluating performance in DA and VAWG
Objectives: Through a greater understanding of which cases represent the greatest risk of future high harm and what works in preventing repeat offending attendees will be better able to shape partnership responses, task smarter and be more effective.
The course will present the practice and evidence that exists in relation to what works in the Policing response to DA and VAWG. The course will support attendees in critically examining proposals that may be asked to consider, fund or evaluate. The course will present the evidence on what works, what backfires and the emerging research that is promising.
Course Structure:
We review the evidence so far including case studies from UK and abroad including on Restorative Justice Conferencing, the use of Independent Domestic Violence Advocates at court, targeted desistance campaigns, DV panic alarms and perpetrator programs.
We cover what works, where things have worked for some people in some circumstances and not for others. We unpick these subtle differences. Where there are more unqualified successes emerging such as the use of Rapid Video Response, which has been successfully used in certain circumstances in Kent, we cover this and share the learning.
We dive deeper into data for DA and VAWG to understand false hotspots and how to target limited resources in a smarter way, using opportunities to overlay partner data to provide context as well as exploring the potential systematic flaws of police crime data sets; by season, day, time of day and public/ private space. We use an example of a large false hotspot in the middle of the river Thames to help delegates see the potential equivalents in their areas.
There are some group exercises for the delegates’ to evaluate proposals and suggest how to then test or improve them.
We also cover opportunities for improving performance now, look at risk assessments and the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning plus the proactive use of solvability analysis to shape multi agency investigative responses. We highlight areas for improvement where there is disproportionality of outcome as well as successes.
The final day concludes with presentations on promising current experiments including the use of rapid video interview response for some domestic abuse cases in Kent, algorythmic forcasting of future risk and an ongoing randomised controlled trial we are evaluating on the use of polygraphs for the management of domestic abuse offenders released from prison.
We will also cover innovations in relation to the use of familial DNA testing to improve the identification of stranger rapists is also shared. This work is being championed by Noel McHugh from the NCA. This is doen by using ‘Likelihood ratios’ not ‘allele count’ and y-STR profiling to offer big improvements in speed and cost efficiency in identifying previously unknown sex offenders who were not on the National DNA database.
Faculty: The Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing team teaching this three-day, high intensity course includes the following instructors:
Dr. Heather Strang, PhD Australian National University, Director, Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology, Co-founder Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing
Dr. Eleanor Neyroud PhD, University of Cambridge
Dr. Sara Valdebenito, PhD, University of Cambridge
Detective Chief Superintendent (Retired) Simon Rose MBA, MSt, PhD candidate University of Cambridge
Cost: This three-day course, per person, offers two pricing options:
Residential (inclusive of 2 nights bed & breakfast) = £1,320.00 + VAT.
Non-Residential = £1,100 + VAT.