Joining the Dots: Domestic abuse, civil and criminal justice and technology

Crest Advisory and CGI have undertaken a partnership research project to identify ways to address the twenty-first century challenges of tackling domestic abuse across the justice system and beyond.

Domestic abuse is a prevalent, high-impact crime with widespread and lasting consequences. Today in England and Wales there are estimated to be 6.5 million adults who have directly experienced domestic abuse, and overall one in four women and one in six men will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. In 2016-17, eighty-two women and thirteen men were killed by a partner or former partner.

They found that the police and criminal courts often lack clear and robust processes for working with the civil justice system. In practice this means that:

  • basic information is not routinely shared between the police and civil courts
  • where information is shared, it is not always timely
  • there is sometimes a lack of understanding among practitioners about what civil orders mean in practice
  • criminal and civil justice systems do not always take full account of each other’s judgements.

For a copy of the full report see here.