Partnerships and Activism: Community Safety, Multi-agency Partnerships and Safeguarding Victims

Abstract

This chapter focuses on multi-agency partnerships as a means of exploring the ways in which activism manifests in safeguarding victims. The author critically reviews twenty-first century pluralised multi-agency approaches to tackling crime, preventing harm, ‘responsibilising’ perpetrators and supporting victims, drawing on a case study example: Tackling serial perpetrators of domestic abuse through Multi-Agency Tasking and Co-ordination (MATAC) and the subsequent Domestic Abuse Whole Systems Approach (DAWSA), both pioneered in the North East of England, the United Kingdom, to reflect on developments in community safety. New partnerships such as these appear less wedded to the traditional criminal justice paradigm that has so far failed so many victims of domestic abuse and more committed to a holistic approach. The spur to recent developments in the policing of domestic abuse is seemingly a complex mix of political—including diverse feminist-influenced—drivers pushing for change. A key message from this chapter is that healthy scepticism from partners means that collaboration is hard work, but can be effective in preventing victimisation and supporting victims. Stakeholders from charities and statutory bodies alike are finding ways of working, such that they are ‘critical allies’ in the drive for change.