Abstract
The problem of intimate partner homicide is featuring increasingly on national and international policy agendas. Over the last 40 years, responses to this issue have been characterised by preventive strategies (including ‘positive’ policing; the proliferation of risk assessment tools, and multi-agency working) and post-event analyses (including police inquiries and domestic homicide reviews). In different ways, each of these responses has become ‘locked in’ to policies. Drawing on an analysis of police inquiries into domestic homicides in England and Wales over a 10-year period, this paper will explore the nature of these ‘locked in’ responses and will suggest that complexity theory offers a useful lens through which to make sense of them and the ongoing consistent patterning of intimate partner homicide more generally. The paper will suggest this lens in embracing what is known and unknown affords a different way of thinking about and responding to this problem.
Highlights
How a state responds to femicide is of international interest (Dawson 2016)
The UNODC (2013) reports that 79% of all homicide victims globally are male with 95% of perpetrators globally being male
These responses fall into two categories: preventive strategies; and post-event analyses designed to inform and improve such preventive strategies
Summary
How a state responds to femicide is of international interest (Dawson 2016). It is evident different countries are developing ways of responding to this issue from the introduction of specific legal offences of femicide (de Avila 2018) or Domestic Violence Disclosure Schemes (Fitz-Gibbon and Walklate 2017) to focusing energy on specialised police response units (see for example, Regoecz and Hubbard 2018; Segrave et al 2016). Work by Bridger et al (2017), using police data and information gleaned from domestic homicide reviews for England and Wales, suggest that there are greater possibilities of prediction (and thereby prevention) of IPH if more attention was paid to the suicidal tendencies of the prospective offender This knowledge clearly did not have the desired effect in the first vignette cited above though it did afford a higher risk assessment for the perpetrator rather than the victim. Such policies range from the pre-emptive (improving contact with the police, engaging in risk assessment, multiagency working and information sharing) to post-event analyses from which lessons might be learned ( current in this regard is the development of Domestic Homicide Reviews) Against this backcloth, it is important to note, as Iratzoqui and McCutcheon (2018: 147) suggest; Within criminological research, domestic violence has been treated as a separate entity, because domestic violence is largely seen as a Buniquely female^ phenomena, since females are overwhelmingly the victims of this form of violence, especially over time. Thinking about what women themselves want from criminal justice is a good place to start
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