Whatever Happened to 'Clare's Law'? Reviewing the Available Evidence on the Effectiveness of the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme

Abstract

While the overall trend has been for the rate of applications and disclosures under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (DVDS) in England and Wales to increase over time; there is an emerging 'postcode lottery' as to how the DVDS is operated across those forces concerned. Meanwhile HMICFRS have made it clear to forces that more needs to be done to deploy preventive measures aimed at reducing the risk of domestic violence toward those vulnerable to such abuse. These measures can be said to include the DVDS in England and Wales. However, there is mixed evidence available in the public domain as to the overall effectiveness of the DVDS at preventing domestic abuse arising through the bringing to an end of a risky relationship, or through the empowerment of victims through the ability to increase their knowledge of their partners' abusive past. The results of a recent freedom-of-information study underpinning this report show that 45.6% of 'early wave' recipients of disclosures under the DVDS have gone on to be victimised by the very partner they were warned about; while there are suggestions from reported cases from the courts that recipients of disclosures are not always able to act on the warnings provided in order to keep themselves safe. Police forces in England and Wales should undertake an exercise to establish whether the disclosures they have made under the DVDS in the last 12 months have had an effect; entailing checking to see if recipients of disclosures have since reported victimisation by the subjects of the disclosures concerned. Follow-up qualitative research may be required, however, to fully explore the problem should a force discover that 'Clare's Law' disclosures are not contributing as effectively as might be hoped to the challenge of protecting potential victims from the harms of domestic abuse. In this way, police forces in England and Wales can begin to evaluate whether recent disclosures under the DVDS have been having a positive impact on the safety and empowerment of victims; or whether more needs to be done by the force to establish how 'Clare's Law' disclosures can be managed and made effectively in conjunction with other preventive measures aimed at tackling domestic abuse. This sort of effectiveness evaluation is particularly important now that domestic abuse disclosure schemes have been taken up outside of England and Wales, in both Scotland and Northern Ireland; and further afield in New Zealand and some parts of Australia.