Domestic abuse – abusive behaviour perpetrated by an adult towards another adult to whom they are personally connected (e.g. partners, ex-partners or family members) – damages mental health, increases mental health service use and challenges clinical management. Training and guidance for mental health professionals on identifying and responding to patients exposed to domestic abuse are available, but there has been less development of resources for mental health professionals in identifying, assessing and responding to perpetrators of domestic abuse. In this article, we describe a framework for responding to domestic abuse perpetration in clinical settings in general adult mental health services, aimed at improving practice. This could support mental health professionals in sensitive enquiry and assessment for domestic abuse perpetration, and guide appropriate responses, as part of routine training and continuing professional development.

This paper analyses legal responses to the problem of debt taken out due to coercion within an intimate relationship. Coerced debt differs from other forms of domestic abuse, as it involves a contractual relationship between the victim and a third-party lender. Legal responses must consider whether the victim should be released from her contractual obligation. The paper employs a theoretical lens of vulnerability and relationality, examining lenders’ duties to combat coerced debt, as well as contractual doctrines of undue influence and duress, which allow victims to have transactions set aside under certain circumstances. The paper argues that victims are being failed by an inadequate legal response. The law views vulnerability as an exceptional state and relationality as a constraint, rather than inherent features of the human condition. Through the social construct of the ‘free market’, lenders are consistently favoured by the law, with little obligation to ensure that transactions are free from coercion. The paper concludes with a call for the state to take greater responsibility for coerced debt and to allocate the risk differently than it currently does. This will promote higher levels of resilience for victims and allow them to escape abusive relational contexts.

That domestic abuse is a human rights infringement has become recognised at policy, practice, and legislative level globally. Homelessness services are critical in averting and mitigating harm to those who have experienced domestic abuse. The British homelessness system achieves this, in part, through offering a legal right to housing in some circumstances. The Housing (Wales) Act 2014 integrates a human-rights based understanding of domestic abuse yet reduces legal rights to assistance. Based on analysis of interviews with fifty-two homelessness workers and twenty-four applicants I argue that moral commitments cannot compensate for legal rights; rather, they deresponsibilise homelessness services for addressing domestic abuse. I show (1) that workers saw cases where homelessness arose from domestic abuse as functionally beyond the remit of homelessness services (2) that empowered women were understood as undeserving by the system and (3) that workers saw domestic abuse cases as a broad and undefined threat to resources.

Mental health services are recognised to have an important role in responding to domestic abuse, but approach across the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is inconsistent. We describe an example of taking a whole- organisation approach to responding to domestic abuse in one NHS mental health foundation trust.

The problem of women's access to self-defence has been internationally recognised. This paper presents original empirical data on women's use of self-defence in practice alongside critical feminist analysis of the requirements of self-defence under Scots law. The empirical findings confirm that women are rarely successful with self-defence at trial level and the doctrinal analysis further demonstrates that self-defence does not adequately reflect women's experience of violence, especially sexual violence, and instead continues to reflect male experiences of (public) violence. It is intended that this research will form part of a larger developing evidence base, the type of which has been called for (Fitz-Gibbon and Vannier, 2017) and can be used to support reform in this area. As such, it represents a significant contribution to socio-legal work that has considered the issue of women's access to criminal defences.

The rise in domestic violence and abuse has been dubbed a ‘pandemic within a pandemic’. Individuals known to mental health services are particularly vulnerable. Yet despite challenges to mitigating domestic violence and abuse in this group, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities to develop new interventions to support those affected.

No recent pandemic has had such a severe socioeconomic impact as COVID-19. Significant economic uncertainty and social restrictions have led to increased levels of stress for many. There has been increased social isolation, financial stress and alcohol intake, all of which can increase domestic abuse and other forms of household abuse. Increases in abuse in the home found in other public health emergencies and economic recessions can be seen now – reported UK domestic abuse rates have increased since the start of COVID-19. This article focuses on how COVID-19 and its anticipated aftermath exacerbate the risk factors for domestic abuse in the general population and discusses clinical implications for mental health practitioners in the UK. It aims to provide a point of learning based on previous disease outbreaks and recessions, with a focus on specific factors, such as unemployment and alcohol misuse, and how these contribute to increasing incidence and severity of abuse – and more importantly, how mental health professionals can mitigate these for patients, 1 in 3 of whom are estimated to have already experienced abuse before the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyzes in the use of virtual reality when used to induce full-body ownership in violent offenders in order to elicit empathetic feelings by allowing them to embody the virtual body of a victim of domestic abuse. The authors explore potentially harmful effects to individuals participating in this kind of therapy and question whether consent is fully informed. The paper concludes with guidelines for ethical research and rehabilitation using this innovative technology.

Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) are conducted when an individual aged 16 or over appears to have died from violence, abuse or neglect by a person to whom they are related or with whom they are in an intimate relationship or who is a member of the same household. DHRs aim to identify lessons to be learned, to improve service responses to domestic abuse and to contribute to prevention of domestic abuse/homicide. We submitted Freedom of Information requests to English Local Authorities to identify DHRs where victim, perpetrator or both were aged over 60. Collected Reports and/or Executive Summaries were thematically analysed. Analysis identified four key themes in the context of the key relationship and caring: major mental illness of the perpetrator; drug and/or alcohol abuse; financial issues; and a history of domestic abuse in key or family relationships. We analysed 14 adult family homicides, 16 intimate partner homicides and five homicide–suicides. Age per se did not emerge as a significant factor in our analysis. Terminology needs to be standardised, and training/education regarding risk assessment needs to be improved in relation to age, myths around ageing/dementia and stresses of caring. Management of mental illness is a key factor. A central repository of DHR Reports accessible for research and subject to regular review would contribute to maximising learning and improving practice.

Domestic abuse policy increasingly uses language which indicates that abuse is patterned according to structural factors. However, practicing according to these structural accounts of abuse is problematic because of the policy and organisational contexts that practitioners work within and, we argue, because the implications of the structured nature of victims’ experiences is not fully understood by all practitioners.

We ask whether women's differential use and experiences of services with a remit to address abuse can be illuminated using two theoretical perspectives – ‘candidacy’ and intersectionality. We report the findings of a literature synthesis that investigates how these improve our understanding of women's help-seeking and service utilisation and of the responses that they receive. Both concepts were highly congruent with the literature and we conclude that, together, candidacy and intersectionality offer a means of enhancing knowledge of how the political becomes enacted in the personal. Embedding such knowledge within practice repertoires offers the potential to develop more nuanced structural understandings of women's experiences and constraints.

This article reviews developments in the field of elder abuse and neglect since the publication of Elder Abuse and Neglect in Canada (1991). The arguments made here are twofold: first, we have no idea of the size and nature of the problem of abuse and neglect in the community or in institutions; second, we do not know how to solve these problems or their attendant issues that have been masked by rhetoric and the recycling of information for the past 20 years. It is time to move forward from the “awareness phase”. What we must tackle in the future is as obvious now as 20 years ago. Our knowledge is incomplete (i.e., our glass remains half full) because we lack the type of investigations we most urgently need: prevalence studies in the community and institutions, serious theory development, and random clinical trials to test our interventions both socially and legally.