Whose Harm is it Anyway? Using Police Data to Represent Domestic Abuse Victims’ Experiences

Abstract

There is a strong tradition of qualitative research documenting the experiences of survivors of domestic abuse. The in-depth nature of this data and the context in which it is collected contrasts with data collected by police officers largely for the purposes of recording and investigating crime. We argue that crime codes are an incomplete representation of ‘harm’ and escalation in domestic abuse. We also suggest harm indexes and severity scores that combine crime codes and sentencing data are an inadequate and potentially misleading representation of victim-survivors’ lived experiences and wider harms suffered. We caution against the use of harm index data to prioritize intervention in cases of domestic abuse and to assess police performance and the impact of interventions. We argue for a wider range of available data to be utilized in the measurement of harm and for measurement frameworks to be informed by foundational qualitative research in this field.