Responding to Domestic Violence

Emerging Challenges for Policy, Practice and Research in Europe

Stephanie Holt, Carolina Øverlien, John Devaney

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781785922619
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784505493
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a critical overview of established and emerging manifestations of domestic violence across Europe.

It describes how countries within and outside the EU are responding to the problem in policy, practice and research. Eminent academics and professionals from a range of European countries share their findings from new groundbreaking victim surveys, and weigh up the legal, social and healthcare challenges. The issues addressed include:

- the cultural challenges of combating abuse forms most prevalent in migrant communities such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage;
- emerging problems such as child-to-parent violence, teenage relationship violence and digital intimate partner abuse; and
- barriers to help-seeking faced by marginalised victims such as LGBTQ and older people.

By showcasing the most effective responses formulated in Europe and exploring innovative ways to research and understand domestic violence, this book is a crucial resource for all those with responsibility for implementing social policy and good practice.

Part One

THE POLICY FRAMEWORK
FOR RESPONDING TO
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
IN EUROPE

Chapter 1

DOMESTIC VIOLENCE –
A RIGHTS-BASED RESPONSE

DRAWING ON RESULTS FROM THE FRA’S
VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN SURVEY

Joanna Goodey, Head of the Freedoms and Justice Department,
European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Vienna, Austria

INTRODUCTION: WHY A RIGHTS-BASED RESPONSE TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE?

This chapter outlines why it is important to place our understanding of and responses to domestic violence in a rights-based framework, which, in the context of this chapter and the data presented in it, is specifically with reference to domestic violence against women in the European Union (EU). This rights-based approach serves to underpin the role of the State, and hence State services, in its duty to acknowledge and effectively respond to domestic violence as it impinges on certain rights.

The chapter is divided into two parts, with the first introducing a rights-based framework, which was developed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), as a useful tool for understanding how the State responds to violence against women. Having outlined this rights-based framework, the chapter proceeds to place responses to domestic violence within the wider legal context of recent responses to victims of crime in the EU. The second part presents selected findings from Violence Against Women: An EU-wide Survey, published by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) in 2014, which interviewed 42,000 women across all EU member states, focusing on psychological violence by a woman’s partner, and presenting an overview of the services women contact in the aftermath of partner and non-partner violence. The survey’s results highlight the role that data can play in providing ‘evidence’ for responding to domestic violence as a human rights abuse.

DEVELOPING A RIGHTS-BASED RESPONSE

Duty bearers and rights holders

A rights-based response to domestic violence acknowledges both ‘duty bearers’ – that is, the State and State actors, such as the police and other authorities – as well as ‘rights holders’, ordinary women whose rights have been violated. The international human rights legal framework, which came to fruition at the end of the Second World War, has sought to ensure that States uphold their duties to individuals, to respect, protect and fulfil their human rights. Traditionally, these rights were focused on ensuring people’s civil and political rights, such as the right to vote or freedom of assembly, but increasingly the scope of rights has extended to encompass areas such as economic and social rights. In the context of domestic violence against women (by men), it is only relatively recently that this has been addressed within a human rights framework as the extreme manifestation of inequality between women and men, and as violating core human rights such as the right to life and human dignity, as well as the right to a fair trial and to an effective remedy – where the State has a responsibility to ensure that women’s abuse is recognised and effectively responded to in line with existing law. In turn, the State’s human rights duties have increasingly included recognition of both negative and positive obligations of the State, that is, not only must the State not violate individuals’ rights, it must also proactively protect individuals’ rights. To this end, human rights case law has evolved in the last decade in recognition of States’ failures in their duty to protect women from abuse, because of, for example, failures by the police or courts to intervene in domestic violence cases.

Arguably, the recognition of violence against women as a form of human rights abuse is relatively recent in comparison with other areas of human rights law, such as political and civil rights, because of the traditional divide between the public and private spheres of life and, hence, where the State has been seen as having a duty to act (European commission 2010; McQuigg 2014). Since the 1970s, the grass-roots women’s rights movement, including practitioners working with victims of domestic violence, together with academic feminists and legal scholars, have progressively sought to highlight this dichotomy between the public and private sphere, and have been instrumental in bringing violence against women high on the agenda to ensure that it receives legal recognition as a human rights abuse. Herein, it is notable that the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted in 1979 and came into force in 1981, does not make explicit reference to violence against women. It is only with General Recommendation 19 of the CEDAW Committee, in 1992, that violence against women – in both the public and private domains – was squarely put within the remit of human rights law. At the regional level, the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention), which was opened for signature in 2011 and entered into force in 2014, is the most comprehensive international legal instrument to date to specifically address violence against women and domestic violence, and demonstrates how far the law has developed over the span of several decades.

The importance of ensuring recognition in law of violence against women as a form of human rights abuse is essential for a number of reasons, paramount among which is that violations of international human rights law demand a response by the State, and international human rights law – unlike public policy, which can be changed from one government administration to the next – cannot be considered as something temporary. To this end, the importance of a rights-based framework for victims of domestic violence is that they have the law, rather than simply policy, on their side. However, as all good socio-legal books acknowledge, the law in the books is only as good as the law in practise, which necessitates that legislation is upheld by policy and the implementation of law in practise. The Group of Experts on Action against Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (GREVIO) is the independent body that is responsible for monitoring the implementation of the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention, and is one example of how countries that have signed up to international human rights law can be held accountable. However, to ensure that rights are enforced in practise means looking at the complex intersection between law, policy and practise. A framework for doing this has been developed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which has constructed a ‘structure-process-outcome’ model (FRA 2011; OHCHR 2012) for looking at the application of international human rights law in practise. Figure 1.1 illustrates this model with specific reference to European legislation that addresses violence against women and domestic violence.

Figure 1.1: Structure-process-outcome model

Another way of describing the UN’s three-pronged ‘structure-process-outcome’ model is to think of each element, in turn, as ‘law’, ‘policy’ and ‘practise’ on the ground. Here, the structural indicators refer to each State’s acceptance of and commitment to legal instruments, such as the Istanbul Convention, which addresses violence against women and domestic violence, and captures the legal framework to which an individual State has signed up to. In turn, process indicators capture concrete efforts to enact law through policies that address violence against women. This means establishing and adequately funding support systems for victims of violence, and ensuring that victims can report abuse by training the police and other services to respond effectively to victims. Finally, outcome indicators measure the results of these efforts by providing data that shows the number of victims and how they, as rights holders, experience reality. This data can be collected as administrative data by the State, and can also be collected by both the State and other actors in the form of criminal victimisation surveys. The FRA’s Violence Against Women survey is based on criminal victimisation survey models, and captures the extent of women’s experience of violence, including whether they report abuse to the police and other services. In this way, surveys, such as the FRA’s, provide a useful comparator between what official criminal justice statistics indicate about the extent of violence against women and a more realistic picture of the ‘true’ extent and nature of violence as women report it in a survey – which, as a reflection of women’s under-reporting to the authorities, shows significantly higher levels of victimisation than official data.

Ideally, this UN model should be populated by data at the level of individual countries that shows how they are addressing violence against women through the provision of structural, process and outcome indicators. The reality is that while data is relatively straightforward to collect on a country’s accession to international law and corresponding national legislation to address violence against women, it becomes harder to document policies and funding that target violence against women, and harder still to provide ‘outcome’ indicators that can paint an accurate picture of the phenomenon beyond official criminal justice data (EIGE 2014). Herein, the FRA’s survey presents a unique dataset that serves to fill a gap at the EU and individual member state level, particularly for those member states that do not have regular and comprehensive surveys on violence against women (Martinez and Schröttle 2006; UN 2015), by capturing the diverse range of women’s experiences of physical, sexual and psychological violence, as reported in the survey.

It is through such ‘outcome’ indicators, which include data on whether women report to the police and other services – and importantly, if ‘not’, then ‘why not’ – that we are able to see whether the State is meeting its duty, with respect to law and policies, to address violence against women. However, in the absence of regular and comprehensive surveys collecting this data, which can be read alongside official statistics and reports from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), it remains difficult to establish whether services and support for women are improving in practise.

Looking at responses to domestic violence in a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: The Policy Framework for Responding to Domestic Violence in Europe
• Part Two: Children’s Experiences of Domestic Violence
• Part Three: New Understandings on Domestic Abuse and Violence
• Part Four: Responding to Domestic Violence and Abuse
• Concluding Remarks: Progressing the Debate on Domestic Violence in Europe
• Contributor Biographies
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Join Our Mailing List
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest
• Endorsements