Frontline Response to High Impact Domestic Violence in Portugal

There have been profound social transformations in Portugal in the last 50 years. Portugal currently adheres to the international and European agenda to prevent domestic violence. In the chapter the Portuguese legislation and the reporting figures regarding domestic violence, the role of the Law Enforcement Agencies, other first responder agencies, and pertinent stakeholders in responding to high impact domestic violence, as well as the National Network for the Support of Victims of Domestic Violence, are addressed. The authors also discuss good practices and significant challenges. Two of these are intertwined – none of them is quickly addressed, nor can they be addressed by themselves. One is developing a collective attitude that considers domestic violence as unacceptable behaviour, besides being punished by the criminal law. The other is directly posed to the law enforcement agencies and has to do with the increasing complexity of the operational procedures (derived from the new tools presented by the government recently). The problem of elites provoking social change on a superlative level is to forget that adopting new social models is not achieved by decree but through social influence processes, which takes time.