Responding to the Covid-19 domestic abuse crisis: developing a rapid police evidence base

The project aimed to provide timely empirical evidence on how Covid-19 and related lockdown measures has impacted domestic abuse recorded by police,1 and associated policing responses. This research was conducted in partnership with seven police forces in England, the Home Office, the College of Policing, and the National Police Chief’s Council. The project analysed all domestic abuse crimes reported to seven police services in England since the start of the pandemic (March 2020) until the end of April 2021. The difference in differences method and data from the two previous years (2018 and 2019) were used to test whether the introduction and lifting of lockdowns had a statistically significant impact on the volume and/or nature of domestic abuse coming to police attention during the pandemic. In addition, 73 officers from four police services were interviewed between June 2020 and June 2021 to triangulate the quantitative results with how officers experienced, made sense of, and responded to domestic abuse as the pandemic unfolded