Responding to the COVID-19 Domestic Abuse Crisis: Developing a Rapid Police Evidence Base, 2020-2021

The data comprises all domestic abuse flagged crime and incident data recorded in seven English police forces between 1.3.2018 and 30.4.2021 as well as transcripts of semi-structured telephone interviews with 73 frontline officers in four police forces conducted between June 2020 and June 2021. The data sharing agreements between the researchers and the participating police forces do not permit depositing the data.The project analysed all domestic abuse crimes reported to seven English police services 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.