The Controversial Issues of Domestic Violence and Abuse are serious and widespread problems that affect individuals and families across all genders, ages, and socio-economic backgrounds.

According to the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 2.1 million people aged 16 to 74 experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2022, with women accounting for the substantial majority of victims. Domestic violence and abuse can take many forms, including physical, sexual, emotional, and financial abuse, and can have severe and long-lasting impacts on victims and family members, particularly children who witness or live within the home of where it is taking place.

A critical criminological reading of domestic violence does not treat it as a private, isolated problem between two people as the harm that is ejected from poor behaviour impacts so many people around the incidents. It treats it as a social problem, one that reflects wider patterns of power, gender, and inequality, and one that the criminal justice system has historically struggled, and at times refused, to take seriously.

How the Criminal Justice System Treats Domestic Abuse

One of the most contested issues surrounding domestic violence is how it is handled by the criminal justice system. Some argue that the system is inadequate and fails to protect victims properly; others maintain that arrest, prosecution, and punishment are necessary to hold perpetrators to account. This in itself has me curious and I have so many questions in relation to the expansion of the community interest especially when abusers are often charming to others.

Historically, the record supports the first argument far more than the second. R. Emerson Dobash and Russell Dobash, whose 1979 study Violence Against Wives remains a foundational text in this field, documented how police and courts in England, Scotland, and the United States routinely treated domestic violence as a domestic dispute rather than a crime, effectively leaving women without protection and abusers without consequence. My argument here is that assumed domestic violence incidents wipes away the coverage of stalkers who have immersed themselves into the lives of the victims, friend and family and their cases are never investigated properly. As for the legal argument, they think it is straightforward: violence against wives was not a breakdown of the family, but an extension of it, rooted in a long-standing social acceptance of male authority within the household. This threshold is always the moral problem.

Decades of policy change have followed, including the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 and the introduction of the coercive control offence under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015. Yet critical criminologists point out that legislative reform does not automatically translate into consistent practice as cases have to be constructed and most are ignored and silenced.

Attrition remains a well-documented problem with many cases reported to the police do not proceed to charge, and even fewer reach conviction, a pattern that feminist criminologists such as Sylvia Walby have linked to under-resourcing, evidential difficulties, and continuing scepticism towards victims within parts of the justice system itself.

Gender, Power, and Domestic Abuse

Another highly contested issue is the role of gender. Men can be, and are, victims of domestic violence, but the overwhelming majority of victims, particularly of the most severe and repeated abuse, are women and their children.

The Femicide Census, a long-running research project tracking the killing of women in the UK, has consistently found that a woman is killed by a current or former partner roughly every four days. As a growing critical criminologist, it is important to point out that the Femicide Census can only count what’s confirmed, a body, an identified killer, a closed case.

In comparison, the Missing People’s project and their work sits in a much murkier space with thousands of people, disproportionately women and girls, who simply never resurface, and whose cases don’t necessarily get classified as homicide, abuse-related, or connected to a domestic context at all. Some are recorded as voluntary disappearances. Some remain open indefinitely. The statistical picture of femicide is, by necessity, built only from the cases that got resolved.

A key point here is about perpetrators moving between families and one that does have some grounding, but it’s genuinely under-researched compared to how much attention goes into single-incident case studies. Domestic Homicide Reviews, which became mandatory under section 9 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, are meant to capture exactly this kind of pattern, learning lessons after a domestic homicide. But they’re conducted locally, by whichever Community Safety Partnership covers that area, and the findings aren’t always fed into a shared national system in a way that would let anyone spot a serial pattern across regions or forces.

That fragmentation is the structural problem that most researchers point at. England and Wales alone have 43 separate police forces, each with their own records systems, historically with limited interoperability. HMICFRS (the police inspectorate) has repeatedly criticised forces for poor information-sharing on repeat domestic abuse callouts, let alone tracking a perpetrator who resurfaces under a new relationship in a different force area entirely. A man flagged as high-risk in Merseyside doesn’t automatically appear as a known risk to a force in Kent or Northumbria if he moves and starts again, and again.

Patterns cannot be explained

Feminist criminologists argue that this pattern cannot be explained by chance or individual dysfunction alone. Dobash and Dobash framed wife abuse as a form of social control, used to enforce compliance within a relationship structured by unequal power. Evan Stark took this argument further with his concept of coercive control, describing domestic abuse not simply as isolated incidents of violence, but as an ongoing pattern of intimidation, isolation, and restriction that denies victims their basic liberty. Stark’s work directly shaped the 2015 legislation criminalising coercive and controlling behaviour in England and Wales, marking one of the clearest examples of critical criminological research translating into legal reform. My question to you would be this, how many professionals still do not understand the varied abuses women and girls suffer?

Others of course reject this framing entirely, arguing that domestic violence stems from individual pathology, such as poor anger management, personal trauma, or mental ill health, rather than gendered power dynamics.

Sociologist Michael P. Johnson offered a way of reconciling these positions, distinguishing between what he termed intimate terrorism, characterised by a sustained pattern of control typically perpetrated by men against women, and situational couple violence (situationship can be useful in stalking research), which arises from specific conflicts rather than an ongoing bid for control and is more evenly distributed between genders.

In contrast, Johnson’s typology is widely cited precisely because it explains why studies measuring ‘who hits whom’ produce very different results to studies measuring who lives in fear.

Mandatory Arrest and “No Drop” Policies

A further point of dispute concerns mandatory arrest and ‘no drop’ prosecution policies, which remove a victim’s ability to withdraw a complaint once charges have been filed, and in some jurisdictions require police to make an arrest whenever there is evidence of domestic abuse.

These policies emerged largely from the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment, conducted by Lawrence Sherman and Richard Berk in 1984, which found that arrest reduced repeat offending more effectively than mediation or separation. The results were widely influential and helped drive a shift towards pro-arrest policies across the United States and, to a lesser extent, the UK.

However, replication studies told a more complicated story. Sherman’s own later research across several cities found that arrest reduced reoffending among employed abusers but appeared to increase it among those who were unemployed, a finding he explained through what he called defiance theory: punishment that is experienced as unfair or humiliating by someone with weak social bonds can provoke further violence rather than deter it. Critical criminologists argue that this pattern reflects a wider issue, that criminal justice interventions designed without regard to social and economic context can produce outcomes that harm the very people they are meant to protect.

Removing a victim’s ability to withdraw a complaint raises further concerns. Victims may fear retaliation, financial hardship, deportation, or the loss of shared custody of children, particularly where the family courts and criminal courts operate on separate tracks. Critics argue that “no drop” policies risk treating victims as witnesses for the state rather than as people with agency, echoing a longer critical criminological argument that the criminal justice system frequently subordinates the needs of victims to its own institutional priorities.

A Little Detour into Religion

Light touch – as it’s worth noting that US Religion (The Bible Belt), particularly conservative Christian doctrine, is genuinely under-examined in domestic violence research, and it’s a real gap worth naming. Nancy Nason-Clark’s work, particularly The Battered Wife: How Christians Confront Family Violence, is one of the few substantial studies directly on this, documenting how some evangelical church communities in North America counselled women to stay, forgive, and preserve the marriage rather than report abuse or leave, treating divorce as a greater moral failure than the violence itself. That’s a real, documented pattern, and it barely appears in mainstream criminological literature on domestic abuse policy.

Towards a More Effective Response

Overall, domestic violence and abuse are complex, structural problems rather than a simple matter of individual criminal behaviour to be punished. A critical criminological approach argues that meaningful progress depends on addressing the political conditions that allow abuse to persist economic dependency, housing insecurity, inconsistent police response, health inequalities, and a justice system that has, for much of its history, treated the home as a place outside its proper reach regardless of who walks through that door.

Organisations such as Women’s Aid and Karma Narvana continue to argue for early intervention, secure and accessible refuge provision, and joined up working between police, courts, and children’s services, rather than relying on arrest and prosecution alone. Bringing together the criminal and civil justice systems, alongside long-term funding for support services, remains central to this argument.

By treating domestic violence as a social and structural issue rather than a purely individual one, and by listening to the substantial body of research built by Dobash and Dobash, Stark, Walby, Johnson, and others working in this tradition, it becomes possible to build a justice response that protects victims properly, rather than one that merely appears to.