Understanding lived experienced is how we can ensure our decision making and activity to tackle domestic abuse remains victim/survivor-focused, placing the victim/survivor at the centre of our thinking and response.
In order to support this, the Gloucestershire DA LPB has appointed a Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence Consultation Officer, whose role ensures the voice of victims/survivors is regularly represented at all partnership meetings and within individual projects. In addition, a consultation network has been built to engage across the whole of Gloucestershire’s communities supporting this work.
As part of the 2024 needs assessment, a bespoke piece of consultation was conducted to inform the development of this Domestic Abuse Strategy for 2025-2028, ensuring it is informed not only by local need, but by what victims/survivors and the community tell us need to be the partnership’s priorities over the next four years.
The results from this consultation supported the key findings from the Gloucestershire Domestic Abuse Needs Assessment 2024, but also identified the following thematic areas:
Victim/survivor focused support
Support locally that is victim/survivor focused. Recognising the needs of individual victims/survivors and ensuring support is able to respond effectively to those needs. This included reflections on a need to secure longer term support, specific support to address economic abuse, personalised support packages and a need to ensure victims/survivors felt believed and listened to.
Specialist domestic abuse support
Identified the demand on specialist services; the need for support to be tailored to the client’s needs, consideration for the factors impacting engagement and ensuring specialist domestic abuse support is accessible. This included reflections on a need for therapeutic recovery support, services that are accessible to all protected characteristic groups, a need for more staff within commissioned services to support overall capacity and flexible approaches to engaging with victims/survivors.
Professional response
The merit of multi-agency working and the need for it when supporting the complexities of domestic abuse. Professional response can lead to identification, disclosure and/or engagement with support.
This include reflections on a need for professionals to be well trained, conduct robust risk management, create safe environments for victims/survivors and provide consistent approaches.
Housing
Identified the demand on housing services, the complex nature of domestic abuse and fleeing your home and the impact it can have on multiple areas of your life. The importance of the response and support available from housing services was apparent and housing services need to be fully supported to achieve this. This included reflections on the need to ensure there are more safe accommodation options, specialist support for those with specialist needs and consistent responses from homelessness teams.
Awareness raising and training
A need for improved knowledge and understanding of domestic abuse and the sources of support
available to enable early identification and intervention, and therefore improve the response to domestic abuse. There was a call for learning opportunities to be easily accessible, consistent and offered widely across all districts, ages and sectors. This included reflections on the need to challenge societal views and improve knowledge and understanding of both professionals and the community.
Faith, religion and culture
Importance of understanding domestic abuse within different cultures, faiths, and religions to improve awareness, identification, and response, to safely manage risk and ensure accessibility to services and support that are faith aware and culturally competent. This included reflections on the need to reduce the stigma of reporting, increase community engagement and ensure cultural education is in place.
Increased support for perpertrators
A need for a robust offer of support for perpetrators that meets demand, meets the needs of perpetrators and carefully assesses risk.
This included reflections on the need to increase accessibility of services, robust risk management
and the need to increase provision that prevents escalation of abusive behaviours.
