7 Policing and ‘domestic’ violence

Violence against women by their intimate partners has a long history which correlates closely with the development of women’s rights and the declining social acceptability of violence against women. At the start of the nineteenth century, severe ‘wife beating’ was already socially unacceptable but, owing to prevalent notions that men should be responsible for the actions of their wives, it remained common for men physically to ‘chastise’ (i.e. beat) their wives as long as this did not result in severe or lasting injury.

During the course of the nineteenth century, legal safeguards were gradually introduced, including the Criminal Procedure Act (1853), which authorised more severe sentences for men guilty of this kind of assault, and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), which allowed women to seek divorce in the event of an abusive marriage. This progress notwithstanding, it remained common for men to assault and attack their intimate partners.

Figure 10: A policeman at a march protesting cuts to services for victims of domestic violence, 1976. [Description: A black and white photograph of a group of protestors with children at the front. They hold placards reading, for example, ‘Help our mums to live in safety’, and ‘Battered families still need this refuge.’ At the front of the crowd a police officer stands with his head bowed.] Source: lhttps://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/august-1976-news-photo/599290266?adppopup=true

The growth of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s generated greater awareness of the issue and new legislation, including the Domestic Violence & Matrimonial Proceedings Act (1976), which gave women the right to remain in the household. But there remained:

Why was it that assaults of this kind often remained, as Emsley puts it, ‘unpoliced’?

For much of the twentieth century, officers were wary of becoming involved in ‘domestic disputes’. In part this was down to their training. Sir Howard Vincent’s The Police Code, as published in 1924, instructed officers under the heading ‘Husband and Wife’ that ‘the Police should not interfere in domestic quarrels, unless there is a reason to fear that violence is likely to result’ (Emsley, 2005, p. 68).

In the mid-twentieth century such attitudes persisted and, even later in the century, reports of ‘wife-beating’ were frequently not recorded as assault and Criminal Investigation Departments often refused to be involved.

While in the early and mid-twentieth century the attitudes of police officers were perhaps not materially out of step with those of many members of the public, evidence from more recent decades indicates that the outdated persistence of a sexist and misogynistic working culture in some teams plays a role here. A 2014 HMIC report concluded that

While most forces are now making great efforts to tackle the issue of violence against women and girls (VAWG), the history of police reticence to intervene in this area has perhaps contributed to the current need to do so.