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Disability and intimate partner violence in England: Gender stratified analyses

No prior random probability sample survey spans the experience of all forms of intimate partner violence (IPV) among people with different types of impairment in England. This study aimed to compare the 12-month prevalence of four types of IPV (physical, sexual, psychological, and economic abuse) for people with and without four types of impairment (physical, sensory, learning impairments, and experiencing difficulties with activities of daily living (ADLs), taking account of variations by gender.

Using the 2014 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, VISION researchers, led by Ladan Hashemi with Hannah Manzur, Annie Bunce and Sally McManus (City St George’s University of London), analysed data on 7546 respondents – 4488 women and 3058 men.

Disabled women reported significantly higher rates of psychological and sexual IPV than non-disabled women. No significant association was found for physical IPV. Women with a learning impairment reported the highest prevalence for almost all types of IPV. Women reporting restricted ADLs were at higher risk of experiencing economic abuse. Disabled men did not have a higher risk of experiencing any forms of IPV compared with non-disabled men.

While violence can contribute to onset of some forms of disability, our findings suggest that disability may also enhance the risk of IPV for disabled women, particularly for women with a learning impairment. Investment in targeted violence prevention programs specifically for disabled women is warranted.

To download the article: Disability and intimate partner violence in England: Gender stratified analyses of a probability sample survey

To cite: Hashemi, L., Manzur, H., Bunce, A. et al. Disability and intimate partner violence in England: Gender stratified analyses of a probability sample survey. BMC Public Health (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-28489-5

For further information, contact: Ladan at ladan.hashemi@citystgeorges.ac.uk

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5th VISION annual conference: Presentations and illustrations now available

The fifth VISION annual conference was held on 7 July at The Light Auditorium in Friends House. The theme was Violence prevention in dialogue: Research and Policy.

After five years of research looking at violence prevention and the resulting health inequalities and focusing on improved measurement, policy, and practice, and delivering through a strong cross-sector partnership, we showcased our research in partnership with stakeholders Refuge, High Trees, Migrants’ Rights Network, Gloucestershire police constabulary, and Revolving Doors. In addition, we invited those working in violence prevention to critically assess our contributions and identify where further research and prioritised focus are required.

Jo Todd of Respect and Professor Gene Feder, VISION Director, reflected on 25 years of working in violence prevention as frontline practitioners and researchers. Drawing on their extensive experience, they highlighted both the progress made and the challenges that remain. While collaboration between government, academia, and the third sector has improved, longstanding silos—particularly across the health and criminal justice sectors—persist. Overcoming these barriers requires sustained commitment to relationship-building and cross-sector working.

They noted that significant progress has been made in violence prevention policy, including the publication of the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy last year. However, there remains considerable interest in how the incoming Prime Minister will take forward the Labour government’s commitment to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, and what this will mean for future policy, practice, and investment.

Professor Liz Kelly from London Metropolitan University was our 2nd keynote speaker and shared her thoughts on the language and naming of violence in the 21st century. Liz highlighted that  language changes not just what we say but what we know and recognise. The words we use in the field as researchers, analysts, policymakers, officials, and practitioners matter and should be clear and grounded in victim / survivor agency and freedom.

VISION research was highlighted in three symposiums:

  • Insight: Key findings on definitions and measurement within violence prevention
    • Dr Vishal Bhavsar (Kings College London) and Professor Miranda Horvath (University of Suffolk) presented on intimate partner violence perpetration.
    • Dr Madeleine Janickyj (University College London) and Emma Pickering (Refuge) presented on technology facilitated abuse.
  • Inclusion: Violence prevention research with marginalised populations
    • Dr Alexandria Innes (City St George’s UoL), Aya Khedairi (Migrants’ Rights Network) and Professor Gargi Bhattacharyya (University College London) presented on insecure migration status. Andri and Aya discussed their project, Understanding Violence: the risks for migrants with rising far-right fascism and the resulting output, Workbook: Migrant Community Insights on Building Safety. Gargi highlighted how the far right is misusing genuine work and research and that media discussion of VAWG frequently descends into racism and incitement.
    • Dr Annie Bunce (City St George’s UoL) and Lauren Bennett and Anthony Donohoe from Revolving Doors presented their work on developing principles for co-analysis with Lived Experience.
  • Involve: A look at two ongoing, impactful pieces of VISION research with partners
    • Dr Elizabeth Cook (City St George’s UoL) and Harry Jenkins (High Trees) presented their collaborative research developing Built on Trust, a report with youth from Lambeth in London on the role of youth spaces and trusted adults in reducing young people’s exposure to violence.
    • Dr Ruth Weir (City St George’s UoL) and Sophie Jarrett (Gloucestershire Police) presented on their system-wide partnership with central and local government, police, education trusts, and the third sector to understand and prevent teenage relationship abuse (TRA). This work has resulted in the establishment of a national group on TRA and a local group wtihin Gloucestershire.

VISION co-Deputy Directors, Professor Sally McManus (City St George’s UoL) and Dr Estela Capelas Barbosa (University of Bristol) closed the conference by reflecting on the achievements of the VISION consortium and outlining priorities for the future of violence prevention research, policy, and practice. Sally highlighted the wide range of datasets, tools, resources, and publications developed by VISION over the past five years. Looking ahead, Estela emphasised the need for further research on violence affecting LGBTQI+ communities and minoritised women and children. She also stressed the importance of breaking down the persistent silos between the health and criminal justice sectors, noting that the impacts of violence extend across both systems. Effective prevention and support therefore require joined-up services, coordinated policies, and cross-sector collaboration.

Visual artists, Abigail and Chloe Baldwin, from Buttercrumble, beautifully captured the day in a series of illustrations which can be downloaded below along with the keynote and symposium presentations.

To download the presentations:

  1. Insight Symposium: Insight Symposium_Perpetrators of IPV; Insight Symposium_Tech Abuse
  2. Inclusion Symposium: Inclusion Symposium_Insecure migration status; Inclusion Symposium_Co-design of analysis principles
  3. Involve Symposium: Involve Symposium_Partnering with young people; Involve Symposium_Teenage Relationship Abuse
  4. Professor Liz Kelly, 2nd Keynote: Keynote 2_The language and naming of violence
  5. Professor Sally McManus, VISION Achievements: VISION achievements

To download the illustrations:

  1. Conference Summary
  2. 1st Keynote – Jo Todd and Gene Feder and 1st Keynote – 2nd illustration
  3. 2nd Keynote – Liz Kelly
  4. Insight Symposium – Data and Definitions
  5. Inclusion Symposium – Marginalised Populations
  6. Involve Symposium – Partnerships
  7. VISION Achievements
  8. Violence Prevention in Dialogue

The Domestic Homicide Review Dataset: A new resource for policy, practice & research

The UKPRP VISION research consortium is pleased to develop and release the Domestic Homicide Review dataset (DHRD) for England and Wales. VISION Research Fellow Darren Cook and VISION Co-Investigator Lizzie Cook (both at City St George’s University of London) compiled structured data derived from publicly available reports from the UK Home Office Domestic Homicide Review (DHR) Library for England and Wales.

The dataset includes linked document-level, incident-level, victim-level, and perpetrator-level records. The release includes four CSV files, alongside a README, codebook, changelog, licence, citation metadata file, and a ZIP archive containing the full release. The dataset is intended to support research on domestic homicide, victimisation, perpetration, vulnerability, mental health, and related criminological and social policy topics.

The initial release includes information on 647 DHR documents made available by the Home Office between December 2022 and March 2026. The dataset is derived from Home Office data, including tagging and filtering categories exposed through the Home Office website. It is not based on manual coding of the full report texts, therefore, users should interpret missing values and untagged characteristics cautiously.

To download the dataset: The Domestic Homicide Review Dataset (DHRD) for England and Wales

To cite: Cook, D., & Cook, E. (2026). The Domestic Homicide Review Dataset (DHRD) for England and Wales (1.0.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21648010

Photo by Robert Clark on Unsplash

Upcoming webinar – The Domestic Homicide Review Dataset for England and Wales: A new resource

 

A new data resource for policy, practice and research

 

THIS EVENT IS IN THE PAST. Wednesday 29 July 2026, 11:00  – 12:00, online

Register here: Ticket Tailor for DHRD webinar

Teams link will be emailed on 28 July to those registered

We are pleased to invite you to the launch of The Domestic Homicide Review Dataset (DHRD) for England and Wales: a new resource bringing together information from 647 Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs) of domestic abuse-related deaths in England and Wales.

Developed using DHRs published in the UK Home Office’s national repository, the database will enable those that engage with DHRs to do so at scale – supporting insights for policy, practice, and research.

In this webinar, we will introduce the dataset and show how to access and use this new resource. The session will:

  • Provide an overview of how the dataset was constructed
  • Show how to access and use this freely available resource
  • Highlight potential for analysis
  • Explore how the resource can complement existing qualitative work on DHRs

This event will be of particular interest to those working in voluntary and community sector organisations, local authorities, commissioning, policy, and research.

The dataset will be presented by Dr Lizzie Cook and Dr Darren Cook (City St George’s, University of London / VISION) with contributions from Sumanta Roy and Rani Selvarajah (Imkaan). The session will be Chaired by Dr James Rowlands (Durham University).

Photo by Robert Clark on Unsplash

Building better survey data on violence

 

By Sally McManus, VISION co-Deputy Director

Good policy depends on good data. While administrative data sources provide key insight, only surveys of the general population can evidence the extent to which violence is experienced, how it has changed in prevalence over time, and whether some groups are more affected – or less likely to get support – than others.  

The VISION consortium is working to improve the measurement of violence in the UK. Here we highlight examples of how VISION has advanced survey methods and generated new survey datasets to improve the evidence base on violence across the population. 

Ensuring the questions on violence get asked 

VISION research has challenged the historical reluctance to ask survey participants about their experiences of violence, with Dr Lizzie Cook arguing that the topics and people excluded from research cannot be counted or represented. VISION has worked with partners and ethics committees to improve and extend survey measurement so that it more faithfully and fully reflects the realities survivors face.  

Developing new questions on violence at work 

VISION researcher Prof Vanessa Gash has been working with the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to pilot an entirely new set of questions on experiences of violence at work. Workplace violence has historically been poorly captured in national surveys. These new questions will make it possible to examine who is affected, in which sectors, and, because UKHLS follows the same people over time, how experiences change within individuals across their working lives. 

Building a clearer picture of economic abuse 

In a project supported by VISION, Rosa Wilson Garwood and Surviving Economic Abuse developed and administered a detailed set of survey questions on economic abuse. This work has deepened understanding of the different component parts of economic abuse and revealed important inequalities in who experiences it. There is now a national dataset available for download from the UK Data Service. It means that researchers can now examine the structure and breadth of economic abuse rather than relying on narrow proxy measures of it. 

Capturing the links between types of violence 

A new approach to the measurement of violence and abuse was developed by VISION researcher Prof Sally McManus for the 2024 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS). Rather than treating different forms of violence in isolation, the new approach spans a range of types of violence and abuse in a way that allows data users to examine how they interact, including co-occurrence and their combined relationship with mental health outcomes. The new dataset is now available for researchers to use, downloadable from the UK Data Service. 

Evidencing the long-term impacts of violence 

Dr Polina Obolenskaya co-ordinates VISION’s responses to consultations, including on survey content. We are keen to encourage the UK’s birth cohort studies and other longitudinal surveys to ask about violence and abuse. Where adopted, such questions have helped generate some of the first longitudinal data on violence and abuse, opening up new research questions about trajectories, risk, and recovery across the life course. 

Adding depth through open-text responses 

Survey approaches can be augmented through the collection of open-text responses, enabling qualitative insight to be generated at scale alongside structured measures. Research by Dr Nadia Aghtale and Fatemeh Babakhani with VISION researcher Dr Ladan Hashemi used an anonymous online survey and open-ended questions to capture women’s narratives of violence and their proposed solutions, revealing perspectives and forms of harm that are often missed in closed survey items. Their use of online data collection methods has shown how survivors from marginalised or hidden populations – often underrepresented in traditional survey methods – can also be reached via online platforms. 

Supporting researchers with designing and using surveys 

VISION has produced tools and guidance to help researchers design and analyse survey data. Dr Alexandria Innes created the VISION Risk of Bias Toolkit to inform understanding of the potential biases in different data sources, and Dr Hannah Manzur critiqued standardised measurement of ethnicity in national survey data proposing changes to the way surveys ask about and code ethnicity. Dr Niels Blom and Prof Vanessa Gash’s examined the strengths and weaknesses of different violence victimisation measures; while Prof Sian Oram and Dr Vish Bhavsar reviewed violence perpetration measures; and Dr Ladan Hashemi and Maryam Ghasemi’s make recommendations for improved measurement of adverse childhood experiences. To help those analysing survey data, Dr Niels Blom generated and archived code that helps users of the Crime Survey for England and Wales to merge multiple years of data, for better examination on lower prevalence groups in society. 

Why it matters 

Survey data isn’t perfect. But surveys provide one key part of the evidence landscape. Together, these developments contribute to a shift in the survey landscape. Violence and abuse have been excluded, undercounted or narrowly defined in national statistics. These new resources help give researchers better tools, and policymakers better evidence, to respond to how violence is patterned in the general population 

For further information about and to access the new survey datasets on violence, please contact: 

  • Vanessa Gash about the new workplace violence module on UKHLS, which will be archived for users in the future 

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VISION Policy Briefing: The impact of intimate partner violence on job loss and time off work in the UK

 

 

Key research findings

The latest research by VISION colleagues, Niels Blom and Vanessa Gash, finds serious negative effects of intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) on labour market outcomes, with 4% of those who experienced intimate partner violence losing their jobs because of the abuse. Furthermore, 1 in 8 of those who experienced intimate partner violence took a period of leave from work, with 1 in 4 of those who took leave needing to take a month or more off work.

Based on a large statistically representative sample for England and Wales, this research is one of the first to examine different types of IPVA, with five categories distinguished in the analysis.

The report examines differences between those who experienced; (1) physical abuse, (2) sexual abuse, (3) stalking, (4) coercive or controlling behaviour, as well as those who were (5) threatened with abuse by a current or former intimate partner.

There were strong differences in prevalence of IPVA by sex, with women disproportionately exposed to threats and to sexual violence. Additionally, compared to men, women were more likely to report multiple types of violence and abuse.

IPVA experiences are strongly related to employment status for both men and women; 5.2% of employed women experienced IPVA in the past year compared to 11.7% of unemployed women. IPVA was experienced by 2.8% of employed men and by 5.3% of unemployed men.

Job loss is associated with all five forms of IPVA, and the risks were highest for those who experienced: stalking, sexual violence as well as physical threats by an intimate partner.

The research, compiled in the latest VISION Policy Briefing, The Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Job Loss and Time Off Work, also includes qualitative findings from those with lived experience of IPVA and abuse. Participants noted an ongoing stigmatisation of victims of abuse, which had serious impacts on disclosure. Victim-survivors noted their fear of being declared ‘unfit for work’ and of becoming a ’marked person’ should they disclose their abuse to relevant managers.

Figure 1. Types of IPVA experienced by female and male victim-survivors.

 

Policy implications

  • Though IPVA was found to have significant effects on victims’ experiences at work, those with lived experience noted a reluctance to disclose IPVA to relevant managers.
  • Employers may therefore want to consider enhanced IPVA and DA support systems for employees in the workplace.
  • While we can expect enhanced support to improve job retention and productivity, we currently lack the appropriate data to directly examine these effects

Updated version: key changes from version published in March 2024

Key changes are that we now include the survey collected in 2022/23, do not include 2004/05, and we now exclude people who had missing information on job classification (NS-SEC), or who lost their most recent employment more than a year before the interview. We now also include IPVA estimates by employment status.

Original VISION Policy Briefing

Short-report-Labour-market-consequences-of-IPVADownload

 

For further information, please contact: Dr Niels Blom at niels.blom@manchester.ac.uk or Prof Vanessa Gash at vanessa.gash.1@citystgeorges.ac.uk

Upcoming webinar – Left behind: People without support after experiencing violence

 

Thursday 4 June 2026, 13:00  – 14:30, online

This event is in the past.

Join VISION for a free webinar exploring groups who can be overlooked by health services, policing, and specialist support systems after experiencing violence.

Register here: TicketTailor – 4 June VISION webinar 

Many people affected by violence do not receive the help they need, for a variety of reasons. At VISION, we’ve analysed data sources such as the Crime Survey for England and Wales to better understand these gaps. In some cases, individuals do not seek medical care from hospitals or GPs for violence-related injuries, while others choose not to report incidents to the police. There are also those indirectly affected—such as people whose loved ones have experienced serious assault—who frequently go unsupported. In addition, a significant but less visible group includes victims of intimate partner violence and serious sexual assault in England and Wales who do not disclose their experiences, particularly to specialist services.

This research offers fresh insights into the risk factors, lived experiences, inequalities, and consequences of violence among those who neither seek nor receive support—the left behind.

After the short presentations, there will be a ’roundtable’ discussion with all present to look deeper into each presentation and talk about the barriers and opportunities. We want to better identify these missing populations and understand their behaviours for not seeking help and conversely for those that are looking for support but the services aren’t necessarily there.

We welcome anyone working in government, police, healthcare, academia, specialist services, education and the community and voluntary sector interested in and / or working in violence prevention and support for those affected.

Programme

Chair: Kimberly Cullen, VISION Knowledge Exchange Manager, City St George’s University of London

Disclosure of Intimate Partner Abuse and Sexual Violence to Formal Agencies and Specialist Services: Comparing Inequality Patterns, Victim Profiles, and Harms by Disclosure, Dr Hannah Manzur, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s University of London and Dr Annie Bunce

  • Our study examines the hidden population of victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and serious sexual assault (SSA) in England and Wales who report non-disclosure of their victimisation, particularly to specialised services. Whilst evidence-building largely relies on victim-survivors’ disclosure through help-seeking pathways and interventions, the experiences and inequality patterns for victim-survivors outside of these pathways are significantly missing from evidence and support provision. In particular, specialised services support some of the most marginalised and invisible victims of violence, yet barriers to disclosure and resource limitations pose significant challenges for both data collection and support access for these groups. The nationally representative Crime Survey for England and Wales offers a unique opportunity to analyse data on IPV and SSA victim-survivors who have not contacted specialised services or disclosed to any other formal agency (inc. The police and health services). Using pooled data (2004-2019) on past-year IPV and lifetime SSA, we compare inequality patterns (by gender, ethnicity, and migrant-status) and victim profiles (including risk-factors, victimisation characteristics, and harms) of victim-survivors based on disclosure (CSEW only, formal agency, or specialised services). Here, we reveal new insights into the risk-factors, experiences, inequalities, and impacts of violence against otherwise hidden violence victims, particularly those excluded from specialised services support.

Healthcare inequalities following violence: analysis of the Crime Survey for England and Wales 2010-2024, Dr Anastasia Fadeeva, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s University of London

  • Although healthcare is key to supporting victims of physical violence, some do not receive it despite injuries. The present research used the Crime Survey for England and Wales (combined waves 2010-2024) to identify which victims of physical violence were less likely to receive healthcare. Despite the presence of injuries, in almost a half of the incidents, victims receive no healthcare. We examined individual and violence-related factors that were associated with not receiving healthcare following violence victimisation. 

Reporting of violence victimisation to the police in England and Wales, Dr Polina Obolenskaya, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s University of London and Dr Annie Bunce, VISION Research Fellow, City St George’s University of London

  • Who reports violence to the police, and under what circumstances, remains a critical but under‑examined question in England and Wales. Although national victimisation surveys consistently show that more than half of violent incidents never come to the attention of police, existing research is fragmented, often focused on single forms of violence (e.g., intimate partner or sexual violence), based on small studies or non-UK contexts. By mapping multiple routes through which violence does or does not come to the attention of the criminal justice system, this research advances an understanding of the “justice gap” and offers evidence with implications for policy, prevention, and victim‑survivor support. 

Indirect victims of violence: Mental health and the close relatives of serious assault victims in England, Professor Sally McManus, VISION co-Deputy Director, City St George’s University of London and Dr Elizabeth Cook, VISION co-Investigator, City St George’s University of London

  • Violence does not just harm direct victims; its effects ripple out through families. Drawing on a representative survey of adults in England, this study found that one in twenty adults were closely related to a victim of serious assault, and that these relatives carry a disproportionate burden of poor mental health. Even after accounting for their own histories of violence, adversity, and disadvantage, close family members face significantly higher levels of depression, anxiety, and feeling unsafe: evidence that policy must recognise, and victim services be resourced to respond to, the needs of families too. 

Join us at this free webinar on 4 June, 13:00 – 14:30. To book your place please register here: TicketTailor – 4 June VISION webinar 

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Using AI to investigate publicly available documents on violence prevention

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly applied in public health, yet their use for analysing fragmented, multi-sectoral policy landscapes remains underdeveloped. Many applications have focused on service delivery, such as AI-powered chatbots, data surveillance and monitoring, and tracking social media interactions for emerging risks, with less attention paid to how AI might support policy analysis. This is especially true for the violence prevention sector, where AI is gaining traction as a solution for triaging help-seeking calls, detecting threatening messages, predicting conflict and improving police data, but not for understanding the policy landscape.

Policy responses to violence are undergoing scrutiny in the UK, coinciding with the recent publication of an updated cross-government strategy addressing violence against women and girls. This renewed focus places increased demands on researchers and policymakers to rapidly synthesise large and fragmented bodies of policy evidence spanning multiple sectors and both local and national government. Traditional approaches to policy review formed around a wholly manual approach may struggle to meet these demands within policy-relevant timeframes.

This research, an exploratory, proof-of-concept case study, aimed to describe the development and preliminary exploration of an AI-enabled tool designed to synthesise evidence from violence-related policy documents in the UK. The team was led by VISION Research Fellow Dr Darren Cook and inlcuded several members from the wider VISION consortium, Dr Elizabeth Cook, Kimberly Cullen, Professor Sally McManus, Professor Gene Feder and Professor Mark Bellis. 

For their article, Artificial intelligence in critical synthesis of public health responses to violence: A novel application to UK violence prevention policy, the team compiled a corpus of publicly available UK policy and strategy documents on violence (N = 343) through expert review, manual searches of government and third sector organisation websites, and automated web scraping.

Then, they used the corpus to train an existing AI framework and deployed it through a question-answer interface. Stakeholders working in violence prevention (academics, practitioners in specialist services and government officials) were invited to pose natural-language questions about violence policy and consider the system’s utility and the usefulness of its outputs. Their feedback indicated that the AI generated reports were well-grounded in the underlying source documents. Syntheses aligned closely with the documents in the tool, and the inclusion of document references and page-level citations supported credibility assessments. Corpus coverage statistics were considered particularly helpful when judging the robustness of responses. 

This research contributes by documenting the early application of an AI-enabled tool designed to support exploratory policy analysis. The team illustrates an emerging analytic capability and its potential role within policy-oriented research workflows. By demonstrating how a document-grounded, closed-domain AI system can be used to interrogate policy framings and identify potential siloes, this work addresses a gap in current public health applications of AI, specifically in the context of violence prevention.

To access the VISION AI tool to ask your own questions about violence prevention: VISION: Violence, Health & Society  

To download the paper: Artificial intelligence in critical synthesis of public health responses to violence: A novel application to UK violence prevention policy

To cite: Cook, D., Cook, E., Cullen, K., Zachos, K., McManus, S., Feder, G., Bellis, M., Maiden, N. Artificial intelligence in critical synthesis of public health responses to violence: A novel application to UK violence prevention policy. Science Direct (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-026-00272-2

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Computational text analysis on unstructured police data: A scoping review

 

Police reports made following attendance at events such as crashes, domestic violence and theft often contain rich contextual details including indicators of mental health issues or abuse types, and persons/entities involved and their relationships, which are not typically captured in structured administrative data, interviews or official statistics. However, the sheer volume of information along with strict data access protocols render manual analysis impractical. Computational text analysis methods offer a feasible and effective approach to automatically process this underutilized data source.

The research team led by Dr Wilson Lukmanjaya (University of New South Wales) included VISION Research Fellow Dr Darren Cook. The team conducted an overview of studies using computational text analysis (e.g., text mining, natural language processing (NLP)), on unstructured police data, serving as a guide for researchers interested in employing similar methodologies. 

Their article, Computational text analysis on unstructured police data: A scoping review, was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA-SCR guidelines, following the two screening processes (title/abstract and full text screening) and the development of a pre-defined protocol. A search was conducted across seven electronic databases covering the past 20 years.

After removing duplicate entries and screening titles/abstracts and full-text publications, 61 studies met the inclusion criteria. Included studies were published between 2004 and 2024, with most from the United States, Australia and the Netherlands.

The scoping review indicates applications of computational text analysis on unstructured police data have moderate to high performance. Common limitations included variable data quality, with reliability depending on the level of detail provided by the police report’s author, and failure to report ethical implications or methodological limitations.

Computational text analysis can extract key information from unstructured police data. However, future research should clearly report ethics approvals and implications, and methodological limitations. 

Recommendation

  1. Establishing a structured data-sharing framework between law enforcement and researchers is crucial to facilitate access and support high quality, impactful research in this field.

To download the paper: Computational text analysis on unstructured police data: A scoping review

To cite: Lukmanjaya, W., Halmich, C., Butler, T., Cook, D., Karystianis, G. Computational text analysis on unstructured police data: a scoping review. Crime Sci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-026-00272-2

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Perpetration of intimate partner violence and suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, and non-suicidal self-harm: a cross-sectional secondary analysis using the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey

Intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization is associated with suicidal behaviour. Suicidal behaviour may also be raised among those who perpetrate IPV compared to those who do not; general population-based evidence is, however, lacking.

The research team, led by Dr Sophie Carlisle (Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust) with VISION researchers Professor Sally McManus, Professor Louise Howard, and Dr Vishal Bhavsar and others, aimed to investigate the associations between using violence against an intimate partner with suicidal thoughts, suicide attempt and non-suicidal self-harm in the past year.

In contrast to previous research focusing on those in contact with criminal justice or health services or with IPV perpetrator programmes, this study presents the first examination of the association between IPV perpetration and suicidality in a recent UK general population sample, which can contribute to the development of a national picture of this association and inform population level strategies to address both suicide and IPV perpetration.

The research team analysed data from the 2014 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. Logistic regressions estimated associations between IPV perpetration and suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, and self-harm. Associations were estimated for men and women separately, and the team explored interaction in estimates by IPV victimization.

There were greater odds of suicidality and self-harm among self-reported perpetrators of IPV compared to the general population. Many of these associations were accounted for by non-IPV life adversities, IPV victimization and substance use. Improving the identification and management of IPV perpetration, and developing targeted safety planning and interventions for this group could reduce suicide for perpetrators and victims of IPV.

Future research generating adequately powered evidence on differences in these associations based on age or ethnic group, could inform targeted prevention/intervention strategies. Future work assessing the impact of increasing severity, or frequency, of IPV perpetration on risk of suicidality could also be helpful in informing future intervention strategies. Finally, further work should also consider the relevance of suicidality to a variety of harmful behaviours perpetrated within IPV. There remains limited evidence for interventions to reduce suicidality for perpetrators of IPV, including perpetrators who are also IPV victims.

Recommendation

Targeted identification and support for perpetrators of IPV could positively impact responses to suicidality and non-suicidal self-harm.

To download the paper: Perpetration of intimate partner violence and suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, and non-suicidal self-harm: a cross-sectional secondary analysis using the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey

To cite: Carlisle S, Whyte R, Saunders K, McManus S, Oram S, Howard L, Bhavsar V. Perpetration of intimate partner violence and suicide attempt, suicidal ideation, and non-suicidal self-harm: a cross-sectional secondary analysis using the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. Epidemiol Psychiatr Sci. 2026 Mar 26;35:e16. doi: 10.1017/S2045796026100559. PMID: 41883282.

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