Despite a general awareness of the prevalence of harm young people are experiencing in their relationships, there is little data and evidence supporting the prevention of and responses to such harm through the adoption of a survivor centred transformative justice approach.
Talia Kensit, founder and former CEO of Youth Realities, explored adolescent domestic abuse as a Fellow with the Churchill Fellowship, a UK charity which supports individual UK citizens to follow their passion for change, through learning from the world and bringing that knowledge back to the UK.
Her travels and research resulted in Prevention, Intervention and Healing: Addressing Adolescent Relationship Abuse, a framework of best practice upheld by the theory of transformative justice. It is Talia’s recommendation that in order to address the epidemic of harm experienced by young people in their intimate relationships, we must implement polices and practice through prevention, intervention and healing.
All those registering will receive an email by 30 October from the Violence and Society Centre with the room and building number where the launch will be held on our Clerkenwell campus.
Adolescent domestic abuse (ADA) goes by many names, sometimes referred to as toxic teenage relationships. ADA includes physical, emotional, and/ or sexual abuse that occurs between young people who are, or were, dating. It is often overlooked in research, policy and practice. As a phenomenon, abusive behaviour between adolescents in intimate relationships remains relatively invisible, due in part to the persistent yet unfounded assumption that domestic abuse is something that only occurs between adults.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales finds that women aged 16 to 19 are more likely to experience domestic abuse than older age groups (ONS, 2020), but despite the prevalence, women in this age group are less likely to be referred to support services (SafeLives, 2017).
SafeLives discovered, on average, experiencing abusive behaviour from a partner begins at age 14 or 15, (2017). Further research in Wales found that among those aged 11-16 years old experienced a range of mental health and social impacts associated with experiencing domestic abuse, including teenage pregnancy, self-harm, and violent behaviour (Young et al, 2021).
With this landscape in mind and led by the need from our partners and to ensure intersectoral collaboration, VISION set up a working group with Thames Valley Police, SafeLives, Islington Borough Council, H.O.P.E Training, Respect, Youth Realities and others to investigate ADA via three activities:
ADA rapid systematicreview to synthesise existing research and data on ADA in teenage relationships (January 2024; funded by the City St George’s, UoL, Policy Support Fund).
ADA workshop: ‘Too Soon, Too Late’ organised by VISION with SafeLives Changemakers and young people who experienced abuse in their relationships when they were aged 13 to 16 (March 2024; funded by the City St George’s, UoL, Participatory Research Fund).
ADA conference, an event to bring together practitioners, people with lived experience, police, researchers, and policymakers working in the ADA environment (April 2024; funded by the City St George’s, UoL, HEIF KE Fund).
The report, Summary of the VISION Adolescent Domestic Abuse activities and events in 2024, is available online. It summarises the findings and recommendations of the review, workshop and conference for a roundtable of police, local government, academics, practitioners and specialist services working in the field held in June 2024. It was produced for the working group as an aid to distil the thinking thus far across the three VISION activities.
ADA Rapid Systematic Review
The VISION review investigates ADA by examining the terminology and related terminology used in the literature. The paper focuses on the perpetration and victimisation as it concerns adolescents, especially those under 16 years old, and the factors that act as protective and recovery mechanisms for young people experiencing ADA.
VISION researchers, led by Dr Ruth Weir, conducted a systematic rapid review of 79 papers from databases for peer-reviewed literature.
The team discovered definitional issues, an overemphasis on quantitative studies, and a lack of attention to ADA when it intersects with cultural factors, gender differences, criminalisation, and poor mental health. Many of the studies report on school-based settings, with limited reporting and understanding of the role of neighbourhood factors in acting as protective and recovery mechanisms. Additionally, literature on impacted adolescents and their help-seeking behaviours is sparse. The review revealed that evidence on abuse affecting adolescents in the UK remains patchy.
Highlights from the VISION ADA rapid review: Gaps, limitations & considerations for future research
ADA workshop:Too Soon, Too Late
Dr Polina Obolenskaya and Dr Annie Bunce, VISION Research Fellows, collaborated on a consultation project, “Too soon, too late”, with the SafeLives Changemakers and with young people who experienced abuse in their relationships when they were aged 13 to 16. The main aim of the consultation was to develop a robust, methodological framework for a future adolescent domestic abuse (ADA) research proposal.
Together with SafeLives, a charity working to end domestic violence, they co-developed the material for the online workshop, a focus group, with young people, which took place in March 2024, and was facilitated by the ‘Changemakers’, a group of young people passionate about amplifying the voices of survivors of domestic abuse. They work alongside SafeLives providing a young person’s expertise on the charity’s work, conducting research, and working to influence policy change.
Some of the preliminary themes from the workshop include:
Lack of recognition amongst young people of both domestic abuse (DA) in general, and ADA specifically.
Young people don’t easily identify their own experiences of ADA as DA.
Young people’s understanding of ADA changes over time.
Young people highlighted the wide variation in experiences of ADA and professional responses to it.
Young people can identify clear priorities for future ADA research.
Young people see school as a key point of early intervention, but feel that improvement is needed in terms of better education around healthy relationships and school cultures that encourage open discussion around DA whilst actively challenging attitudes and behaviours conducive to ADA and sexual violence.
Further information can be found in the report available for downloading online.
ADA Conference
The Adolescent Domestic Abuse conference held on 18 April brought together 161 academics, practitioners, and policy makers to share existing research, policy and practice. Dr Ruth Weir, Senior Research Fellow at the Violence & Society Centre and the VISION research project at City, and Katy Barrow Grint, Assistant Chief Constable at Thames Valley Police, welcomed the delegates.
Louise Rolfe, OBE, Metropolitan Police and National Police Chief Council lead for Domestic Abuse was a keynote speaker. Louise spoke about the national context of domestic abuse, highlighting the most harmful abuse that is seen is coercive control and that domestic abuse accounts for more than 30% of violent crime. She also spoke about the role of the media requiring scrutiny and the need for sustainable long-term systemic solutions.
Professor Christine Barter, Co-Director of the Connect Centre for International Research on Interpersonal Violence and Harm, University of Central Lancashire, also gave a keynote. She provided an overview of her 15 years of research exploring the prevalence, subjective impact and risk factors associated with abuse in young people’s relationships in her presentation, Researching abuse within teenage relationships: A critique of a decade’s work and what we could do better. Her mixed-method body of work addressed both victimisation and perpetration for young people aged 13 to 17.
There were panels on Teenage relationships and abuse: What the research says; Sexual violence in teenage relationships; and Specialist services and local government. Presenters included academics sharing their ADA research from Loughborough University and Durham University and specialist domestic violence organisations like SafeLives, Refuge, and Women’s Aid. Islington Borough Council, representing local government, discussed their work on a multi-agency model project to identify, intervene and protect teenagers experience ADA.
By Elizabeth Cook, Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Sociology at City St George’s, University of London
As the VISION consortium approaches the end of its third year, work continues on consolidating the learning from various large datasets in crime and justice, health, and specialist services.
What we know is that these datasets are structured in different ways, collected by different agencies, and curated for quite different purposes. They represent particular waysofknowing about violence and abuse: they can help to identify patterns (e.g., what determines whether victim-survivors of sexual violence and abuse access support), prevalence (e.g., of workplace bullying and harassment), trends over time, and associations (e.g., between intimate partner violence, suicidality, and self-harm). However, we also know that large datasets struggle to capture the complex, and sometimes messy, realities of violence and abuse experienced by communities, especially those that are marginalised and minoritised.
Peer action research in Lambeth
In Lambeth, working in collaboration with peer researchers has made visible the evidence gaps that emerge at the intersection of multiple systems of inequality, including racism and misogyny.
We are lucky to be partnered with Lambeth Peer Action Collective (LPAC), High Trees and Partisan as part of a peer action research project. The aim of the project is to explore the role that trusted adults and trusted spaces can play in protecting young people from exposure to violence. Currently, there are 11 peer researchers that work as part of the LPAC: a collective of young people and youth organisations campaigning for change in their community. They are supported by High Trees, a Community Development Trust in Tulse Hill, eight partner youth organisations, and Partisan, a Black-led Community Interest Company providing culturally sensitive mental health support.
What has been achieved so far?
The project builds upon research conducted by the previous cohort of LPAC researchers conducted between December 2021 and August 2022. This project identified the impacts of violence on young people in Lambeth and the structural conditions of poverty, housing, education, urban regeneration, and public safety that were experienced unequally across the community.
Developing these findings further, the second cohort of peer researchers have been participating in weekly research training sessions led by High Trees and supported by VISION. The group has been learning everything they need for the next stage: from safeguarding and finances, to developing research questions, critical thinking skills, and how to evaluate research methods. This month, the LPAC researchers are getting ready to put into practice the interview skills that they have been learning each week in preparation for the next stage of the project – recruitment.
There has been amazing progress so far – not only in forming a research question and defining key concepts, but in developing a shared space for researchers to feel like change is possible and to collaborate with others who want the same.
What have we learned?
There are ongoing conversations about how peer action research can work to redress the imbalance between ‘researcher’ and ‘researched.’ These conversations seem even more relevant to research on violence and abuse, where the issue of power is central to both.
So far, the weekly sessions with peer researchers as well as our meetings with High Trees have taught us a lot about how power operates within institutions and the ways that it can be shared if there is a will to share it. This can be reflected in adequate resourcing, decision-making, access, and sharing skills and knowledge. The project has underlined the importance of respect in research: for different forms of expertise, within spaces, and within research relationships. The project has also challenged adult-centric assumptions about what we suppose that young people need to live better lives.
As mentioned previously, this project highlights the evidence gaps that occur at the intersection of multiple inequalities. In doing so, peer action research can also shape how we utilise large datasets, recognising how different social realities are reflected within existing data (or not).
In this sense, this collaboration has also made hyper-visible the question of: what and who is research for? As others have suggested, action research is not so much a methodology, but a way of thinking about research: it is a way of approaching a specific problem through community, participation, and curiosity. It is not necessarily driven by knowing more about something, but by wanting to change something with what you know.
We hope that this research continues in that spirit!
Although estimating the prevalence of victimisation among young people is challenging, previous research indicates that around a fifth of young people have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner, half experienced emotional victimisation, and a quarter report some type of unwanted sexual contact. National UK crime surveys consistently find young women to be at greater risk of victimisation than those over 25, and intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA) is one of the leading risks of death globally for younger women (aged 20–24).
In this paper, VISION Director Professor Gene Feder and colleagues from the University of Bristol and University of Central Lancashire, explored young people’s experiences of seeking or receiving institutional help and support in relation to IPVA.
Semi-structured interviews were carried with 18 young people aged 18 to 25, using Life History Calendars. Experiences of range of types of services in relation to intimate partner violence were explored, including support from education; primary and maternity services; third sector organisations; and counselling and support workers.
Participants said that they wanted clearer information to be provided in schools on identifying abuse from a younger age and better signposting and access to specialist services. They described how they benefited from equal power dynamics in relationships with professionals where they were supported to make their own decisions.
The authors found that young people often view adult support services as not for them and more needs to be done to understand effective responses to IPVA among different groups. Professionals in all sectors (including schools) need IPVA trauma-informed training that encourages equal power dynamics, with a clear understanding of and access to referral pathways, to be able to respond better to the specific needs of young people experiencing IPVA.
Even experiencing just one type of adverse childhood experience (ACE) increases the risks of poor health outcomes in adulthood, including health-harming behaviours, poor sexual and mental health, and crime and violence.
Among people experiencing one type of ACE, this study examined which ACEs were most strongly related to each type of health harms, using a combined study sample of 20,556 18–69 years living in England and Wales. The research team, including VISION researcher Mark Bellis, found that sexual abuse in childhood strongly predicted subsequent obesity. Sexual abuse also showed the biggest increase in later cannabis use. Household alcohol problems in childhood was the ACE most strongly associated with violence and incarceration in adulthood.
Toxic stress can arise from ACEs such as physical and sexual abuse, but other more prevalent ACEs, for example verbal abuse and parental separation, may also contribute substantively to poorer life course health.
VISION Interim Director Gene Feder collaborated with Valeria Skafida from the University of Edinburgh and Christine Barter from the University of Central Lancashire to undertake a critical analysis of UK longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional population surveys which asked about experiences of intimate partner violence and abuse (IPVA).
Seven relevant UK representative population-based surveys which asked about IPVA among adults and/or young people (16–17 years old) were identified. They critically engaged with the questionnaires to analyse the strengths and limitations of existing UK data on IPVA.
Several limitations in UK surveys were identified. Many questions still showed a bias, partly historical, towards collecting more data about physical abuse. Few surveys asked about financial abuse, abuse post-separation or through child contact, or through technologies, though improvements were under way.
Surveys still sought to count incidents of abuse, instead of enquiring about the impact of abusive behaviours on victims. Ethnicity and other demographic variables were not always adequately captured (or accessible to data users), making it difficult to explore aspects of inequality. Potentially useful comparisons within the UK were difficult to undertake given the increasingly divergent questionnaires used in different UK nations.
They discussed how future iterations of existing surveys or new surveys can improve with regards to how questions about IPVA are asked. Given that surveys across geographical contexts often suffer similar weaknesses, their findings are relevant for IPVA survey methodology beyond the UK context.
