UNDERSTANDING THE COURT EXPERIENCES OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN DOMESTIC ABUSE: A PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH PROJECT

Domestic abuse (DA) is a major driver of care proceedings. The government reports that 250,000 children in England were identified as in need of support from children’s social care due to DA in 2018–19(1). The sector-led Care Crisis Review (2018) acknowledged concerns that child protection responses to DA place ‘too great a responsibility on women to protect their children’(2).
We are proposing a two-and-a-half-year Participatory Action Research (PAR) project to explore how care proceedings can be improved for mothers who have experienced DA. This project will synthesise a divergent range of narratives to produce detailed insights into the factors shaping mothers’ experience of care proceedings. It will go further than a conventional study by offering a vision for a better public family law system, co-designed by parents and practitioners.
This project offers a unique contribution in three ways:
1. Joan Hunt has shown that the experiences of parents in public law, in comparison to private law, are ‘particularly poorly understood’(3). Our project will be the first to consider the factors particular to mothers experiencing domestic abuse in public family law.
2. A PAR approach has never been used in family justice research. By recruiting mothers with lived experience to be participant researchers, we will harness the knowledge of those closest to the system.
3. This project will offer concrete solutions through a co-design process, which will bring together our participant researchers and a diverse group of family justice practitioners to prototype alternative models of care-proceedings.