Project FOUNDATION supports engagement with high-harm domestic abuse perpetrators

Project Foundation, our collaborative partnership with HIOW Constabulary and the HIOW PCC, is showing promising results.

This pilot initiative was developed jointly by police, Hampton Trust and the PCC’s team to manage high-harm and repeat domestic abuse perpetrators and nudge them into specialist services and interventions.

As part of the project, police provide a monthly list of approximately 150 perpetrators who meet the Foundation criteria:

• committed one or more DA offences within the previous 2 years
• are currently perpetrating DA against intimate partners
• are perpetrating in a family setting (at least one child present linked to the occurrence)
• have not been cautioned or charged in relation to their current offending
• are between the ages of 18-30

Our Foundation Practitioners, who are now co-located with police priority crime teams, assess the perpetrators using the Priority Perpetrator Identification Tool, which has been developed to help frontline practitioners identify a subset of perpetrators considered the most dangerous and thus priorities for multi-agency monitoring and management.

They provide specialist guidance to frontline police officers in developing risk management plans for high-harm perpetrators and support police during joint perpetrator engagement visits. A recent review showed successful engagement with perpetrators and referrals to behaviour change programmes or other specialist services where police alone had struggled to achieve any meaningful engagement previously.

Repeat perpetrators often present with complex needs that make engagement difficult and are difficult to address by police alone. Our Foundation Practitioners provide a regular point of contact that allows them to undertake stabilisation work and motivate perpetrators into behaviour change programmes when they are ready.

The practitioners are helping the officers with a growing caseload. Getting a perpetrator to engage requires persistence and a regular sustained point of contact. The intervention and engagement take up was lower prior to the practitioners coming on board. Part of this was because the perpetrator did not want to engage with police officers – this is a real barrier even if the officers do their best to reassure them everything is independent.

The practitioners save the team hours of work, from reviewing the cohort list, scoring the PPITS and creating their part of the risk management plan. This keeps the officers free to robustly enforce the DVPN and Order along with assisting the other teams with targeting perpetrators in the district.

Sergeant Darren Woolvin, HIOW Constabulary