Page 5
Full article published in: Crime Science Volume 12, Issue 1 | 2023
To read more
Domestic abuse in the Covid-19
pandemic: measures designed to
overcome common limitations of
trend measurement
Research & Innovation
Newsletter
Dr. Eric Halford
Assistant Professor
Policing & Security Program
Rabdan Academy
Hodgkinson Sarah
Dixon Anthony
Farrell Graham
Research on pandemic domestic abuse trends has produced
inconsistent findings reflecting differences in definitions, data and
method. This study analyses 43,488 domestic abuse crimes recorded
by a UK police force. Metrics and analytic approaches are tailored to
address key methodological issues in three key ways. First, it was
hypothesised that reporting rates changed during lockdown, so
natural language processing was used to interrogate untapped
free-text information in police records to develop a novel indicator of
change in reporting. Second, it was hypothesised that abuse would
change differentially for those cohabiting (due to physical proximity)
compared to non-cohabitees, which was assessed via a proxy
measure. Third, the analytic approaches used were change-point
analysis and anomaly detection: these are more independent than
regression analysis for present purposes in gauging the timing and
duration of significant change.
However, the main findings were largely contrary to expectation: (1)
domestic abuse did not increase during the first national lockdown in
early 2020 but increased across a prolonged post-lockdown period,
(2) the post-lockdown increase did not reflect change in reporting by
victims, and; (3) the proportion of abuse between cohabiting
partners, at around 40 percent of the total, did not increase
significantly during or after the lockdown.
Volume 1 l Issue 2 - 2023