Identifying and recording domestic abuse

The way domestic abuse will be identified and recorded within the criminal justice system is changing.

A new judicial finding of domestic abuse has been introduced through the Sentencing Act 2026.

Where an offense has involved domestic abuse, as defined by the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, this can now be formally recorded by the court at the point of sentencing.

Now, it's more than a note that remains on a court file because the domestic abuse flag will be shared with relevant agencies and visible across police, probation, and prison, prison digital systems.

One of the challenges we see repeatedly in our reviews is that information exists, but the pattern isn't necessarily visible.

So one agency knows about one incident.

Another agency holds information about something that happened several years earlier.

Police may have attended previous incidents.

Probation may hold other information.

There may have been different victims, different relationships or offenses which looked at individually just don't necessarily tell the whole story.

So the Minister for Victims and Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, Alex Davies-Jones, said that, "Too many victims have suffered because patterns of abusive behavior haven't always been recognized across the justice system." And so often we cite the importance of looking for patterns in overview reports.

When we undertake domestic abuse-related death reviews, we rarely understand domestic abuse by looking at one incident in isolation.

We look backwards.

We build a chronology.

We bring information together from different a- organizations, and usually something becomes visible that wasn't visible to individual practitioners at the time.

We see escalation.

We see repetition.

We see controlling behavior.

We see different agencies holding different pieces of information.

Quite regularly, we see a perpetrator appearing in relation to more than one victim.

The new finding is intended to make some of that history more visible to the frontline professional and help police, probation, and prisons identify repeat domestic abuse offenders and assess and manage risk more effectively.

Dame Nicole Jacobs, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, has described this as a step change in our ability to track domestic abuse perpetrators through the criminal justice system.

She's also made an important point about the wider information this could provide.

Better recording could give us a clearer picture of how pervasive domestic abuse really is within the justice system.

There's potentially enormous value in that because good safeguarding depends on us being able to understand context.