Redress, rights and responsibilities: comparing European intervention systems

Abstract

While there is an overall consensus in Europe on the need for a comprehensive approach to domestic violence, different models are emerging. Some focus on criminal prosecution of perpetrators, others construct intervention around protection of victims, and the obligations of professionals are differently framed by legal and institutional provisions. Against a background of research mapping the diverse frameworks across Europe, the project `Cultural Encounters in Intervention Against Violence' (CEINAV) explored these differences in depth in Germany, Portugal, Slovenia and England and Wales, whose intervention systems exemplify some of these differences, and found that these do shape the pathways by which women threatened by an intimate partner may enter and move through (or withdraw from) the intervention system. In addition, the rights of a woman facing violence to make decisions affecting her own life is seen differently. The different approaches all raise questions of when and how far intervention actually meets the needs of the women and children subjected to `domestic' violence (much of which is actually not perpetrated by a spouse or a live-in partner). Both the focus on victim protection and, paradoxically, the emphasis on criminalisation seem to have only a very limited potential to stop perpetrators from violence.