Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

How Boris Johnson could reach his target on cutting violent crime

Can Boris Johnson really cut violent crime by 20 per cent? James reported recently that the Prime Minister has set his Cabinet this target, and is demanding that every department get involved in realising it.

Most people have focused on the most salient political problem, which is knife crime. But if the Prime Minister is really serious about driving the overall violent crime statistics down, then he already has a piece of ‘oven-ready’ legislation which could help him do this – if he’s prepared to spend a bit more money on it. The Domestic Abuse Bill is returning to Parliament very soon, after just making it through all the prorogation jamboree in the autumn. Domestic abuse is a crime that often involves a great deal of repeated violence, including homicide, with two women a week dying at the hands of a current or former partner. Campaigners often describe it as ‘domestic terrorism’, and compare the amount of attention paid to domestic homicides with the response to the far smaller number of terrorism-related deaths. In 2018, 173 people were killed in domestic violence-related homicides. Charities estimate that each year more than 100,000 people in the UK are at high and imminent risk of being murdered or seriously injured as a result of domestic abuse.

Domestic abuse has moved up the political agenda in the past few years – one of the winners at our Parliamentarian awards last night was Rosie Duffield, who spoke very powerfully in the Commons last year about her own experience of coercive control – but often the debate is about how to get women (victims are predominantly female) away from violent partners, rather than about the offenders themselves. Perpetrators of abuse tend to be repeat offenders, often doing the same thing to one partner repeatedly, before moving onto another victim.

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