The main screening tool used to determine which domestic violence victims need support has “obvious problems” and should be replaced, the UK safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, has said.
Phillips is reviewing systems, including the Dash (domestic abuse, stalking, harassment and “honour-based” violence) questionnaire, largely relied on by police, social services and healthcare workers across the UK since 2009 to assess risk.
Academics and others working in the sector have raised concerns about the 27-question tool, which assesses answers to decide which respondents are deemed high risk so they can be referred to specialist care.
Phillips told the BBC’s File on 4 that she was reviewing the entire system supporting victims but said it would not change overnight.
“My instinct is that the tool doesn’t work, but until I can replace it with something that does, we have to make the very best of the system that we have,” Phillips said.
Any risk assessment tool was “only as good as the person who is using it” and people had been killed even when deemed to be at high risk, she said.
“The grading system won’t immediately protect you. It is the systems that flow from those risk assessments that matter much, much, much more than the score.”
Families of women who were murdered after not being graded as high risk are exploring legal action against the institutions they believe failed their loved ones.
A number of academic studies, some dating back almost a decade, have looked into how Dash is performing and have found that it is unable to identify high-risk victims accurately.
A study from the London School of Economics published in 2020, analysing Greater Manchester police data, found that in almost nine out of 10 repeat cases of violence, victims had previously been classed as standard or medium risk by officers using Dash.
In 2022, academics from Manchester and Seville Universities analysed anonymous police force data and found 96% of victims who were judged retrospectively as high risk had been classed previously as “standard” or “medium” risk by Dash.
“When it comes to the question of the reliability of Dash as a predictive tool, there is a growing consensus that Dash does not do that job at all well,” Dr Heather Strang, the director of the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology at the University of Cambridge, told the BBC.
Nour Norris, whose sister Khaola Saleem and niece Raneem Oudeh, were stabbed to death by her niece’s ex-partner in 2018, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme their risk was downgraded “to a tick-box exercise”.
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“Raneem was failed because her risk was downgraded to a tick box exercise,” Norris said. “That’s how simple it is, and we can’t allow victim safety to be dependent on which police force is going to answer their call. In other words, the system is just a tick box.
“In order for us to save lives like Raneem’s and many victims’ as we speak today, we must evolve the system and reform the police and change the justice system in many ways. This system has to be evolving all the time.”
Phillips’ comments come after the government said new measures would be introduced to crack down on so-called “honour-based” abuse, which is motivated by the perception that a person has brought shame to themselves, their family or the community. Related crimes include female genital mutilation, forced marriage and murder.
There were 108 domestic homicides in England and Wales in the year to March 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics.
New statutory guidance and a legal definition of “honour-based” abuse will be brought in to help combat the crime. The Home Office will pilot a study looking at how widespread this crime is, a community awareness campaign will be launched and teachers, police officers, social workers and healthcare professionals will receive more training under the new policies.
