Interpreting Multi-Agency Partnerships: Ideology, Discourse and Domestic Violence

This article examines local multi-agency responses to local domestic violence, in particular considering how the introduction of local Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRP) in the UK in the late 1990s affected service provision. Using a longitudinal case study, the article considers how feminist ideologies have been supplanted by a combination of judicial processes and bureaucratic politics. These developments are represented by three dominant discourses: ‘criminal justice’, ‘managerialism’ and ‘equalities’; discourses that have had a number of consequences in the implementation of domestic violence policy. The first is that a one-dimensional criminal justice discourse has displaced a feminist political, power and control, analysis. Second, the ascendancy of managerialism has allowed prescriptive short-term performance measurement to prevail over long-term ‘sufferer-orientated’ responses, and finally an ‘equalities’ discourse prioritized perpetrator initiatives and discouraged dissent. The result has been the dominance of the statutory sector, a marginalization of voluntary agencies and a partial alienation of women’s groups; a process which has proved detrimental both to the interests of female sufferers (who form approximately 90 per cent of victims of domestic violence) as well as voluntary agencies.