What are Integrated Domestic Abuse Courts?

Work with offenders looks at a new briefing from the Centre for Justice Innovation.

In June 2020, the Government published the Harm Review, an expert-led review into how the family courts handle domestic abuse and other serious offences. The review found that the adversarial process in the family courts often worsened conflict between parents, which could re-traumatise victims and their children. In its response to the report, the Government committed to create an Integrated Domestic Abuse Courts (IDAC) pilot, to consider family and criminal matters in parallel in order to provide more consistent support for victims.

What are IDACs?

The Centre for Justice Innovation (CJI) reviewed the literature of IDACs and spoke a number of practitioners in order to come up with a list of their key features:

• IDACs sit within a wider family of specialised domestic abuse court models. IDACs uniquely bring together domestic abuse cases which would traditionally be heard separately in the criminal, civil or family courts into one court process.
• IDACs use integrated case listing and information to simplify the legal process for litigants, often seeking to ensure all eligible court hearings for a family are heard in front of the same judge, in part to reduce the likelihood of conflicting orders.
• Some IDACs deal with almost all domestic abuse cases across criminal, civil and family courts in a particular local area regardless of whether there are concurrent cases; others hear a subset of domestic abuse cases where there is likely to be overlap between an existing case and previous orders made or where there are outstanding issues which might reasonably be litigated; and a small group only hear cases where there are concurrent proceedings.
• IDACs integrate these court processes with services to promote safety, advocacy and support.
• IDACs often employ judicial monitoring, following the imposition of a criminal sentence, or civil orders of protection, to monitor compliance of perpetrators.

There are similar models in the US where “co-ordinated” domestic abuse courts address many of the same goals as IDACs, but due to local legal culture and court operations, use a small team of judges rather than a sole judge to hear the civil and criminal cases.

Do they work?

So far the evidence base for IDACs is pretty small and far from conclusive. At this point, we just don’t know whether this is an effective approach or not which is why there is real value in the government piloting such a court in England and Wales. However, there are lessons from (mainly North American) evaluations of broader specialist domestic abuse courts which suggest they can improve victim satisfaction, compared to traditional court processing. Moreover, where specialist domestic abuse courts take a problem-solving approach and deploy judicial monitoring post-sentence, there is promising evidence they can change sentencing patterns and can make a difference to the frequency of re-offending.

The CJI briefing helpfully highlights six key lessons for implementing IDACs:

1. Eligibility for IDAC cases should be clearly defined, identifying which types of cases ought to be routed into the IDAC.
2. The use of a court coordinator role is especially useful to ensure eligible cases are identified, routed into the IDAC and managed effectively when there.
3. The IDAC needs strong partnerships with external services, to give the court the ability to fast track court users into suitable services for culturally appropriate, person-centred support.
4. While IDACs may have benefits in terms of information-sharing and victim safety, there is the potential for significant additional costs involved in increased staff time and output.
5. A key emphasis should be placed on training and continuous professional development for staff. This should include culturally sensitive and anti-discriminatory training.
6. Provisions for staff well-being should also be made to manage stress and potential burnout.

Over recent years, the government has placed increasing emphasis on the importance of tackling domestic abuse and this is the latest manifestation of its commitment. It is to be hoped that the pilot starts soon and is rigorously evaluated. If the pilot is successful, then we must wait and see whether the government is prepared to invest in the “significant additional costs” required to run these courts effectively.