Estela Capelas Barbosa

Interpersonal violence comprises a variety of different types of violence that occur between individuals, including violence perpetrated by strangers and acquaintances, intimate partners and family members. Interpersonal violence is a leading cause of death, particularly among young adults. Inconsistencies in definitions and approaches to the measurement of interpersonal violence mean it is difficult to clearly understand its prevalence and the differences and similarities between its different subcategories and contexts. In the UK, specialist services provide support for victim-survivors and also perpetrators of violence. As well as delivering frontline services, specialist services collect data on interpersonal violence, both routinely and for the purpose of research and evaluation. This data has the potential to greatly improve understanding of violence in the UK; however, several issues make this challenging. This review describes and discusses some of the key challenges facing the two types of data collected by specialist services. Key inconsistencies regarding conceptualisation and measurement are identified, along with the implications of these for the synthesis of data, including implications for researchers, service providers, funders and commissioners. Recommendations are proposed to improve practice, the quality of data and, therefore, the understanding of interpersonal violence in the UK.

Violence reduction is a United Nations (UN) sustainable development goal (SDG) and is key to both public health and criminology. The collaboration between these fields has the potential to create and improve prevention strategies but has been hampered by the usage of different definitions and measurements. This paper explores the definitions and measurements of violence by the World Health Organization, UN, and Council of Europe to arrive at a harmonized framework aligned with the SDGs. Violence and abuse are defined by these organizations as intentional actions that (are likely to) lead to harm, irrespective of physicality or legality. When recording violence and abuse, health- and justice-based administrative systems use different codes which cannot directly be translated without resorting to broad overarching categories. Additionally, the identification of the number of victims, perpetrators, and events is challenging in these systems due to repeat victimization/offending, multiple victims/perpetrators, and multiple engagements with services associated with a single event. Furthermore, additional information on the victims (e.g., ethnicity) and events needs to be registered to evaluate progress toward the SDGs. We propose a framework to record violence that includes individual and event identifiers, forms of violence and abuse (including physical, sexual, and psychological), harm, and individual and event characteristics.