Violence & Society researchers and Gloucestershire Constabulary awarded police funding to research teenage relationship abuse

Teenagers experience disproportionately high and increasing rates of abuse in their intimate relationships.

Frontline workers, like police officers, teachers or social workers, lack evidence on how to best identify abuse in teenage relationships and how to stop it from occurring.

Criminologists and data scientists from City St George’s, University of London and police at the Gloucestershire Constabulary have been awarded funding from the Office of the Police Chief Scientific Adviser (OPCSA) through the Police STAR Fund, to close this gap.

Dr Ruth Weir (Deputy Director of the Violence & Society Centre at City St George’s) and Deputy Chief Constable Katy Barrow-Grint (of the Gloucestershire Constabulary, and Honorary Research Fellow at City St George’s), will co-lead the project, and have partnered with the domestic abuse charity SafeLives.

Uncovering the risks, harms and scale of teenage relationship abuse

The research project will establish what the risk and harms of abuse in teenage relationships look like and how they differ from adult relationships.

To establish the scale of the problem, the project will analyse police data to identify incidents involving under-16s over the past ten years that have remained hidden in police records.

Teenage relationship abuses cases have been hard to identify previously, due to under 16s not being flagged as experiencing domestic abuse under current law.

The project will also provide guidance on identifying and responding to teenage relationship abuse for people working across the police, in social care, in education, in youth services, at health services and across specialist support services.

Young people with lived experience of abuse, and people working with young people, are involved at every stage of the research.

The project is designed so that the guidance can be rolled out across police forces nationally.

Human-led technological solutions: Combining AI with lived experience

The project will use cutting-edge research methods, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is an artificial intelligence (AI) technique that analyses large volumes of text.

The research combines NLP, analysis of ten years’ worth of anonymised police and other data from Gloucestershire Constabulary, and interviews and focus groups with young people with lived experience.

The NLP will be informed by insights from SafeLives Changemakers, who are a group of young people aged 13-24 that are experts in the challenges their peers face today. Some also have lived experience of domestic abuse.

With their understanding of how young people talk about teenage relationship abuse, the Changemakers will sharpen the NLP model's ability to recognise cases of teenage relationship abuse “hidden” inside a decade of police records.

Dr Ruth Weir, said:

We want to give those working with young people something they currently don't have: a clear picture of what risk and harm looks like in teenage relationships.

We cannot assume that the risks and harms of domestic abuse are the same in teenage relationships as in adult relationships.

If we don't understand what risk looks like for young people, we can't respond to it appropriately, and young victims fall through the cracks of systems designed for adults.

Intervening can change the trajectory of someone's life.

We are working with SafeLives Changemakers to uncover cases of teenage relationship abuse that would otherwise stay invisible.

DCC Barrow-Grint said:

We know there's a problem and that some children are displaying worrying behaviours within their relationships, but what we don't yet understand is the full scale of the issue.

Nationally there has been an increase in strangulation and sexual violence offences involving under 16s, and after doing a dip sample here in Gloucestershire, we believe around 4% of our strangulation cases involve 13- to 15-year-olds.

These ages are alarming, but what we don't yet know is the full scale of the issue and this funding will help determine that.

Once teenage relationship abuse comes to the attention of police, a crime has often already happened. We need to review the data and see how we can identify and deal with the risks to ensure we can safeguard children and prevent the abuse from happening in the first place.

About the project

Also on the research team are Dr Darren Cook, Research Fellow in Natural Language Processing at City St George’s; Dr Annie Bunce, Research Fellow in Criminology at City St George’s; and Dr Katerina Hadjimatheou, Director of the Centre for Criminology at the University of Essex.

The funding comes as part of the Police STAR Fund, which is an annual innovation call run by the OPCSA to stimulate local innovation, encourage collaboration and solve scientific and technological problems within policing.

City St George’s works with industry to develop academic research which responds to real-world policy needs.

This project directly supports the Government’s Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy by strengthening prevention and early identification of abuse, improving systems understanding, and informing proportionate, evidence-led responses for young people.

Colleagues from the National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection (NCVPP) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) sit on the advisory board of the project.