Explaining immunisation against violence against the person in Wales and its implications for a narrative approach to evidence-based policy-making

Explaining immunisation against violence against the person in Wales and its implications for a narrative approach to evidence-based policymaking. With this PhD studentship, I would seek to look at evidence-based policymaking from a different perspective by studying those who are immunised against violence, even though they may be at risk, rather than those who are already committing said violence. During my time as a Research Assistant at the Crime and Security Research Institute (CSRI) I was responsible for creating an exploratory coding framework and building a repository for Welsh safeguarding reports - namely Domestic Homicide, Mental Health Homicide and Adult Practice reviews. As part of my research, I saw a trend in life patterns where perpetrators and family members were interviewed as part of the review process. I strongly believe that this would benefit from further study. There are many in the periphery of these reviews who are at risk, yet never suffer violence or perpetrate it themselves. Looking at these alternative narratives can help reveal 'unknown unknowns' from a policy perspective and can serve to better inform both policy creation and safeguarding measures. Although my personal interest is in fatal violence inside the home, I would be particularly interested to explore issues of non-fatal violence and comorbidity with this studentship. Often, we see those that are at the centre of domestic homicide reviews have a record of prior violence that they have perpetrated outside the home on others (usually Police officers). With mental health homicide reviews, we see a similar pattern of behaviour - even though every MHHR is not necessarily domestic in nature, there is often a large overlap that will see a DHR and an MHHR being commissioned for each offence. There are also elements of this 'immunisation' against violence in adult practice reviews, where high risk individuals feature in the narrative of the reports but have not committed any crimes. I should like to undertake a mixed-methods approach with this studentship - using lifetime interviews and focus groups for narrative establishment, with a strong grounding in secondary data analysis to relate this to what we already know about interpersonal violence in Wales.