Domestic Abuse Podcast recorded in partnership with the Willow Project

As part of the 16 Days of Action against Domestic Abuse, Detective Chief Inspector Darren De’ath has spoken to The Willow Project and recorded a podcast, speaking about his role as force lead in tackling domestic abuse, stalking, rape and serious violence.

Part of DCI De’ath’s job is to make sure officers are aware of what domestic abuse is, how they should be dealing with it and the actions they should be taking.

As well as this, he has been working on developing a new process to capture feedback from domestic abuse victims, which will allow us to learn from this and develop new ways of working, to ensure the safety of victims and to find ways to work with perpetrators.

Detective Chief Inspector Darren De’ath said: “I am doing everything I can to ensure that we as an organisation are accountable for the delivery of domestic abuse services in Derbyshire.

“Over the past year the force has been working hard to develop new teams to work with victims of domestic abuse; we introduced a Domestic Abuse Intervention Management Team which looked at the needs of the victim and finds ways to support them. This gives them confidence to either end their relationship or to work at it, for example we have officers that will assist them to go shopping to help them not to be too reliant on their partner, and work with them to regain control over their life.”

Since this podcast was recorded the force has recently developed a Domestic Abuse Review Team which provides a secondary review across all public protection notification documents, officers’ comments when attending an incident, and historical information. The team determines the final risk level and will allocate this to the relevant team and if needed, will make referrals to partner agencies.

In May 2021, the force also started supporting the national DRIVE programme alongside nine other police forces.

The programme identifies perpetrators who are at high risk of committing offences of domestic abuse, and try to work with them to identify what makes them offend and be able to break this offending cycle.

Derbyshire can currently have up to 125 people on the programme and when this podcast was recorded, the total number of people on this programme was 11, ten of which were men and one was a woman.

Detective Chief Inspector Darren De’ath added: “What I am aiming to do is recruit more police officers to work with victims of domestic abuse and to have more offender managers to be on the DRIVE programme, so that more perpetrators can be seen and have a bigger impact.

“We have to realise there are vulnerable people who may not come onto the police radar due to different factors, and it is those who I want to put these processes in place to help support and break that cycle, by giving them the tools to either help them in their relationship or to work to remove one of them from that relationship.”

If you are struggling in your relationship, help and support is available. You can contact us by sending this page a private message, by sending a DM to our Contact Centre on Twitter (@DerPolContact), or by visiting our website: www.derbyshire.police.uk.

You can also call us on 101, and 999 in an emergency.

To listen to the podcast and find out more about the work we are doing to help those who have been victims of domestic abuse, and the steps we are taking to work with perpetrators can be found by following this link: The Willow Pod / Darren De'ath the Detective Chief Inspector in charge of domestic abuse talks about his work. (audioboom.com) or by searching for the podcast on Spotify and Apple podcasts.