Domestic homicide reviews | Kirklees Council

Please note that this page contains content that you may find distressing. If you or someone you know is affected by domestic abuse, please visit Kirklees Domestic Abuse for further information and support.

Community Safety Partnerships are required to conduct a Domestic Homicide Review when someone aged 16 or over has died as a result of violence, abuse or neglect by:

a person they were related to or had been in an intimate personal relationship with; and/or
a member of the same household.

The Domestic Violence, Crime and Adults Act introduced Domestic Homicide Reviews in 2011.

Purpose of a Domestic Homicide Review

A Domestic Homicide Review provides an opportunity for local council, criminal justice, health and third sector agencies to:

Consider the contact that the victim(s), including any children, and perpetrator(s) had with local services;
Analyse how these services responded to the victim and perpetrator and whether there are things that could be done differently in future to improve how services respond to victims of domestic abuse and hold perpetrators accountable for their behaviour; and
Identify learning that can be shared with all staff and improvements that can be made to services and partnership processes.

Lessons learned from Domestic Homicide Reviews help agencies to improve their response to domestic abuse and to work better together to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.

The Domestic Homicide Review process

Each review is overseen by a panel of agency representatives and specialists who can provide expert advice on key issues that the family may have been experiencing. The panel will make every effort to include information from the victim's family, friends and work colleagues, but will also respect when these individuals choose not to be involved in the review. Many families in these circumstances are supported by an advocate.

DHRs are not enquiries into how someone died or who is to blame - they do not form part of a disciplinary or performance management process for individual staff (agencies retain responsibility for managing these processes). They do not replace, but are in addition to, concurrent investigations that may be undertaken by police and other criminal justice agencies (including the coroner) and independent bodies (such as an ombudsman).