Women’s Aid Annual Audit 2025
The Annual Audit 2025 by Women’s Aid provides a comprehensive overview of domestic abuse services in England during 2023-24. It highlights key findings on service demand, provision, funding, and systemic challenges, including a significant shortfall in refuge spaces, underfunding, and barriers faced by marginalized groups. The report also addresses the impact of rising living costs, international conflicts, and the need for sustainable funding and specialist support. It offers insights into the state of the sector, identifies gaps, and advocates for meaningful change to better support women and children affected by domestic abuse.
UK Trauma Council: Research Roundup Mar 2025
PECIAL EDITION #3 Childhood Trauma and Domestic Abuse
This document is a comprehensive research roundup on the impact of trauma and childhood domestic abuse, highlighting key factors that influence children’s mental health and recovery. It explores the emotional and psychological effects of domestic abuse, factors that exacerbate harm, protective elements fostering resilience, and evidence-based interventions like group therapy, art, and play. It emphasizes the importance of supportive relationships, tailored approaches, and intersectionality in addressing diverse experiences. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers can use this resource to better understand and support children and young people affected by domestic abuse.
Safe Lives: Values and principles for effective multi-agency working
This document outlines values and principles for effective multi-agency collaboration to support children, adults, and families. It emphasizes a cultural shift towards “doing the right thing” over “doing things right,” focusing on trust, transparency, and shared responsibility. Key values include accountability, boldness, care, and dynamism, while principles stress flexibility, safety, inclusivity, and collaboration. It provides guidance for professionals to create impactful, person-centered responses, foster positive relationships, and ensure safety and wellbeing. Ideal for those seeking to improve multi-agency practices and prioritize the needs of individuals and families in their work.
Understanding stalking – beyond the myths
A blog post from Somerset Domestic Abuse that outlines what stalking is, its prevalance, the impact it can have and also signposting to places where statistics or support may be available
Somerset’s Domestic Abuse Strateg 2021-2024
The Somerset Domestic Abuse Strategy 2021-2024 outlines the county’s approach to tackling domestic abuse, guided by the Domestic Abuse Act 2021. It includes key principles, evidence from a needs assessment, achievements, and the impact of COVID-19. The strategy focuses on supporting survivors, addressing perpetrators, preventing abuse, creating a robust system, and targeting underrepresented groups. It highlights priorities, funding allocations, campaigns, and training frameworks for professionals. The document is essential for understanding Somerset’s multi-agency efforts, strategic goals, and initiatives to improve support, raise awareness, and reduce domestic abuse across the community.
Thrive Somerset: Building Thriving Communities Strategy 2024–2029
Countywide strategy focusing on strengthening community resilience, voice and connection; models localised solutions to health, transport, food and housing needs and amplifies community insights into policy.
Somerset Local Development Scheme (Feb 2025)
Sets out Somerset’s programme for preparing local planning documents that govern housing, economy, community facilities and infrastructure – providing the statutory context for community development and place-based investment decisions.
Unlocking the potential of Big Local partnerships
This report explores the role and impact of Locally Trusted Organisations (LTOs) in the Big Local programme, which empowers residents in 150 areas in England to lead community transformation. LTOs manage funding, provide governance, and support resident-led decision-making. The research highlights the dynamic and complex relationships between LTOs, Big Local partnerships, and Local Trust, emphasizing the importance of trust, clear communication, and effective governance. Recommendations include improving induction processes, regular relationship reviews, and sharing transferable learning to support resident-led change beyond Big Local.
The report advocates for sustained policy and infrastructure support for community-led initiatives
Local Trust – Delivering Big Local: The Role of Locally Trusted Organisations
The Big Local programme uses key service providers, known as Locally Trusted Organisations. Their main role is to manage Big Local funding on behalf of volunteer-led partnerships. This paper sets out what Local Trust knows about Locally Trusted Organisations in general and in relation to resident-led decision making and control. It identifies gaps in knowledge and questions to explore through research. This is mostly focused on instances where the relationship does not work.
Stronger Together – A co-production toolkit
A complete toolkit that explores what co-production is, information on 5 key themes – collaboration, diversity, respect, empowerment and involvement. This document has links to further documents and resources that may be useful for those who are exploring their co-production journey and how to include people from their community within their organisation(s) or service(s).