Lecture in Childhood and Youth Dr Emma Katz has continued to make a difference with her domestic violence research, by collaborating with key external partners, this time Welsh Women’s Aid.
Training professionals from across south Wales, Dr Katz discussed how children are affected by coercive control in contexts where their father is perpetrating domestic violence and abuse against their mother. The professionals who attended, reported that this training had helped them to improve the support they give to children and mothers who have experienced domestic violence. As part of her Impact Case Study, Dr Katz collected written feedback from the professionals about the specific ways that they plan to use the research. The next step is to stay in contact with them in the coming months, gathering further information about how Emma’s research is being used to benefit people in Wales.
Elsewhere, Dr Katz used HEIF Route to Impact Funding to establish relationships with key local providers of domestic violence support services in Merseyside. Providing the workshop as part of her impact case study, Dr Katz trained and collected feedback from organisations including Wirral Council, Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Merseyside Domestic Violence Service, Helena Partnership, The First Step, and Person Shaped Support (PSS). These organisations were enthusiastic about the research and identified many ways that they could use it to enhance their services. The next step is to continue to track their progress in the coming months, to gather further information about how Emma’s research is used to benefit people’s lives across Merseyside.
Dr Katz also presented at the prestigious European Conference on Domestic Violence in Portugal. She urged leading European specialists in domestic violence that we need to move beyond conceptions that see children as harmed only if they witness physical violence, such as their father hitting their mother. Speaking at the 2nd European Conference on Domestic Violence in Porto, Dr Katz’s arguments - that these children should be viewed as living under a regime of coercive control that that continually affects their everyday lives - stimulated much discussion, and her research was praised in two of the conference’s keynote speeches. It can be downloaded here.