Sarah Hilder

Serious Violent or Sexual Offenders Travelling Across EU Borders. Ideological and Ethical Challenges of Information Exchange.

The relative ease of international travel, coupled with open borders across much of the European Union provides capacity for some serious violent or sexual offenders to utilise these advancements to increase their opportunities to offend. In 2013, an EU-funded project reviewed existing information exchange systems and the challenges of collaborative working across EU Member States to manage such offenders. This article reviews key issues arising from that research, and a range of ideological, ethical and legal differences and constraints that impact upon the choices and actions of law enforcement and probation personnel.

Working with Perpetrators of Domestic Violence and Abuse: The Potential for Change

This chapter commences with a brief overview of the development of behavioural change programmes for perpetrators of domestic violence and abuse (DVA) in the UK. Sarah Hilder and Caroline Freeman highlight a number of academic discourses, which have been utilised to examine the commission of DVA, with more sophisticated understandings developing over time of the diverse characteristics of DVA perpetrators. They discuss the impact of competing approaches to programme intervention, influenced primarily by discourses rooted in psychology and feminism. The evaluation of perpetrator programmes remains problematic, although the recent Mirabal (Kelly, L., & Westmarland, N. (2015) Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes: Steps towards change: Project Mirabal final report. London and Durham, NC: London Metropolitan University and Durham University) study provided opportunity for broadening ideas on the victim-centred metrics that may be applied. The authors conclude by drawing upon desistance frameworks to argue the potential of combining programme interventions with a more holistic understanding of what may lead to an individual cessation from DVA.