Domestic abuse is an incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening, degrading and violent behaviour, including sexual violence, in most cases by a partner or ex-partner, but also by a family member. It is more common than you think. In most cases, it is experienced by women and is perpetrated by men, but men and non-binary people can be victims too. This type of behaviour takes many forms, including:

While Bexley is consistently one of the top 6 safest boroughs, we have for a number of years ranked midtable on the safety scale when it come to domestic abuse. It is for this reason that the BCSP Board named domestic abuse a priority area in its own right - it is an outlier which deserves due focus to change that trend and its devastating impact for families.

The BCSP has a Domestic Abuse Strategy which outlines in more detail the work being done, and a domestic abuse working group who oversee delivery against that strategy.