Professor Barry Godfrey shares his recent event on High-Harm, High Frequency DA Offenders at Westminster

In 2022-23, N8 PRP funded the Small Grant project ‘High Harm High Frequency Domestic Abuse Offenders’, led by Professor Barry Godfrey (University of Liverpool), in collaboration with 5 N8 PRP police forces. In 2025 the team was awarded a £30k ESRC Impact Accelerator Award to develop the impact of this research. As part of that award, Professor Godfrey recently hosted an event at Westminster, to bring together academics, politicians, police, and policy-makers to discuss innovative means of tackling the highest harm offenders. The aim was to show how collaborations between police, academia, tech companies, and parliamentarians could drive forward the attempt to halve violence against women and girls. Here, Professor Godfrey shares his experience and reflects on the value of the event.

Heading to Westminster

Although I have visited Parliament many times this year as part of an ESRC Impact Accelerator award, working with the Thematic Research Lead for Justice, the talented Professor Ruth Lamont, it always leaves an impression on me. The reason for my visit this time was to host ‘Identifying the most dangerous perpetrators of violence against women and girls’ in the Attlee Rooms in Portcullis House on June 8th. The room itself doesn’t differ much from any university seminar room, albeit accompanied by some of the most expensive cakes and bottled sparkling water in the world… one bottle which had the branding was kindly smuggled out of the building for me by an MP and now sits on my desk at home. Not sure what the penalty for that is, but, given how tight security was there at the time, I’m glad they took the risk and not me.

Why This Matters

The proximity of the room to the corridors of power means that MPs of all parties and ranks, as well as members of the House of Lords, can pop in very easily to hear the talks. It is important to me, as a member of the academic community, that the ideas we develop contribute to our field and to practice (that is where the value of the N8 PRP really lies), but also to policymakers and higher-decision makers. Since this smaller cohort of high-harm high-frequency perpetrators are each responsible for approximately 40 calls for police service every year, and for persistently harming vulnerable women and girls, the need to tackle the threat they pose is critical.

Cross-Sector Collaboration

The event was opened by Liberal Democrat President Josh Babarinde MP, someone who has supported research, and has strongly supported victims of VAWG, throughout his parliamentary career. He spoke about how the N8-funded research on high-harm high-frequency perpetrators had been critical in devising legislation. We then heard about the ambitious and innovative methods being applied to VAWG perpetrators by criminologists, econometricians, statisticians, and digital experts from the University of Liverpool. Some of these projects are being supported by Dell Technologies, who sent along a senior team to take part in the event. The National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection gave an overview of the direction they were taking, and various police force representatives talked through their processes for evaluating and mitigating the risks posed by the most dangerous offenders in their force areas. Our N8 forces were strongly represented, particularly Cheshire and Merseyside, as were the Met and Dorset Police.

Pathways to Change

Lastly, Home Office and NPCC perspectives on V-VAWG (the opportunities and threats offered by digitally-sophisticated vehicles) were also well-received, and the mix of audience (Domestic Abuse Commissioner’s Office, Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology, various Home Office sections and departments) provided an extremely fertile ground for the research to be discussed and debated following the talks. MPs not only asked questions about the research they had heard about in the talks, but also subsequently in parliamentary and in Select Committees. Convening events in Portcullis House was a practical way of ensuring that research funded by N8 PRP is discussed by national bodies. It worked very well, and the resulting connections and conversations will outlast the memories of the building and hospitality (though I still have that branded bottle of sparkling water to remind me of that…).

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