Education Policy and Practice on Intimate Partner Violence Among Young People in the UK

This paper presents a qualitative systematic review of educational policy and practice on tackling intimate partner violence (IPV) among young people in the UK. Up to date, the majority of school-based IPV interventions were conducted in the US and now there is growing consensus among UK policymakers, researchers and practitioners as well to address IPV issues through educational practice. This review aims at gathering evidence of the type and nature of policies and institutional level practice adopted to tackle IPV issues among young people within an educational context, and what impacts these interventions have on mitigating the occurrence of IPV. In undertaking this review, three databases (Eric, BEI and Scopus) were searched and grey literature was manually added. Findings from the review suggest that the majority of interventions were effective in altering attitude and promoting awareness of IPV. Still, longitudinal studies are needed to see if changes in attitude can be translated into the effective behavioural alteration in real-life situation. Although most students expressed satisfaction toward the existing interventions, it was also found that lack of consideration of gender can lead to uncomfortable feelings among students. There were contradictory views regarding whether teachers or external experts would be a better person to deliver the intervention and who was the person students preferred to turn to for help. Besides, country-wide interventions are needed to make sure all schools have an opportunity to provide IPV education, and the support from the UK government is of crucial importance to make this happen.


Policy background
UK policymakers started to put more emphasis on addressing intimate partner violence (IPV) issues since the 1970s, while at that time, IPV came under the umbrella of domestic violence (Gelles, 1980;Graca, 2017). The first attempt of the UK government to fight against domestic violence by law is the enactment of Domestic Violence Matrimonial Proceedings Act 1976, which can be regarded as a turning point in the history of UK legislation on addressing domestic violence (Graca, 2017). This act clarifies the equal rights of spouses in a variety of cases and provides the police with the power to handle violence in domestic settings (Graca, 2017). However, in the 1980s and 1990s, IPV preventive works remained low profile in the UK government documents (Coy & Garner, 2012;Fancy & Fraser, 2014;Phipps & Smith, 2012). Then, in the 2000s, more laws, published to address a broader range of IPV issues such as Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 and Sexual Offences Act 2003, especially the enactment of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims (DVCV) Act 2004. DVCV Act (2004) brought numerous changes in respect of criminal law on domestic violence, and have been described as the most significant overhaul of the law relating to domestic violence in the last 30 years (Graca, 2017). After that, The Home Office (2011) implemented Domestic Violence Protection Notices and Orders, which were aimed at providing victims with timely protection and insulating them from abusers' persecution (Graca, 2017). However, up to that point, the majority of the published laws on domestic violence focused on abuse in marital relationships and children maltreatment within the family context, and only limited attention was paid to the prevalence of IPV that occurred among intimate relationships of people young. This situation started to change in 2013, when the UK policy definition of domestic violence was extended to include 16-17 years' old young people due to the increased prevalence of IPV issues among them (Home Office, 2013). The government also issued policy documents such as the Call to End Violence against Women and Girls (EVWG) 2010 and Ending Violence against Women and Girls (EVWG) Strategy 2016-2020 and successfully ran Teenage Relationship Abuse Campaign, all which showed that the UK policy began to make an effort on tackling IPV among young people.
There is an advocacy of the multi-agency approach by the UK government in preventing domestic violence since the 1990s, especially with the implementation of Inter-Agency Circular on Domestic Violence by the Home Office in 1995 (Cleaver, Maras, Oram, & McCallum, 2019;Graca, 2017). This approach allows different institutions to work collaboratively to provide victims of domestic violence with multiple needs and seamless responses (Graca, 2017). The multi-agency approach was strengthened after the publication of DVCV Act 2004, which required the creation of a variety of institutions to address domestic violence, such as Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs, Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences and Domestic Violence Courts (Cleaver et al., 2019;Graca, 2017). However, the school's role in domestic violence prevention was less valued by the multi-agency approach, and more emphasis was given to charity organisations, e.g., Tender, Women Aid and NSPCC, especially in providing support to victims of domestic violence (Cleaver et al., 2019;Stanley, Ellis, Farrelly, Hollinghurst, Bailey, et al., 2015). The multi-agency approach is continuing to be used today while there is an increasing recognition of the school's critical position in primary prevention to challenge deep-rooted gender

Research background and questions
IPV among young people has long been a worldwide concern for policymakers, practitioners and researchers due to its increased visibility in the society, however, it hasn't provoked the same level of interest in the UK as elsewhere ( , whereas, very few systematic reviews can be identified to collect the evidence to evaluate the intervention of IPV that is solely to do with the UK context. It is doubtful if the findings from the intervention outside of the UK context are applicable within the UK context since IPV is a complex issue and involves deeprooted cultural norms, rituals and customs passed between generations. To establish the evidence for educational policy and practice on addressing IPV among young people in the UK, and to provide implications for policy development and further research, this qualitative systematic review sought answers regarding the following questions: In what ways have policies and institutional level practices been used, or can be used, as a tool or mechanism for tackling IPV in different educational contexts in the UK?
What impacts have these educational policies and practices had on addressing IPV and what evidence exists to support this?

The current study
This review identified three systematic reviews aimed at recognising IPV related interventions in the UK. However, all the identified systematic reviews attempt to inform the UK based practice primarily by examining interventions undertaken outside of the UK context ( None of these reviews has evaluated the evidence on the effectiveness of educational policy and home-grown intervention specifically within educational settings in the UK (Stanley, Ellis, Farrelly, Hollinghurst, Bailey, et al., 2015). Therefore, this qualitative systematic review will narrow this research gap and promote future knowledge development in this field.

Literature identification
We undertook a qualitative systematic review of IPV educational policy and practice from 1990, when the works in the field of IPV started to increase in the UK, to March 2019. A search was performed in three bibliographic databases: Education Resources Information Centre (ERIC), British Education Index (BEI) and Scopus. To identify relevant literature in these three bibliographic databases, we performed PICo (population, phenomenon of interest and context) as the searching framework (See Appendix A) with the combination of Boolean phrases (See Appendix B). The bibliographic searches included 1,161 articles, the majority of the papers identified for this research are from peer-reviewed journals. Avoid missing out relevant publications, a complementary search by manually scanning the citations in included articles was adopted, which added eight papers into this review. Finally, 11 published studies have been included in this review (see in Fig.1).

Literature screen
In the process of literature screen, the included 11 papers followed a detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria (see in Table 1). This inclusion and exclusion criteria has been applied to exclude studies regarding title and keywords, abstract, full-text and a process of detailed review.

Data extraction
To address the review questions mentioned in Section 1.2, 11 included articles were extracted into a summary table (see in Table 2). Detailed information was retrieved from 11 studies to answer two review questions as: name, type, location of intervention; author, publicantion year, type of paper; details of intervention; mentioned UK policy or intervention; and summary of the findings, as summarised in Table 2.

Results
This study identified 11 school-based IPV studies, which were categorised into seven types of educational interventions. The first five educational interventions (see in Table 2) were conducted by external organisations identified in nine studies on addressing IPV issues among young people within school settings including: Relationship without fear (n=4), Healthy Relationship Programme (n=1), Tender's Healthy Relationship Education (n=2), the Zero Tolerance "Respect" Pilot Project (n=1) and Think U Know Campaign (n=1). Among the five educational interventions, one was implemented in Scotland (the Zero Tolerance "Respect" Pilot Project) and the others were carried out in England. The latter two included studies (see Table 2) about students' view towards the existing PSHE and RSE curriculum and addressing newly emerged IPV issues within school curriculum including same-sex relationship education and sext education.
Among the included qualitative studies, majority of the research adopted interview and focus group as the methods for data collection. The sample of most studies are among young people from secondary schools aged 10 to 15 and in a group of less than 50 participants. Most of the studies did not mention the gender composition of the participants, while one study (same sex relationship education) looked into the gender differences of participants as lesbians, gay men, heterosexual women and men. Additionally, the relationship without fear (RwF) programme also provided a comparative analysis of attitudinal changes between male and female students before and after the intervention. Almost all studies were delivered with the theme to promote healthy and respectful relationships, generally during PSHE and RSE curriculum in a period of intervention less than half year. A summarised list of findings from all included papers is presented in the fourth column of Table 2. Three themes emerged following a thematic synthesis, which will be outlined in the next section.

Findings and analysis
To answer the proposed research questions, we undertook a comprehensive examination of the 'results' and 'findings' sections of the 11 included studies. All the selected papers were entered into the qualitative data analysis software Nvivo 12 pro to facilitate a systematic analysis. To ensure our analysis was rigorous, we adopted a three-stages thematic synthesis, pioneered by Thomas and Harden (2008, p. 4) as follows: 1) line-by-line text coding; 2) constructing descriptive themes; and 3) generating analytical themes. The authors argue that the process of descriptive and analytical themes interpretation can produce transparent and explicit outcomes (Thomas & Harden, 2008). Three themes were generated as a result of conducting the thematic synthesis method Impacts of the intervention

Evaluations of the intervention
Identified recommendations by the papers

Attitudinal change
The majority of the interventions indicate significant improvements in changing participants' attitudes including less acceptance of abusive and violent behaviours,

Behavioural change -help seeking skills
As for behavioural change, different interventions have different views on the effectiveness concerning altering behaviours. On the one hand, some studies found that students applied knowledge to realistic actions in combating IPV shortly after the intervention. For example, they started to talk about the harmfulness of IPV behaviours to family members and seek accessible sources for support (Bell & Stanley, 2006;Jørgensen et al., 2019). When it comes to whom to turn to help, most participants prefer to contact professionals anonymously or report IPV behaviours to police rather than communicate with family, friends or teachers ( . Only ask for participants' perceptions if they would seek help or whom they would turn to help cannot measure their realistic behaviours in help seeking in a real-life context (Fox et al., 2016). Therefore, longitudinal studies, e.g., up to one-year pre-test-post-test study or a 4-year follow-up period are needed to examine how knowledge obtained from the intervention can be translated into effective behaviours in the future.

Positive-like the intervention
This review identified some positive comments from participants who took part in the intervention. Students expressed their affections towards the intervention as they benefited a lot from these interventions. For example, the majority of participants from Fox and Gadd (2012, p. 19) mentioned that 'all the RwF sessions were very good' and they 'enjoyed being part of it a lot'. Also, they learnt the characteristics of a healthy relationship, different types of IPV behaviours and how to get support in an abusive relationship. Additionally, Reid Howie Associates (2001) points out that the majority of the participants claimed to enjoy all the sessions, and none of them identified a session that was not enjoyable. However, Bell and Stanley (2006) argue that the intervention was more popular with girls, while boys showed less interest in them.

Negative-dislike the intervention
Some participants showed their unease and dislike at being part of these interventions. As mentioned in Fox et al. (2014), participants easily became bored and started to chat with others because there were too many lessons, case studies and stories. Similar to Jørgensen et al. (2019), which pointed out the whole school assemblies were ineffective in delivering the information as there was no one listening. Some students also felt awkward to role play in IPV situation, and students who watched role-play could feel uncomfortable as it aroused their own lived experience . Most of the students' reflected that 'we didn't enjoy the role-play' (Fox et al., 2014, p. 34). Additionally, some sexist comments also made male students feel upset because they were mainly blamed for abusive behaviours . For example, concerns from the focus groups in Gadd et al. (2014, p. 474) indicated that 'male gender was getting blamed for abusive…' and 'there were boys also have problems with girls, maybe the ones who were victims'. Besides, some students were anxious about future relationships after the intervention and started to worry about getting into an abusive relationship.

The content
Few studies discussed the need to clarify what topics should be included to the content of interventions across the UK. There were several interventions conducted by institutions in the UK such as Tender, Women Aids and the Zero Tolerance Trust, however, all of them are different in the content they used (Fox et al., 2016). It was argued that future studies better to make a comparison between different interventions to decide what content should be adopted (Fox et al., 2016). Also, it is highlighted that the importance of catering to students' preference in designing the content. Students' active participation requires varied content to include a variety of actives . In addition, content on gender should be designed to attract different gender needs and delivered more thoughtfully, avoid being "sexist" by only focusing on male perpetrators, female victims or heterosexual relationships (

The approach
The majority of interventions are carried out in a small group within a short period. A country-wide approach still absent in the UK to make sure all students have the chance to receive IPV education (Fox et al., 2016). Besides, the long-term approach is highly demanded to capture the realistic impacts interventions have on students in the long run (Fox et al., 2016). Moreover, it is necessary to avoid 'one-size fits all' approach when delivering the content, teachers should respond to the needs of all students and student-centred approach works better to teacher-led approach for this type of education . As a participant argued that 'the lessons was not to do with us, we were just listening' (Fox et al., 2014, p. 33). Other participants also reflected that they have to find the information themselves instead of letting teachers tell them . Another point that needs considering more carefully is the gender approach in content delivery. This is important because gender understanding in teaching techniques can assist the intervention to be more inclusive and appeal to gender needs (Sanders-McDonagh et al., 2015). When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of interventions, various views were identified in the studies.  argue that there was a lack of measures in quite a few aspects of the possible changings in attitude, knowledge, understanding, empathy and help-seeking behaviours, whereas Reid Howie Associates (2001) points out that there was a need to bear the limitations in mind that an intervention cannot solve all these issues.

Discussion
To our knowledge, this is mong the first review to identify and evaluate the UK based policy and home-grown interventions on preventing IPV. The majority of the systematic reviews regarding school-based interventions were globally based ( While there is still a concern about the effective delivery of RSE because of the teachers confidence and comfort level regarding the content (Bell & Stanley, 2006;Donovan & Hester, 2008; Reid Howie Associates, 2001), RSE curriculum will be made compulsory in all schools in the UK from 2020 (Long, 2018). Besides, teachers who hold gender stereotypes and have aggressive tendencies may project a confusing gender norm to students and fail to mitigate the risk of resorting violence among students. Therefore, support from RSE subject's specialists and professional training is critical in overcoming these challenges when teaching RSE curriculum. However, another concern is that there is no standard assessment for RSE and there is a need for the common understanding of the rationale and purpose of schools' achievement on RSE. Although levels, grades or pass/fail assessments are not suitable to RSE subjects, informal assessments through teachers' observation, verbal feedback and students' self-assessment should be adored (Formby et al., 2010; PSHE Association, 2020).

Conclusion
Educational interventions to prevent IPV is of critical importance but relatively underexplored in the UK and the work to address IPV issues is still in low profile within the formal school settings (Fox et al., 2014; Stanley, Ellis, Farrelly, Hollinghurst, & Downe, 2015). This review identified 11 school-based IPV studies from peerreviewed journals and grey literature. The central theme of educational programmes is to reshape social norm toward gender inequality and stereotypes as well as to create respect and equal relationships (Bell & Stanley, 2006). Generally, by promoting young people's awareness on identifying the early sign of IPV and educating them with the knowledge and skills in relation to IPV. However, the majority of existing preventive programmes are small scale, limited in their methodology, the dissemination of findings is low and have little evidence of effectiveness on the intervention outcomes.
This review locates the majority of studies from the UK grey literature while much fewer sources are available from peer-reviewed journals to inform what has been done to prevent IPV issues. Besides, there is still a research gap in eliminating IPV issues from monitory groups of people, including abusive same-sex relationship, IPV against women and girls from monitory communities, women perpetrate as well as men victims.