Self-Blame and (Becoming) the Crazy Ex: Domestic Abuse, Information Sharing and Responsibilisation
Renehan, Barlow and Walklate (2023)
Content Warning: Domestic Abuse
The 2021 Domestic Abuse Act puts Clare’s Law (the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme) into the statute, allowing police to share criminal history to prevent domestic abuse. This article discusses research on women's experiences of accessing the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (Clare's Law). The authors draw on finding from a larger study on women’s experiences of schemes like Clare’s law and outline the ways women share and receive information in an informal manner between themselves to prevent domestic abuse. The authors argue that the lived experiences of women are often located within a red flag discourse, which places the responsibility, inadvertently, on the women themselves, which in turn causes self-blame for staying in abusive relationships. In their conclusion the authors suggest ways to better understand the reality of victim-survivors. Lastly, they discuss how by understanding and acknowledging daily life support practices to enable women to make sense of disclosures of domestic abuse and provide appropriate support at the correct time.
