Roles and Responsibilities

People with different relationships to a victim of domestic abuse will have different ways of supporting them and different responsibilities.

While family members can be really close to a victim, their ability to support them might be limited. They can only offer emotional and practical support. A police officer, on the other hand, might only know the victim through their work, but they can offer substantial support: they can signpost the victim to specialist services, do safety planning and prepare the case for the legal proceedings.

How you can support a victim and your responsibilities depend on your spheres of influence: on the one hand, your proximity to the victim and, on the other, your power to support them. And these don't always go hand in hand.

Co-workers and managers tend to fall somewhere in between.