Abstract

To narrow the justice gap, the previous British Labour government advocated a multi-agency approach to bring the perpetrators of domestic violence to justice and to manage victim safety. However, taking as a starting point, the available Crown Prosecution Services data from 2007, there is little supporting evidence that the collaborative approach has been effective in some areas of the UK. The Northampton area, which has been one of the least successful locations in securing convictions according to the available quantitative data, has been studied to identify the statutory and voluntary agencies involved in domestic abuse cases in an attempt to understand why attrition has increased over the last year despite the collaborate attempts to narrow the justice gap. A Foucauldian toolkit has been used to theorize the findings and contextualize them into a broader governmentality framework.