Greater Manchester has secured more than £1 million to support victims of domestic abuse and tackle the behaviour of perpetrators.
The Home Office awarded £1,082,129 to Greater Manchester last week, as part of its £7.17 million fund for domestic violence prevention programmes.
Areas to benefit from the funding include Manchester, Stockport, Salford, Eccles, Bolton, and Wigan.
The funding boost will enable Manchester charity ‘Talk, Listen, Change’ to deliver a series of programmes focusing on interventions for domestic abuse perpetrators.
The programmes include working with one-to-one with female perpetrators, group work with heterosexual men, plus support for adolescents in relationships and child-on-parent abuse.
Programmes for men in same-sex relationships, and people who have English as a second language will also run for the first time.
The ‘Drive’ Project, a national programme for high-risk and serial perpetrators, which has bases in Manchester and Salford, will also receive funding.
One of Drive’s partner organisations, ‘Respect’, will deliver its own Young People’s programme for parent abuse and adolescent perpetrators.
Greater Manchester’s Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Bev Hughes, has acknowledged the need to work with perpetrators to change their behaviour.
She said: “We know for some people lockdown has caused extra strain, potentially trapping people with their abusers, cut off from existing support networks. This is why it is crucial now more than ever that preventative work is undertaken to help perpetrators, and support victims and survivors”.
Michelle Hill, CEO of ‘Talk, Listen, Change’ is pleased that after ten years of domestic abuse support in Manchester, they can now extend their support to men in same-sex relationships and people who speak English as a second language.
She said: “We are delighted to have received the Home Office funding, which will expand our existing domestic abuse prevention work”.
The funding boost comes as charities report a sharp increase in demand during the pandemic, with a 46% rise in calls to domestic abuse services.
Independent research by the University of Bristol in January found that the Drive Project’s perpetrator strategy could cut the risk of physical abuse by 82%, and coercive abuse by 73%.
