speciesism – SVDV Research Group

Non-Human Animals at the Intersection of Domestic Violence: The Call for anthropocentricism to GIVE WAY!

21 May 2020jcoope03

This is Associate Professor Di Turgoose and Dr R E McKie’s 6th blog in a series of 6 on their work on pets and domestic abuse. The focus of this blog in on the international reach of their work in the autumn of 2019 at the European Conference on Domestic Violence conference.

In September 2019 at the 3^rd Bi-annual European Conference on Domestic Violence (ECDV) held in Oslo, Norway, Di delivered a paper on our work on pets and domestic abuse. The ECDV is viewed as the greatest platform for international impact on the conference circuit for domestic violence and abuse. Over 800 delegates from 80 countries were in attendance and our contribution at the event was paramount in sustaining and continuing to build and develop our work in this area.

The role of animals as victims within the Criminal Justice System (CJS) has come under some scrutiny; albeit the literature is both sporadic and fragmented (e.g. Moore, 2005; Madeline, 2000). Nevertheless, some researchers have also begun to engage in an ontological evaluation of animals as victims of crime in England and wales as have we (see Flynn and Hall 2017 for example).

However, one under explored area is the role of pets and their victim status in domestic abuse ’cases’. At the conference, Di presented the findings of our small empirical research project on undergraduate trainee criminal justice practitioner’s interpretations of agency and victimization with pets in domestic abuse situations. For us, engaging these future and emerging practitioners in this area of research and ascertaining their perspectives is integral for meeting some of the future challenges in research and practice in these areas if change is to be realised.

Our paper was entitled ‘Non-Human Animals at the Intersection of Domestic Violence; The Call for anthropocentricism to GIVE WAY!

Our findings indicated that initially students’ views were challenged by the notion that pets might be considered independent agents of victimization. However, they began to recognise the relevance of considering anthropocentric views in relation to domestic abuse and pets. The themes raised have practice and pedagogical worth which requires further study. At the time of writing we have secured ethical approval for a project to advance our research further in this area.

During the conference Di was invited to meet the Mayor of Oslo at the Oslo City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is presented annually as a thank you for our ground breaking research committed to advancing an understanding of domestic abuse across species.

An outcome of Di presenting our work on the international domestic abuse stage, is the fostering of links to collaborate with academics across countries. It has led to developing key areas of research and impact including the creation and expansion of networking opportunities and the emerging knowledge transfer from our work to others in the field. Importantly, this has set the next step towards our research focused agenda to create an environment for ‘greening’ the domestic violence and abuse agenda addressing speciesism in the research and practice of domestic abuse and pet abuse.

In terms of outcomes/next steps Di and Ruth are working towards achieving the following 3 key targets in 2020-2021.

Knowledge transfer and the sharing of creative innovations in this emerging cross- field, with the intent of greening the domestic violence and abuse agenda by addressing speciesism.
The creation and expansion of networking opportunities across disciplines/sectors
The facilitation of an open dialogue between key stakeholders.

#domesticviolence #domesticabuse #pets #speciesism #anthropocentric #companionanimals

Dr Ruth E. McKie is a Senior Lecturer in the Community & Criminal Justice Division at DMU. Ruth’s PhD explored climate change denial & criminology. She is subject expert in Environmental Crime & Harm, researching various crimes e.g. environmental crime & animal abuse. Contact Ruth on ruth.mckie@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @ruthmckie1

Di Turgoose is a Teacher Fellow & Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at DMU. She is a pracademic with 20 year’s work experience in the Criminal Justice System with perpetrators & victims of crime. She is subject expert in domestic abuse for the MOJ. Contact Di at di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @pracademiccrime

All content posted remains the property of the author(s) and must not be copied. However, quoting some part of the content is allowed provided you link back to the original article.

If you feel you might be interested in submitting a guest blog for us please contact di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk in the first instance to discuss this

Beyond Domestic Violence, Companion Animals and Independent Agency: Why as criminologists we need to converse beyond speciesism, towards an intersectional approach

21 May 2020jcoope03

This is Associate Professor Di Turgoose and Dr Ruth E. McKie’s 5th blog post in a series of 6 on pets and domestic abuse. This post focuses on the national reach of their work in the summer of 2019 at the ‘Hidden Victims’ panel of the British Society of Criminology (BSC) Annual conference where Di and Ruth were invited to present by the @victims BSC research group. You can access the victims research website here https://www.britsoccrim.org/victims-network/).

We were invited to contribute an academic paper to the Victimology Research Group Annual Panel on our work on pets and domestic abuse at the Annual BSC conference. You can access the British Society of Criminology website here (https://www.britsoccrim.org/conference/2019-bsc-annual-conference/).

The conference is the highlight of the criminologist’s calendar for the year in the UK with delegates travelling from across the world to attend. This provided us with a national platform to discuss our work bridging the boundaries between traditional victimology and a victimology that incorporates animal abuse and domestic abuse. Thus, we relished the opportunity of presenting to this audience which consisted of victimology experts in the domestic violence and abuse field, particularly as they may have been less familiar/unfamiliar with the concepts of speciesism and argumentation on human-animal relationships.

Our paper argued that the concept of denial of agency is equally applicable to the underexplored area of non-human animals namely pets as hidden victims of domestic abuse. We incorporated perspectives from eco-feminism and green criminology to challenge speciesism in the traditional Criminal Justice System and its practices in England and Wales. In doing so, we proposed a theoretical and ontological diversification within the field of domestic abuse studies, to help give voice to non-humans as independent agents that experience domestic abuse.

Our paper was titled beyond Domestic Violence, Companion Animals and Independent Agency: Why as criminologists we need to converse beyond speciesism, towards an intersectional approach. You can access our paper here https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/18323

Through this presentation we planned to start a conversation that companion animals/pets should be recognised as victims experiencing domestic abuse and therefore worthy of victimhood status in their own ‘right.’ Following our paper others have contacted us to thank us for highlighting the issue, bringing awareness to it, and inform us of their interest and wish to collaborate. At the time of writing we have subsequently been granted ethical approval for an empirical mixed methods study to progress our work in this area in 2020.

#domesticviolence #companionanimals #pets #hiddenvictims #speciesism #eco-feminism

All content posted remains the property of the author(s) and must not be copied. However quoting some part of the content is allowed provided you link back to the original article.

If you feel you might be interested in submitting a guest blog for us please contact di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk in the first instance to discuss this.

Domestic Abuse and Pets Research: Local Impact June 2019

12 February 2020jcoope03

This is Di Turgoose and Ruth E. McKie’s third blog in a series of six on pets and domestic abuse. This blog details the local reach, influence and impact of their work in the area of Companion Animals and Domestic Abuse in 2019, at a local event on June 21^st 2019.

In June 2019, the Institute of Research in Criminology, Community Education and Social Justice (CCESJ) held their annual symposium at Leicester Castle Business School at De Montfort University, where we were invited to present our work by the Institute’s Director Dr Christina Quinlan. You can access more information about the Research Institute here. https://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/irccesj/index.aspx

Here we presented a theoretical paper on our work on pets and domestic abuse to date. Our audience was an auditorium of academics, pracademics and PhD students, whilst none of whom were ‘expert leads’ in domestic abuse, all were specialists from the School of Applied Social Sciences at DMU which includes colleagues from Policing and Criminal Justice, Probation and Community Justice, Social Work, Youth and Community alongside Educationalists who are familiar with domestic abuse as a volume crime.

In our paper we acknowledged an uptick in recognition of the importance of ‘hidden’ victims of domestic abuse as a distinct topic for empirical study and practical policy in recent years. This has increased awareness that previously ‘invisible’ and ‘vulnerable’ victims, such as children as we argued in our poster presentation in an earlier blog (you can access our poster through dora at https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/18324) should be given independent agency. That said whilst we welcome this progress it does not, we believe, go far enough.

Currently, non-human animal abuse is largely considered as a risk indicator (‘red flag’) for inter-human abuse in the Criminal Justice System and allied fields in domestic abuse relationships. Our aim at the symposium was to start a conversation concerning recognising non-human companion animals (‘pets’) as victims experiencing domestic abuse as worthy of victimhood status in their own ‘right.’ We argue, from this standpoint, that the concept of independent agency considered to apply to children is equally applicable to pets who are victims of domestic abuse. The overarching themes in our paper thus centred around pets, speciesism, , eco-feminism, intersectionality and victimhood.

We concluded our paper by asking our audience to re-assess ‘what should count as domestic abuse’ in light of our presented positionality. You can find our paper ‘realigning the domestic violence planet, bringing speciesism into focus and starting a conversation on a new intersectionality and victimhood’ here at https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/18321 Our input was met with much interest and we were overwhelmed to see the local impact through personal pledges made to challenge speciesist practice.

This response spurred us on and informed our next steps in terms of planning empirical research on pets and domestic abuse and criminal justice organisational responses to this phenomenon. At the time of writing we are in the data collection stage of a ground-breaking project in this area; we expect to present our initial findings by Mid-2020.

We will be posting further blogs on this site and would welcome contact regarding our work which is continuing at speed.

Di Turgoose is a Teacher Fellow & Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at DMU. She is a pracademic with 20 years work experience in the Criminal Justice System with perpetrators & victims of crime. She is subject expert in domestic abuse for the MOJ. Contact Di at di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @pracademiccrime

All content posted remains the property of the author(s) and must not be copied. However quoting some part of the content is allowed provided you link back to the original article.

If you feel you might be interested in submitting a guest blog for us please contact di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk in the first instance to discuss this.

Pets and Domestic Abuse Research: Local Impact March 2019

12 February 2020jcoope03

This is Di Turgoose and Ruth E. McKie’s second blog in a series of six on Pets/Companion Animals and Domestic Abuse. This blog details the local reach, influence and impact of their work in this under researched area at a local event on 1^st March 2019.

The local event we refer to in this blog is the 3^rd bi-annual conference hosted by De Montfort University’s (DMU) Sexual Violence and Domestic Violence (SVDV) Research Network, in partnership with members of the East Midlands Criminal and Civil Justice Working Group. The conference focus was on children as victims of domestic abuse. Children are vulnerable as non-adults in households where domestic abuse takes place, as are pets.

We wanted to explore both the similarities and differences in the complexity of vulnerabilities in domestic abuse relationships by way of discussion with delegates at the conference. We felt that a hard copy visual poster was the best mechanism to enable us to facilitate such a discussion. We entitled our poster ‘Children and Pets: The Hidden Victims of Domestic Abuse: Where Action & Activism merge’

Turgoose, D and McKie R. E. (2019) You can access our poster here https://www.dora.dmu.ac.uk/handle/2086/18324

Our poster was discussed by a wide range of delegates and stimulated many conversations and sharing of perspectives (both personal and organisational) regarding perceptions of and attitudes to pets being recognised as domestic abuse victims, in their own right. We are grateful to Dr Christina Quinlan Director of the Institute of Research in Criminology, Community Education and Social Justice (CCESJ) for the funding grant that enabled us to print off our poster in hard copy for the conference. You can access more information about Dr Quinlan’s Research Institute via this link here https://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/irccesj/index.aspx

In essence this event enabled us to raise awareness of the issues of pets as hidden vulnerable victims and explore the steps that need to be taken to draw attention to and develop a research and policy agenda that recognises pets as vulnerable victims in their own right in domestic abuse relationships in the future. As researchers we are calling for a broader theoretical development to help raise awareness and understanding of the dynamics involved by utilising the exceptionally well known ‘Power and Control Wheel’ model (Pence and Paymer cited in Johnson 2006) which has been used solely for human victims previously.

Raising this awareness has important implications for service delivery and community resources which may help professionals and advocates to develop the support mechanisms these victims really need to survive and best recover from the trauma of domestic abuse. This will be the scope of a project we will be undertaking in early 2020 as joint principal investigators.

REFERENCES

Pence, E. and Paymar, in Johnson, M (2008) A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence London University Press

Turgoose, D and R. E McKie (2019) Children and Pets: The Hidden Victims of Domestic Violence & Abuse (DVA): Where Action & Activism merge! 3rd biannual SVDV Conference Sexual and Domestic Abuse in the lives of Children and Young People March 1st 2019

All content posted remains the property of the author(s) and must not be copied. However quoting some part of the content is allowed provided you link back to the original article.

Dr Ruth E. McKie (below left) is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Community and Criminal Justice at DMU. Ruth completed her PhD in 2018 exploring climate change denial and criminology. She is a subject expert in Environmental Crime and Harm, conducting research in this field exploring various crimes such as environmental crime and animal abuse. You can contact Ruth on ruth.mckie@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @ruthmckie1

Di Turgoose (below right) is a Teacher Fellow, Aspiring National Teacher Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences at DMU. Di is a pracademic with 20 years experience working in the Criminal Justice System with perpetrators and victims of crime. She is a subject expert in domestic abuse alongside being an expert advisor for the Ministry of Justice. You can contact Di on di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @pracademiccrime

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Di-and-ruth-carousel1.jpg

If you feel that you might be interested in submitting a guest blog for us please contact di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk in the first instance to discuss this.

Domestic Violence and Abuse, ‘Pets’ and Agency: A conversation we need to have and a call for action 2019

22 October 2019jcoope03

In this first blog in a series of six co-authors Di Turgoose and Dr Ruth E. McKie outline their recent (2019) work on pets/companion animals and domestic violence and abuse. In essence Ruth and Di have started a conversation about, and have called into question the idea of ‘persons’ specifically who and what counts as a victim/survivor in domestic violence and abuse ‘cases’.

Pets/companion animals now play an important role in a western society household. Indeed, there are more households in the UK that have a pet/ companion animal, than have children. In 2018, a total of 45% of 13 million households in the United Kingdom had a pet/companion animal (https://www.pfma.org.uk/pet-population-2019) ). 26% of these were dogs, 18% cats, and the rest included horses and/or other forms of small animals, reptiles and birds. Unfortunately, pets/companion animals also make up households/families where there is evidence of domestic violence and abuse. It is at the intersection of pets and domestic violence and abuse where our research interest as activist, pracademic, victimologist, criminologist and feminist scholars located in the domain of social sciences and criminal justice practice lies.

Evidence has existed for decades including Fitzgerald’s initial and subsequent research in the early noughties indicating that domestic violence and abuse survivors (if they do indeed survive) do not leave, have delayed leaving, or have returned to a domestically abusive and violent relationship because of a concern for their companion animals/pets’ safety and welfare (You can read some of Fitzgerald’s work here e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/016059760703100405) This means that for many victims/survivors, they feel that they cannot leave/escape/flee violence and abuse. This in part, is because of a lack of appropriate protection and intervention strategies and resources for their beloved pets/companion animals, despite the best efforts of both the specialist domestic violence sector and animal welfare agencies. It is evident to us in our own observational practice that the situation today remains relatively constant and unchanged.

This poses some important research questions that remain unanswered or underdeveloped. These we have felt compelled to pursue since we the authors of this blog first met as academics working at the interface of criminology and victimology in the Community and Criminal Justice Division at De Montfort University. One important question is why when we appear, especially given the above figures, to be a ‘nation of pets lovers’ in the ‘UK,’ that the provision for the safety and well- being of pets is not given more priority per se? Moreover, why are companion animals/pets appear to be largely relegated to a ‘risk flag’ indicator of inter-human abuse in agencies with responsibility for ‘dealing with’ domestic violence ‘cases.’ This is especially problematic given what we know about the heightened risk of homicide (given the gendered nature of domestic violence and abuse read femicide) when a victim/survivor is considering leaving/fleeing? Vexed and perplexed about the lack of co-ordinated attention to the issue of pets/companion animals and domestic violence and abuse, we have embarked on a number of research projects and organised engagement events on the phenomenon in an effort to call for the starting and the re-starting of conversations locally, nationally and internationally on the issue of pets/companion animals and domestic violence and abuse.

From the outset, it is important for us to be clear that what we call for in domestic violence and abuse studies, practice and thinking is not to merely shift the concept of family domestic violence and abuse/coercive control to include pets/companion animals. Rather we contend that, we must in fact shift towards seeing animals, and thus pets/companion animals, as ‘somebody’ that can/should be treated as an independent being. In our view, animals possess agency and person hood in their own right, not simply the property of or as secondary to humans as a speciesist lens would afford. This will require a pivotal paradigm shift in the way society currently thinks and acts about our relationship with animals, if we are to achieve a whole system change to end violence against animals, and in this specific case, pets/companion animals which includes in domestic violence and abuse settings.

To this end, we will be exploring over the course of three further blogs the development of our ideas which demonstrate our success locally, nationally and internationally with regard impact and reach this summer about our work on pets/companion animals and domestic violence and abuse. A journey that started with a conversation in the office concerning the poster (see insert above) on display on one of our desks by Juno Women’s Aid (previously known as Women’s Aid Integrated Services W.A.I.S.) and has culminated, thus far with an invite from the Mayor of Oslo in Norway to the City Hall, the location of the prestigious Nobel peace prize presentation each year and towards some potential collaborative working with others.

We will be posting further blogs on this site and would welcome contact regarding our work which is continuing at speed.

Di Turgoose is a Teacher Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Community and Criminal Justice Division at DMU. Di is a pracademic with 20 years direct experience of working within the Criminal Justice System with perpetrators and victims of crime especially related to sex offending and domestic abuse. She is a subject expert in domestic abuse and lead on related research informed modules alongside guest lecturing for colleagues on her specialism. Di co convenes the Sexual Violence and Domestic Violence Research Network at DMU. You can contact Di on di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @pracademiccrime

Dr Ruth E. McKie is a lecturer in the Division of Community and Criminal Justice at DMU. Ruth completed her PhD in 2018 exploring climate change denial and criminology. She is a subject expert in Environmental Crime and Harm, conducting research in this field exploring various crimes such as environmental crime and animal abuse. You can contact Ruth on ruth.mckie@dmu.ac.uk or via twitter @ruthmckie1

All content posted remains the property of the author(s) and must not be copied. However quoting some part of the content is allowed provided you link back to the original article.

If you feel you might be interested in submitting a guest blog for us please contact di.turgoose@dmu.ac.uk in the first instance to discuss this.