We Keep Us Safe: Co-designing community-led responses to domestic, family and sexual violence among people with a history of criminalisation and drug use

Research aims

The project will generate new evidence on community-led, non-carceral responses to DFSV.

The project will draw on transformative justice frameworks and participatory co-design, engaging with people who have used and experienced violence to:

1. explore the specific pathways that lead to the use of DFSV by criminalised men who use drugs, including the systems that enable this violence
2. generate survivor-led alternative responses to harm that centre the voices and priorities of criminalised women who use drugs
3. build the evidence-base for lived experience DFSV research and practice
4. establish an emerging framework for survivor-led DFSV prevention and response that can be tested in services for criminalised people who use drugs, both victims and survivors and those who use DFSV.

The project will centre people with a history of drug use and criminalisation in the design of their own violence prevention and response interventions. Criminalised communities have a long and enduring legacy of experimenting with non-carceral responses to violence within their own communities and are therefore best placed to guide the design and implementation of solutions.

Methods

Using mixed methods participatory design, the project will unfold sequentially, with each phase informing the next. Proceeding over four stages, the project will include the following:

1. Centring lived experience as a priority voice

• • Recruiting a peer researcher with lived experience of DFSV, criminalisation and drug use to co-lead the research activities, including conducting qualitative interviews and facilitating co-design workshops.
  • Scoping review and concept development: Scoping review of existing survivor-led antiviolence theory and practice to guide the development of an emerging conceptual framework.
  • Qualitative interviews to contextualise the emergent conceptual framework and inform the co-design phase.

2. Co-design

• • Conceptual framework mapping (with victims and survivors): Exploring how criminalised victims and survivors contextualise men’s use of DFSV to generate insights into their preferences for justice, accountability and healing.
  • Theory of change development (with men who use violence): Developing narrative explanations of the structural factors that have enabled and sustained men’s use of DFSV and the potential pathways into and out of using violence.
  • Feminist participatory action research (with all research participants): Criminalised victims and survivors and men who use DFSV will work together to finalise the theory of change and identify and design community-led interventions to address DFSV.

3. Synthesis and reflection

• • Autoethnographic reflection: Exploring the tensions and possibilities of survivor-led antiviolence work and building the evidence base for lived experience research that contributes to new ways of understanding the world.