Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018: interim reporting requirement

2. Structure of the Report

The report starts with an overview of the legislation and reporting requirement, and the context and background in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents the statistical findings followed by the main findings from the research on victim and witness experiences of domestic abuse court cases in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 provides a summary of emerging findings relating to the operation of the Act from the perspectives of victims/witnesses in the research. Chapter 7 provides a description of the common themes emerging from the victim and witness research concerning the wider 'justice journey', including key findings related to different victim and witness groups such as children and young people. Areas for improvement identified in the research are summarised in Chapter 8. Information on court business is provided in Chapter 9. The report concludes with a description of the methodology, scope and limitations of the evidence gathered for this report in Chapter 10.

Terminology

Throughout the report, the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 is referred to as 'the Act'. In some cases where the report references evidence sources it may be referred to as 'DASA'.

The term 'survivor' is often used to describe people who have experienced domestic abuse. The Reporting Requirement requests information on experiences of 'witnesses'. In this report, we mostly use the term 'victims' as victims are also witnesses. In some of the cases referred to in the research, the person accused of a domestic abuse offence was not convicted. The use of the term 'victim' is not intended to cast doubt or otherwise comment on the outcome of individual court cases and is simply used as a term to describe persons reporting to have experienced domestic abuse.