'You wouldn’t want to get rid of criminal justice processes’: tensions involved with criminalising family abuse based on identities of gender and sexuality in England and Wales

In this article we engage with debates about the usefulness of the law in England and Wales in addressing family abuse perpetration drawing on qualitative empirical data. Initially, we provide our conceptual framework for making sense of family abuse as a form of ’honour’-based abuse, which starts with a consideration of its definition. Subsequently, we provide an overview of the debates about whether and what role the law might have in addressing family abuse. This includes drawing from our work that understands family abuse as being the product of individual, community and societal factors each of which, depending on the context and individual family, might act as a push towards family abuse, or a pull away from it. In the methodology we explain our approach to collecting data through interviews with practitioners and faith leaders, case studies and data from existing data sets. Our findings indicate a separation of what is meant by the law into legislation and the criminal justice system (CJS). Participants evidence a contingent consensus that legislation is crucial to promote prevention and early intervention by defining criminal behaviour. However, most also show little faith in the CJS because of its systemic underfunding, inefficiency and the systemic discrimination that leads to minoritised groups being wary of using it.