In a landmark moment for those working at the intersections of domestic abuse and serious youth violence, the Domestic Abuse Commissioner for England and Wales, Dame Nicole Jacobs, has presented a compelling report to Parliament that places the experiences of child survivors at its heart. Crucially, the report highlights how the siloed nature of current strategies fails to address the interconnected nature of violence – particularly among young boys grappling with masculinity, trauma and identity.
Section 6.7 of the report draws heavily on the work of Dr Jade Levell, whose research Boys, Childhood Domestic Abuse and Gang Involvement: Violence at Home, Violence On-Road shines a light on how early exposure to domestic abuse can shape complex, often conflicting experiences of masculinity and vulnerability.
In a parallel international development, Dr Levell’s book has also been cited in a new report by the Ombudsman for Children in Sweden. This report highlights the high level of childhood domestic violence and abuse among children who have been involved in and exploited by criminal networks. Dr Levell was invited to speak at the Swedish parliament in February 2025.
As practitioners, policy makers and educators are urged to rethink their frameworks, Dr Levell’s findings offer a roadmap for more holistic, gender-aware interventions.
We sat down with Dr Levell to discuss the real-world implications of the report, her hopes for policy change and what it means to move from evidence to action.
About the report
1. How did it feel to see your research featured so prominently in government-level reports in both the UK and Sweden?
It is a satisfying moment. I feel like others are starting to see what I see: that by failing to intervene early with children who are growing up with violence and adversity, we are leaving them vulnerable to later exploitation and violence. This is something that is known in practitioner circles, but we need policy and funding shifts to follow. This recognition gives me hope for real change.
2. Section 6.7 of Dame Nicole Jacobs’s report draws attention to a ‘co-occurrence’ between domestic abuse and serious youth violence. Can you explain what that relationship looks like in practice?
We’ve created a strategic landscape which siloes out violence in private and public. Professionals tend to assess past trauma separately from current risk. As a result, we are not very good at considering children who are experiencing violence concurrently in private and public spaces.
In my research analysing children’s case files, you see children receiving interventions for their own use of violence, but no one recognises that they are living with violence at home. They are then framed as potential perpetrators without due consideration for the violence that they’re also experiencing themselves. This helps explain why interventions often fall short.
3. Your research focuses on how boys navigate identity after trauma – the tension between pressure to be ‘strong’ and experiences of deep vulnerability. What are the risks of not recognising this in education, policing or social care?
Boys growing up with violent men are shaped by harmful models of masculinity. It makes sense to me that when we understand how boys see themselves as young men, we also need to understand how living with violent men in childhood impacts them.
In my book, I use Connell’s masculinity theory to explore the ways that marginalised boys can experience patriarchal pressures to be tough, strong protectors and providers, yet navigate these while making sense of their experience of male violence themselves. It is important to note that my research focuses on boys who are also facing intersectional forms of marginalisation. Most children who live with domestic violence do not become involved in youth violence, life ‘on-road’ and in gangs. However, some who are also facing poverty and discrimination related to gender, race, class and age, and who are living in gang-affected areas, are more at risk.
Boys who live with domestic violence can try and escape by spending more time outside the home, rendering them vulnerable to exploitation, grooming and involvement in criminality. Some become involved because they feel pressure to be providers and think that earning money (even through illegal means) can help financially support their struggling family.
In my research, boys described the painful pressure to protect their mothers, and turning to tough, aggressive behaviour to mask feelings of failure. Some discussed how, looking back, they could see they were looking for love and family among their peers, but actually only found fear. They felt they had to act toughly and aggressively as a form of protection. There was an interesting distinction in the data about being ‘a man’ and being ‘The Man’ in the gang context. These insights reveal so much about how boys see their options in the face of their own victimisation.
When boys have been brought up with fear and love so intertwined in their own homes, it is easy to see how these emotions can become confused in their own relationships. Seeing this through a masculinity lens helps us understand why, although boys and girls experience childhood domestic violence at similar rates, it is predominantly boys who perpetrate violence in public spaces.
4. The report recommends gender-specific and masculinity-aware interventions. What might these look like in practice, and why are they so urgently needed?
Children who experience domestic abuse are often treated as a generic group, receiving support indirectly through their mother. But boys and girls experience and survive trauma differently. They exist in the world differently. So, it makes sense to consider gender in the interventions that we provide.
In the youth-offending sector, lots of interventions are shaped by unspoken assumptions about what working-class boys want or need. One example is boxing. This can be effective for some, yet unless we open conversations about the gendered experience and recovery for boy child survivors of male violence, we aren’t able to examine whether such an activity may be further triggering for a victim of domestic abuse. We can’t make assumptions that boys want to engage in particular sports and activities. By making masculinity explicit in our design and delivery, we also open up the potential for gender-transformative spaces where we can actively challenge norms and stereotypes and offer children approaches that may enable them to explore what it means to be a boy in contemporary society. Unless we have gender in our conversations, we can’t explore this effectively.
5. What role do schools and youth services currently play in supporting boys who have experienced domestic abuse, and where do you see the biggest gaps?
There are two significant gaps at the moment. The first is that children aren’t being given opportunities to disclose, so no one knows what’s happening until it’s been going on for far too long. It’s much harder to intervene later once a young person is already being criminalised. I recently spoke to an organisation that runs a youth work service in the local hospital emergency department. They shared an example of a child who came to A&E with a broken arm and disclosed domestic abuse at home to the youth worker.
These informal touchpoints with trusted adults can be critical – but cuts to youth services have made them increasingly rare. The second challenge is that some boys are enacting violence at school, and instead of the root causes being identified, they’re labelled and excluded. Schools are under huge pressure, but targeted investment in early support could transform outcomes.
6. Your book research used music as an interview tool, and your recent work with children impacted by serious violence in Bristol used art and ‘craftivism’. Why do you think creative methods are important?
I grew up with domestic violence and abuse myself in childhood, and its enduring aftermath. I know what it’s like to feel unseen and unheard. I know how difficult it is to articulate what childhood is like in that situation.
That’s why creative, non-invasive methods feel like a natural choice for me.
Creative approaches can disrupt the power imbalances between the researcher and participant. Music can act as an anchor to memories. Lyrics and art can help articulate difficult topics. Instead of asking targeted, tight questions, I think it’s important to give space and creative tools for participants to share what they want to say.
Systemic challenges
7. Do you think the Serious Violence Prevention Duty has delivered on its promise to integrate different types of harm – or has it fallen short?
A key flaw in the Serious Violence Prevention Duty is that it puts the onus on local areas to define what is ‘serious violence’ in their region and use local evidence to identify the causes. At present, areas are asked to consider the severity of the offences, the impact on victims, their prevalence and their impact on the community. This skews a focus on high-profile public events (e.g. ‘knife crime’).
Because childhood domestic abuse is hidden, we often need national data to prove its prevalence – making it harder to justify at the local level. The risk is that actions taken under the Duty are interpreted within a hierarchy of violence, with gender-based violence being seen as less of a priority.
This framing affects commissioning: areas seek interventions that can show results within short political cycles.
It is much harder to prove the effectiveness of a service for child survivors of domestic abuse, which may not show ‘success’ – in the form of a reduction or prevention of later violence – for five years, and even then will be hard to attribute to one cause.
Call to action
8. If you could sit down with a policy maker reading this report for the first time, what would be the one takeaway you’d want them to remember from your research?
I think it is summed up in the famous quote by Frederick Douglass: “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
9. For practitioners working on the front lines – in schools, youth services or local authorities – what is the first step they can take toward a more integrated, gender-responsive approach?
Make sure they are trained in domestic violence and abuse and are confident speaking to children about it and managing disclosures. Personally, I think any professionals going into schools to raise awareness about related complex issues, such as ‘healthy relationships’, and ‘knife crime awareness’ need to keep in mind that they will have children in the room who are living with domestic abuse. It’s almost guaranteed. We need to create sensitive teaching practices around other forms of harm and provide opportunities for children to disclose.
Practitioners could consider a gender impact assessment in any interventions that are offered. Are sex-segregated groups going to be offered? Are considerations being made in the planning about how boys and girls experience the world differently? How do we integrate and challenge masculinity norms when we talk about a topic? How do we tackle sensitive teaching topics about violence, harm and growing up, if we assume there are always children who are experiencing (or who have experienced) male violence in the room?
10. What does success look like to you, five years from now, if the recommendations of this report are acted on seriously?
We need to rethink how we categorise, assess and label ‘serious violence’. Our risk assessment systems across a wide range of services are skewed towards immediate risk of harm and homicide, and this is missing out child survivors of domestic violence and abuse. A child living with domestic violence and abuse could easily be missed or assessed as low risk within the serious violence gravity score, the DASH risk assessment, the MARAC system, Children’s Services assessments and CAMHS assessments. Often, when perpetrators no longer reside at home, the risks are seen as having gone, leading to cases being closed.
We need to see that domestic violence can have catastrophic impacts on a child for their entire life, not just because of their own later risks of causing harm, but also because of the myriad health impacts that track children throughout the life course (as shown in longitudinal research on adverse childhood experiences).
We need tools that place children’s lived experience at the centre, not just their current risk to others. We need to ensure that teachers and youth workers are trained to recognise and respond to domestic violence and abuse, and to provide specialist services they can refer to post-disclosure. If we had this available, then children who use violence or act out in school may be less likely to be excluded, because instead of their presenting behaviour being managed in isolation, specialist services are on hand to support the underlying causes.
I would like to see a statutory duty that compels areas to provide support to all children who are victims of violence. These services would be directly accessible to children, not contingent on parental consent, where they can receive intensive support that is gender specific and tailored to them for as long as they need.
As Dame Nicole Jacobs’s report makes clear, until we see children as victims in their own right, they will remain invisible.
Jade Levell is a Senior Lecturer in Social and Public Policy (Criminology and Gender Violence).
Boys, Childhood Domestic Abuse and Gang Involvement by Jade Levell is available on Bristol University Press for £85.00 here here.
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