Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 – Reporting Requirement

1. Background

This report updates the statistics provided in the Interim reporting requirement report that are required to meet the reporting requirement in section 14 of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 (DASA 2018). The data for 2021-22 was not available at the time of publishing the interim report in January 2023, due to data issues identified during routine validation checks when the 2021-22 Criminal Proceedings data was being published. These issues meant that it was not possible to provide the usual breakdown of convicted persons by court type required for inclusion in the report.

Since the interim report was published, data on case registrations with charges under section 1 of the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018, statutory domestic abuse aggravations, and statutory domestic abuse aggravations involving a child have been provided by the Scottish Courts and Tribunal Service (SCTS). These data better meet the level of detail required for reporting. This report contains these data alongside the number of cases that resulted in a conviction, the number of non-harassment orders (NHOs) that were issued, and how many of those NHOs related to a child. The conviction data has been extracted from the dataset used to prepare the Scottish Government Justice Analytical Services Criminal Disposals Dashboard . The report also includes court journey times from the Journey times in the Scottish Criminal Justice System: 2023-24.

The disposal data is based on management information as such, the contents of these data may be subject to change.

The particular part of the reporting requirement which the data covers is provided at the start of each section. The statistical information provided in this report demonstrates usage of the Act during the first three years of implementation.

The nature of the course of conduct offence means that the behaviour has to happen over an extended period that must have begun after the Act was implemented which means that the first year of implementation did not effectively cover a full year on this basis and it also took time for cases to build up and progress through the system. The second and third years coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery from it and the widespread impact it had across the justice system. Whilst this information provides a vital contribution to the broader evidence based on the implementation of the Act, none of the years covered here (2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22) should be viewed as indicative of longer term trends.

Statistics from future years will provide a better understanding of how the Act has impacted on how domestic abuses cases are prosecuted in court.