Domestic Homicide Reviews

A Domestic Homicide Review (DHR) is a locally conducted multi-agency review of the circumstances in which the death of a person aged 16 or over has, or appears to have, resulted from violence, abuse or neglect by:

a person to whom he or she was related, or with whom he or she was or had been in an intimate personal relationship; or,
a member of the same household as himself or herself.

DHRs were introduced by section 9 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 (DVCA 2004) and came into force on 13 April 2011. Their purpose is not to reinvestigate the death or apportion blame, but to:

establish what lessons are to be learned from the domestic homicide, regarding the way in which local professionals and organisations work individually and together to safeguard victims;
identify clearly what those lessons are, both within and between agencies, how they will be acted on, within what timescales, and what is expected to change as a result;
apply these lessons to service responses including changes to policies and procedures as appropriate; and to,
prevent domestic violence homicide and improve service responses for all domestic violence victims and their children, through improved intra and inter-agency working.

The DHR will usually draw upon information obtained from:

interviewing family members
interviewing significant people who may have known the victim
obtaining information from participating agencies, either by way of an Individual Management Review (IMR), or by other means such as a chronology of events.