Victim retraction is almost universally viewed by criminal justice officials as a problematic outcome in cases of domestic violence, consequently policy initiatives have been designed to increase support to victims in the hope that more will decide to continue with their cases instead of retracting their statements. However our understanding of the various causes and full consequences of retraction remains limited. Using data from five Specialist Domestic Violence Courts (SDVCs) in England and Wales, we analysed a sample of 216 domestic violence cases to assess the relative influence of victim characteristics, offence characteristics, features of case processing, and evidence available from case files on the decision to retract. Despite the innovative courts, each embedded in strong multi-agency partnerships, half of domestic violence victims still chose to retract. The policy implications of these results are discussed in the context of current British government initiatives designed to 'Narrow the Justice Gap' and 'Bring Offenders to Justice' while at the same attempting to locate the victim "at the heart of the criminal justice system."

The process of consultation has become integral to the development, implementation and evaluation of a raft of UK health and social policies. However, the current bewildering patchwork of areabased initiatives means that, in many localities, it is impossible to evaluate the outcomes of particular targeted initiatives, let alone make sense of local planning consultations, Best Value reviews and (multi-agency) service reviews which run concurrently. The cumulative effects of this consultation "overload" threaten to swamp both local authorities and their service users. Consultation is itself a crucial yet deeply problematic process. There is an official view which holds that an "old" model of consultation-often tokenistic and unrepresentative-is being replaced with a "new" one. This paper examines and challenges that view in relation to the key policy areas of housing, social services and policing. It also pays particular attention to, and problematizes, the notion of "hard-to-reach groups", which is so dominant in the discourse of consultation. The paper argues that developing appropriate tools and recognizing that consultation is a process-not an event-are essential starting points in addressing these problems. The next step is to reconcile the principles of both evidence-based policy and user-led services into a strategic (and "joinedup") framework. But, when all this is accomplished, we still need to question the political and fiscal contexts in which policy-making takes place and within which the process of consultation is itself bounded.

No abstract

Book reviewed in this article: Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (eds) Community, Crime and Disorder. Safety and Regeneration in Urban Neighbourhoods, Lynne Hancock Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s Chin‐tao Wu Talcott Parsons Today: His Theory and Legacy in Contemporary Sociology, A. Javier Trevino (ed.) Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography, Uta Gerhardt Professionalism: The Third Logic, Eliot Freidson Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth‐Century Britain, Jeffrey Hill The End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990s, Anthony King Biographical Research, Brian Roberts Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidney Smith and Julia Watson