This is what a study day on the Level 4 Domestic Abuse Support Worker apprenticeship actually looks like.
Or: what happens when you stop pretending practitioners don't already know things
Here is the thing about training domestic abuse support workers. They already know things. They have sat with people in crisis at 4pm on a Friday when every other service has closed. They have written referrals that went nowhere. They have watched a perpetrator walk out of a MARAC meeting with less scrutiny than the victim who reported him. They have done the emotional labour of holding someone else's worst day while managing their own.
You do not teach these people by standing at the front of a room and explaining what coercive control is.
What you do — what we do — is take what they already know and push it somewhere they haven't been yet. Give it a framework. Give it evidence. Give it language sharp enough to use in a room full of people who would rather not hear it.
This is what that looked like on a recent study day.
Start with the stereotype. Then blow it up.
We opened by asking the group what they picture when they hear the word extremist.
You already know the answer. We all do. It's so consistent it barely needs describing — because it's the same image that's been fed to us for twenty years by every thriller, every news package, every documentary that needed a villain with a particular kind of face.
One practitioner nailed it: there are basically two versions right now. Your shaved-head, Union Jack-waving figure on a street corner. And then your Assassin's Creed-looking terrorist — hood, headdress, something strapped to him that probably shouldn't be there.
Both images. Instantly available. Completely confident.
Then the question: how much of that is media? How much of what we think we know about extremism has been constructed for us by twenty years of content that needed a recognisable villain?
Most of it, the group agreed. Every other film or TV series, the characters are always portrayed within those stereotypes in some way — even if it's just a subtle nod.
And here is why this matters for domestic abuse practice: the same process that gives us a fixed image of what an extremist looks like gives us a fixed image of what a victim looks like. And what a perpetrator looks like. The stereotypes feel like pattern recognition. Like you're reading the situation accurately based on experience. The problem is the pattern was laid down by culture and media and the stories that get told and retold — not by the reality of who actually causes harm and who actually experiences it.
The stereotypical perpetrator is a stranger. He looks dangerous. He has form. He is not someone who sends flowers.
Except — and this is where it gets interesting — one of the things the group examined was exactly that. A man who sent flowers. Who had been in a relationship with the woman reporting him. Who therefore, to one police officer's mind, could not possibly be a threat.
That officer's name is not the point. The template in his head is.
The research is worse than you think
Two pieces of current UK research put numbers on how widely these beliefs are still held. Neither makes comfortable reading.
The EVAW 2026 survey of 3,000 UK adults found that 26% believed rape could not occur if a victim didn't resist. 30% believed consent can be assumed within marriage. 29% believed a man can't be held responsible if he was drunk when he raped. And among younger adults, these numbers are going in the wrong direction. The manosphere is not a fringe. It is well-funded, algorithmically amplified, and it is working.
The Keele University 2022 study found something that stopped the group. The most persistent myths were not about victims. They were about perpetrators. Only 42% of participants correctly disagreed with the idea that alcohol or stress can turn someone into a rapist. Two thirds believed most rapes are committed by strangers — when ONS data shows 90% of rape perpetrators are already known to their victims.
We have made more progress, as a culture, in challenging victim-blaming than in challenging the myths that let perpetrators go unrecognised. And it is the myths about perpetrators that are doing the most damage — because when someone doesn't match the template of what danger looks like, the template says there is nothing to worry about.
One more thing the group noticed, which is worth saying plainly: the voices amplifying these false beliefs are louder, better funded and more sophisticated at using technology than the voices correcting them. Education helps. It is not enough on its own.
What that looks like when it kills someone
The Shana Grice case is not unusual. We use it because the officer who failed her explained himself — in his own words, on record, at his misconduct hearing — with such clarity that you can see exactly how the template works.
Grice reported being stalked multiple times. The officer fined her for wasting police time. Michael Lane murdered her.
At the hearing, he explained his reasoning. She'd been in a relationship with Lane. She sent texts with kisses on them. Her account had inconsistencies. She hadn't reported immediately.
The group had things to say about the kisses on texts. Specifically: we all do it. Automatically. To people we barely know. A learner pointed out that in English culture putting an x on a message isn't even romantic anymore — it's just punctuation. One person in the group confessed to accidentally sending a kiss to their dentist. The tax man, someone else offered, definitely didn't need that.
The officer saw those kisses and read: she wasn't really afraid of him.
He did not check the police computer. He had decided, before he started, what kind of case this was. Lane didn't look like the template. So there was nothing to see.
When the group then learned that Lane had been the subject of 13 complaints from other women over three years — and had been quietly removed from a Scout leader role over allegations of grooming a 14-year-old — the response was not surprise. It was a very particular kind of fury. The kind you feel when you already knew something was coming and it came anyway.
"Sending flowers to someone who doesn't want them, while damaging their car, is a load of bullshit as evidence of care. The officer saw romance. He should have seen a pattern."
The officer was not malicious. He was applying beliefs that a substantial proportion of UK adults still hold. That is not a defence. It is a measure of the scale of what practitioners are working against — every day, in referral meetings and risk assessments and conversations with colleagues who should know better.
The parallel nobody sees coming
One of the things that happens when you give experienced practitioners space to make connections is the conversation goes somewhere you didn't plan.
This one went to radicalisation.
Once you start mapping what practitioners already know about coercive control onto what they know about radicalisation, something becomes very difficult to unsee. The mechanics are identical. Target someone vulnerable. Create dependency — make them feel this relationship, this group, this person is the only safe place. Cut them off from anyone who might offer a different view. Make them, ultimately, expendable.
The county lines runner who takes the risk so the people above him don't have to. The person drawn into extremist violence by an ideology that promised belonging. The victim whose role is to absorb harm so the perpetrator doesn't have to face consequences.
Same playbook. Different contexts.
To put it precisely: the manipulation you see in an abusive relationship — where the perpetrator convinces the victim that everyone else is the enemy, that only they can be trusted — is exactly what radicalisation looks like at a community scale. In a relationship it's one person being isolated. In radicalisation it's a community being told they can't trust anyone outside it. It's the same thing.
And then the question nobody had quite asked before: does the Assassin's Creed terrorist have a healthy relationship with his girlfriend?
No. Probably not.
If someone is capable of systematically manipulating and dominating in one part of their life, that capacity doesn't stay in a box. The stereotypes about extremists and the stereotypes about domestic abuse perpetrators look nothing alike. But the playbook is the same. And practitioners who understand coercive control already understand more about radicalisation than most counter-terrorism training will ever teach them.
This also matters in the other direction. A child growing up inside coercive control is being taught — without anyone intending to teach them — a particular model of how power works. Who to trust. What loyalty costs. What happens to people who don't comply. When an extremist ideology or a gang or a controlling partner offers that person belonging and purpose and an explanation for why the world is unjust, it is offering those things to someone already primed to receive them. You cannot see that by applying the stereotype of what an extremist looks like. You can see it if you understand what coercive control does to a person.
Which is exactly what the practitioners in that room know.
Low-cost behaviour and what it produces
Here is a concept that landed hard and deserves to hit hard more widely.
When harmful behaviour carries no meaningful consequences — when it gets excused, minimised, managed quietly, or simply never recorded — the person doing it receives a signal. The signal is that the behaviour is acceptable. A lifetime of low-cost behaviour produces the confident assumption that the behaviour is free.
Lane was never charged with anything. Thirteen complaints. A safeguarding concern dealt with by quietly removing him from a voluntary role. Nothing that cost him enough to change anything. Each time the template said he wasn't the real threat. Each time the cost was near zero.
This is also what makes the DBS system insufficient as a standalone safeguard. It surfaces what has been reported, recorded and charged. It tells you nothing about the pattern that exists in reality but not in the system. The perpetrator who has never been caught — or whose behaviour has been managed quietly by institutions protecting their own reputation — is invisible to every organisation that might have intervened.
This is why perpetrator accountability is not a separate conversation from victim support. It is the same conversation.
Why the first two years matter
The Level 4 Domestic Abuse Support Worker apprenticeship is not for people who need to learn what domestic abuse is.
It is for people who are already doing the work — and who are in the window where what they learn becomes who they become as practitioners. The first one to two years in this sector is when instincts form, when patterns get established, when the culture of an organisation starts to shape how someone thinks about a case. That process is going to happen whether or not there is a programme around it.
The apprenticeship makes it intentional. It gives practitioners the research, the evidence, the named concepts and the space to examine what they're absorbing — so that what they develop is not just competence but the capacity to challenge. To be the person in the MARAC meeting who names the myth. To push back, with evidence, on the assumption that a man sending flowers couldn't possibly be dangerous. To write the referral that doesn't get ignored.
Your staff are already doing remarkable work. We want to make them formidable.
Want to know more?
If you run an organisation in the DA sector and you want your practitioners to be as good as they possibly can be — we would love to talk. Not a sales conversation. Just a conversation about what your team needs and whether we can help.
Or
If you're in your first couple of years in this sector and you're reading this thinking "someone finally said it out loud" — that's the energy we teach in. Talk to your employer about the Level 4 DASW apprenticeship, or get in touch directly and we'll help you have that conversation.
https://www.be-astute.co.uk/skills
https://www.be-astute.co.uk/book-a-conversation
References:
https://aurorand.org.uk/police-misconduct/
https://haliruna.com/dispatch-false-accusations
