Counselling Research

Domestic Abuse Counselling Research

The research that the Domestic Abuse Counselling (DAC) Model is based upon was undertaken by Jeannette Roddy shortly after she completed her professional counselling qualification in 2009. As part of her placement in a domestic abuse agency, she was surprised to learn that, after significant training had been given to her, that the work with clients who had experienced domestic abuse was even more complex than had been presented. As she became interested in this, she chose this as a topic for her literature review for the course, concluding that there had been very little research in the field up until that time, and no research from a client perspective had been undertaken. Jeannette was studying at York St John University at the time and the University found the funding for a PhD into the client experiences of domestic abuse counselling. Jeannette applied for and was successful in gaining the studentship which allowed her to study for and successfully complete her PhD from October 2010-June 2014. This was then published Jeannette's first book in 2015.

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Following on from her PhD, she taught and completed research at the University of Sunderland on the male experience of domestic abuse counselling in the UK (Roddy and Keech, 2019; Keech and Roddy, 2019 ) and at the University Salford, where she published a competency framework for Domestic Violence Counselling (Roddy and Gabriel, 2019). From this framework she then created a training programme for therapists for domestic abuse counselling with other academic staff at Salford which has been published by Routledge as a training handbook, Jeannette's second book (Roddy, 2023). Jeannette also set up a domestic abuse counselling service at the University of Salford to confirm that the model of practice was effective in a clinical setting (Roddy and Viliardos, 2023). Please do check out these books and the papers using the links provided as they have been very well received.

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Jeannette has recently had an article published in the March 2024 edition of Therapy Today, the professional journal for BACP, which highlights some of the issues with finding appropriate counselling for domestic abuse in the UK today. Entitled "It's time we improved post-domestic abuse support", it is available to download.