Clare's Law — England and Wales Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (Cautionary Case)

The Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (Clare's Law) lets individuals ask police whether a partner has a record of violence and lets police proactively disclose where risk is identified. It was piloted for 14 months in four police areas in 2012–13 and rolled out across England and Wales in March 2014.
Scale: a 2025 University of Essex briefing reports over 100,000 applications in the past decade. The Essex survey suggests 16% of applicants had never told anyone about the abuse and 69% already knew something of their partner's history before receiving a disclosure.
Limits: a critic noted the pilot recorded 111 disclosures across the four areas and drew on 38 questionnaires, most completed in front of an officer (opinion source). A 2023 BBC investigation, cited by Essex, found many applications were rejected without information being given. Academic critiques (Duggan & Grace 2018; Fitz-Gibbon & Walklate) point to the lack of a statutory basis, procedural vulnerabilities, data gaps and privacy tensions.
We found no evaluation showing that disclosures reduce violence, so this is included as a widely copied but weakly evidenced measure.

Read the full analysis: https://repository.essex.ac.uk/41590/1/Clare%27s%20Law%20Policy%20Briefing%202025.pdf