MARAC — Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences for High-Risk Domestic Abuse Victims, England and Wales

Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences (MARACs) are meetings where police, probation, Independent Domestic Violence Advisers (IDVAs), children's services, health, housing and voluntary agencies share information on victims at high risk of serious harm or homicide and agree a coordinated safety plan. The model was first developed in Cardiff in 2003.
Cases are referred when a standard risk-assessment threshold is met, on professional judgement, when abuse is escalating, or when there is a repeat incident within 12 months. A meeting typically lasts half a day and covers 15 to 20 cases. The three core components are enhanced information sharing, the IDVA who represents the victim, and action planning.
Scale: about 250-260 MARACs operate in England and Wales; roughly 56,500 cases were discussed in the 12 months to June 2012. The Home Office has funded coordinator posts, training and quality assurance since 2008 (GBP 1.4m in 2011/12).
Evidence: the Cardiff evaluation (Robinson, 2006) reported that 6 in 10 victims were not re-victimised. EIGE summarises monitoring data in which 45% of cases saw abuse cease and a further 20% saw fewer police incidents. However, the 2011 Home Office review (Steel, Blakeborough and Nicholas) concluded that MARACs have the potential to improve safety and may be highly cost-effective, but that the outcome evidence is relatively weak and a more robust evaluation is needed. It also found variation in practice, with identification, representation, caseload volume and action planning the most frequent challenges.
Reading the evidence honestly: this is a widely adopted, well-documented coordination model with plausible mechanisms and encouraging descriptive data, but without a comparison group; the cost-saving ratio quoted in secondary summaries is not independently verified.

Read the full analysis: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/3032/