APPLIED ANALYSIS SERIES — AAS-007
THE DIRECTIVE™ — APPLIED ANALYSIS SERIES — AAS-007
Non-Fatal Strangulation and the Failure of Risk Transmission
A SAFECHAIN™ Governance Analysis of High-Risk Domestic Abuse Indicators, Safeguarding Continuity, and Institutional Response
Reference: SAFECHAIN/AAS/2026/007
Author: Samantha Avril-Andreassen FRSA
Organisation: SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453)
Abstract
On 7 June 2022, section 75A of the Serious Crime Act 2015, inserted by section 70 of the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, came into force, creating standalone offences of non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation, each carrying a maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment. The offence was created in direct response to evidence — including from the campaign group We Can't Consent To This, which found that 38% of women under 40 had experienced unwanted slapping, spitting, choking, or gagging — that strangulation had previously been prosecuted, if at all, as common assault, a charge that did not reflect either its severity or its significance as a risk indicator.
This paper does not examine whether non-fatal strangulation is dangerous, or whether the law now recognises that danger. Both are well established. This paper examines a narrower and, this series argues, more consequential question: once strangulation has been disclosed, recorded, or charged at one point in the system, does that information travel — in a form that preserves its significance — to the other institutions that go on to make decisions affecting the same family.
Non-fatal strangulation provides a case study in how high-risk safeguarding information can become progressively weakened as it travels through institutional systems. Using Disclosure Integrity™ (Paper 9), The Implementation Paradox™ (Paper 23), The Coordination Deficit™ (Paper 25), The Continuity Deficit™ (Paper 26), The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™ (Paper 6), and The Responsibility Paradox™ (Paper 33) of the SAFECHAIN™ Foundational Architecture Index™, this paper traces a single illustrative chain — from a police call-out to a family court decision — and asks, at each point along it, whether strangulation remains visible.
Keywords: Non-Fatal Strangulation, Domestic Abuse, Safeguarding, Coercive Control, Disclosure Integrity™, The Coordination Deficit™, The Continuity Deficit™, Institutional Failure, Risk Assessment, SAFECHAIN™, The Directive™
A Note on This Paper's Framework
Two corrections to the framework as originally proposed for this paper are recorded here for transparency. First, an earlier draft of this paper's framework cited "Paper 32 — The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™." Paper 32 is, in fact, The Power Paradox™ — a paper concerned with how institutions created to protect people can become focused on managing systems or on institutional self-protection. The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™ is Paper 6. This is the second time this specific error has occurred (the first being in the framework originally proposed for AAS-006), which suggests the two papers have been conflated somewhere upstream of both drafts. The correction below uses Paper 6 for Institutional Failure Taxonomy™. Paper 32, The Power Paradox™, is not separately addressed in this paper, but is noted here as a paper that may be directly relevant to a future AAS piece on institutional responses to non-fatal strangulation specifically — the question of whether institutions respond to a strangulation disclosure by addressing the risk it indicates, or by managing the institution's own exposure, is squarely Power Paradox™ territory, and is left for that future piece rather than absorbed into this one.
Second, Paper 23, The Implementation Paradox™, has been added to the framework. AAS-002 of this series examined a recognition framework — the eight-stage homicide timeline — that exists, has been disseminated, and yet whose consistent application could not be confirmed. Non-fatal strangulation now has its own version of this pattern: the offence exists, training exists, guidance exists, and yet, as Section 6 below shows, even the basic question of how many such offences are recorded each year cannot currently be answered from published statistics. That is Implementation Paradox™ territory in a particularly stark form, and Paper 23's absence from the originally proposed framework would have left this paper's strongest piece of evidence without its proper architectural home.
This paper's scope is risk transmission after strangulation has been disclosed, recorded, or charged at some point in the system. The question of barriers to initial disclosure — examined through Paper 1 (The Participation Gap™) and Paper 17 (The Equality of Arms Paradox™) elsewhere in this series, including in AAS-006 — is not addressed here. A person's capacity to disclose strangulation, including the language available to them to describe it, is a significant question in its own right, but a different one from the question this paper asks: what happens to a disclosure once it has been made.
1. Introduction: The Risk Indicator That Must Not Be Lost
Every safeguarding system depends upon signals. Some indicate concern; some indicate vulnerability; a small number indicate immediate and potentially life-threatening danger. Non-fatal strangulation belongs in that last category, and the law now says so explicitly: since 7 June 2022, strangulation and suffocation have been standalone criminal offences under section 75A of the Serious Crime Act 2015, carrying up to five years' imprisonment — a sentence range that places the offence in the Crown Court, where, prior to June 2022, the same conduct would typically have been charged as common assault, triable only in the Magistrates' Court.
The significance of strangulation lies not only in the act itself but in what it may represent: a pattern of escalating coercive control, a willingness to exert power through fear and life-threatening force, and — in the homicide timeline examined in AAS-002 of this series — a documented stage in the pathway some domestic abuse relationships follow toward fatal violence.
Recognition of this significance has grown substantially. The question this paper asks is what happens next. Information must travel: police must record it, prosecutors must charge it appropriately, risk assessment processes must weigh it, family courts — where a strangulation allegation arises in the context of child arrangements — must receive it, and decision-makers at each stage must recognise its significance not as a generic assault but as the specific, high-risk indicator the 2022 legislation says it is.
Each of these is a transmission point. Each transmission point is an opportunity for information to weaken — not necessarily through any individual's failure, but because the systems involved were not designed around strangulation as a distinct category until 2022, and may not yet treat it as one in practice.
2. The Difference Between Recognition and Transmission
AAS-002 of this series examined the Magistrates' Association's first Domestic Abuse and Stalking Conference, and the eight-stage homicide timeline presented there, as a recognition tool — and asked what ensures that a recognition framework, once disseminated, is applied consistently rather than depending on whether an individual magistrate happened to attend the conference at which it was introduced. AAS-006 examined a related but distinct question: where strangulation has been disclosed and recorded, does it remain visible at the point an interim contact decision is made, or does the sequencing of disclosure and decision mean it is not yet validated, or not yet known to the decision-maker, at the moment it matters most.
This paper sits between those two questions. AAS-002 asked whether a recognition tool is applied. AAS-006 asked whether validated information arrives in time. This paper asks a third, connecting question: between recognition (the offence exists, the training exists) and the point of decision (the family court hearing), what is the actual sequence of institutions and records the information passes through — and at which point, if any, does the specific fact of strangulation stop being visible as strangulation, as opposed to being absorbed into a more general description of "assault" or "an incident"?
Recognition without transmission produces what this paper calls partial visibility: a record exists, somewhere, that strangulation occurred — but a later decision-maker, working from a different record, may see only that "an assault took place" or that "there was an incident in [year]." Partial visibility is not the same as no visibility, but for a high-risk indicator specifically, partial visibility can mean the difference between a decision-maker who is alerted to the homicide-risk literature AAS-002 examined, and one who is not — even though, somewhere in the system, the information that should have triggered that alert exists.
3. A Worked Transmission Chain
To move from the general proposition that information can weaken in transmission to a concrete account of where this happens, this section traces an illustrative chain — not a claim about any specific case, but a sequence of institutions and records that a strangulation disclosure made to police, in the context of an ongoing or recent relationship, may pass through before it could potentially reach a family court considering child arrangements.
Police call-out / report of strangulation
↓
Crime recording (currently coded within '8N — Assault with injury')
↓
DASH risk assessment (Domestic Abuse, Stalking, Harassment and Honour-Based Violence)
↓
MARAC referral, if risk is assessed as high
↓
Cafcass safeguarding enquiries, if family proceedings are issued
↓
Safeguarding letter to the family court
↓
Family court decision (e.g. interim contact arrangements)
At each arrow in this chain, the question is the same: does the record that strangulation specifically occurred — as opposed to "an assault" or "a domestic incident" — survive into the next stage? Sections 4 to 6 examine three points in this chain in turn: the crime-recording stage, the risk-assessment and referral stage, and the family court stage — the last of which connects directly to AAS-001's C1A findings and AAS-006's interim-decision analysis.
4. Disclosure Integrity™ at the Point of Recording
Paper 9, Disclosure Integrity™, asks whether decision-makers can rely on the information that reaches them. At the first transmission point in the chain above — crime recording — this paper's research found a striking illustration of the question Paper 9 asks, from the system's own statistical apparatus rather than from any individual case.
Section 6 below sets this out in detail, but the headline finding can be stated here: the Office for National Statistics, asked in a Freedom of Information request for the number of non-fatal strangulation and suffocation offences recorded under section 75A since its introduction, responded that strangulation and suffocation are recorded within the broad offence category '8N — Assault with injury,' and that ONS does not hold data broken down to the level of the specific offence within that category.
This means that, at the very first transmission point — the point at which a strangulation disclosure becomes a crime record — the specific fact of strangulation may already not be separately retrievable from the resulting statistic, even though, under the law in force since June 2022, it is a distinct offence with its own elements, its own maximum sentence, and its own significance as a risk indicator. Whether the individual crime record itself specifies section 75A is a separate question from whether that specificity survives into the aggregated data the system uses to understand patterns — but if it does not survive even at the level of national statistics, the question of whether it survives into an individual safeguarding letter, prepared by an individual Cafcass officer working from an individual police record, becomes correspondingly more pressing.
5. Coordination, Continuity, and the MARAC Stage
Paper 25, The Coordination Deficit™, and Paper 26, The Continuity Deficit™, are both engaged at the DASH and MARAC stages of the chain in Section 3. The DASH risk assessment is designed precisely to capture indicators such as strangulation and translate them into a risk grading; MARAC exists precisely to coordinate a multi-agency response where that grading is high. In principle, this stage of the chain is the system working as intended — strangulation is the kind of indicator DASH and MARAC were built to surface and act upon.
The Continuity Deficit™ question arises at the next step: whether the outcome of a DASH assessment and any MARAC referral — including the specific indicators that drove a high-risk grading — travels forward into Cafcass safeguarding enquiries if family proceedings are subsequently issued, in a form that preserves which indicator drove the grading. AAS-001 of this series examined, through the C1A form, how safeguarding allegations more generally are validated at only 64% of the rate at which they are noted. This paper does not have equivalent published figures specific to strangulation, and does not claim them. What this paper notes is that if a DASH assessment graded a case as high-risk specifically because of a strangulation disclosure, and that grading — without the specific reason for it — is what reaches a safeguarding letter, a family court reading "high risk" without "because of strangulation" has lost precisely the information that AAS-002's homicide-timeline framework would flag as most significant.
This is the Continuity Deficit™ in its sharpest form for this topic: not the loss of a risk grading, but the loss of the reason for it — which, for an indicator as specific in its significance as strangulation, may be the part of the information that matters most.
6. Disclosure Integrity™, Implementation, and the Statistical Gap
Paper 23, The Implementation Paradox™, as AAS-002 of this series developed it, describes a recurring pattern: a framework or recognition tool is developed, validated, and disseminated — often well — while the question of whether it is consistently applied remains untracked. Non-fatal strangulation, as a legislative and policy matter, has been developed and disseminated about as thoroughly as any domestic abuse-related reform in recent years: a specific offence, a five-year maximum sentence, extensive professional guidance, and prominent campaigning and awareness work, including by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation.
And yet, as Section 4 set out, the ONS's own account of its data — provided in response to a direct request for strangulation-specific figures — is that strangulation and suffocation offences under section 75A are recorded within 'Assault with injury' and are not separately retrievable. If the question "how many non-fatal strangulation offences were recorded last year" cannot currently be answered from published national statistics, then the question this paper has been building toward — "does strangulation remain visible as it travels from a police record to a family court decision" — is, at the level of the system as a whole, currently unanswerable in the affirmative. The Implementation Paradox™ here is not that strangulation goes unrecognised. It is that recognition has not yet been built into the infrastructure — statistical, and by extension administrative — that would allow anyone, including the institutions themselves, to know whether transmission is occurring.
Paper 6, The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™, is relevant here as the framework within which a fuller account of why this gap exists could be developed — whether it reflects the time lag between a 2022 legislative change and the multi-year cycle of crime-recording classification updates, a deliberate decision that the existing 'Assault with injury' category was sufficient, or simply an absence of anyone with responsibility for ensuring the new offence acquired its own data category. This paper does not attempt that fuller account; it records the gap as the clearest available evidence that recognition and transmission are not the same thing, even four years after the offence was created.
7. Accountability: The Responsibility Paradox™ Across the Chain
Paper 33, The Responsibility Paradox™, is engaged across the whole chain set out in Section 3. No single institution in that chain is responsible for the chain as a whole. The police are responsible for crime recording; the Home Office and ONS for crime statistics; local MARAC partnerships for multi-agency risk coordination; Cafcass for safeguarding enquiries; the family court for the eventual decision. Each link may function correctly according to its own standards — a crime is recorded, a DASH assessment is completed, a safeguarding letter is written, a decision is made — while the chain as a whole loses the specific information (strangulation, as opposed to assault generally) that gave the original disclosure its significance.
This is the Responsibility Paradox™ in the form this series has used the term throughout: where multiple actors each bear partial responsibility for a process, and each may discharge their own part of it correctly, responsibility for the integrity of the chain as a whole may not sit anywhere in particular — and the family court, at the end of the chain, bears the consequences of transmission losses that occurred at points entirely outside its control or knowledge, in the form set out in AAS-006: a decision made on the information available, where what is not known is not visible as a gap.
8. What Might Follow
The proposals below follow directly from Sections 3 to 7, and are framed, as elsewhere in this series, as questions rather than as a programme.
• Whether the classification of offences under section 75A of the Serious Crime Act 2015 could be made separately retrievable within crime recording and national statistics — addressing the specific gap identified in Sections 4 and 6, and providing, for the first time, a basis for understanding whether transmission of this indicator is improving over time
• Whether a DASH assessment that grades a case as high-risk specifically because of a strangulation disclosure could carry that specific reason forward — not only the grading — into any subsequent MARAC referral and, where relevant, Cafcass safeguarding enquiries, addressing the Continuity Deficit™ identified in Section 5
• Whether the worked chain in Section 3 could form the basis of a structured review — by the agencies involved, rather than by SAFECHAIN™ — of where, in practice, strangulation-specific information is or is not currently preserved, as a way of locating transmission losses more precisely than this paper, working from published sources alone, is able to
None of these proposals require new offences or new legal tests. The offence, and its maximum sentence, already reflect the law's view of strangulation's significance. The proposals concern whether that significance, once established at one point in the chain, can be read at every other point in it.
9. Conclusion: From Recognition to Transmission
Few safeguarding indicators have received as much legislative, professional, and public attention in recent years as non-fatal strangulation. That attention has produced a specific offence, a five-year maximum sentence, and a body of guidance and training that did not exist before 2022.
This paper has examined what happens to that recognition as it moves through the system: from a police call-out, through crime recording, risk assessment, multi-agency referral, and safeguarding enquiries, to a family court decision. At more than one point in that chain, this paper has found — not through access to individual case files, but through the system's own published statistical account of itself — that the specific fact of strangulation may not travel with the same clarity as the general fact of an assault.
The question is not whether risk is recognised. The recognition exists, in law, in training, and in public awareness. The question is whether risk is transmitted — and, on the evidence this paper has been able to gather, that question does not yet have a confident answer, because the data that would answer it does not yet exist in a form that distinguishes strangulation from assault generally. That, in itself, is a finding.
Reading This Alongside the Architecture
This paper forms part of The Directive™ Applied Analysis Series and should be read alongside:
• Paper 6 — The Institutional Failure Taxonomy™
• Paper 9 — Disclosure Integrity™
• Paper 23 — The Implementation Paradox™
• Paper 25 — The Coordination Deficit™
• Paper 26 — The Continuity Deficit™
• Paper 33 — The Responsibility Paradox™
It should also be read alongside AAS-001 (Two Reports, One Chain, the C1A example referenced in Section 5), AAS-002 (From Recognition to Practice, the homicide timeline referenced throughout), and AAS-006 (The Pro-Contact Culture Problem, the interim-decision dynamic referenced in Sections 2 and 7).
SAFECHAIN™ welcomes discussion with the Office for National Statistics, the Home Office, MARAC partnerships, Cafcass, and the Institute for Addressing Strangulation on the questions raised in Section 8, particularly the statistical gap identified in Sections 4 and 6.
References
Serious Crime Act 2015, s.75A, as inserted by Domestic Abuse Act 2021, s.70, in force from 7 June 2022 (Domestic Abuse Act 2021 (Commencement No. 4) Regulations 2022).
Office for National Statistics (2023). Non-fatal strangulation and non-fatal suffocation offences in the UK, Freedom of Information response FOI-2023-1498, 13 November 2023.
We Can't Consent To This (2020). Research on the prevalence of non-fatal strangulation among women under 40.
Burton, M. & Hunter, R. (2025). Everyday Business: Addressing domestic abuse and continuing harm through a family court review and reporting mechanism. Domestic Abuse Commissioner's Office.
© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved. SAFECHAINN Ltd (Company No. 12038453).
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Reference: SAFECHAIN/AAS/2026/007
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© 2026 Samantha Avril-Andreassen. All rights reserved.
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