This article reports the findings of a study estimating the prevalence of domestic violence for one local area in London, England. Part of a wider project exploring the financial costs of domestic violence to the public purse, this article examines a truism about domestic violence: that it is largely hidden. Through a trawl of key agencies identified by previous U.K. studies to which women turn for assistance, this project estimates that approximately one in nine of the population of adult women in the London Borough of Hackney experienced domestic violence during1996. This paper presents the methodology we developed to estimate prevalence from the workloads of public service agencies.
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