Nicole Renehan, from the Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse, discusses the design of neuroinclusive interventions using co-produced data and action learning sets.
Neurodiversity has become increasingly visible across policy, practice and public debate.
Yet in many areas of criminal justice and domestic abuse intervention, neurodivergent people remain poorly understood, misinterpreted, or excluded by systems that were never designed with them in mind.
My research sits within this tension: how can we develop responses to domestic abuse that are both safe and effective, while also being neurodiversity affirmative by design?
This question has shaped a programme of qualitative research I have led over the past several years, including:
- Exploring the experiences of neurodivergent men attending domestic abuse perpetrator programmes (DAPPs) and the views of practitioners delivering these interventions. Anonymised and safeguarded data for this project are available via the UK Data Service.
- Studying the perspectives of neurodivergent led organisations advocating for neurodivergent people.
Listening to gaps in the data
Much of the existing evidence base on domestic abuse interventions reflects neurotypical assumptions about communication, emotional processing, group work and compliance.
Through interviews with neurodivergent men and practitioners across the UK and internationally, my research repeatedly highlighted an important pattern in the combined findings.
Namely, behaviours interpreted as disengagement, resistance or lack of motivation were often better understood as responses to sensory overload, communication mismatches, or inaccessible programme design.
At the same time, the data revealed significant gaps.
Neurodivergent people were largely absent from the design of interventions, training curricula, and policy standards, despite being over‑represented in criminal justice settings.
In many cases, information about neurodivergence was either not collected, inconsistently recorded, or used in ways that risked reinforcing deficit‑based narratives rather than informing meaningful adjustments.
These findings raised an important methodological question for me: if the problem is that services are not designed with neurodivergent people, then producing more research about them without working alongside them risks reproducing the same exclusions.
Designing from the margins
To address this, I led a study with representatives from neurodivergent‑led organisations in England, resulting in the report ‘Designing from the margins’. Rather than positioning these organisations as stakeholders to be consulted at the end of the process, the research centred their expertise from the outset.
This work confirmed many of the earlier findings but also deepened them.
Participants consistently emphasised that truly neuroinclusive services must be designed “from the bottom up”, informed by lived experience rather than adapted retrospectively. They also highlighted the risks of superficial inclusion: reasonable adjustments without meaningful training, data collection without trust, and consultation without power‑sharing.
Importantly, the research reinforced the idea that co-production is not simply an ethical choice, but a data practice. Who is involved in shaping questions, interpreting findings, and deciding what counts as evidence fundamentally shapes what we come to know, and what remains invisible.
From research to action: why we chose action learning sets
With support from an ESRC Impact Acceleration Grant, I worked with my colleague Dr Vicky Butterby and a group of specialist organisations to translate this body of research into a practical resource for the domestic abuse sector: ‘Supporting neurodivergent clients: a guide for practitioners facilitating domestic abuse perpetrator interventions’.
Rather than producing a guide based solely on academic synthesis, we chose to co‑design it using Action Learning Sets. This approach brought together domestic abuse practitioners, probation staff, neurodivergence specialists and researchers over a series of structured, facilitated sessions.
Action learning sets provided a space for participants to reflect on real‑world dilemmas, test ideas against practice constraints, and engage in honest disagreement.
The aim was not consensus for its own sake, but learning through dialogue: asking what was possible, where tensions lay, and how neurodiversity‑affirmative practice could be embedded without minimising the harm of domestic abuse or compromising victim‑survivor safety.
Crucially, the process itself was designed to be neuroinclusive.
Meetings were held online, participation was flexible and asynchronous options were built in. Clear structure, predictability, and explicit permission to regulate one’s body or energy were not add‑ons – they were fundamental to how we worked together.
What emerged and why it matters
Across the action learning sets, participants explored questions such as how to distinguish coercive control from structural or sensory needs; how risk is assessed when data is limited or misinterpreted; and how services can support neurodivergent practitioners alongside clients. These discussions fed directly into cycles of drafting, review and revision.
The result is an interactive web-based guide which practitioners can use alongside their existing interventions to support neurodivergent clients.
The guide also has an accompanying resource for practitioners working within integrated support services to support victim survivors whose partner is neurodivergent. The guide is now publicly available online.
The guide is a living document. It reflects what happens when research data, practitioner expertise and lived experience are brought into sustained conversation, rather than treated as separate stages of “knowledge transfer”.
In this sense, the guide is not simply an output of research impact – it is part of the research process itself.
Reflections on data, impact and co-production
Writing for the UK Data Service Data Impact blog has offered an opportunity to reflect on how data is gathered, interpreted and mobilised in areas that sit at the intersection of vulnerability, harm and responsibility.
My research has repeatedly shown that gaps in data are rarely neutral: they often reflect whose experiences are considered legitimate, whose knowledge is trusted, and whose needs are deferred.
By using co‑produced qualitative data and action learning as a method, this work demonstrates how alternative approaches can challenge those gaps.
Designing from the margins does not weaken evidence, it strengthens it by ensuring that what we collect, analyse and act upon is grounded in the realities of those most affected by policy and practice decisions.
As neurodiversity continues to gain attention across research and policy spaces, there is an opportunity to move beyond awareness towards structural change.
For me, that starts with asking different questions, sharing power in the research process, and treating impact not as an endpoint, but as an ongoing, collaborative endeavour.
About the research
‘Supporting neurodivergent clients: a guide for practitioners facilitating domestic abuse perpetrator interventions’ was developed in collaboration with Project partners Community Justice Scotland, Probation Service North East, and Respect. Project Consultants include Neurodiverse Connection and Monika Labich Coaching and Therapy.
The projects mentioned in this article were supported by the ESRC Impact Accelerator Grant (grant number RG200284), ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant number ES/W005379/1) and ESRC Doctoral Studentship (grant number ES/P000665/1).
About the authors
Dr Nicole Renehan is an Assistant Professor in Criminology in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse (CRiVA).
Dr Vicky Butterby is a Research Associate at Durham University within the Global Centre for Contextual Safeguarding.
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