The Home Office led Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs), which Greater Manchester Police volunteered to pilot, have helped successfully safeguard 119 victims of assault, coercive and controlling behaviour and threats in Greater Manchester between 27 November 2024 and 31 March 2025.
The pilot started in Bury last November before expanding to Wigan in January 2025, and most recently, across the City of Manchester in February 2025.
Further expansion across Greater Manchester is set to come.
DAPOs give police greater opportunities to protect victims of domestic abuse from harm, whether they are supportive of action against the perpetrator or not.
The pilot also allows GMP to consider civil orders in cases where there hasn’t been a recent incident, but have a named victim and suspect, or where physical violence hasn’t been present, but the victim is suffering emotional or verbal abuse.
Once a DAPO is in place, police continually monitor these, conducting regular compliance checks and visits to the victim to make sure there have been no further incidents, the perpetrator is adhering to the prohibitions, and the victim is safe.
Of the orders secured to date, GMP dealt with 45 breaches – the majority of those for failing to register
Five men, however, who breached their order by contacting the victim when they shouldn’t have, were swiftly arrested, put before the courts, and jailed.
At the centre of the DAPO process is a dedicated team who process all the applications, help build evidential packages and present these to the court
This team also handle all the Domestic Violence Protection Notice (DVPN) notices, which are the orders still available in other parts of Greater Manchester.
When DAPOs came into place, the team doubled in size to ensure all victims are serviced appropriately.
