Our communications role in the Spire project got well and truly underway today as Plexus played its part in the Local Partnership Conference on Domestic Violence Abuse – held in Market Harborough.

The conference, which was attended by all the European partners involved in the project (with the exception of Crete who was tied up with the European elections), focused on the impact of domestic violence in two very different ways.

Firstly, with a presentation from Professor Carol Hedderman, a leading expert on domestic violence from the University of Leicester. Secondly, with a drama performance called Cracks of Light, which aims to illustrate how domestic violence affects people’s lives. As you can imagine, it was a very powerful performance, encompassing the whole range of human emotions.

Our increased understanding of the issues will really help us when it comes to producing communication materials for the project, plus of course, we’ll be working very closely with all the partners involved. We met the partners prior to the conference – and they also presented their findings from focus groups ran to find out how people view domestic violence in each of the project areas – Crete, Spain, Sweden and the UK. As you imagine, the findings were very interesting, revealing some fascinating differences and similarities between countries.