More than 5,000 children have been exposed to domestic abuse in Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent during the past year.

Schools are now made aware of pupils who are living with domestic abuse as part of a campaign launched by Staffordshire Police in February 2021.

And children are also set to be recognised as victims of domestic abuse in their own right under the Domestic Abuse Act, a police performance meeting heard on Thursday (January 27).

Chief Constable Chris Noble spoke of another recently-launched campaign, Operation Cocoon, which involves encouraging residents to look out for neighbours who may be suffering abuse.

He said: "Where someone's being victimised in a particular property, very discreetly and very carefully we will visit other properties in the area. We may well have an opportunity to identify other offending, or encourage neighbours to listen out and look out for their neighbours in terms of what's going on.

"We will track that and see how effective that is. It's one of the ways we are trying to be innovative, as opposed to waiting for someone to report, how we can get ahead and protect them earlier on.

"We are doing a lot of excellent work around domestic abuse, where we know women are particularly vulnerable in their homes because of some of the challenges around Covid.

"We will be holding particular intensification weeks, highlighting what we're doing around offenders and perpetrators as well as supporting women and girls as best we can. Very often police will not see the full picture, but perhaps from a school environment, health environment, from friends and colleagues, we might have an opportunity earlier on to see where vulnerabilities might be."

Between December 2020 and November 2021 Staffordshire Police received 18,245 reports of domestic abuse. Of these 6,713 – 37% – were in Stoke on Trent and 11,655 were in Staffordshire.

Domestic abuse levels have remained "stable" for the last four years, a report to the meeting said.

Staffordshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner Ben Adams said: "I think what's most powerful with those numbers is it helps the public to understand the level of risk and harm that is out there – and that is in everyone's neighbourhood. We all have a part to play in keeping our eyes open for that.

"I'm very pleased my team commission an excellent service across the county. We've got good levels of support for victims of domestic abuse.

"We've seen some really good continual increasing numbers of people using that service. They were there during Covid and I think it's helping in prevention as well as support.

"One of the issues is partners finding it difficult sometimes to see cases through or bring prosecutions, for lots of understandable reasons.

"We have a programme specifically to target perpetrators and those that have quite often declared themselves to be a risk to their partner, but also been identified as likely to benefit from counselling, group work and things like that. It has a real positive impact because we've got to prevent this whenever we can.

"In a national meeting the point was made that this is primarily about women and girls but not solely. Exploitation of people or targeting around a sexual opportunity is also a concern in homosexual relationships as well and there have been some terrible recent cases on that."