The initiative was part of a larger strategy to tackle the level of knife-related episodes taking place in homes across the county, officials said. The knives would still be sharp enough to cut food, the police said, and the results of the small-scale trial would be evaluated at the end of the year.

“It is only one small part of the whole range of what is done to safeguard and protect domestic abuse survivors,” Superintendent Matt McFarlane, who leads the Nottinghamshire police’s knife crime strategy, said in an emailed statement on Thursday. The police also said they were uncertain if this was the first time such a program was seriously considered anywhere.

But at least one critic said the proposal betrayed a lack of understanding about domestic-abuse issues that was literally laughable. Jessica Eaton, a psychologist and founder of VictimFocus, a research consultancy in forensic psychology, feminism and mental health, said that when she first read of the proposal, she thought it had come from an article in The Onion, the satirical newspaper.

“The problem is not the sharpness of the knife,” she said. “The problem is male violence.”

She said in a phone interview on Thursday: “The risk comes from the offender, not the knife. We know that blunt trauma can cause death. Just because a knife has been blunted doesn’t mean that it won’t pierce the skin or kill someone.”

Charlotte Kneer, the chief executive of Reigate and Banstead Women’s Aid, a refuge and charity based in Surrey, England, agreed that the Nottinghamshire police’s approach was ill advised, further perpetuating the myth that domestic violence was a “crime of passion.”