The past two decades have seen dramatic changes in the response to domestic violence in states and communities throughout the United States.(1) To date, a great deal of the change has occurred within the criminal and civil justice systems. In many communities the justice systems have experienced a number of important changes in their laws and agency practices related to domestic violence. As a result many justice systems now respond to domestic violence in a way that is more likely than in the past to hold perpetrators accountable and to protect and support battered women. At the same time, social services for battered women have become more widely available with substantial growth in domestic violence hotlines and shelter services, and batterer intervention programs have been developed and made available in many communities. While problems of execution and service availability still remain even in the most progressive jurisdictions, shifts in public knowledge and attitudes have occurred that, at the local level, seem to support better responses to domestic violence in many communities.
There is also a growing awareness that the problem of violence against women is complex and requires comprehensive service responses involving agencies and services beyond the justice systems. A number of coordinated efforts have grown up over the recent past, as some communities have moved beyond changes in individual agencies, usually those in the justice systems, to respond to domestic violence in a more comprehensive and coordinated way. Many of the early efforts focused on coordination among agencies within the criminal justice system, or between these agencies and domestic violence service providers. In recent years, however, a "second generation" of coordinated responses has developed as some communities have expanded their efforts to include a broader array of agencies and stakeholders, including health care providers, child welfare agencies, substance abuse services, clergy, and business. Some communities have gone a step further and worked to involve the community as a whole in responding to domestic violence through prevention and education efforts aimed at raising community awareness and reshaping attitudes about this issue. Many of these more expansive efforts are quite new; only limited information has been available about them and the broader community and legal contexts in which they have occurred.
This report presents the results of a project to examine coordinated community responses to domestic violence, with a special focus on communities that are trying to incorporate into their response services and stakeholders beyond the justice system. The study was designed to understand the different approaches taken to coordinating a response and how these have developed not only in relation to the needs of battered women but in the context of other policy influences. All of the communities in the study have coordination efforts dating back a number of years that began with the criminal justice system and, in many cases, with domestic violence service providers or advocates. These communities' efforts to expand their response to include other agencies or stakeholders are more recent and much less developed than their criminal justice response. This study describes how the communities coordinate criminal justice responses and examines the issues that they have encountered as they have begun to move beyond the justice systems. Since most of these efforts are in their early stages, the findings do not provide definitive answers about the best approach to broad coordination or the likely outcomes. The study does, however, raise a number of important issues for communities to consider as they seek new and better ways to address this complicated problem.
This report is organized as follows. Chapter 2 describes the study design including site selection and site visit procedures. Chapter 3 provides descriptions of each community's efforts, including the history, features and outcomes of the coordination. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 discuss important cross-cutting issues about how the sites created change, the mechanisms they used, and opportunities for further efforts. The report concludes with a summary of the important issues for communities and various agencies to consider in coordinating a response to include a broad range of organizations and stakeholders. The remainder of this chapter provides a brief discussion of the diversity of the service needs of battered women and batterers and issues involved in developing a coordinated response.
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Diversity of Service Needs
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Each year more than two million women are seriously assaulted by their male partners (Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association, 1992). Countless others suffer less serious physical abuse as well as verbal or emotional abuse. The needs of battered women and their batterers span several service systems, and may require interventions by one or more of the criminal and civil justice systems, social service, health, or mental health care agencies, and support systems for battered women and their families.
Battered women sometimes seek relief through the criminal justice system, which historically has served as the main vehicle in a community's formal response to domestic violence. The National Crime Victim Survey (NCVS) found that 56 percent of women who had been victims of a violent crime committed by an intimate partner reported the incident to the police (Bachman, 1994). Women have different reasons for contacting law enforcement agencies. In the NCVS, half of the victims of domestic violence called on law enforcement as a means to punish the perpetrator while 28 percent wanted to stop the violence or prevent it from occurring again (Bachman, 1994). In recent years, the criminal justice system has moved toward a proactive approach in which the response to domestic violence is not dependent on the victim's participation. Mandatory arrest, probable cause arrest, and pro-prosecution (i.e., "victimless" prosecution) policies are efforts to take the responsibility off the victim for determining whether or not to pursue legal remedies. The relief available through the civil justice system has also improved in some communities with changes in the use of and remedies available through protection orders.
Battered women may also access domestic violence shelters and services instead of, or in addition to, criminal justice measures. Until the late 1970s, few shelters or services existed specifically for domestic violence. A decade later there were more than 800 shelters for battered women in the United States (Gelles and Straus, 1988). These programs frequently provide a number of services in addition to shelter, such as counseling, legal assistance, and advocacy. Despite their wider availability, shelter services are not used by most battered women. Gelles and Straus found that less than 2 percent of women who were severely abused reported seeking help from a battered women's shelter during the prior year, and no victims of minor violence sought help from shelters (Gelles and Straus, 1988). A couple of factors may contribute to the small proportion of women using shelter services. In many communities, the services may be inadequate to serve all battered women who request services from the shelter (Gelles and Straus, 1988 and Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, AMA, 1992). Also, leaving the abuser and going to a shelter, or seeking help in obtaining a protection order are major decisions used as a last resort by many women.
The health care system often unwittingly provides another important source of services for battered women, although traditionally it has not played an active role in identifying or intervening in domestic violence. Battered women seek treatment for traumatic injuries resulting from the abuse (e.g., bruises, cuts, broken bones, etc.), and for primary care complaints related to the abuse (e.g., chronic headaches, abdominal pains, sleeplessness, depression, etc.) (Council on Scientific Affairs, AMA, 1992). Research indicates that more than one-fifth, and perhaps as many as one-third, of women receiving care in hospital emergency departments have symptoms related to domestic violence (Council on Scientific Affairs, AMA, 1992). Most commonly, women seeking such health services do not identify themselves as battered women and the health care providers do not identify them as such. Most women using health services in relation to symptoms caused by battering are not in touch with any other services where they do self-identify. Therefore, the health care system provides an access point to battered women who are not being served by other systems. In recent years some health care providers have become increasingly aware of this issue and have developed policies to screen for domestic violence and to intervene in these cases. Some jurisdictions require health care providers to report domestic violence to law enforcement agencies. Thus, health care systems represent important intervention points for expansion of community-wide systems of response to domestic violence, but attempts to use them this way will raise many important issues that do not surface when women themselves identify battering as the problem.
Other service systems such as alcohol and drug treatment programs, child protective services, and programs for the homeless are also very likely to have clients who suffer from domestic violence, and may also have clients who are perpetrators. At this time these systems are even less likely than health care systems to identify the existence of domestic violence among their clients, or to intervene and offer services if domestic violence issues become apparent. However, a few communities are beginning to work with one or more of these systems to bring them into the domestic violence service network. In addition, a few of the communities we visited are taking steps to broaden their network further to include businesses and corporations through their employee assistance programs, and clergy as both opinion-setters and potential first points of supportive service contact (through pastoral counseling). To the extent possible, this study tried to identify communities in which some of these more expanded networks were in the process of development so we could explore the issues involved.
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Issues in Developing a Coordinated Community Response
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We can conceptualize an idealized "coordinated community response" as one that "covers" both a community's service and support systems and its population of battered women in potential need of assistance. Given that efforts to establish a coordinated systemwide response are trying to raise the consciousness of a number of different agencies and stakeholders at the same time that it is trying to change agency behavior toward a response that addresses the service needs of all battered women, it is not surprising that issues arise pertaining to both services and people. Since the focus to date has been on bringing new services into a network, more thought and experience has accumulated about service-related issues. But as communities are successful in drawing in different kinds of services, they will inevitably face issues related to the fact that the clients of these newly-integrated services often have quite attitudes and motivations than the women who traditionally have sought shelter and other domestic violence services on their own.
In this study we have sought to understand what issues arise as communities strive toward a coordinated response to domestic violence, and how communities have tried to resolve these issues. With respect to bringing in new types of agencies or services, we wanted to examine issues that arose when agencies had not historically worked together, or when there had been antagonistic relationships in the past; what happened when the different missions or legal obligations of agencies conflicted; what happened when the traditional goals of different agencies for their clients did not match or correspond; and what happened when professional orientations were incompatible. With respect to the populations covered, we wanted to know who the different agencies were likely to see, including: what types of women, with what levels of consciousness about domestic violence and what levels of commitment to extract themselves from it; ever- or currently married to abuser or not; with or without children; whose children were or were not themselves in danger of or experiencing abuse; with or without complicating personal problems such as substance abuse. We wanted to know how communities had approached the problems of offering services to women who had not voluntarily sought help for domestic violence, who might not want help with it, might deny its seriousness or frequency, might have fewer or no social supports for ending it, and might in general be in circumstances with few or no resources at their disposal to deal with it.
In the chapters to follow, we hope to provide the reader with some of the experiences of six communities facing these issues and beginning to grapple with them. Although the communities we visited are among the most progressive in working on these issues, even they are still at the stage of learning by doing. Their experiences can be informative to others who are thinking about creating a broader community response to domestic violence.
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