Coordinated Community Responses to Domestic Violence in Six Communities: Beyond the Justice System. The Iron Range: Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Northern St. Louis County and surrounding areas are known throughout Minnesota as "the Range" because the Mesabi Iron Range was the main reason for settlement of the area and the core of its economic base until the end of the 1960s. The largest town is Hibbing, with about 18,000 people; the Range Women's Advocates, the primary domestic violence advocacy and service organization, is located in Virginia, a town of about 9,500. There are 10 other, smaller, towns in the area large enough to have their own police department; courts are located in both Hibbing and Virginia, but are part of the same state court district (the 11th). The population is virtually all white (97 percent), of Scandinavian, German, and central European extraction, with about two-thirds of the non-white population being Native American. From the 1960s through the early 1980s, the Range suffered economic decline and population loss as the mines and iron- related manufacturing and extraction dwindled and nothing took its place. However, the feeling of some of those we interviewed was that during the past decade the populace has come to terms with the economic circumstances, stopped simply longing for the return of the past, and has moved to a place of economic stability, albeit not growth, and certainly not prosperity for all.

• Overview of the Coordinated Community Response

  • Two organizations are key to the development of the coordinated community response to domestic violence on the Range—the Range Women's Advocates (RWA), and the Family Violence Council. RWA provides services and advocacy for battered women, offers extensive educational activities to schools and community groups, contracts for and monitors batterer intervention services, and serves as a unifying conduit for issues and concerns of how formal systems treat battered women. The RWA also runs the Range Interventions Project (RIP) which focuses on getting all elements of the criminal justice system to respond appropriately to domestic violence—to "speak with one voice." It does training, protocol development, system integration, and monitoring with and for criminal justice agencies. The Family Violence Council's mission is to reduce all forms of family violence. "All players" participate, including schools, social services, health professionals, chemical dependency treatment providers, representatives of the business community, and women who have been battered as well as RWA/RIP and all criminal justice agencies.

    Criminal justice mechanisms include mandatory arrest for probable cause, calling an advocate for the woman at the time of making an arrest, sending all reports to RWA, reasonably consistent ordering of batterer to treatment for both civil (OFP) and criminal cases, monitoring of compliance with court orders and willingness of probation to "violate" a man and send him to jail if he consistently fails to comply with either treatment or protection orders, and enough batterer intervention resources to meet the need.

• History and Development

  • Range Women's Advocates (RWA) has been at the center of the local response to domestic violence since that response began in the late 1970s. Everyone we interviewed mentioned the importance of that consistency and persistence in moving Northern St. Louis County in the direction of more awareness of and direct supportive actions for victims of domestic violence. The smallness of the community and the extensive networking and interactions among most key players were also seen as an important factor in the gradual development and spread of services.

    In addition to services for battered women and advocacy on their behalf, RWA started the Range Intervention Project (RIP) in 1983 in response to an inquiry by Duluth's Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) director Ellen Pence about whether RWA would like to try to replicate DAIP in their rural setting. The mission of both intervention projects (RIP and DAIP) is to stimulate change in criminal justice agencies so that the entire system holds batterers accountable and keeps women safe. To these ends, about three years ago (when RIP had been in existence for about 10 years) RWA assembled an advisory committee to RIP composed of representatives from every part of the criminal justice system. This advisory committee focuses on identifying and completing specific tasks intended to improve the response of the criminal justice system, such as developing a checklist (protocol) for law enforcement to use in collecting evidence and writing reports in domestic violence cases. Protocols for prosecutors and judges are next on the advisory committee's agenda.

    In the past year RWA also has tried to involve clergy in combating domestic violence, by getting clergy to acknowledge that domestic violence happens, commit themselves to resist it, and determine to speak against it from the pulpit. Through the RIP, RWA provides batterer intervention programs (education classes) and monitors compliance, and participates fully in other regional efforts to affect change. One of these, the Family Violence Council, was recently organized by the chief judge of the district in response to directives from the Minnesota Supreme Court. This Council is pulling together opinion leaders, business people, the medical community, and the organizations traditionally involved with domestic violence issues. Its goals are to address all types of violence; to try to shift public opinion toward rejection of violence; and to develop needed supports in the community for victims of violence.

• Features of Coordination

• Other Community Context for the Response to Domestic Violence

  • The Range Community

    The fact that this is a small, stable rural community makes a big difference in the ease with which coordination happens, and the familiarity of all the players with each other. Most sit on each others' boards and have interacted in numerous ways over the years. It is also important that RWA has been around for so long, and with the same people as key figures. It means that any time anyone has an issue related to domestic violence, they know whom to call.

• Outcomes, Issues, and Future Directions

  • The obvious strengths of the service and support system for domestic violence on the Range are Minnesota's progressive laws on the issue, strong local awareness of the issue and willingness to treat it seriously, and the cooperation in evidence among the many agencies and organizations involved in the system. The gaps in the system include, for the criminal justice system, the behavior of many local prosecutors on the Range. For the overall system of services for battered women, gaps include adequate affordable housing, legal services (for civil issues), workplace recognition and action, involvement of emergency rooms and other medical settings in recognizing domestic violence and responding appropriately, and the involvement of clergy on the issue.

    RWA and RIP have been around for so long in this community, and coordination has been the "treatment of choice" almost from the beginning, that it was difficult for the people we interviewed to separate out the effects of coordination from the effects of legal changes, the retirement of older, resistant members of many agencies and organizations, and the general passage of time. Most people attributed significant impact to the legal changes that made mandatory a lot of the "good practice" things that RWA and other advocates around the state had been trying to establish. RWA's education efforts, and especially the training work of RWA and others (e.g., required judicial training) with police, probation, and judges, appears to have changed the attitudes of these actors "drastically" (in the words of several informants). People felt there was less ignorance of the issue in the community as a whole, and that women in the community knew a lot more about the resources and options available to them than had been the case before RWA began its extensive education and prevention efforts.

    Efforts currently underway which will become major future endeavors include more extensive involvement of business leaders and clergy in combating domestic violence (both by changing attitudes and by making more supports and services available). The general opinion is that it is much easier for individual women to get appropriate action on a domestic violence case than would have been possible even ten years ago. However, all agree also that the overall level of domestic violence in the community has not been affected, and that there are still no predictably effective treatment options that will change battering men into men who do not need to use physical, emotional, or verbal abuse.