Response to Domestic Violence in the Quincy, Massachusetts, District Court, 1995-1997

The Quincy, Massachusetts, District Court initiated an
 aggressive, pro-intervention strategy for dealing with domestic
 violence cases in 1986. This study was funded to examine the workings
 of this court and its impact on the lives of victims. The four main
 goals of the research were: (1) to describe the workings of the
 primary components of this model jurisdiction in its response to
 domestic violence, specifically (a) what the police actually did when
 called to a domestic violence incident, (b) decisions made by the
 prosecutor's office and the court in their handling of these
 incidents, (c) how many victims talked to a victim advocate, and (d)
 how many offenders received batterer treatment and/or were
 incarcerated, (2) to describe the types of incidents, victims, and
 offenders seen in a full enforcement jurisdiction to determine if the
 types of cases coming to attention in such a setting looked similar to
 cases reported in studies from other jurisdictions, (3) to interview
 victims to hear directly about their experiences with a model court,
 and (4) to examine how well this model jurisdiction worked in
 preventing revictimization. Data used in this study were based on
 domestic violence cases that resulted in an arrest and arraignment
 before the Quincy District Court (QDC) during a seven-month study
 period. Six types of data were collected for this study: (1) The
 offender's criminal history prior to the study and for one year
 subsequent to the study incident were provided by the QDC's Department
 of Probation from the Massachusetts Criminal Records System Board. (2)
 Civil restraining order data were provided by the Department of
 Probation from a statewide registry of civil restraining orders. (3)
 Data on prosecutorial charges for up to three domestic
 violence-related charges were provided by the Department of
 Probation. (4) Data on defendants who attended batterer treatment
 programs were provided by directors of two such programs that served
 the QDC. (5) Police incident reports from the seven departments served
 by the QDC were used to measure the officer's perspective and actions
 taken relating to each incident, what the call for service involved,
 characteristics of the incident, socio-demographics of the
 participants, their narrative descriptions of the incident, and their
 stated response. (6) Interviews with victims were conducted one year
 after the occurrence of the study incident. Variables from
 administrative records include date and location of incident, number
 of suspects, age and race of victims and offenders, use of weapons,
 injuries, witnesses, whether there was an existing restraining order
 and its characteristics, charges filed by police, number and gender of
 police officers responding to the incident, victim's state at the time
 of the incident, offender's criminal history, and whether the offender
 participated in batterer treatment. The victim survey collected data
 on the victim's education and employment status, current living
 arrangement, relationship with offender, how the victim responded to
 the incident, how afraid the victim was, victim's opinions of police
 and the prosecutor, victim's sense of control, satisfaction with the
 court, victim's past violent relationships and child sexual abuse,
 victim's opinions on what the criminal justice system could do to stop
abuse, and whether the victim obtained a restraining order.

Tags: case-processing, court-cases, courts, domestic-violence, imprisonment, offenders, police-response, treatment-programs, victims
Organization: Department of Justice