The Criminalization of Domestic Violence: Promises and Limits.
Series: NIJ Research Report
Published: January 1996
58 pages
134,576 bytes
The Criminalization of Domestic Violence: Promises
and Limits
by Jeffrey Fagan
Presentation at the 1995 conference
on criminal justice research and evaluation
Jeffrey Fagan, Ph.D., is visiting professor in the
School of Public Health at Columbia University.
This paper is an adaptation of the presentation 
Dr. Fagan made on July 10, 1995, at "What To Do 
About Crime," the annual conference on research and 
evaluation sponsored by the National Institute of 
Justice, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the 
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 
Prevention, and held in Washington, D.C.
-----------------------------------------------
Abstract
During the past 30 years, the criminalization of
domestic violence has developed along three
parallel but generally separate tracks: criminal
punishment and deterrence of batterers, batterer
treatment, and restraining orders designed to
protect victims through the threat of civil or
criminal legal sanctions. Each of these policy
tracks has been informed, advanced, and supported
by advocacy groups for battered women. Victim
advocacy groups have worked vigorously for
legislative and policy change, monitored and
corrected the implementation of law and policy, and
intensively supported expanded resources for victim
services. Several jurisdictions have attempted to
integrate these policies in systemwide approaches
within the justice system.
Thus far, however, research and evaluation on
arrest and prosecution, civil or criminal
protection orders, batterer treatment, and
community interventions have generated weak or
inconsistent evidence of deterrent effects on
either repeat victimization or repeat offending.
For every study that shows promising results, one
or more show either no effect or even negative
results that increase the risks to victims. 
Several factors have influenced the current state
of policy and practice. Domestic violence and
partner assault are complex behaviors. The range of
sanctions for offenders has been limited, their
deterrent effects mitigated by social and
contextual factors, and their implementation
constrained by practical operational contingencies.
The social organization of courts and local legal
cultures tend to devalue domestic violence cases.
Perhaps most important, theories of violence have
not been integrated with theories of domestic
violence, and research and evaluation designs thus
far have been weak. 
A program of research and development is
recommended to advance the current state of
knowledge on the effects of legal sanctions for
partner violence. Theory is essential to this
effort. Testable ideas should be identified from
theoretical advances, formative evaluations of
innovative practices, and qualitative studies of
battering careers. A stable and sufficient resource
stream will be required to support developmental,
evaluation, and research efforts. 
Overview
Beginning in the 1970's, social policy toward
female victims of domestic assaults has focused on
improving legal responses to protect women and
punish offenders. The primary focus has been the
mobilization of societal institutions to increase
the range of formal and informal controls at their
disposal. During this time, social control through
law dominated theories on how best to reduce
domestic violence, focusing on the effects of
increasing the risks and punishment costs of
violence toward intimate partners. Rooted in
assumptions of specific deterrence, social control
in this context emphasized the application of legal
sanctions through arrest and prosecution of
assailants or the threat of legal sanctions through
civil legal remedies that carried criminal
penalties if violated. Legal action was designed to
exact a retributive cost, and to the extent that
further violence was not evident, the suppression
of violence was attributed to the intrinsic
deterrent effects of legal sanctions (Dutton, 1995;
Sherman, 1992a; Fagan and Browne, 1994).
At the same time, reforms in civil legal protection
also have expanded nationwide (Grau et al., 1984;
Harrell, Smith, and Newmark, 1993). Until the legal
reforms of the late 1970's, a woman could not
obtain a restraining order against a violent
husband unless she was willing to file for divorce
at the same time (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,
1982). When protective or restraining orders were
available, their enforcement was weak, the
penalties for violations were minor, and they were
not available on an emergency basis. Reforms in
protective and restraining order legislation
enabled emergency, ex parte relief that included
not only no contact provisions but also economic
and other tangible reliefs for battered women.
These reliefs, and the application of criminal laws
as well, were extended to women in unmarried
cohabiting couples and to divorced or separated
women.1
These reforms held great promise. The
"criminalization" of domestic violence cases
beginning in the 1970's sought to increase the
certainty and severity of legal responses, thereby
correcting historical, legal, and moral disparities
in the legal protections afforded to battered women
(Zorza, 1992). For many years, societal responses
to domestic violence excluded legal intervention.
Advocates for battered women claimed that male
batterers were rarely arrested, prosecuted, or
sentenced as severely as other violent offenders.
Research showed that these claims were accurate.
Police often exercised discretion in avoiding
arrest in responding to domestic violence incidents
where there was probable cause (Black and Reiss,
1967). In many departments, policies for domestic
"disputes" actively discouraged arrest, focusing
instead on alternative responses such as family
crisis intervention or counseling for batterers
with alcohol abuse problems (Bard and Zacker,
1971). Prosecutors failed to actively pursue cases
where victims and offenders had intimate
relationships, fearing that women might drop
charges (Parnas, 1967). Sentences often were less
serious for males convicted of domestic violence.
For example, Davis and Smith (1982) showed that the
presence of a victim/offender relationship led to
less serious case assessments in prosecutorial
screening, even after controlling for victim injury
and weapon use. The result of these processes was a
higher dismissal rate for domestic cases at the
prosecution stage compared to other violence cases,
and less serious sentences.
These concerns led to a wide variety of reforms in
law and criminal justice, aimed primarily at
increasing the likelihood that sanctions would be
forthcoming in domestic violence cases. They ranged
from the elimination of organizational,
eligibility, and systemic complications that
limited access to criminal legal remedies for
battered women; to law changes mandating arrest for
domestic violence; to mandatory treatment and
supervision of men convicted of assaults against
female intimate partners; to the reorganization of
court structures to create special forums for the
adjudication of these cases (Hilton, 1993). 
Resources, both political and fiscal, were
mobilized to improve civil and criminal legal
responses through training, technical assistance,
and dissemination of innovations and reforms.
Such efforts were undertaken with both symbolic and
substantive goals. Certainly, the passage of
legislative mandates for criminal sanctions
symbolizes public contempt for the actions of
persons who are violent toward adult partners. The
mobilization of resources and the passage of
(strong) laws signaled societal rejection of
domestic violence and communicated important
cultural messages rejecting norms supporting
battering. Such responses are particularly
appropriate when domestic violence is defined as a
"cultural" problem. The symbolic component of
criminalization policies also may be intended as a
general deterrent, by conveying the message that
legal consequences are likely and severe if a man
assaults his wife. The substantive goals were to
implement both specific and general deterrent
threats to reduce the incidence of domestic
violence. Here, however, the goals were less clear.
Whether criminalization was designed for
retributive, incapacitative, or other social
control purposes or whether it was designed to
assist victims or target batterers for criminal
punishment was not clear in legislation and policy.
These reforms did not question the deterrence
underpinnings of legal interventions--that
increases in the certainty and severity of criminal
(and also civil) legal sanctions would reduce
domestic violence was assumed. Policy goals
addressed the legal and systemic problems that
stood in the way of the full application of the law
for domestic violence. With few exceptions,
research and evaluation on legal reforms and
innovations focused on their operational goals and
on their outcomes but almost never on their
effects.2 The narrow range of studies on the
deterrent effects of legal sanctions for domestic
violence stands in contrast with the extensive
efforts of activists, victim advocates, and
criminal justice practitioners to mobilize law and
shape policy to stop domestic violence.3
This paper presents a review of the promises and
limitations of the criminalization efforts in
domestic violence. The reforms of the past 20 years
have not been adequately evaluated with respect to
their deterrence goals, despite the
institutionalization of law and policy to
criminalize domestic violence. With the exception
of the influential Minneapolis Domestic Violence
Experiment (Sherman and Berk, 1984a, 1984b),
criminalization policies have proliferated without
consideration of the empirical evidence of their
effectiveness or their unintended consequences.
Only one experiment on prosecution has been
completed (Ford, 1993), yet policies to expand
prosecutorial involvement proliferated quickly even
in the absence of consistent deterrent effects. In
fact, evaluations of prior efforts have not been
influential in shaping the direction and content of
criminal justice reform in general. In addition,
basic research on interpersonal violence, domestic
violence, and the effectiveness of legal sanctions
also has been segregated from the development and
evaluation of criminalization reform efforts.
This paper addresses these concerns. It begins with
a brief history of the development of modern legal
reforms in domestic violence and examines their
theoretical underpinnings. Next, it reviews the
empirical evidence on the deterrent effects of
criminal and civil legal sanctions for domestic
violence. Then, the unique contexts of domestic
violence are examined to identify factors that
influence the deterrent effects of criminal justice
reforms. These include both exogenous influences in
communities and legal institutions and endogenous
factors unique to the context of domestic violence.
The paper concludes with an agenda for building an
empirical base for knowledge and policy to control
domestic violence.
Modern Policies and Their Effectiveness
Historical and Modern Origins of Legal
Interventions
Legal interventions in family violence have both
modern and historical origins. Historically, female
victims of domestic violence have sought help and
protection from a variety of institutions,
including family, church, and community. However,
the involvement of legal institutions in domestic
violence has been inconsistent throughout U.S.
history. The historical origins of laws and legal
interventions for child protection, for example,
have roots in both the Puritan and Progressive
Eras. Early laws concerning violence against wives
and children were symbolic affirmations of Biblical
principles demarking the line between legitimate
physical force and "beating." However, Pleck (1989)
reported that only 12 cases of domestic violence
were prosecuted in the Plymouth Colony between 1633
and 1802.
Legal interest and mobilization have occurred
cyclically since that time, coinciding with State
interests in enforcement of laws concerning "public
morality" or increased fear of crime generally
(Pleck, 1989). In 1871, Alabama became the first
State to rescind a husband's right to beat his
wife, noting that the "wife had the right to the
same protection of the law that the husband can
invoke for himself..." (Fulgham v. State, 46 Ala.
146-147). However, there were few prosecutions
under these or any other State laws for violence
toward wives, and the doctrine of family privacy
continued to prevail over these largely symbolic
statutes. Over the next century, attention from the
police and the courts to violence against women has
peaked at different times, influenced in part by
broader concerns with the status of women and the
legal control of social problems (Dobash and
Dobash, 1979; Pleck, 1989; Gordon, 1988).
The 1960's. In the 1960's, society began paying
attention to violence within families. What
historically was a private family matter became an
appropriate target for State intervention. Violence
toward wives and intimate partners was raised as a
social problem within the context of violence
against women--the result of the work of feminist
activists, rape crisis counselors, clinical
researchers working with women, and the earliest
workers in battered women's shelters. Victims of
domestic violence presented themselves to feminist
grassroots organizations via rape crisis programs
and hotlines as well as to newly created
victim-assistance programs. The newly created
victim-witness programs in the 1970's became
magnets within the criminal justice system for
victims of intimate or domestic violence; battered
women quickly became a major portion of their
workload. The Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration of the U.S. Department of Justice
took the lead in promoting a broader response,
funding 23 programs between 1976 and 1981 for
services including shelters, special prosecution
units, treatment programs for wife beaters,
mediation units, and civil legal interventions
(Fagan, Friedman, Wexler, and Lewis, 1984). The
publication of nationwide epidemiological data on
violence within adult couples (Straus et al., 1980;
Gaguin, 1977-78) reinforced for the general public
the scale of domestic violence and prompted further
activism.
Unlike the rush to criminalize child abuse, legal
institutions responded with ambivalence. In the
early stages of reform, concerns about domestic
violence were limited to married couples. It was
identified as a recurring criminal justice problem,
especially for the police (Bard and Zacker, 1971).
Criticism of the inadequacy of police responses led
to programs and training to improve police
responses. However, these efforts were designed to
do everything possible to avoid formal legal
processing of men who beat their wives or partners.
Police officers were trained in crisis intervention
to look for comorbidity with drunkenness, to
mediate on the scene to defuse the immediate
crisis, and to make appropriate referrals for
longer term interventions (Bard, 1970). They were
trained to do anything except arrest violent
husbands. For many years, police culture portrayed
domestic violence as the most potentially dangerous
situation for police officers, with elevated risks
of serious injury or death; subsequent data proved
this false (Garner and Clemmer, 1986). If not
dangerous, spouse abuse was viewed by the police
and the courts as an intractable interpersonal
conflict unsuited for police attention and
inappropriate for prosecution and substantive
punishment (Parnas, 1967). In fact, many police
departments had "hands off" policies prior to the
1970's, and police training manuals actually
specified that arrest was to be avoided whenever
possible in responding to domestic disputes (IACP,
1967).
The 1970's. Other legal barriers prevented women
from obtaining civil legal remedies as well. Until
the legal reforms of the late 1970's, women could
not obtain a restraining order against a violent
husband unless they were willing to file for
divorce at the same time (U.S. Commission on Civil
Rights, 1982). When protective orders were
available, enforcement was weak, penalties for
violations were minor, and use in emergencies was
not possible.
The convergence of the interests of feminists,
victim advocates, and some conservative politicians
interested in expanding the use of the law to
enforce "public morality" led to a series of
reforms beginning in the late 1970's to strengthen
criminal justice responses to domestic violence.
Political pressure by feminists sought to frame
solutions to domestic violence in a legal context
(Lerman, 1981; Zorza, 1992).
The 1980's. By 1980, 47 States had passed domestic
violence legislation mandating changes in
protection orders, enabling warrantless arrest for
misdemeanor assaults, and recognizing a history of
abuse and threat as part of a legal defense for
battered women who killed their abusive husbands.4
Police departments changed their procedures not
only in response to these pressures but also
pursuant to successful litigation by women against
police departments for their failure to enforce
criminal laws and to protect them from violent
partners. (See, for example, Scott v. Hart U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of
California, C76-2395; Bruno v. Codd 47 N.Y. 2d 582,
393 N.E. 2d 976, 419 N.Y.S. 2d 901 [1979]; and
Thurman v. City of Torrington 595 F. Supp. 1521
[1984].)
The array of statutory, procedural, and
organizational reforms covered nearly every aspect
of the legal system. Police departments adopted
proarrest or mandatory arrest policies. Domestic
violence units were formed in prosecutor's offices,
and treatment programs for abusive husbands were
launched in probation departments and among
community-based groups. Reforms in protective and
restraining order legislation enabled emergency, ex
parte relief that included not only no-contact
provisions but also economic and other tangible
reliefs for battered women (Grau, Fagan, and
Wexler, 1984). These reliefs, and the application
of criminal laws as well, were extended to women in
unmarried, cohabitating couples and to divorced and
separated women. A small number of jurisdictions
developed coordinated, systemic responses that
brought to bear the full range of social controls
and victim supports for battered women.
Institutionalization
Looking back over 30 years, legal reforms in
domestic violence have developed along three
parallel but generally separate tracks: criminal
punishment and deterrence of batterers, batterer
treatment, and restraining orders in the civil
court designed to protect victims through the
threat of civil or criminal legal sanctions. The
promise of criminalization was straightforward: the
symbolism of public statements valuing the safety
of battered women and condemning batterers,
substantive expanded social control of wife
beaters, and the political mobilization of legal
resources and institutions to protect victims. 
Additional reforms included recognition of violence
risks to cohabitants and broad interpretation of
laws on domestic violence to include gay and
lesbian couples. Other efforts have been designed
to increase funding for battered women. Surcharges
on marriage licenses, for example, created a
funding stream for services to battered women.
Each of these policy tracks has been informed,
advanced, and supported by advocacy groups for
battered women. These advocacy groups have worked
aggressively for legislative and policy change,
monitored and corrected the implementation of law
and policy, and lobbied intensively for funding for
victim services. Collaboration with the growing
community of victim services agencies in the 1970's
created powerful alliances that moved for
procedural reforms in the criminal justice
responses to domestic violence.
By 1990, many States had developed sweeping and
strong legislation that corrected historical wrongs
such as warrantless arrests in misdemeanor cases or
requiring women to file for divorce before
receiving protective orders (Zorza, 1992). These
reforms also made accessible a wide range of
criminal and civil remedies that recognized the
reality of domestic violence and the complexity of
its criminalization (Lerman, 1992). These efforts
were institutionalized in law and policy with
significant changes achieved in statutes, the
organization of investigative and prosecutorial
agencies, and the allocation of court services and
resources.
Legal Sanctions and Domestic Violence
Two types of reforms have characterized criminal
justice responses to family violence. One set of
reforms was aimed at procedures and jurisprudential
issues. These reforms attempted to increase and
simplify the participation of battered women in the
criminal justice process. Many sought to rectify
procedural barriers, whereas others relaxed
evidentiary standards for initiating criminal
prosecution. Underlying these reforms was the
theory that family violence could be stopped
through legal sanctions and that legal sanctions
were effective in reducing violence. Another set of
reforms was aimed at specific measures to stop the
violence. Although subsuming many of the procedural
reforms, these reforms embodied explicit measures
to legally sanction offenders.
These interventions to control violence against
adult intimate partners reflect several different
policy goals and separate but parallel tracks:
criminal punishment and deterrence of batterers,
batterer treatment, and protective interventions
designed to insure victims' safety and empowerment.
Because of the interdependency of legal
institutions in pursuing these policy goals, the
discussion of legal interventions is not organized
according to their separate responsibilities but on
the basis of policy goals they pursue with respect
to reducing violence toward intimates.
Criminal Legal Sanctions
Minneapolis research on arrest as a deterrent. 
Efforts to deter domestic violence have focused
primarily on the police. However, this burden may
have unfairly fallen on the police. Although arrest
may have independent effects in reducing the risks
of further violence, sanctions ultimately result
from the actions of prosecutorial and judicial
actors who mete out criminal penalties. 
Nevertheless, a rich criminological literature
acknowledges the general and specific deterrent
effects of police actions independent of
substantive punishments.
Police actions in domestic violence have been
widely evaluated; this also has been the arena of
legal interventions where experimental designs have
been used most often. Although the results have
been the strongest overall, they have also been
equivocal. The Minneapolis Domestic Violence
Experiment is perhaps the most widely cited and
influential criminal justice experiment in recent
criminological and policy literature. The
Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Sherman
and Berk, 1984a, 1984b) was a critical event in
changing public and scholarly perceptions of
domestic violence from a "family problem" amenable
to mediation and other informal, nonlegal
interventions (Bard and Zacker, 1971) to a law
violation requiring a formal criminal justice
sanction.
In that experiment, street-level police officers'
selections of the most appropriate response to
misdemeanor domestic violence were determined by an
experimental design, i. e., random assignment to
one of three treatments: (1) arresting the suspect,
(2) ordering one of the parties out of the
residence, and (3) advising the couple. Using
victim interviews and official records of
subsequent police contact, Sherman and Berk
(1984a:267) reported that the prevalence of
subsequent offending--assault, attempted assault,
and property damage--was reduced by nearly 50
percent when the suspect was arrested. On the basis
of the results from what they emphasized was the
"first scientifically controlled test of the effect
of arrest on any crime," Sherman and Berk (1984b)
concluded that:
(T)hese findings, standing alone as the result of
one experiment, do not necessarily imply that all
suspected assailants in domestic violence incidents
should be arrested. Other experiments in other
settings are needed to learn more. But the
preponderance of evidence in the Minneapolis study
strongly suggests that the police should use arrest
in most domestic violence cases (1984b:1).
In the decade since the preliminary results were
announced in the "Science" section of the New York
Times (Boffey, 1983, p. L1), the study's findings
were reported in over 300 newspapers in the United
States, broadcast on three major television
networks in prime-time news programs or
documentaries, and featured in numerous nationally
syndicated columns and editorials (Sherman and
Cohn, 1989). The Attorney General's Task Force on
Family Violence endorsed the study's findings and
recommended that State and local agencies adopt a
proarrest policy toward domestic violence (U.S.
Attorney General, 1984). Following the attention
given to this study's results, a dramatic change in
formal policy consistent with the study's proarrest
findings has been reported by police departments in
both large and small U.S. cities (Sherman and Cohn,
1989).
The Minneapolis experiment was designed, funded,
and implemented as a test of specific deterrence
theory (Sherman, 1980) and was a direct response to
the call for such tests by the National Academy of
Sciences (Blumstein et al., 1978). The Minneapolis
experiment is atypical for its innovative
experimental design, test of theory, extensive
public visibility, focus on a controversial policy
issue, and apparent effect on public policy. This
experiment is atypical for another reason: It was
replicated.
Replications of the Minneapolis experiment. The
initial reports of deterrent effects in the
Minneapolis experiment were tempered by later
criticisms of its designs and claims of the
overreach of its conclusions given the limitations
in the design (Binder and Meeker, 1992).
Replications of the Minneapolis experiment in five
jurisdictions failed to produce consistent results.
Garner, Fagan, and Maxwell (1995) showed
inconsistency in the directions, effect sizes, and
statistical power in experiments based on both
official arrests and victim interviews over a
6-month followup period. Thus, where there was once
one experiment with two consistent findings
(prevalence and time to failure), there are now
seven similar experiments in which the findings on
the specific deterrent effect of arrest on the
prevalence of reoffending--the central finding of
the Minneapolis experiment--differ internally by
data source and externally by site.
The replications are noteworthy also because of two
important corollary findings. First, Sherman et al.
(1992a) and Berk et al. (1992) in multisite
analyses and Pate and Hamilton (1992) in a
single-site analysis reported on the interaction of
arrest with two measures of "stake-in-conformity"
(Toby, 1957), the marital and employment status of
the suspect. This line of analysis suggests that
arrest increases violence for unmarried and also
unemployed suspects and deters it for married and
employed suspects. Sherman et al.'s (1992a:687)
evaluation of the published findings from Colorado
Springs, Dade County, Milwaukee, and Omaha is that:
All four experiments that have examined this
hypothesis report an interaction with unemployment
consistent with the stake-in-conformity hypothesis,
at least in the official data.
The interaction effects suggest the importance of
subgroup differences in the specific deterrent
effects of arrest. However, because the cases in
each of the experiments disproportionately came
from neighborhoods with concentrations of the
common risk factors for violence--high
unemployment, poverty, and divorce rates--deterrent
effects may have been confounded with broader
contextual effects. The analysis of these
hierarchically structured processes requires
methods to disentangle social structural factors
from the individual factors that contribute to
violence generally and that may undermine the
deterrent effects of legal sanctions. The
availability of informal social controls--the
potential for job or relationship loss or for
social stigmatization from neighbors or relatives--
may also undermine the effectiveness of legal
controls. In fact, the absence of a systematic
deterrent effect across sites in the arrest
experiments and evidence of the escalation of
violence among men who were unemployed and
unmarried led Sherman (1992a, 1992b) to conclude
that mandatory and proarrest policies were
inadvisable.
Second, one of the experiments included an
"offender-absent" group in which arrests were not
made, but warrants were issued for the absent
batterers (Dunford, 1990b). The deterrent effects
of police intervention were clearer and more
consistent across different outcome measures in
this experiment than in any of the other
conditions. The continuing threat of legal
sanctions evidently has a stronger deterrent effect
than the actual imposition of a sanction through
the arrest process. This is a theme discussed later
in terms of prosecution programs. Unfortunately,
the Omaha offender-absent experiment was not
replicated elsewhere in the Spouse Assault
Replication Program (SARP) cohort.
However, conclusions about the ineffectiveness of
deterrence based on the police experiments may in
fact be inaccurate, because the actual
implementation of deterrence was minimal in these
experiments. Most offenders were not prosecuted
once arrested. Legal sanctions were limited to
booking for most of those arrested. Few were
handcuffed, most spent only a few hours in custody,
and only a small number were jailed overnight
(Sherman, 1992a). Only misdemeanor cases were
included in the experiment, a selection bias that
reduces the generalizability of the experiments.
Only in the Omaha offender-absent experiment-- the
experiment with consistent evidence of deterrence--
were felony cases included. Accordingly, the
limitations of the SARP experiments led Garner et
al. (1995) to conclude that the effects of arrests
remain unknown.
Prosecution Experiments 
The low rate of prosecution in domestic violence
cases undermines deterrence by neutralizing the
actions of the police and reducing the likelihood
of legal sanctions following arrest. Although some
level of sanction may result from arrest,
deterrence ultimately results from the actions of
prosecutorial and judicial actors whose actions
lead to substantive punishment.5 Historically, like
the police, prosecutors were accused of disinterest
in family violence cases, failing to file cases
presented by the police or discouraging willing
victims from pursuing criminal complaints. Whether
discouraged by the evidentiary problems in these
cases, the ambivalence and lack of cooperation from
victims to press forward with prosecution,
patriarchal notions about family privacy and male
prerogatives, or signals from a disinterested
judiciary who were unwilling to respond to
prosecution with meaningful sanctions, prosecutors
had little incentive to follow through with
vigorous presentation of domestic violence cases
(Elliott, 1989; Ford, 1993).
In many communities, the rate of prosecution
remains extremely low, less than 10 percent for
misdemeanor cases (Ford, 1993; Schmidt and Steury,
1989). Fagan (1989) found that fewer than 5 percent
of 270 cases involving women with injuries were
criminally prosecuted. Dutton (1995) reported that
conviction and sentencing are even rarer.
Special prosecution units. The advent of special
prosecution units created an atmosphere and
organizational context in prosecutors' offices in
which domestic violence cases had high status.
These units created incentives for vigorous
prosecution without competing with other units for
scarce trial or investigative resources with other
high-visibility cases (Forst and Hernon, 1985).
These units also created an atmosphere in which
prosecutorial screening could include a wider range
of factors than simply the evidentiary strength of
the case or the severity of the victim's injuries.
Thus, for example, prosecutors can entertain
criteria that may reflect the likelihood of future
(severe) abuse, such as the history of violence in
the relationship or the past frequency of victim
injuries. Although such factors may be less
concerned with the likelihood of obtaining a
conviction, sorting cases in this way provides for
the allocation of legal sanctions based on the
priority of victim protection rather than the
typical pragmatic case-sorting factors.
The likelihood of prosecution also reflects the
interaction of prosecutorial case-screening
decisions with victim choices. Some research
suggests, however, that victims may have wider
interests in mind than legal sanctions when filing
for prosecution. For example, Ford (1991) suggests
that victims' goals are instrumental: obtaining
money or property, coercing partners to obtain
counseling, or protecting themselves or their
children. Thus, their evaluations of prosecution
may involve a more complex determination about how
prosecution, in combination with other factors,
will increase their safety and well-being. To avoid
these complications, some prosecutors have adopted
no-drop policies that avoided the last-minute
withdrawal of charges that frustrated police and
judges. However, critics of no-drop policies
suggest that they provide further disincentives for
women to interact with the legal system to create a
"context of deterrence" within the relationship,
based on the possible conflict between victims' and
prosecutors' goals or interests, as well as
victims' perceived costs of prosecution vis-a-vis
their actual goals. Thus, victims' efforts to end
the violence may involve strategies in which
choices are constrained by both the context of
legal institutions and the contexts of their
relationships.
Despite the development of special prosecution
units, few studies have documented the effects of
prosecution on the control or recurrence of spouse
or partner assault. Most studies of prosecution of
partner violence have focused on prosecutorial
decisionmaking regarding the sorting and selecting
of cases for prosecution (e.g., Schmidt and Steury,
1989). Fagan (1989) found subgroup differences
similar to those reported by Sherman et al. (1991)
for arrests. Men with prior arrest records or who
had lengthy histories of severe violence toward
their partners were more likely to reoffend if
prosecuted compared with men not prosecuted. Again,
evidence of iatrogenic or counterdeterrent effects
raises serious questions not only about the
deterrent effects of legal sanctions but also about
the interactions of violent men with legal
institutions that may produce this effect. 
Indianapolis experiment. The most comprehensive
prosecution study has been the Indianapolis
Domestic Violence Prosecution Experiment (Ford,
1991, 1993). There was no significant protective
effect from prosecution in the experiment, but
there was a significant reduction in "severe"
violence when victim-initiated prosecutorial
actions were compared with the traditional
summons-and-prosecution procedure (Ford, 1993). The
results suggest small marginal gains in deterrence
from the use or threat of prosecution, gains that
are mitigated by small effect sizes coupled with
small sample sizes.6
These studies raise the question of victim
empowerment and the hypothesis that the threat of
prosecution, placed in the hands of the victim to
use in her efforts to end her partner's violence,
may have deterrent effects. Several jurisdictions
have encouraged the use of warrants by victims in
cases in which arrests were not made. The "Sword of
Damocles" model of deterrence may invoke deterrence
processes through the elimination of the mediating
effects of legal actors and the allocation of legal
power to the woman-victim (Dunford, 1990; Ford,
1993). When coupled with informal sources of social
control, the threat of prosecution may have a
greater deterrent effect compared with the more
typical deterrence model in which threats are
contingent on the dynamics and processes of legal
institutions. This indirect deterrent effect is an
important avenue for future research.
Batterer Treatment
Treatment interventions for batterers vary in
several respects. Most are court-mandated programs,
some are self-help, and others operate under the
aegis of social service or private agencies. Their
underlying assumptions about the causal and
restraining mechanisms for intimate violence vary.
Their operational characteristics vary as well,
including the duration and frequency of contacts
and the objectives of treatment. Most address the
need for anger control or dissipation techniques
and recognize the relationship of power and control
to the use of violence. Most do not allow for
"relapse" in the way that clinical trials do in
some substance abuse treatment or pharmacological
research. They integrate victim safety with the
offender's behavioral changes as central components
of program development.
There are several typologies of batterer treatment
programs. Edelson and Syers (1990) distinguish
programs into three categories: self-help programs
that emphasize anger management strategies and
personal responsibility, educational programs that
teach through passive learning about the sources of
violence and the techniques of anger control, and
some combination of the two methods. Harrell (1991)
studied programs in Baltimore County that embraced
three types of underlying assumptions about causal
and cessation processes: feminist theories about
power relations, social casework models that
emphasize reduction of external stressors and
interpersonal dynamics, and cognitive-behavioral
models that stress anger management. The latter
models also vary in their attention to
psychopathological variables versus cognitive
deficits in anger control.
What is not in evidence in these programs is
recognition of different types of batterers or
efforts to match batterer profiles to specific
treatment types (Saunders and Azar, 1989). However,
there may be considerable need to address these
concerns of responsivity (Andrews et al., 1990).
For example, violence toward intimates is more
intractable to treatment interventions for men with
longer and more serious histories of violence
toward intimates, longer criminal records of
violence toward strangers, and traumatic violence
exposure as children (Fagan et al., 1984; Hamberger
and Hastings, 1993).
Experimental evidence. There is very little
nonexperimental or quasi-experimental evidence to
evaluate the effectiveness of batterer
interventions. For example, Hamberger and Hastings
(1993) reviewed 19 studies published in the 1980's.
Only one (Dutton, 1995) used an untreated control
group and reported sizeable differences in
recidivism between treated and untreated batterers.
In this study, only 4 percent of offenders reported
subsequent violence to the police, whereas 16
percent of victims reported subsequent violence.
Based on police reports during a followup period of
6 months to 3 years, the recidivism rate was 40
percent. Harrell (1991) compared outcomes across
treatment programs and reported no differences,
with recidivism rates of over 60 percent.
However, most studies are not useful for assessing
the effects of batterer treatment because they have
no comparison group. The few that do have such
groups rely on comparisons of completers with
noncompleters, a selection bias that presents
serious obstacles to the assessment of treatment
effectiveness. Followup times varied as well, from
1 month to 3 years. Analyses that examine the
hazards of renewed violence controlling for
differential time periods were not evident in any
of the studies. Measurement varied as well, ranging
from self- and police reports of subsequent
violence to outcome measures related to the
treatment intervention but not the violence. For
example, Hawkins and Beauvais (1985, cited in
Edelson and Tolman [1993]) reported only on
pre-post differences in Symptom Check List (SCL)-90
scores but did not report on subsequent violence.7
Sample sizes in these studies ranged from 9 to 170,
indicating a range of statistical power estimates
and strength of results. Among the treated groups,
cessation rates varied from 46 percent to 91
percent, a range that more likely reflects the
diversity in intervention methods and research
designs than the true range of effects in
treatments. In a similar review, Davis (1995,
personal communication) found that 6 of 27 studies
of batterer treatment used quasi-experimental
designs of varying construction.
Experimental designs using control groups of men
who were under other forms of legal supervision
were not evident in the literature. But such
designs are of obvious importance, both to assess
treatment effects substantively and to assess the
marginal effects of treatment compared with other
social or legal interventions. Current research by
Robert Davis and colleagues at the New York City
Victim Services Agency involves randomized trial of
batterer treatment that addresses many of the
limitations of the previous studies. Although
recidivism rates in batterer treatment are similar
to recidivism rates for criminal cases in general,
the absence of systematic controls makes it
difficult to conclude that there are marginal gains
from treatment compared with either incarceration
or untreated probation supervision.
Systemic Responses: The Domestic Violence Court
Recent innovations have focused on the creation of
specialized courts to process domestic violence
cases and intensive systemic reforms designed to
align the components of the civil and criminal
legal systems to ensure consistent application of
sanctions and reliefs in cases involving domestic
violence. Systemic programs, such as the
comprehensive systems of coordination among legal
and community-based programs in Duluth, Minnesota,
and San Francisco, embed legal sanctions in a dense
web of social control that reinforces the messages
of treatment and the threats of criminal
punishment. However, these programs are difficult
to evaluate. Establishing comparison conditions
internally or across communities is difficult,
making it tough to sort out the effects of
prosecution or advocacy from the effects of
treatment. This makes it hard to answer the
question of whether or how legal sanctions create a
deterrent effect, and again the question of the
deterrent effects of legal sanctions is unanswered.
Even within these programs, recidivism rates among
treated batterers are comparable to rates for
protective order and arrest studies: Recidivism in
Duluth ranged from 40 percent (Shepard, 1992; cited
in Edelson and Tolman, 1993) to over half (Edelson
and Syers, 1990) and were invariant over short and
long followup periods (Hamberger and Hastings,
1993). Failures reflect the familiar correlates of
lengthy prior record and abuse history in the
batterer's family of origin (Fagan et al., 1983;
Harrell, 1991).
The creation of specialized courts for family
violence cases responds to the devaluation of these
cases in mainstream courts. The "stream of cases"
argument suggests that cases are prioritized for
processing and allocation of punishment resources
according to their relative severity compared with
other cases in the same context (Emerson, 1983;
Jacob, 1983). This framework suggests that domestic
violence cases may be assigned a lower priority for
prosecution and punishment when placed alongside
other violence cases involving strangers. These
courts provide substantive dispositions, often
batterer treatment programs coupled with probation
supervision, that create incentives for prosecutors
to complete prosecution. The advantages of
specialized prosecution units apply to specialized
courts as well. Cases are evaluated not in
comparison with external priorities but in the
narrow light of other similarly structured cases.
Dade County Domestic Violence Court. The Dade
County, Florida, Domestic Violence Court (DCDVC)
illustrates these ideas. DCDVC is a criminal court
with a civil component designed by a team of
representatives from every segment of the criminal
justice system to serve as a coordinated, systemic
response to the treatment of domestic violence
cases in the courts.  DCDVC, which commenced in
November 1992, represents an innovative,
interdisciplinary, and integrated systemwide
approach of a team of criminal justice system
professionals to the treatment of domestic violence
misdemeanor cases, civil protection orders, and
violation of civil protection order cases.
Currently, only misdemeanor cases are processed in
the court.
The members of the court, led by the judiciary,
work together as a team toward a shared goal of
reducing family violence. From arrest to completion
of sentence, only judges trained in family violence
handle the cases in a court that recognizes the
necessity of expanding traditional roles and limits
in an effort to create court reform in a system
that has proven in the past to be ineffective and
unresponsive. The founders of DCDVC believe that
the combination of intensive victim services,
treatment for batterers, and an active judicial
role in the social contexts of the community can
improve the control of misdemeanor domestic
violence and avoid its escalation to more serious
violence and injuries. The court is based on the
following principles:
o  The administration of therapeutic jurisprudence
creates an expansion of the traditional role of the
criminal justice system, which historically has
been concerned with punishment but has failed to
consider the role of treatment in domestic violence
cases. Defendants are required to successfully
complete a batterer's treatment program based on
the Duluth model (Edelson and Syers, 1990),
complete substance abuse treatment, and meet other
case-specific requirements such as mental health
counseling. All cases are monitored by the court
after imposition of the sentence, and the defendant
is required to return to court periodically during
probation to discuss progress in counseling and
compliance with the sentence.
o  There is an emphasis on the needs of children
who live in violent homes. Parents are educated
about the effects of domestic violence on their
children. The court--in partnership with a facility
associated with the University of Miami School of
Medicine (The Mailman Center for Child Development,
which has developed a 10-week age-specific
counseling program for children who have witnessed
domestic violence)--makes completion of the group
counseling by the defendant's children a condition
of the defendant's probation.
o  The members of the court acknowledge and accept
the responsibility, both in the courtroom and in
the community, to educate the public about domestic
violence and the fact that domestic violence is a
crime. The role of "judge as teacher" in the
courtroom is tested, and judges have a
responsibility to make public appearances at
community meetings and in the popular media and to
educate the public about the court and about
domestic violence.
o  The court serves as a catalyst for change as a
community leader by coordinating a communitywide
approach and communitywide participation in a local
campaign to combat family violence.
o  Judicial education and training in family
violence is mandatory for all judges and
prosecutors and some public defenders assigned to
DCDVC. Victim advocates are employed in the court
to facilitate the victim's participation in the
court process and to make services available and
accessible to the victim. 
DCDVC is also noteworthy because it is currently
being evaluated using an experimental design. The
use of the "gold standard" in court evaluations is
rare, often the result of legal and ethical
complications (Zeisel, 1972; Fagan, 1990).
Evaluation data are not yet available for the DCDVC
experiment. What will be learned from this
experiment? First, the evaluation will indicate
whether legal sanctions are more likely and severe
in a court dedicated to domestic violence cases.
Second, the evaluation will assess the
effectiveness of sanctions fashioned in the context
of the broader concerns of victim and child safety
plus treatment intervention for assailants.
Accordingly, comprehensiveness will be a component
of the court response not forthcoming in courts of
general jurisdiction where domestic violence
misdemeanors are docketed alongside other
misdemeanor cases.
Some questions will not be answered by this design,
questions that are nevertheless important in
evaluating the deterrent effects of criminal
sanctions for violence toward intimates. First, the
exclusion of felony cases limits generalizations
from this study. Felony cases are important not
only because of their severity but also because of
the potential escalation from repeat serious
offenses to potentially lethal cases (see, for
example, Browne, 1987). Other forms of serious
partner violence may be excluded, including
"marital" rape and other sexual crimes between
cohabitating or former intimates. Second, treatment
interventions are provided in the context of legal
sanctions, introducing legal coercion as a
potential confounding factor in treatment
effectiveness. The DCDVC experiment will not allow
for a test of the deterrent effects either of legal
sanctions or punishment on intimate violence or of
the effects of treatment independent of legal
threats. Factorial experiments may be needed to
sort out these potentially competing and
confounding factors in controlling domestic
violence.
Civil Legal Sanctions: Protective Orders and the
Prosecution of Violators
Reforms in the concept of restraining orders for
battered women preceded reforms in arrest and
criminal law. Beginning with the passage of the
Pennsylvania Protection from Abuse Act in 1976,
every State now provides for protection orders in
cases of domestic violence (Klein, n.d.). In many
locales, the barriers and complications of criminal
arrest and prosecution have made protective orders
the primary source of legal sanction and protection
for battered women. In contrast to the reactive
arrest and criminal prosecution processes,
protection orders are victim-initiated and timely.
They also allow a relaxed standard of proof, focus
on the victim's protection, and prescribe a wide
range of specific interventions or reliefs that
address extralegal concerns of safety and economic
well-being. However, few studies have examined the
effectiveness of restraining orders in reducing the
incidence of domestic violence, and those few
studies have been nonexperimental or
quasi-experimental with designs that weaken any
conclusions about their effectiveness. Moreover,
there are little data on the extent to which
protection orders are used in conjunction with
criminal prosecution.
How effective are protective orders in stopping
domestic violence? Harrell, Smith, and Newmark
(1993) found that 60 percent of 300 women
interviewed twice in 1 year after receiving a
protective order suffered abuse at least once. Over
1 in 5 reported threats to kill; severe violence
was reported by 29 percent. Other acts of violence
were reported by 24 percent, and property damage
was reported by 43 percent of the women. Threats
and violence did not subside over time, and there
were no significant differences in the percentage
reporting subsequent violence in the first 3 months
of the year compared with the final 9 months of the
year. Klein (n.d.) used official records (new
arrests for domestic violence, new restraining
orders against the same defendant issued by the
same victim) to measure reabuse in 644 cases in
which temporary restraining orders were issued.
Nearly half (48.8 percent) of the men reabused
their victims within 2 years of the issuance of a
restraining order. Moreover, over half (54.5
percent) were rearrested for other crimes as well. 
Neither of these studies reported results for
comparison or control groups. Grau, Fagan, and
Wexler (1984) found no significant differences in
subsequent abuse between women receiving
restraining orders and women receiving other
interventions. Moreover, they reported that
subsequent violence was more likely among men with
histories of severe domestic violence or prior
records of stranger crime.
Limitations and Contradictions in the
Criminalization of Domestic Violence 
There is little conclusive evidence of either
deterrent or protective effects of legal sanctions
or treatment interventions for domestic violence. A
closer reading of this literature suggests several
issues that may lead to a better understanding of
why past research has failed to locate deterrent
effects and whether and how law influences the
control of domestic violence. The issues fall into
three general domains: the embedment of domestic
violence in complex social and individual contexts,
weak research designs and limitations on policy
experiments, and the theoretical issues in male
violence.
Legal and Social Control of Domestic Violence
The experiments on the effects of arrest on
domestic violence raised important hypotheses on
the interaction of legal controls (such as arrest
and prosecution) with informal social controls
(such as social bonds). Sherman et al. (1992a) and
Berk et al. (1992a) in multisite analyses and Pate
and Hamilton (1992) in a single-site analysis
reported significant interactions of arrest with
two measures of "stake-in-conformity" (Toby, 1957):
Arrest increases the risk of violence for unmarried
and unemployed suspects and deters it for married
and employed suspects. Results from four of the
replications concluded that ". . .all four
experiments that have examined this hypothesis
report an interaction with unemployment consistent
with the stake-in-conformity hypothesis, at least
in the official data" (Sherman et al., 1992a:687).
Fagan (1989) reported similar interactions between
sanctions and social position among prosecution
cases, and Harrell (1991) reported the same
patterns for batterers in treatment.
The lesson of these studies is that formal (legal)
sanctions are effective when reinforced by informal
social controls and weakened when those informal
controls are absent (Tittle and Logan, 1973).
Williams and Hawkins (1989a, 1989b) suggest that
deterrence of domestic violence is contingent on
reciprocity of formal and informal social controls.
They suggest the deterrent effects of arrest will
be greater for batterers who perceive higher social
costs associated with the act of violence and with
arrest (Bowker, 1983, 1984). These costs include
loss of job, relationship and children, social
status in the neighborhood, and whatever
substantive punishment they receive. Accordingly,
the social and structural position of batterers,
including their prior punishment experiences and
the meaning they attach to them, will mediate the
deterrent effects of sanctions. When batterers
perceive that punishment is not a cost worth
avoiding, legal sanctions alone are unlikely to
induce compliance with the law.
The sources of informal social control of domestic
violence may lie either within the individual, in
the form of internalized beliefs and social bonds,
or may be externally reinforced through normative
behaviors within neighborhoods and other social
contexts (Williams and Hawkins, 1989b; Fagan,
1992).8 That is, social and economic conditions may
shape the motivations and perceptions of batterers
regarding the salience of legal sanctions and the
extralegal costs that accompany them (Zimring,
1973). Both in Minneapolis and the other arrest
replication sites, the cases disproportionately
came from neighborhoods in which risk factors were
high: high unemployment, poverty, and divorce
rates. The availability of informal social
controls--the potential for job or relationship
loss or for social stigmatization from neighbors or
relatives--in those neighborhoods may have
attenuated the development of informal social
controls and, in turn, undermined the effectiveness
of legal controls. This suggests that opportunity
structures at the neighborhood or community level
have direct effects on the availability of informal
(or extralegal) individual-level controls that are
critical reinforcers of legal sanctions.
Legal Contexts of Criminalization and Reform 
The legal context in which case processing and
sentencing decisions are made may influence the
severity of sanctions handed down in domestic
violence cases. For example, norms within local
legal "cultures," such as practitioner beliefs
about whether victims will drop charges or
patriarchal views of domestic violence, influence
the likelihood of official action when there is
discretion. Differences in court "cultures"
regarding domestic violence may explain the
variation across communities in the rates and
severity of sanctions for these offenses.9 Like many
other legal reforms, criminalizing domestic
violence may have unintended consequences,
reflecting the social organization of the courts
and processual contexts, rather than legal statute.
The relatively recent entry of domestic violence
cases into court calendars also challenges the
existing calculus of how cases are evaluated.
Emerson (1983) argues that decisionmakers evaluate
cases against a backdrop of other cases and that
assessments of seriousness are relative and occur
in comparison with other cases. If criminal
authorities in different jurisdictions classify
objectively similar cases differently because of
their respective caseload contexts, then the
sanctions in each jurisdiction should reflect the
comparative position of domestic violence relative
to the other cases before those judicial
authorities (Hassenfeld and Cheung, 1985).
Accordingly, the criminalization of domestic
violence will influence the reactions of officials
in the working groups that exist within each court.
The criminal court may produce less stability in
processing domestic violence cases because bringing
battered women into criminal court entails a change
in standard operating procedures. Jacob (1983)
suggests that criminal court participants,
particularly prosecutors who possess more
information than other courtroom personnel and who
have a disproportionate influence over the
disposition of cases, will behave inconsistently
when faced with a new class of offenders (Mohr,
1976). This may lead to less cohesiveness among the
working group members of the criminal court whose
social organization is geared to case attributes of
stranger crimes and less oriented to the special
circumstances of cases involving intimate
relationships. Prosecutorial screening continues to
reflect the strength of the case, with prosecutors
taking their cue from the actions of police as well
as the likelihood of conviction (Schmidt and
Steury, 1989).
Similar processes may influence the construction of
restraining orders in the civil (family) court.
There, the presentation of cases involving family
members is consistent with the historical stream of
cases around which the legal cultures and working
groups have evolved. However, courts accustomed to
divorce and custody proceedings may evaluate
domestic violence cases as different and perhaps
less weighty compared with the majority of their
dockets. Accordingly, the "going rate" for crimes
involving violence between intimate partners may
not be any higher compared with stranger violence
cases in the criminal court or divorce and child
custody cases in the family court, and in fact may
be lower (Emerson, 1983; Mohr, 1976; Mather, 1979).
The Complexity of Domestic Violence 
Compared with many other violent crimes, the legal
and social dimensions of domestic violence present
several complications for effective legal control.
Domestic violence differs significantly from other
forms of violence in several important ways. First,
there are strong emotional ties between victims and
assailants. The parties often love one another, or
at least the victim may love the assailant. The
bond may be traumatic (Dutton and Browning, 1988),
complicating victim resolve to enter into a lengthy
adversarial proceeding to invoke punishments and
creating internal conflict regarding separation.
The victim may be financially dependent on the
assailant or may face a severely diminished
standard of living if separated. Arguably, she
faces an economic life at or below the official
threshold of poverty upon leaving the relationship
(Sidel, 1986).
These ties to assailants may lead victims toward
rational objectives in invoking legal sanctions.
Thus, they may be less concerned with deterrence
than they are with using legal institutions to
guarantee their own safety, survive economically,
protect their children, or get counseling help for
their assailants (Ford, 1991). They may also see
the threat of prosecution as a means of terminating
the relationship and escaping the violence (Lerman,
1992). Thus, victim choices about invoking legal
sanctions may be less concerned with punishment and
deterrence and ultimately seek to use the law for
other goals. The social control functions of the
law are compromised in this context even when
victim choices and well-being are optimized.
Second, domestic violence often is a recurring
event between individuals in daily contact, usually
without the forms of guardianship and surveillance
that are available in public spaces. Unlike
robberies, in which victims and offenders often are
unacquainted, or other assaults involving
acquaintances, victims and assailants often occupy
the same space, share and compete for resources,
and have emotional ties. In this context, threats
are readily conveyed and quite believable. On the
other hand, it is extremely difficult to mount and
maintain a deterrent threat within a context of
ongoing and unsupervised contact between victim and
assailant.
Third, the scale of domestic violence makes it
difficult to control solely through legal sanctions
and deterrent threats. The base rates remain quite
high relative to other violent crimes, with
self-reported domestic assault prevalence rates of
at least 10 percent for both men and women (Straus
and Gelles, 1986). Prevalence rates exceed 30
percent for some subgroups. Domestic violence rates
are highest among subgroups who also have high
rates of stranger violence, further burdening
limited police resources within spatial areas where
assaults are concentrated (Fagan, 1993). Many cases
are unreported, and estimates of the extent of
reporting to the police are as low as 20 percent
(Dutton, 1995). However, those who do report appear
to be individuals who have few nonlegal resources
for protection or deterrence (Bowker, 1983). Even
if reporting were not increased, the high rates of
domestic violence make it difficult for police
departments to arrest every man who commits a
misdemeanor or felony assault against his partner,
much less to arrest him every time he does it,
without paralyzing their own agencies and the
courts. In the face of a high base crime rate,
police departments are challenged to maintain a
credible deterrent threat in cases where arrests do
not occur.
Finally, the deterrence logic of criminalization
assumes a rational offender-actor who weighs the
costs of offending--costs associated both with the
act itself and the legal actions that ensue--
against whatever benefits that may accrue from the
behavior (Miller and Anderson, 1986; Fagan, 1992).
This logic is strained in the context of domestic
violence. Although domestic violence has been
interpreted as a goal-oriented and implicitly
rational behavior (Tedeschi and Felson, 1995),
episodes of rage during more serious assaults often
obviate rational calculations and perceptions of
costs (Browne, 1987). Studies with batterers in
treatment suggest conditions of impaired cognition
or mental disorder (Dutton, 1995). The logic of
deterrence is compromised among batterers whose
behavior is patterned over time and for whom
rational calculations are not possible during the
arousal of a violent assault.
Domestic violence is unique in the concentration of
risk factors and absence of formal controls for
violence. Only the reciprocity between legal and
informal social controls makes possible the control
of domestic violence in general. Among violent men
whose behaviors are increasingly spiraling out of
control, the threat of punishment may be remote and
inconsequential under conditions of arousal and
cognitive distortion.
Weak Research and Evaluation Designs 
Few empirical studies use research or evaluation
designs that can detect deterrent effects of legal
sanctions. Accordingly, it is difficult to
determine the extent and magnitude of effects from
legal sanctions. The empirical literature is
littered with weak evaluation designs. Experiments
are rare, as are clinical trials for treatment
interventions. Most studies have small samples and
limited experimental power. Followup periods are
too short (usually 6 months), making it impossible
to see longer term effects that may accrue.
Budgetary limitations for many grant programs,
including the National Institute of Justice,
historically have constrained the results of
research and evaluation on domestic violence. If
the development and testing of theory is a
cumulative process from repeated experiments, the
foundations of empirical knowledge to advance
theory and practice are not available for domestic
violence.
In intervention research, sanctions are
conceptualized and measured using dichotomous
variables, a strategy that fails to account for
variation in the delivery of interventions. The
implementation of the underlying theories of
interventions also is overlooked in most
intervention research. These strategies lead to two
sources of error. First, we may falsely reject
theory when in fact the theory was not adequately
implemented in the interventions. This is a case of
program failure, in contrast to a theory failure,
that reflects a valid experiment. This source of
error can be addressed by careful attention to the
measurement of treatment .strength and integrity"
(Sechrest et al., 1979). Program content and
ideology are critical elements of intervention that
often are not captured adequately in batterer
treatment research.
Second, the absence of continuous measures of
interventions or sanctions may fail to detect
incremental or marginal effects. That is, "dosage"
is a critical yet unstudied dimension of research
on legal sanctions generally and particularly in
domestic violence (Sherman, 1992a). Most studies
have conceptualized legal sanctions as discrete
variables with limited range. Few studies have
analyzed the effects of legal sanctions within a
framework of increasing severity. Thus, different
forms of arrest may constitute qualitatively
different levels of sanction. Legal sanctions may
involve different levels or conditions of probation
supervision or treatment regimens of various
intensity. Restraining or protective orders for
battered women involve a wide range of the reliefs,
and the number and types of reliefs vary
extensively across cases (Fagan, Maxwell, Macaluso,
and Nahabedian, 1995). Accordingly, the limited
effects of legal sanctions may reflect analytic and
measurement strategies that may conceal important
differences in the extent and severity of legal
sanctions.
A related concern is the narrow range of sanctions
in most experiments on legal interventions. Since
the 1970's, the range of legal sanctions for
batterers has expanded at a glacially slow pace.
Although arrests have increased, the substantive
sanction in most cases remains simply the process
of arrest. The range of sanctions in the arrest
experiments expanded in small increments. Few
arrestees were handcuffed, and a relatively low
percentage of the arrested group spent anywhere
from a few hours to overnight in jail following
arrest. Prosecution rates remain low. Pretrial and
postconviction treatment regimens vary widely in
the intensity of the treatment and the burdens they
place on assailants. There is limited evidence of
the use of incarceration or more intensive forms of
supervision unless injuries are serious. When the
range of punishments or sanctions is narrow, the
validity of tests of deterrence is intrinsically
weak, and the likelihood of detecting a reduction
in violence appears remote.
There are other limitations on research design that
weaken empirical findings. Although experiments
represent a "gold standard" of social research,
there are many circumstances in which random
assignment is neither practical nor ethically
justifiable. In particular, untreated control
groups are not tenable when victim safety is at
risk. However, there are alternatives that do not
get used: Factorial and bootstrapping designs, in
particular, are valid design options that are
absent in this literature. Censoring (exclusion) of
cases and attrition are sources of selection bias.
Analysis of subgroup differences often is not
reported, even though it is reasonable to expect
different outcomes among population subgroups.
Treatment effects are likely to decay over time,
yet analytic strategies rarely examine the effects
of sanctions on the temporal dimension of
recidivism (Visher, Lattimore, and Linster, 1991;
Lattimore, Visher, and Linster, 1995).
Finally, there are exogenous influences on sanction
effects that often are not addressed in research on
domestic violence (Fagan, 1993). For example,
subcultural influences may overwhelm the effects of
legal sanctions or treatments in motivating
domestic violence. That is, high divorce rates may
devalue marriage or coupling, weakening the
informal controls on violence that work
reciprocally with legal sanctions. Residential
mobility, high rates of poverty, and weak social
cohesion are dimensions of social disorganization
that weaken informal social controls on violence
generally and undermine motivations for compliance
with the law.
Problems in Designing Policy 
Conflicts in policies about legal interventions
have led to ambiguous findings in the domestic
violence literature. Ambivalence best describes the
policy goals and theoretical under- pinnings of
criminal justice interventions. For example, many
of the developments in prosecution of domestic
violence have been designed to increase the
involvement of prosecutors, but strategies diverge
on the identification of goals. Although some
reforms are designed to punish offenders and
establish a specific deterrent effect, other
policies aim to protect victims by threatening
prosecution while achieving other important goals
such as economic relief, victim safety, or coerced
counseling. These are competing alternatives that
are not necessarily compatible. They involve
focusing resources on victims versus offenders and
using resources (especially prosecution resources)
for goals that do not involve conviction and
punishment. The critical evaluation question is
whether legal institutions organized around the
goal of detecting and punishing crimes can
effectively shift toward a more flexible and
preventive set of activities.
Many of the reforms and innovations in arrest and
prosecution have been designed to empower victims
and afford them a greater role in decisionmaking on
the use of legal resources. However, the social
organization and legal "culture" of these
institutions is challenged by this additional
focus. These policies may raise internal
contradictions, offer risks and tradeoffs (for
example, victim autonomy versus prosecution of
violent offenders), and complicate the evaluation
of "effectiveness" of legal interventions.
Moreover, criminal justice institutions are asked
to make linkages to social service agencies in
domestic violence cases that they are not asked to
make in other types of crimes.
Finally, do these efforts control violence,
especially the repeat violence that may escalate
toward lethality? Most policy statements would
include the reduction or cessation of violence, yet
current evidence from these reforms is not
promising. Most important, current research and
evaluation efforts have not asked these questions.
Practical Limitations in Mounting Deterrence 
Criminal and civil legal reforms over the past 20
years have raised the priority of domestic violence
cases within legal institutions. However,
implementation of policies to control domestic
violence competes with other crime and violence
problems for limited resources. Several criminal
justice problems have competed for resources over
this time, each with an urgency that demanded a
share of a fixed pool of resources. For example,
special drug courts have been established in
several jurisdictions, prosecutors have developed
special units to prosecute gang violence, and
investigative resources have been allocated to
child abuse cases in the wake of increasing child
fatalities in the late 1980's. The result is uneven
or weak implementation of newly developed policies
for domestic violence with the unintended
consequence of weakening the criminal justice
response. On a more practical and day-to-day level,
domestic violence cases compete with violence and
other patrol priorities for immediate attention by
the police.
Consider the following example. It's Friday night,
and there are five cars on patrol in a city of
approximately 125,000 people. One car is
investigating an injury accident, another is
responding to a fight in a bar, another to a report
of a man with a gun, another is directing traffic
at a corner where a traffic light is not working,
and another is investigating a report of a robbery.
At 10:30 p.m., three domestic violence calls come
in. What does the dispatcher do? Consider a second
scenario: The officer in the fourth car leaves the
traffic light scene to respond to one of the
domestic violence calls. She is about to make the
arrest when she receives a radio call about a
robbery in progress. What does she do? What is she
ordered to do?
These are not uncommon scenarios. The reality of
competing priorities for sorting cases for arrest
and prosecution suggests that domestic violence
cases, especially low-injury or noninjury domestic
violence, will not receive a higher priority than
other events. Similar scenes can be imagined in
prosecutors' offices. It is not uncommon that
within many "legal cultures" and working groups in
prosecutors' offices, prosecuting domestic violence
cases is not a pathway to recognition and promotion
even when resources are organized in a way that
makes such prosecution possible.
A related concern is the implementation of rapidly
proliferating treatment programs for domestic
violence assailants. Consider first that there is
virtually no methodologically sound evidence of
effective treatment interventions for domestic
violence. Yet many jurisdictions have mandated a
wide variety of treatment interventions of varying
lengths, behavioral orientations, qualifications of
providers, and level and type of criminal justice
supervision. In addition, these programs vary
extensively on such important dimensions as victim
safety planning. In one State, a statewide program
mandates weekend treatment regimens of
approximately 36 hours, including showing of films
and testimonials or confessions from batterers.
There is little chance of success in such
atheoretical efforts with minimal implementation.
Implementation of law and policy suffers from these
types of real-world constraints. What appear to be
weak policies in fact may reflect weakly
implemented policies or policies whose goals are
undercut by resource limitations and organizational
constraints.
The Failure to Recognize the Importance of
Differentiated Responses for Different Types of
Battering
Analyses of SARP data from Milwaukee and other
sites suggest the possibility of interactions
between formal and informal sources of social
control. What has not been tested is the
possibility of differences in the effects of legal
sanctions for different types of batterers. Yet
there is ample reason to proceed in this way. For
example, Fagan et al. (1984) reported consistent
differences in the recurrence of recidivism between
subgroups of batterers defined by the severity of
their prior violence. Just as domestic violence is
best understood from the characteristics of
batterers (Hotaling and Sugarman, 1986), so too may
the effects of legal sanctions be best understood
based on the battering careers of violent males.
Yet most research on the effects of legal sanctions
for domestic violence has treated batterers as a
homogeneous group. This obscures potentially
important subgroup differences in the effects of
legal sanctions. Moreover, failure to distinguish
analytically among subgroups may mask potential
iatrogenic effects from legal sanctions that
elevate risks for victims of more serious assaults.
Several studies have suggested typologies of
batterers that distinguish them along several
dimensions. Holtzworth-Munroe and Stuart (1994)
reviewed 19 empirically derived typologies based on
either rational-deductive strategies or
empirical-deductive strategies. They identified
three dimensions that distinguish among subtypes of
batterers: severity of marital violence, generality
of violence (toward strangers as well as
intimates), and psychopathology or personality
disorders. Based on these dimensions, three types
of batterers are hypothesized: family only,
generally violent, and dysphoric or borderline
personality batterers. Each of these types is
hypothesized to be involved in different levels of
severity of domestic violence.
There is utility in typologies such as these to
predict responses to legal sanctions. For example,
impulsivity and low self-control characterize
generally violent batterers, personality variables
that may complicate the rational logic underlying
deterrence theory. The family-only batterer engages
in the least severe forms of violence and also
exhibits the lowest levels of impulsivity and may
be most amenable to legal sanctions. Analyses by
Fagan et al. (1984) confirm the different reactions
to legal sanctions for family-only batterers versus
generally violent males.
These dimensions are rarely considered in research
on domestic violence yet should be an important
component of sanction and treatment research. The
failure to consider these dimensions is a failure
to identify factors that may mitigate the effects
of sanctions. For now, the empirical literature
does not include any studies that examine the
relationship between types of batterers and the
effects of legal interventions.
Treatment research with offenders generally has
recognized the importance of "responsivity" of
different types of individuals to various
interventions (Andrews et al., 1990). Understanding
the effects of legal sanctions for batterers must
account for the different responses of different
types of batterers to both types of sanctions and
their "doses." These factors also may be important
and useful in sorting cases for prosecution or in
determining the extent to which sanctions may risk
victim safety. We know, for example, that when
there is a lengthy history of prior calls for
service, stronger legal intervention may be needed
compared with cases in which there is a shorter
history (Fagan et al., 1984).
The Segregation of Theories of Interpersonal
Violence From Theories of Domestic Violence
A corollary concern is the extent to which theories
of violence generally inform research on domestic
violence, including the effects of legal sanctions.
The typology suggested by Holtzworth-Munroe and
Stuart (1994) is based on a range of personality
and developmental variables that were derived not
only from research on batterers but from the
literature on violence generally. Yet theory and
research on domestic violence have segregated
theories of violence from theories of battering.
The social and ideological constructions of
battering have limited the types of variables
considered in research on domestic violence. 
Assuming that patriarchy and power relations alone
cause domestic violence leads us toward conclusions
that do not consider a full array of explanatory
variables from other disciplines (Fagan and Browne,
1994). However, assuming that domestic violence is
caused by a more complex set of hierarchical
influences--for example, weak social controls,
situational arousal, or even psychopathology--may
lead us in quite another direction. The importance
of recognizing factors from theories of violence
that may influence the effects of legal sanctions
is evident from the types of variables that define
the typologies of batterers. Their inclusion offers
a significant advance over the current level of
empirical knowledge.
The Role of Legal Institutions in the Control of
Domestic Violence 
The criminalization of domestic violence proceeded
from two perspectives. For advocates of battered
women, mobilizing legal institutions was designed
to have symbolic and generally deterrent effects.
But these reforms also included goals to protect
women victims of domestic assaults through the
mobilization of extralegal services and the
development of referral linkages. Also, by lending
the political authority of legal institutions in
efforts to prevent domestic violence, the moral
authority of messages from women's groups and
community-based organizations was reinforced. The
inclusion of legal sanctions in a network of
services helped to expand the web of social control
designed to protect women victims. All these
focused on women. But for actors in legal
institutions, these reforms were focused on a class
of offenses and offenders now prioritized for
adjudication. The advent of services for domestic
violence within legal institutions offered the
promise of addressing violent crimes that
previously had eluded the mechanisms of sanctions
and legal control.
Goals and expectations differed in these two
perspectives, particularly in terms of the focus of
the policies. In pursuing victim protection goals,
legal institutions, especially criminal justice
system agencies, were asked to refocus their
efforts on the protection of victims and the
coordination of extralegal and legal services. This
perspective differs from the traditional goals of
criminal justice institutions to focus on the
detection and punishment of crimes. In this view,
assailants are the focus of the efforts of criminal
justice agencies.
Accordingly, for domestic violence, policy goals
coexisted within legal institutions to both punish
offenders and protect victims. These goals may be
reciprocal as policy but may be in conflict at the
operational level. Placing expectations for police
and prosecutors to invoke informal social controls
in which legal sanctions play an indirect role may
require tasks and roles for personnel for which
they are not well trained or that may contradict
the roles and expectations in their jobs with
respect to other types of crimes. It may require
legal actors to pursue goals in domestic violence
cases that they do not pursue in other types of
crimes. Also, for crimes of the scale of domestic
violence, it may be unrealistic to expect legal
institutions to effectively control crimes that
affect significant portions of the population.
These contradictions raise concerns because they
may undermine the effectiveness of legal
institutions in stopping domestic violence. Role
and policy ambiguity can affect the performance of
agencies with respect to their missions; in this
case, it may undermine their effectiveness in
pursuing either victim protection or offender
sanctioning roles. There is no doubt that linkages
between legal institutions and services for
domestic violence victims are critical to stopping
violence. However, these linkages may best be
accomplished through a strategic division of roles
among institutions that tap the strengths of each
organization.
Domestic violence is best explained by the
characteristics of men. Social control is most
effective when legal controls interact reciprocally
with extralegal social controls. This suggests that
the role of legal institutions in stopping domestic
violence may most effectively focus on the
detection and punishment/control of batterers and
indirectly on the coordination of extralegal
services to protect battered women. Although legal
systems should be open and accessible to battered
women, these institutions should not take on the
role of managing the coordination of services that
involve social service, shelter, and other
interventions.
Pursuing goals for specific types of cases that may
conflict with the primary mission of legal
institutions raises the danger of marginalizing
those cases. It was the historical marginalization
or denial of domestic violence cases that motivated
contemporary reforms to increase criminal justice
system involvement in domestic violence. The
question now, after two decades of reform, is what
type of involvement of criminal justice agencies
works best to control domestic violence? By
emphasizing the deterrence and punishment of
domestic violence, legal institutions focus their
efforts in directions that may permit them to
maximize their effects.
Advancing Knowledge and Policy Through Research and
Development
For over 20 years, research on the effects of
increased criminal justice involvement on domestic
violence has emphasized systemic reforms and
efforts to increase the rate at which legal
sanctions are applied. Yet there remains
inconsistent and inconclusive knowledge about the
effectiveness of criminalizing domestic violence on
controlling repeat victimization. Research on the
effects of legal sanctions has been limited by weak
research designs, a narrow range of theories, poor
conceptualization of potential interaction effects
and subgroup differences, weak interventions and
sanctions, and implementation problems. We simply
do not know what the effects of legal sanctions for
domestic violence are, whether there are
differences in these effects for specific
population groups, what the theoretical bases are
for their effects or noneffects, and what the risks
and limitations of a policy of "criminalization"
are.
This dilemma is partially the result of a strategy
for knowledge development in which well-intentioned
reforms were mounted but with weak evaluation
designs that often were introduced after programs
were designed and launched. The dilemma also
reflects a reluctance to ask the more difficult
questions of the utilitarian effects of these
reforms with respect to the control and cessation
of subsequent violence. But this state of knowledge
has left us without an adequate basis for
formulating policy or practice. Given the current
state of affairs, a reviewer a decade from now may
well conclude again that we still do not know
whether legal sanctions can effectively control
domestic violence.
Another reason has been the segregation of
evaluation research from basic, theoretically
driven research. In domestic violence and many
other social policy areas, evaluation has been an
enterprise quite separate and apart from basic
research. But recall that the Minneapolis
experiment and the replications in SARP have been
the most influential studies in the development of
legal policy on domestic violence. These were
theoretical studies, not demonstration evaluations
or policy experiments. They were tests of
deterrence theory sponsored by the National
Institute of Justice Crime Control Theory Program.
The lesson is simple: The greatest gains in
knowledge and policy have come from theoretically
driven studies. This lesson should form the
foundation for developing a research strategy that
will begin to examine the effects of the
criminalization of domestic violence and foster
gains that will lead to more effective policies and
greater safety for victims.
To begin the development of a cumulative body of
theoretical and empirical knowledge to inform
policies, a research program is needed that
addresses the concerns and limitations of existing
research. Such a process can be translated to other
criminological problems and form the basis of a
"model" for building knowledge and policy. There
are several steps to this effort.
Establish a Framework To Develop and Organize
Knowledge To Inform Policy
Over the past three decades, disparate voices have
called for the creation of an experimenting society
(Campbell, 1969; Riecken et al., 1974; Boruch,
1994). These essays were noteworthy for their
endorsement of experiments to inform policy. But
they also suggested a dynamic process in which
theory, method, and practice should converge to
inform policy. Knowledge is cumulative, and these
"social experimenters" sought to influence and
rationalize how contemporary policies are
developed. The point here is not necessarily that
all research should proceed from an experimental
base. Experiments are difficult to mount and often
in domestic violence are ethically unsound. Rather,
knowledge and policy will advance when built on a
cumulative foundation of empirical evidence,
practical wisdom, and theory. All three elements
are needed to move policy forward; none is
sufficient by itself. The threshold for what
constitutes knowledge should be high, and knowledge
should be cumulative. Leaders in the development
and testing of innovation in criminal justice
should commit their agencies and organizations to
this model of knowledge development.
The sources of ideas to fuel this process for
domestic violence must come from a variety of
efforts. Qualitative research, often providing the
context for "discovery" of social processes, is
critical to develop testable hypotheses. The
studies of Bowker (1983, 1984) are examples of how
theory can be constructed from a "thick
description" of the processes that women invoke to
end domestic violence, including the complex
interactions of legal and social sources of
control. Research on interpersonal violence
generally also contributes to the formation of
theories about how legal sanctions might work. For
example, recent ethnographic work on male violence
highlights the role of "hypermasculinity" in the
genesis of bar fights, fights that often are
conflicts over women and status (Oliver, 1994). In
addition, formative evaluation of innovative and
effective practices can provide testable ideas.
When formed in the context of theory, these studies
also can drive the design of rigorous studies to
test their effects under controlled conditions. For
example, pilot studies on the effects of an
experimental program of police-social service
interactions in New York suggest promising results
(Davis and Taylor, 1995). Replication and extension
of these experiments are needed to inform policy.
Build a Foundation of Theories 
Although criminalization of domestic violence has
proceeded apace for over two decades, only recently
and perhaps after the fact did theoretical research
begin on its crime control effects. Before that,
important formative research had focused on
mechanisms to mount deterrence: increasing the
certainty of arrest, developing policies for
increasing the involvement of prosecutors, creating
treatment programs. The few studies that have been
built on a theoretical foundation have identified
important interactions and contingent effects that
need further elaboration and testing.
The question is, however, which theories? And,
whose theories? Theories about the motivations and
control of male violence generally and specifically
toward intimates should be integrated with
deterrence and social control theories that guide
criminal sanctions. Recognition of subgroups and
their differences along key theoretical dimensions
(e.g., developmental backgrounds, cognition, mental
disorder, embedment in violent social networks)
should be part of the conceptual development and
testing of interventions--whether legal sanctions
or treatment regimens. Theories about the
reciprocity between informal and formal social
control should be part of the foundation for
testing the effects of criminal sanctions. Theories
about the contextual effects of neighborhoods and
communities that influence the salience of
sanctions also should be part of the testing of
legal sanctions.
Perhaps most important, the development of theory
within a framework of cumulative research suggests
that no research or evaluation should proceed
without a theoretical foundation. It is theory that
is generalizable, not practice in the absence of a
conceptual framework for its effects. While
cautiously avoiding "decontextualizing" the
complexity of domestic violence (Lerman, 1992), we
need to examine the interfaces of theories of
violence, domestic violence, and social control in
the context of the dynamics of domestic violence.
Theoretical perspectives on violent events can
complement theories on violent persons, providing
unique perspectives on how social contexts shape
the onset of domestic assaults (Tedeschi and
Felson, 1995).
Develop a Program of Research and Development To
Test Theoretically Driven Interventions and
Policies 
To accomplish these goals, evaluation must be
institutionalized as part of a framework for
assessing policy. Although experiments are
preferred, controlled testing involves a variety of
designs that do not necessarily require the
randomization of people. In fact, there is growing
interest in experiments in which programs,
organizational units, or communities are the units
of control and analysis (Boruch, 1994).
Nevertheless, experiments involving individuals
continue to be important, although they are
ethically challenged. Alternatives that maintain
experimental design but avoid no-service controls
are available. For example, yoked designs involve
random allocation of subjects to different
combinations of interventions, thereby avoiding the
problems of no-service control groups. A variety of
other alternative design options are available for
constructing control groups. One design may include
case controls from other programs or from a group
receiving a competing intervention. Multiple
baseline comparisons, prior program cohorts, and
other alternatives to random assignment can produce
results with high internal validity (Rothman,
1986).
Other dimensions of evaluation should include
careful measurement of implementation and
"therapeutic integrity" within programs as well as
"dosage" to individuals within the program.
Baseline and postprogram measurement of violence
should be specific with respect to time, action,
location, circumstances, and outcomes (injuries).
The limitations of official records suggest that
multiple measures of postprogram violence should be
recorded. Considerable effort is needed to avoid
sample attrition of individuals with the highest
risks of reabuse or reinjury. This will allow for
the measurement not only of multiple outcomes but
also of multiple dimensions of recidivism necessary
for deterrence research (Blumstein et al., 1978).
Results should be disaggregated among population
subgroups, if sample sizes permit, to examine
offender-intervention interactions. This will
ultimately contribute to knowledge about
responsivity of different individuals to different
forms of treatment (Andrews et al., 1990). Followup
periods should be sufficiently lengthy to determine
the decay rates of treatment and the factors that
bear on postprogram failure. Statistical power must
be measured and reported as part of the evaluation
of significance and effect size.
Evaluation should be made a requirement for fiscal
support. Ongoing assessment of programs is good
management, and control of risks and improvement of
effectiveness are two dimensions of that
assessment. Although programs may rightfully fear
the withdrawal of funds when programs are
ineffective, there are two reasons to take that
risk. First, ethical standards mandate that
programs ensure they are not doing harm, and the
costs of harm in a violence intervention are quite
high. Second, poor results should be a cue for
refinement of program design not a sign to abandon
efforts at improvement. Funders must be educated
similarly that political risks are necessary for
the evolution of successful and effective programs.
Finally, basic research on domestic violence and
violent offenders should become routinized within
programs and ongoing services. The need for basic
research on violent offenders and violence is
evident from the recommendations of three major
commissions on violence (American Psychological
Association, 1993; Reiss and Roth, 1993; Centers
for Disease Control, 1993). Yet many programs,
whether private or public, see basic research on
the causes and correlates of domestic violence as a
task for others. Some see research as a burden,
others as a distraction from their mission, and
still others see it as exploiting their clients.
Even when there is recognition of its importance,
knowledge generated from research often is assigned
a lesser value than folk knowledge gained from
anecdotes and the reflections of staff and
administrators. Programs must realize the
opportunities for knowledge development from their
interactions with violent offenders. There is
critical information from research that can inform
both theory and practice in interventions.
Construct a Stable Infrastructure for Supporting
Research 
Research support is inconsistent and generally at
levels too low for thorough testing of policies and
practices in domestic violence. The complexity of
followup with victims and offenders alone will
consume time and resources. A strategy for stable
funding will need to address several dimensions to
overcome the structural limitations of the current
research context.
First, we must carefully consider the
infrastructure for funding both programs and
research on interventions for domestic violence.
Funds for research, like program funding, tends to
be driven by streams tied to specific agencies or
problem definitions. In communities with serious
violence problems and extensive service networks, a
more rational and need-driven basis for supporting
evaluations should be constructed. Accordingly, a
"superfund" for evaluation could be constructed
with contributions from specific government
entities (that support services), private
foundations concerned with developing effective
violence prevention and interventions, and research
agencies concerned with developing basic knowledge
or evaluation data on domestic violence. Evaluation
block grants from Federal agencies could provide a
Federal share for local or State evaluation
"superfunds." Funders of services, programs
themselves, or researchers could request evaluation
support from the fund.
Second, the structure of research should be
considered--longer studies of broader scope are
needed to pursue certain questions. We need to set
realistic goals for research; we cannot
realistically expect answers to complex domestic
violence questions in 2 years and $250,000. Reforms
to the peer review process should be part of this
effort. For example, stable and continuous review
panels could work closely with applicants to refine
and revise promising proposals. Third, research and
evaluation must be supported externally and at
appropriate funding levels as part of funding for
program operations. Programs should not be
confronted with choices between services and
research. Part of the institutionalization of
research and evaluation should be the creation of a
stable funding stream independently from services
funding. This will support an uninterrupted
research agenda that is funded at a level to create
valid information. Independence of researchers from
programs is necessary to ensure that programs
receive an impartial assessment. The principle of
risk-responsivity (Andrews et al., 1990) should
apply as well to funding: the higher levels of
funding should be allocated to the programs that
deal with the highest level of risk or threat. The
production of valid and generalizable research
knowledge is not cheap and may cost as much if not
more than interventions. Political "shyness" over
this reality must be set aside.
Finally, collaboration should be encouraged between
universities and domestic violence services and
intervention programs, whether they be community
supervision, legal sanctions, or residential
treatment. For example, doctoral programs that
emphasize research can establish field placements
or internships with intervention agencies to
initiate either basic or evaluation research
agendas. Violence is a complex phenomenon, not well
explained by the traditionally separate disciplines
of the behavioral and health sciences. Because it
involves theoretical knowledge from several
disciplines, the creation of internships within
programs can foster interdisciplinary research and
the advancement of knowledge beyond the limitations
of single disciplines.
The proliferation of commissions and legislative
actions suggests that the control of violence has
become a national priority. Funding for basic
research, evaluation, and intervention programs
should reflect that priority. One reason for the
inadequate knowledge base about violence or its
interventions has been the traditionally low level
of funding for violence research (Reiss and Roth,
1993; American Psychological Association, 1993).
Reductions in violence, like progress in the fight
of disease and technological advancement, will
begin when there are investments in knowledge
development commensurate with the urgency of the
problem.
Two Additional Concerns 
Support development of methodological tools for
consistent research. Measurement error and design
inconsistencies make studies often noncomparable.
There is much controversy surrounding measurement
and design in family violence (Weis, 1989). A
program of support for the development of validated
measures and methodological innovations would
provide a compatible body of knowledge for
synthesis and theory building.
Translate research findings to inform policymakers
and practitioners. Policymakers, practitioners, and
advocates rightfully complain that academics
produce alien and unreadable documents that are not
helpful in their work. But asking academics to
recast their work in nontechnical language may
require skills that they may not have. Let
academics and policy researchers be technical; do
not ask them to direct their efforts toward a
different audience than their peers who are the
gatekeepers on theoretical and substantive
knowledge. Instead, enterprises are needed that
create multiple products for diverse audiences from
these technical reports. This form of social
science journalism will provide an invaluable
bridge from social and behavioral science to the
audiences who will implement policies and ideas.
A Final Note 
Without meaningful change in the structure of
research and evaluation in domestic violence, a
reviewer 5 or 10 years from now will likely reach
the same conclusions reached in this review: "We
just don't know, the evaluation data aren't very
good." We could have said all this 5 years ago and
actually did say it 10 years ago (Boruch, 1994).
Let's not be embarrassed or embarrass ourselves by
continuing on this frustrating path of fad-driven
and nonsystematic policies with weak after-the-fact
evaluations. Collaborative research to develop and
test theoretically driven interventions and
policies will make a significant contribution to
the development of policies for legal interventions
to protect battered women. A continuation of the
research efforts of the past two decades will not.
Notes
1. However, throughout this period in nearly every
State, civil and criminal legal sanctions have
remained separate though parallel remedies with
divergent underlying legal theories and behavioral
assumptions. Although legislatures have acted to
increase the use of both civil and criminal legal
sanctions to control domestic violence, there is
continuing discussion of how the court system can
most effectively protect domestic violence victims.
2. For example, a significant portion of the Family
Violence Services and Prevention Act of 1984
provided funding for 23 law enforcement training
projects across the country from 1986-1992
(Newmark, Harrell, and Adams, 1995). The goals of
the training effort were to improve the quality of
responses of police officers to female victims,
improvements that will encourage their use of the
law in future incidents. Whether the increased
quality or quantity of police response made a
difference in the lives of battered women was not
addressed.
3. In fact, only a handful of studies have examined
the effects of legal sanctions, both civil and
criminal, on the recurrence of domestic violence.
Although domestic violence has been a longstanding
concern at the National Institute of Law
Enforcement and Criminal Justice, NIJ's
predecessor, the priority and resources assigned to
the evaluation of legal reforms in domestic
violence have varied, as have the types of
questions and designs to answer them. Accordingly,
the empirical evidence to assess the effectiveness
of legal reforms has been narrow and
methodologically weak. The Minneapolis Domestic
Violence Experiment (Sherman and Berk, 1984a,
1984b) arguably has been NIJ's most influential
research effort. But the Minneapolis experiment was
noteworthy not because it was an evaluation of
arrest policy for domestic violence. In fact, it
was a test of deterrence theory, and domestic
violence was not its primary concern. The
replication experiments, collectively known as
Spouse Assault Replication Program (SARP), were
concerned with tests of deterrence theory also
(Sherman, 1992a; Garner, et al., 1995).  
 4. The "battered woman's" defense was applied not
only in cases in which the woman killed the man
during an attack but also in cases in which the man
was not actively threatening or abusing the woman
at the time of the incident (Browne, 1987).
5. Historically, like the police, prosecutors were
accused of disinterest in family violence cases by
failing to file cases presented by the police or
discouraging willing victims from pursuing criminal
complaints. Whether discouraged by the evidentiary
problems in these cases or the signals from a
disinterested judiciary that was unwilling to
respond to prosecution with meaningful sanctions,
prosecutors had little incentive to follow through
with vigorous presentation of domestic violence
cases (Elliott, 1989; Ford, 1993).  For example,
Fagan (1989) found that fewer than 5 percent of 270
cases in 5 criminal justice systems were criminally
prosecuted. 
6. These conditions reduce the statistical power of
the experiment and limit its effect on theory and
policy.  Statistical power is an estimate of the
probability of falsely rejecting a null hypothesis-
-that is, detecting a significant effect when in
fact it may be valid (Cohen, 1988). In this case,
the small effect size and limited sample sizes
suggest that these findings may well result from
chance.
7. They did report, however, on subsequent calls to
the police for domestic disturbances, an imprecise
measure of domestic violence with fairly high
measurement error.
8. Williams and Hawkins (1986, 1989b) specify three
types of costs that create informal controls:
attachment costs (e.g., the loss of valued
relationships), stigma (e.g., social opprobrium,
embarrassment), and commitment costs (e.g., loss of
job or economic opportunity) (Carmody and Williams,
1987). Thus, Williams and Hawkins (1986, 1989b) are
consistent with other deterrence theorists in
suggesting a reciprocal and complementary
relationship between formal and informal controls
for domestic violence. They state, for example,
that ". . . persons (may) anticipate that others
will disapprove of their arrest for committing a
certain act, and they (may) refrain from that
activity because they fear the stigma of being
caught" (1986:562-563). Thus, for all these types
of costs, extralegal punishment may be contingent
on legal sanction.
9. Local legal culture describes the local patterns
of practice that reflect in part the informal norms
and expectations that regular players in the system
have developed and have come to accept as "how we
do things" (Kritezer and Zemmans, 1993). For the
purpose of this proposed research, "local legal
culture" includes the norms and attitudes, formal
rules, and social relations that influence case
outcomes. Criminal courtroom proceedings reflect
both formal externally imposed rules and informal
procedures and unspoken rules and customs. "The gap
between the formal and informal rules--what the
public expects and what actually occurs in
practice--is largely the product of local legal
culture" (Schiller and Manikas, 1987).
Schiller and Manikas (1987) suggest that the local
legal culture is shaped by the fragmented nature of
the criminal justice system and the many
participants involved in reaching consensus on
"going rates" of sanctions for specific types of
cases. Formal rules are often not enforced because
to strictly adhere to the rules would contradict
the values and expectations of the legal culture.
Schiller and Manikas (1987) suggest that the
courts' formal rules and informal customs be
reconciled so that the reality in a criminal
justice courtroom reflects the theoretical
underpinnings of the justice system.
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