Evaluating Contracted Domestic Violence Programs

The growing significance of domestic violence programs run by the state and contracted nongovernment agencies in Australia over the past decade has not been matched by a commensurate growth in evaluation of those programs. A number of evaluations have been conducted, but only a few have been long-term and large-scale, due to funding and other constraints. The promotion of evidence-based practice and policy encourages practitioners and scholars to aim for comprehensive and systematic review of initiatives, but achieving that is no mean feat since both the service delivery and governance of these programs are often complex and multi-stranded.

In this article we reflect on theoretical and practical issues of evaluation by reporting on the experience of undertaking an evaluation of domestic violence perpetrator and victim support programs delivered for an Australian state government by contracted community service agencies. The experience was not as we had expected on the basis of social policy debates. In this situation, there were difficulties in generating sufficiently robust data on offenders in group programs that delayed and limited the scope of a quasi-experimental assessment of intervention, although that strand continues to date. At the same time, however, this strengthened the importance of evaluating service delivery and governance issues within a ‘realist evaluation’ paradigm. Since contemporary domestic violence programs often typically combine coordinated support for women and children and behaviour change intervention with offenders, evaluation needs multi-stranded approaches that may draw on paradigms more commonly thought of as being in tension.