From Victim Safety to Victim Engagement

The research study by DePrince and colleagues provides welcome validation for an approach to intervention in domestic violence cases pioneered in the 1980s by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, MN, that introduced a proactive contact by independent advocates with victims immediately following police intervention. Direct outreach to victims was one strategy in a larger effort to implement new policies and programs designed to respond in a coordinated way to misdemeanor domestic violence cases. The development of this approach was motivated by the issues confronting advocates at that time: concern that the battered women filling our shelters would not be protected when they returned home or moved to a new residence; the prevailing policy of police departments to mediate domestic violence cases in lieu of arrest; prosecution policies that resulted in many dismissals; the frustration of the courts with victims who failed to cooperate in the prosecution of their cases; and the desire of many victims that state intervention direct its attention to ending their partners’ violence so that their families could possibly remain intact.

DAIP’s goals were to increase the safety of victims and their children, decrease danger to interveners, especially responding police officers, and better hold abusers accountable for their violence, which included the creation of an educational program for batterers that could be ordered as a condition of sentencing for willing defendants. Working in conjunction with law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, this advocacy organization identified gaps in the existing case processing system and negotiated new protocols that initiated a coordinated community response (CCR) to these cases (Pence, 1985, 1996). The coordinated intervention included the adoption of a law enforcement policy that required an arrest in cases of injury to the victim when probable cause was established; improvements in evidence-gathering at the scene and in the quality of police reports; the introduction of a policy within the city attorney’s office that promoted prosecution when evidence was sufficient, whether or not the victim cooperated with the prosecution; the creation of a free batterers’ education program to address the behavior that resulted in the criminal justice intervention and could be ordered by judges as part of a sentence or as a condition of a protection order; and the initiation of an outreach contact by community advocates with the victim and by volunteer jail visitors with the offender after the police intervention. Once police had cleared the scene, if the alleged abuser was arrested and taken to the jail for booking, police informed the victim that advocates would be called to come out to speak with her. Officers encouraged contact with the advocates, who would explain what she could expect from the subsequent court actions, provide information about community services, and provide her with assistance in taking whatever steps she felt were necessary. If the woman agreed, advocates would go out to speak with her in person or over the phone. When the alleged abuser was not arrested or removed from the home, advocates would arrange to contact the victim at a later, safe time by phone. This contact was the first step in establishing a relationship with the victim that would facilitate her ability to take advantage of available community services as well as the possible interventions of the criminal justice system.

The model was eventually replicated in jurisdictions around Minnesota when state funding became available to support initiation of community intervention projects, and in time its growing reputation as a promising practice led to its spread across the country. An indication of the influence of the CCR approach can be seen in the original and later iterations of the Violence Against Women Act. Domestic violence advocates incorporated a strong emphasis on coordination among government agencies and community advocacy organizations in the requirements of its funding programs.

As communities accrued experience with the implementation of CCRs, tensions emerged to challenge the thinking about this approach as conflicts arose in daily practice regarding how best to achieve the stated intervention goals. For example, in pursuing the goal of holding batterers accountable, some prosecutors were willing to jail victims who refused to testify, while community advocates argued that the goal of victim safety should lead to policies that instead protected victims who were reluctant to publicly confront their abusers due to the risk of further violence. Some CCRs experienced serious conflicts about the confidentiality of communications and data exchanged among the collaborating agencies to facilitate informed decision making. Domestic violence organizations experienced pressure from criminal justice agencies to ignore confidentiality obligations when they insisted that they could not share client information without the client’s permission. As a result, DAIP introduced an emphasis on “victim safety” as the primary priority among the CCR goals. When a case presented a conflict between offender accountability and victim safety, the intervention should err on the side of safety. Thus the demand that advocacy agencies share confidential information with government agencies was refuted by the argument that protecting the victim’s safety was a higher priority than the criminal justice goal of holding the offender accountable for that incident of violence.

Over time, however, it became clear that insistence on the primacy of the principle of victim safety did not in itself resolve all of the dilemmas posed by domestic violence cases. Many prosecutors who agreed that it was inappropriate to jail victims for refusing to testify were cognizant of the fact that some of these victims wanted assistance, but were threatened with retaliation by their abusers if they actively participated in the case. These prosecutors were concerned that failure to prosecute, in effect, colluded with abusers and facilitated further violence against these victims. They honestly struggled to decide how victim safety was best promoted in these situations: by attempting to prosecute the case or by dismissing it? Advocates and prosecutors together attempted to craft more nuanced responses that were informed by an understanding of the dynamics of abusive relationships (Asmus, 1991).

These tensions persist in CCR efforts today. A current dilemma is posed by the practice of automatically imposing criminal no contact orders as a condition of release from detention. Should courts consult with victims to inquire if a no contact order is desired before it is imposed? Should courts modify or drop an order solely on the victim’s request? If not, what other considerations are relevant to this decision? How does the state avoid collusion with offenders who may be pressuring victims to request that orders be dropped?

Each of these individual dilemmas reflects larger questions related to our criminal justice system. What is the responsibility of state interveners toward victims, given their obligation to hold offenders accountable and protect public safety? How does a state intervener determine how a victim’s safety is best protected? When and how should a victim’s wishes be taken into account in case decisions? Are there circumstances when the state should intervene in spite of the victim’s wishes, or when there is reasonable suspicion that she is being prevented from truly expressing her wishes? In domestic violence cases, when the lives of the victim and offender are often enmeshed in many ways, interveners are particularly challenged to determine an appropriate course of action when CCR goals conflict.

Issues such as these underscore the difficulty of developing public policy that produces positive outcomes for the diverse individuals who are drawn into the criminal justice system and the particular circumstances of each of their lives. Present efforts to resolve these policy dilemmas are attempting to develop more nuanced responses that take into account both the level of risk posed by the offender to the extent that it can be assessed, and the particular life circumstances of individual victims and offenders, such as poverty, mental illness, or immigration status, to intervene effectively while mitigating unintended disparate impacts. To facilitate this more contextual response to domestic violence cases, interveners must attempt to establish some connection or relationship with victims to obtain the level of information required. The ability of interveners to assess the level of danger, or determine which actions at their disposal would be most effective in a particular case, requires the victim’s perspective to provide the context in which existing public information about the history of the abuser’s violence can be best understood.

A recent iteration of the CCR approach, described in The Blueprint for Safety: An Interagency Response to Domestic Violence Crimes (Praxis International, 2010), was developed through the collaboration of government agencies and advocacy groups in St. Paul, MN. The Blueprint stresses the importance of victim engagement in guiding policy development and interventions in individual cases. In its foundational principles, victim engagement is included in several ways. Recognizing that domestic violence is a patterned crime, the Blueprint stresses continuing engagement with victims and offenders. Contact with a victim is likely to continue for an extended time and building a respectful relationship with each victim improves the likelihood of successfully partnering with her or him in the future. The Blueprint advises interveners to “engage in a dialogue with the victim rather than treating her or him as a data point” (Praxis International, 2010, p. 6).

Another principle of the Blueprint is to intervene in ways that send messages of help and accountability. If the psychological and physical hold that abusers have over their victims is to be challenged, it is important that victims understand how the CCR will counteract that power, believe that interveners understand the reality of living with coercive controlling abuse, see that interveners are united in their approach, and feel that help is available as long as it is needed. Lastly, the Blueprint emphasizes the need for interveners to understand the unique social reality of each victim and offender that results in disparate impact of the policies. Victim engagement improves the ability of interveners to avoid actions that result in neither just nor protective outcomes and enhances the victim’s ability to understand and benefit from the available interventions.

This research on victim-focused outreach supports the wisdom of the Blueprint and other criminal justice coordination models that emphasize the role of victim engagement in promoting the ability of a CCR to enhance victim safety. It is impressive that the researchers successfully completed a randomized, longitudinal study of the Denver community-coordinated, victim-focused outreach program. In this article, the researchers discuss the evaluation of the impact on criminal legal system outcomes of the victim-focused CCR in which the relevant criminal legal system and community-based agencies were stakeholders in the outreach design and implementation.

As the authors note, research on the impact of victim outreach outcomes relevant to the criminal legal system has lacked randomized control designs. Past research on the CCR approach typically studied the overall impact of the coordinated intervention, or the effects of arrest or prosecution. For example, this author participated in a quasi-experimental evaluation of three local coordinated intervention projects that included victim outreach and found evidence of the positive impact of CCR on criminal justice outcomes (Gamache, Edleson, & Schock, 1988). However, the research did not tease out the impact of any single intervention in isolation from the others. This study makes a significant contribution to the field by specifically evaluating the impact of victim outreach and validating its inclusion as a critical activity of a CCR.

The stated goal of the Domestic Violence Coordinated Triage Intervention Project is to “implement a victim-focused CCR intervention.” The Outreach Program involved community-based advocates contacting victims by phone at case inception regardless of prosecution filing status. In addition, the outreach design attempted to match victims with an appropriate service provider, assigning cases to different partner agencies based on an assessment of the victim’s specific needs gleaned during these contacts. This attempt to customize the victim outreach strategy exemplifies recent attempts to improve the effectiveness of CCR interventions with diverse populations.

The evaluation focused on the impact of a community-coordinated and victim-centered outreach approach on criminal legal outcomes, based on the reasoning that prioritizing victims’ needs would yield positive results. The study was designed to compare the results of a proactive outreach strategy (O) with the practice of simply referring victims to services (R); however, as the study proceeded, two other groups naturally resulted: victims who declined assistance (D) and those who were never reached (NR). As the groups did not differ across demographic variables, they were included in the research. As a result, the study provides information about these two groups of victims that is valuable to CCR organizers who seek to better understand why victims drop out of the system. Unfortunately, the article provided few details about the exact nature of the outreach strategy, which left many questions unanswered regarding the types of assistance that victims found particularly useful or what most facilitated their engagement with the criminal justice intervention.

Victim information was gathered through personal interviews and, impressively, the study was able to retain 80% of the original sample in the third and final victim interviews that took place 12 months later. A majority of the women experienced physical aggression or injuries, and the vast majority reported psychologically aggressive tactics, in the 6 months prior, indications that these abusers were unlikely to stop their violence without intervention.

Across all groups, victim contact was linked to better criminal justice outcomes, but proactive outreach resulted in greater positive impact in several ways. Among women who continued to live with their abusers at the time of the first interview, 100% of the O group had verdicts entered in their cases versus 33% of the R group. Proactive outreach appears particularly helpful to women who continue to cohabit with their abusers in the month after police intervention, which suggests that interveners should persist in contacting victims in all cases, and not view a victim’s lack of immediate separation from the abuser as an indication that she does not desire the assistance of the courts.

The finding that ethnic minority women in the O group were significantly more likely to go to court than women in other groups is also instructive. As many communities encounter greater difficulty in resolving these particular cases, the implementation of proactive victim outreach strategies may yield better case outcomes for ethnic minority women. However, the findings also raise a concern about the outcomes of these cases that was not discussed in the article.

There was a greater likelihood that a guilty verdict was entered in cases involving ethnic minorities, and interestingly, in cases involving women with higher SES. What explains the moderating influence of these factors? Are defense attorneys more likely to advise an ethnic minority defendant to plead guilty than other defendants? Are prosecutors less willing to dismiss charges in these cases? Were higher SES defendants allowed to plead to lesser charges more often than other defendants, thus increasing the likelihood of a plea, but possibly resulting in lighter sentences? Future research should examine possible explanations for these findings, so that unintended disparate treatment may be avoided.

In these harsh economic times, the argument that legal outcomes are enhanced by outreach efforts may prove invaluable to advocacy organizations when budget cuts to CCR projects are contemplated. All too often, outreach and victim services are the first programs to be eliminated. Proactive outreach allows victims to participate more meaningfully in the criminal justice intervention in their lives. A victim’s continued involvement can facilitate the court’s ability to respond more helpfully and appropriately to the specific context of the perpetrator’s use of violence. As the authors note, early contact results in subsequent invitations from the system that allow victims to make their own decisions about continued involvement in the case. When victims are not invited into the system in an effective way, they are seldom afforded this opportunity.