Domestic Abuse Intervention Project

Community-Based Intervention

Overview

The Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP) in Duluth, Minnesota, is a comprehensive community-based program for intervention in domestic abuse cases. It attempts to coordinate the response of the many agencies and practitioners who respond to domestic violence cases in our community. The project involves community organizing and advocacy that examines training programs, policies, procedures and texts—intake forms, report formats, assessments, evaluations, checklists and other materials. We ask, how does each practice, procedure, form or brochure either enhance or compromise victim safety?

When a woman being beaten by her husband calls 911, she dials into a complex community system, which often resolves cases based on institutional imperatives rather than on making victim safety central. This reflects an historical tolerance for domestic violence, rather than the attitudes of individual practitioners.

Negotiating common understandings among agencies lessens the negative impact of fragmented philosophies and responses on the victims of domestic violence. These understandings make central the victim's experience of violence and coercion and ongoing threats to her safety. The shared framework for community intervention is guided by practical questions: Who is doing harm to whom? How dangerous is this situation? Who needs protection?

Community agencies include the communications center (911), police department, prosecutor’s office, sheriff’s department, probation department, women’s shelter, public health department, district court bench, and several mental health agencies. With each agency, our aim has been to make links between what individual practitioners do in a case and the overall effect of intervention.

Principles of Intervention

1. Whenever possible, the burden of confronting abusers and placing restrictions on their behaviors should rest with the community, not the victim.
2. To make fundamental changes in a community’s response to violence against women, individual practitioners must work cooperatively, guided by training, job descriptions, and standardized practices that are all oriented toward the desired changes.
3. Intervention must be responsive to the totality of harm done by the violence rather than be incident or punishment focused.
4. Protection of the victim must take priority when two intervention goals clash.
5. Intervention practices must reflect a basic understanding of and a commitment to accountability to the victim, whose life is most impacted by our individual and collective actions.

Adherence to these principles helps to produce consistent results regardless of the beliefs or values of an individual practitioner.

Policies and Procedures

It is vital that policies and procedures for intervening in domestic assault cases be founded on a sound theoretical basis which protects battered women, helps judicial system practitioners discharge their public duties, and renounces the practice of victim blaming. We use following guidelines when developing policies.

1. Victims must have access to safe emergency housing.
2. Using the legal system to intervene in cases is for the benefit of public safety, but especially for victims of the abuse. Victims should not be put at risk of greater harm in order to hold an offender accountable. The first priority of intervention should be to carry out policies and protocols which protect the victim from further harm.
3. The intensity of intervention should be based on the need for protection from further harm and on what is needed to create deterrence to the offender. The use of jail or incarceration should be considered when other safety measures are inadequate. More jail does not equal more justice for battered women.
4. The primary focus of intervention should be on stopping the assailant's use of violence, not on fixing or ending the relationship.
5. In general, the court, in determining its action in a case, should not prescribe a behavior or course of action for the victim, e.g., it should neither force testimony by threatening to jail victims for refusing to testify nor mandate treatment for the victim who has not used violence.
6. The courts and law enforcement agencies should work cooperatively with victim advocacy programs and provide the advocacy/shelter program and victims with the broadest possible access to legal information.
7. The courts should, when appropriate, mandate educational groups for assailants and impose increasingly harsh penalties for any continued acts of harassment and violence they commit.
8. All policies and procedural guidelines should be reviewed by members of the communities not represented by the majority culture (e.g., communities of color, the gay/lesbian/bisexual community, people who are low income). Their review should include a close look at monitoring procedures to safeguard against the use of race, class, or lifestyle biases in implementing policies.
9. All interventions must account for the power imbalance between the assailant and the victim.
10. Policies and procedures should be designed to act as a general deterrent to battering in the community.
11. Policies and procedures adopted by agencies in the judicial system should be continually monitored by an organization that is outside the judicial system and is guided by victim advocacy programs and battered women.
12. All practices and policies should be continually evaluated and discussed to ensure their effectiveness in protecting all victims and to provide ongoing training for agencies.

Domestic Violence Policy Checklist

The checklist is designed to aid agencies in examining the extent to which their domestic violence policies organize workers to think about and act on these unique criminal cases effectively.

Does your policy cover

1. What practitioners do under what circumstances?
2. Guidelines to sort cases into appropriate levels of response?
3. Methods to ensure practitioners’ compliance (tracking)?
4. How to make an exception to the policy?
5. How to document actions, designating the information to include on relevant forms to decrease reliance on memory, and to improve completeness of case information?
6. With whom and ways to share information on a case and link with others?

Does your policy

1. Focus on changing the institution, not the victim
2. Balance need to standardize institutional response and need to address particulars of a case
3. Encourage a response built on cooperation of relationship with others who also intervene in these cases
4. Focus on institutional practices, not people
5. Build in methods of ensuring compliance with policy while permitting responsible exercise of discretion
6. Link practitioners to those beyond the next worker in the system
7. Account for offenders’ level of danger
8. Assume victims will be vulnerable to consequences if they participate in confronting offender
9. Assume offender is likely to batter in future relationships
10. Document pattern and history of abuse when and wherever possible

Does your policy account for how

1. Legal or institutional categories help and hinder understanding of the case
2. Practitioners will get around the intent of the policy
3. Offenders will circumvent the intent of the policy
4. The policy/response will be used against victims of battering
5. Different levels of dangerousness and risk require different levels of response
6. Punishment/sanction will impact offenders and victims
7. Non-intervention will affect offenders and victims
8. Rehabilitation/programming can be used against victims
9. Victims use violence against their abusers
10. The speed of response will impact victim safety
11. Children are affected by violence
12. Offenders can use children to control victim
13. Institution sends double messages about children’s exposure to violence

Does your policy

1. Account for different impacts of interventions depending on social status of victims and/or offenders
2. Standardize procedures that focus on safety (i.e., sentencing matrix, policy report form, control log, dispatching screen)

An intervention project is most effective if it is independent from city and county government. The DAIP in Duluth has received limited funding from these units of government, and hence has been relatively unfettered when confronting a particular practice of a participating agency. While intervention projects are usually separate from the shelter, organizers of projects should work with shelters to ensure that projects are not negatively impacting shelter funding and that the protection of battered women through safe housing and advocacy takes priority.

Additional components of the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth include a 28-week education program of offenders. The program uses the curriculum Creating a Process of Change for Men Who Batter which was developed by the DAIP. Advocates at the DAIP contact the partners of men court ordered to the program to offer advocacy, community resources, and education groups for women using our curriculum In Our Best Interest: A Process for Personal and Social Change.

Curriculum materials and trainings on the Duluth programs are described in the Training and Resources pages.