Deborah Epstein

Refocusing on Women A New Direction for Policy and Research on Intimate Partner Violence

A key question facing researchers of intimate partner violence is how the real-life contexts of victims’ lives should affect state policy. The bulk of recently adopted and much touted criminal justice reforms have taken the form of relatively inflexible, one-size-fits-all mandatory responses focused on counseling, restraining, and punishing batterers. Even the protection order system relies far more heavily on batterer treatment programs than on victim support to prevent future violence. Together, these reforms have largely sacrificed the contextualized, woman-centered focus from which the antidomestic violence movement originated. Recently, however, a small body of research has emerged indicating that responding flexibly to victims’ needs and providing them with advocacy and broad social support could be a more successful strategy for keeping women safe. These data highlight the importance of expanding victim-centered resources and reincorporating a particularized perspective into current policy and practice. Development of this literature should guide future reform efforts.

The Victim-Informed Prosecution Project: A Quasi-Experimental Test of a Collaborative Model for Cases of Intimate Partner Violence:

The Victim-Informed Prosecution Project (VIP) was designed to amplify the voice of the victim in the prosecution of a battering current or ex-partner through collaboration between the prosecution and victim-centered agencies.This article describes the rationale for and design and implementation of VIP and then explores whether it increased perceived voice.While some VIP services (advocacy and civil protection order representation) were associated with increased perceived voice, the program as a whole was associated with it only in the context of greater contact with prosecutors, when cases were more likely to be felonies.We make specific recommendations for applying this model.

Beyond the RCT: Integrating Rigor and Relevance to Evaluate the Outcomes of Domestic Violence Programs

Programs for domestic violence (DV) victims and their families have grown exponentially over the last four decades. The evidence demonstrating the extent of their effectiveness, however, often has been criticized as stemming from studies lacking scientific rigor. A core reason for this critique is the widespread belief that credible evidence can derive only from research grounded in randomized control trials (RCTs). Although the RCT method has its strengths, we argue that it is rarely an optimal—or even a possible—approach for evaluating multifaceted DV programs. This article reviews the reasons that RCT is a poor fit for such programs and argues that a more inclusive conceptualization of credible evidence is critical to expanding our knowledge base about how DV programs affect survivors’ safety and well-being.