Criminal Justice Procedures in Family Violence Crimes

Abstract

Public attitudes about family violence have shifted during the past decade from indifference to support for use of legal remedies to deter and punish. Few studies adequately describe the methods and differential effectiveness of police and prosecutorial handling of family violence cases. Much of the conventional wisdom concerning justice procedures for dealing with family violence is not substantiated by the available research. Only about one-third of domestic disturbance calls to police involves some form of family violence crime; consequently, studies of police responses to domestic disturbance calls are not generalizable to the subset of calls involving family violence. The claim that the police are less likely to apply criminal sanctions to family violence crimes than to stranger violence crimes is not substantiated by existing research. Few studies support the claim that different factors are involved in decisions to prosecute family violence crimes as compared with stranger violence crimes. Finally, no systematic evaluations identify which sentencing outcomes reduce or eliminate subsequent family violence. The existing research should be improved by resolving definitional problems and ambiguities, by collecting data specific to particular types of abuse, by obtaining more representative samples of offenders and victims, by using better controls and longer follow-up periods on study samples, and by adopting more explicit theoretical and conceptual formulations to guide evaluation research.

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