The Effects of State and Local Domestic Violence Policy on Intimate Partner Homicide

In the United States, rates of homicide involving “intimate partners”—spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends—have declined substantially over the past 25 years. Public awareness of and policy responses to intimate partner violence have increased during the same period. The coincidence of the two trends leads naturally to the question of their relationship: To what extent has the social response to partner violence contributed to the decline in intimate partner homicide?

Research evidence addressing that question is highly limited, but the few existing studies suggest that domestic violence resources such as hotlines, shelters, and legal advocacy programs may be associated with lower rates of intimate partner homicide, while controlling for other influences (Browne and Williams, 1989; Dugan, Nagin, and Rosenfeld, 1999).

The authors have assessed the relationship between intimate partner homicide and domestic violence resources for a larger number of places over a longer period of time and with a richer set of outcome and resource measures than used in previous research. That relationship is interpreted in terms of the exposure-reducing potential of domestic violence resources. Simply put, those policies, programs, and services that effectively reduce contact between intimate partners involved in a violent relationship reduce the opportunity for further abuse and violence.

This perspective on intimate homicide assumes that any mechanism that reduces the barriers to exit from a violent relationship will lower the probability that one partner will kill the other. For example, the availability of welfare benefits, by hypothesis, reduces a woman’s exposure to violence by providing financial support for her and her children to leave an abusive partner. Although the idea of exposure reduction is relatively straightforward, its effects on violence need not be.

Substantial evidence shows that the highest homicide risk is during the period when a battered victim leaves the relationship, suggesting a potential “retaliation effect” from exposure reduction associated with domestic violence interventions (Bernard and Bernard, 1983; Campbell, 1992). Such retaliation effects could occur if the intervention (e.g., restraining order, arrest, shelter protection) angers or threatens the abusive partner without effectively reducing contact with the victim. The authors evaluated the exposure-reducing and retaliation effects of a broad range of domestic violence resources on levels of heterosexual intimate homicide by victim gender, race, and marital relationship to the offender for 48 large U.S. cities between 1976 and 1996, controlling for changes in marriage and divorce rates, women’s status, and other time- and place-varying influences.

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http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/199711.pdf