Models of Community Coordination in Partner Violence Cases: A Multi-Site Comparative Analysis

Coordinated community intervention is widely heralded as the key to achieving better outcomes in cases involving violence within families, particularly violence between partners. On the surface at least, the appeal of coordination is intuitive: people working together from different (and sometimes competing) bases of power and with different kinds of resources are -- more likely to improve the prospects, for victims than are criminal justice agents or victim service providers working in isolation. However, although researchers and practitioners nearly unanimously recommend greater investment in community coordination strategies, there has been very little systematic observation of the process, problems, and products of local coordination efforts.

The purpose of this project is to explore the dimensionality of community responses to domestic violence, and, through comparative case studies of five communities, to develop and begin to test hypotheses about the efficacy of different coordination experiences. This study began with some simple but important observations. First, single-site studies of community coordination efforts are typically designed to document progress over time toward particular objectives, which may have been defined at the outset of the project by participants.

However, a comparative study of coordination offers a somewhat different research opportunity, the opportunity to observe multiple dimensions along which communities vary, and assess those variables’ relationships with outcome measures. Second, preliminary research for this project suggested that practitioners are willing to describe, often with considerable confidence, the nature of their communities’ responses to domestic violence, although they do not always describe it in similar terms; but they express.

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http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/187351.pdf