NCJ Number
221764
Journal
Violence Afainst Women Volume: 14 Issue: 2 Dated: February 2008 Pages: 136-157
Date Published
February 2008
Length
22 pages
Annotation
An examination of the domestic abuse and criminal careers of 342 men arraigned in the Quincy District Court (Massachusetts) for domestic violence between 1995 and 1996 examined whether any intervention or multiple interventions over relatively short periods could change long-term behavior such as domestic violence.
Abstract
The study found that the number of abusers who ceased their abuse as indicated by new arrests for domestic abuse or new restraining orders filed against them eroded from 84 percent over 6 months to 39 percent over 9 years. Batterer intervention research with shorter followup periods have uniformly found that the majority of abusers did not reabuse after arrest, prosecution, referral to a batterer program, probation supervision, and/or a restraining order lodged against them. The current research suggests that these studies may have failed to expose the chronic and persistent nature of domestic abuse over time even when time-limited interventions are applied. Study findings also suggest a link between domestic violence and overall criminal behavior. Just over two-thirds of the men were arrested and prosecuted for assault and battery, 44 of them with a dangerous weapon. Another 8 percent were arrested for rape, kidnapping, robbery, or armed assault. Just over 20 percent were arrested for violating a civil restraining order, including 15 percent who were also arrested for assault and battery during the order violation. Only 5 percent were arrested and charged with a nonviolent offense. In the followup longitudinal study, researchers tracked the criminal and civil records for the following decade through the end of 2004 for all but 14 of the abusers in the study (n=342). 4 tables and 36 references