This report documents the evaluation of implementation and outcomes for the Domestic Violence Homicide Prevention Demonstration Initiative, funded by the United States Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women. The initiative includes the implementation of two domestic violence homicide reduction models: the Lethality Assessment Program and the Domestic Violence High Risk Team program.
This report has two goals: the first is to assess how the model programs, the Lethality Assessment Program and the Domestic Violence High Risk Team program, were implemented in each community to understand if the models were implemented as intended; the second is to assess outcomes that resulted from the implementation of the model programs, including impact on collaboration among providers, offender accountability, victim participation in services, victim perceptions of safety, re-offense, and re-victimization.
The report lists six evaluation questions and several sub-questions to gauge the efficacy of the programs. It also relies on qualitative methods to assess stakeholder perceptions of the facilitators and barriers to implementing the model program. The overall goal of this report is to judge whether the Lethality Assessment Program and the Domestic Violence High Risk Team program help reduce domestic violence.
To increase the efficacy of the report, the interview subjects were stratified by sex, age, native language, risk level, and sexual orientation.
Barriers to success in implementing these programs include the lack of training for law enforcement officers, the volume of calls coming in from domestic violence victims, and that law enforcement officers were asked to use their personal phones to respond to calls from victims, among other concerns.
Stakeholders, including law enforcement, domestic violence service providers, and affiliated professionals, had positive impressions of the Lethality Assessment Program and mixed perceptions of the Domestic Violence High Risk Team program.
The interviewees reported that they needed a better description of the process for the Lethality Assessment Program, and communities reported that they needed a more standardized process to provide them with a better understanding of the process for the Domestic Violence High Risk Team program. Overall, the report concludes that both the Lethality Assessment Program and Domestic Violence High Risk Team program require more research to better understand the effects of the programs.
This report includes 25 tables and 36 figures; it is the result of a grant given to Yale University under the NIJ grant 2013-ZD-CX-0001.