Violence Against Women: Reflections on the Research Agenda

• NCJ Number: 159566
• Author(s): J Travis
• Date Published: January 1995
• Length: 13 pages
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored

Annotation

The NIJ Director discusses the impact of research about violence against women on past, current, and future policies and programs regarding this issue.

Abstract

NIJ is currently supporting four projects. One will set a research agenda covering prevention, education, and legal strategies, with emphasis on underserved populations. The others will focus on the feasibility of creating centralized State databases on the incidence of sexual and domestic assault, the means by which abusive partners obtain the addresses of domestic assault victims, and the battered woman's syndrome. In addition, effectiveness of the Violence Against Women Act will be evaluated from three perspectives. The past two decades of research examining the effects of a mandatory arrest policy for spousal assault have had a major impact on public policy and also reveal the limits of research to determine the effectiveness of specific policies. Overall, a theoretical framework is needed for the ideal criminal justice response to domestic assault. Two innovations that appear promising in this area are community policing with its problemsolving philosophy and the domestic violence court of Dade County (Fla.). Both research and policymaking must recognize that domestic violence is a particularly egregious form of violence that differs from other violence in three crucial respects. List and summaries of studies