Sexual abuse

Andy Mao: [In progress] — notwithstanding the number of elder abuse, neglect and exploitation cases around the country that occur each year, the number of elder abuse prosecutions varied widely around the country.

This esteemed panel today will be focusing on perhaps some of the reasons for that variation and some of the factors that go into elder abuse prosecutions.

To my immediate right is Dr. Shelly Jackson. Dr. Shelly Jackson is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences. She has written and authored extensively on a wide array of issues involving child abuse, domestic violence. Recently, she has focused a lot of her attention on — focused and presented on issues involving elder abuse and mistreatment as well as financial exploitation. Dr. Jackson will be focusing today on a study, an NIJ-funded study, on some of the factors that go into a prosecutor's decision on whether to prosecute an elder abuse case.

To Dr. Jackson's right is Lori Stiegel. She is the senior attorney of the American Bar Association's Commission on Law and Aging and has specialized in elder abuse since 1995. Lori was a member of the National Research Council's study panel on Risk and Prevalence of Elder Abuse and has authored and co-authored extensively on elder abuse, a number of articles including Elder Abuse Detection and Intervention: A Collaborative Approach, Elder Abuse in the State Courts: Three Curricula for Judges and Court Staff, as well as The Power of Attorney Abuse: What States Can Do About It. Lori will be focusing on some innovative court models that have tailored themselves to deal with elder abuse cases and will be focusing on that link in the elder justice chain.

Last but not least, to my far right is Page Ulrey. Page is a senior prosecuting attorney with the King County Prosecutor's Office in Seattle, Washington. She started there in 1998 and in 2001 was appointed to the newly-created position of elder abuse prosecutor in the criminal division. During her time there, she founded and chaired the King County Elder Abuse Council and the Criminal Mistreatment Review Panel. Since 2007, Page has worked as the elder abuse prosecutor in the Economic Crimes Unit and has focused on cases involving vulnerable adult financial abuse, neglect and sexual assault.

With that, I am going to turn it over to Dr. Jackson, who will start us off on her presentation.

Shelly Jackson: OK. Good morning. I am going to be talking about some barriers and facilitators in prosecuting elder abuse in a pilot study that we've done. I want to acknowledge my colleague, Tom Hafemeister, who's the co PI on this project. He's also my husband, and he and my kids were upstairs still sleeping when I left.

[Laughter.]

Jackson: And then, of course, we'd like to thank NIJ for funding the project.

Now, before I get into the prosecution part of this, I wanted to tell you about how we became interested in prosecution. We were funded a few years ago to study financial exploitation of the elderly, and what we did was we looked at financial exploitation by comparing it to other types of abuse, like physical abuse, neglect and what we call “hybrid” cases. And that's where there's financial exploitation and something else going on. And you can see by the title here that we were interested in the dynamics, the risk factors, and when we conceptualized this study, we were thinking about Adult Protective Services as society's response. Well, we were gathering our data, we were running our analyses, and we found out that 18 percent of the cases in our study were prosecuted and received a conviction for elder abuse. They might have been prosecuted on something else, but for elder abuse, it was 18 percent of the cases. But the physical abuse cases were more likely than expected to be prosecuted compared to those other four types of abuse that was going on.

We also learned at that time that our caseworkers were finding it very difficult to get prosecutors to help them out in those cases. So almost three-fourths of our caseworkers said, “You know, if I go to law enforcement, they're less likely to help me in a financial exploitation case than a physical abuse or a neglect kind of case.” But then just in general, they were extremely frustrated with how prosecutors were responding to their cases. And so we engaged them in a conversation about why that might be, and you would hear things like, “Well, the elder actually told her son that she could — her son that he could write checks out of her checkbook,” or you've got power of attorney issues.

Elders make poor witnesses. If it is not $100,000 or more, prosecutors aren't going to take the case. And these are things that you would hear in the literature as well when you do a review of the literature; they're really reflected there as well. And that got us to thinking about what's going on here, and it seemed to us that the caseworkers have this perception and belief; they really believe that prosecutors aren't going to take their cases. So that leads them to think, “Well, why bother? I'm not going to send it over to the prosecutor anyway,” and this was particularly true in financial exploitation because what was happening with those kinds of cases is if there's physical abuse and financial exploitation, they might pursue physical abuse thinking, “Oh, prosecutors might take that, but I'm going to drop the financial part because nobody's going to do anything about that anyway.”

And then this is really anecdotal, but then we would go to conferences, and I would hear prosecutors say, “You know, elder abuse isn't a problem in my jurisdiction. Nobody ever sends me those kinds of cases,” and then we're thinking wait a minute, what's going on here, there is some kind of miscommunication between these players. And that led us to go back and think we were initially thinking about society's response in terms of Adult Protective Services, but we said, “Wow! What prosecutors are doing is directly influencing what our caseworkers are doing, what they're willing to pursue,” and so we went back to NIJ and asked whether we could expand our study a little bit to try and start figuring out what prosecutors are thinking when elder abuse cases come their way.

And so we've done a pilot study looking at some barriers and facilitators, and that's what I'll present the rest of the presentation on.

OK. So this is a pilot study, and we had interviews with prosecutors in four states, Virginia, California, Illinois and Pennsylvania, and I'll tell you why those states were chosen. But we had 17 prosecutors, and as I said, this is a pilot study. They had 13 years of experience on average, so, in general, they had some experience in prosecuting. Almost half of them had a hundred or more cases, which I can't even imagine what that's like, but maybe you can speak to that.

And almost three-fourths of them were not what you call a dedicated — I'm not sure exactly what the term is, but elder abuse is not the only thing they do. So, in almost three-fourths of the cases, they had 25 percent or less of their caseload was elder abuse.

OK. And then we created an interview instrument based on a review of the literature, some of the things we talked about before, but many, many other things, demographics and experience and then these facilitators and barriers to prosecution.

Now, we had five UVA law graduates. These were, I will confess, students of my husband's whose jobs were either deferred — this was during the economic downturn. People weren't walking out into great jobs. Their jobs were either deferred or they didn't have job, but they were going back to their states, to California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and that's why we had those states. I mean, it was a convenient sample for sure.

So, once they would initially get the prosecutor in the office to agree to an interview, then we just used a snowball technique, “Is there somebody else that you know that we can interview about this?” And, on average, the interviews were 40 minutes. We tried to get them shorter, but we couldn't. There was a lot to talk about.

OK. So these are some of our results, and the first thing we wanted to know is whether it mattered to prosecutors if the case came from Adult Protective Services, whether the referral came from law enforcement or didn't matter, and in two-thirds of the cases, it didn't matter, but where there was a preference, it was for law enforcement, and that, of course has to do with evidence. They're generally seen as better at collecting evidence, and this is kind of the theme that we're going to hear throughout this, it depends on the evidence, and I think Page is going to speak to that as well.

OK. And then we asked them is elder abuse more difficult, the same, or easier to prosecute than other kinds of crimes? And I think it's 56 percent said that it is more difficult. And when we were talking to our caseworkers, over half of them thought that these were difficult cases to prosecute.

And then we got into why that might be. So we're going to look at a number of factors that might influence why these are harder, and one of the things we were interested in is whether the organizational climate of the office, the agency that the prosecutor worked in, whether they take these cases seriously, and 94 percent of them do take them seriously. A third, a quarter of them thought that the prosecutors in their office were even more willing to take an elder abuse case than other kinds of crime, and that they were more likely to receive a conviction in about a third of those cases. And that had to do with things like sympathy for the elder.

And then almost half of them perceived, anyway, that they were rewarded for taking elder abuse cases. And Pennsylvania was significantly more likely to feel that way, and Virginia was significantly less likely to feel rewarded for taking elder abuse cases.

OK. And then we were interested in prosecutor training, and 41 percent of our prosecutors received less training in elder abuse compared to other kinds of trainings that they might receive, so training might be an issue.

And then we have another, a range of issues that we asked them about, and we just put them all on one slide here. So you often hear elders make bad witnesses, and you can see 93 percent of our prosecutors felt like elders make poor witnesses; the elder is unavailable to be a witness. There is weak evidence in these cases. Perpetrators acted within their rights, and that is often what you'll hear with power of attorney, right? There's nothing. She signed it. He can do what he wants to with it, “he said/she said” kinds of cases.

So, over half of the prosecutors thought that these were real issues that they have to deal with. Less so, though, were uncooperative third parties, it's not perceived as a crime, the prosecutor is unqualified, or there's insufficient resources in the office. And we saw before that the offices that we talked to, anyway, generally take these cases seriously.

And then we asked about a range of victim characteristics as well, whether these would increase the willingness to prosecute a case. So, willing to testify, significant harm was done to the elder. The elder has the ability to testify. They press charges or the elder made the complaint or the elder is not deceased, and what do most of those have to do with, except for the harm, they really have to do with victim cooperation. And I think that's what prosecutors are seeing when they think about are they willing to press charges, are they willing to testify, that that signals to prosecutors whether the elder is going to be a cooperative witness. Now, less influential is whether the perpetrator is a stranger or a close relative.

And then some personal characteristics of the victim had to do with things like mental health, whether the victim is living — we just saw that — whether they're articulate, good cognitive status, their physical health. These were a little less endorsed than the previous group of characteristics, but still there is a third to a half that consider these important factors as well.

What we did find, though, is social network, education, age and gender were not endorsed by prosecutors, but you can kind of see that those would be things like sexism, ageism, classism, and so you would probably not expect those to be endorsed, I think, but probably related to some of those other characteristics, I would guess.

OK. We also asked them an open-ended question, whether there were any perpetrator characteristics that might be influential in deciding whether to take these cases, and generally, they said no. And here, again, it depends on the evidence.

One person said family members are less likely to be prosecuted, and another said nonfamily members are more likely to be prosecuted. And, in our study, we definitely found that relatives were less likely to be prosecuted, which is not surprising.

OK. We were also interested in law enforcement because very often the case comes to prosecutors through law enforcement, and all of our prosecutors thought that law enforcement take elder abuse cases seriously.

And, in Virginia, we heard some variations on that, and so that's why we decided to ask that question. But the prosecutors in our study thought they take elder abuse cases seriously and that they receive good evidence from prosecutors. And almost three-fourths of them, of the prosecutors, said that APS is involved in their cases, and when they are involved, 85 percent said that they receive really helpful assistance from Adult Protective Services, that they like Adult Protective Services being involved in their cases. And part of that has to do with kind of, you know, figuratively speaking, but holding the elder's hand through the criminal justice process, that they have much greater skill in doing that than some others.

OK. So we also asked them, though, are there any ways that law enforcement and APS might improve what they're doing, and, of course, they had some suggestions, such as collaboration, and this is one of my big themes. I've been in the world of child advocacy centers for over a decade, and I'm very fond of the multidisciplinary approach. And I'm going to come back to that at the end. I think it's one of the keys.

I thought it was really interesting, though, that they thought that law enforcement and APS should be more proactive, given that because the APS at least perceives they don't take those cases, they don't bring them to the prosecutors, document everything. And then also they thought law enforcement needed some training in interviewing individuals with cognitive deficits, and we heard from our caseworkers that law enforcement is very impatient when they interview elders. They like everything in a nice, neat package, and it takes elders a little longer to kind of get the story out, and they get frustrated and leave.

And then the limits of power of attorney authority, and I think this really has to do with Virginia. Virginia just passed a uniform power of attorney. Lori wrote that great, great, great article — or monograph? Anyway, on power of attorney, and so Virginia just passed that. It goes into effect July 1. So that will be less of an issue for us, but it's going to take a lot of training because we heard from our caseworkers that power of attorney cases, law enforcement doesn't do anything with those. So it's going to take some education to get them thinking in that direction.

We were also interested in whether we needed statutory reform or whether those statutes were working fine, and 81 percent thought that their statutes were helpful to them. Virginia, however, was significantly less likely to find their statutes helpful, and I think that has to do with their financial exploitation, lack of statute.

OK. We also wondered if there were some legal constraints that prosecutors were working within, and, of course, there are. There's the confrontation clause, and with our elders who become incapacitated for various reasons from cognitive deficits to death, confrontation clause becomes a big issue and also a lack of hearsay exception, so if we can't get the elder up on the stand, are there any ways that we can get information from other people into the courtroom. So those are two pretty huge barriers.

Power of attorney laws, I just mentioned, and narrow neglect statutes, and we're going to look at neglect in a minute specifically, and those seem to be really tough cases.

OK. And we have identified a few court reforms, and we were interested in whether prosecutors thought these were helpful, expedited trials, enhanced penalties for the perpetrators, of course, priority on the docket and accommodation for elders. And those were generally, over 60 percent, over two-thirds thought that those were really useful reforms. But you can see the expedited trials, priority on the docket, that's getting the elder in there as fast as we can, so that we can make sure we get them up, get the case in the courtroom.

And then, in terms of investigation and prosecution reforms, we've got some things going on there. Multidisciplinary teams were endorsed by, I think it was, 88 percent of the prosecutors. As I said, I'm a big fan of the specially trained prosecutors, equally powerful, specialists in the office, in the prosecutor's office, to aid investigation, the availability of social service agencies, these forensic centers — have you all heard of elder forensic centers? — which is another kind of multidisciplinary approach, and vertical prosecution.

But what you can see, I think what a lot of those reforms have to do with, is getting elder cooperation, victim cooperation, right? If you've got vertical prosecution, you've got the same person kind of bonding with the elder and helping them through the system. So I think that's what is at the base of a lot of these reforms, is trying to get our elders.

What I thought was interesting is no-drop policies and mandatory arrests were not nearly as endorsed, but I will tell you, in our study, with the physical abuse cases that were prosecuted, it's not that our elders wanted those cases prosecuted. They didn't, none of them — seventy-five percent of our elders didn't want prosecutors involved at all — and particularly the physical abuse, but what happened is they're in this brawl with their perpetrator, and they call law enforcement and they come out, and the elder says, “No, I'm sorry. I don't really want to do this,” but law enforcement says, “You either press charges or we will, but we're not dropping it.” And those are the cases that ended up the most likely to be prosecuted. It's because there was law enforcement involvement. I know we can argue the merits of whether that's a good thing or bad thing, but that's the explanation for why these cases were prosecuted.

OK. And then we asked them open-ended questions about prosecutor — about other kinds of reforms, and I think this is reflective of what we've just been talking about, that we need some hearsay exceptions in those cases where elders become incapacitated or die. And this one, I'm hoping Page or Lori can speak to a little bit more, but the appointment of a defense attorney and then cross-examine the elder before the defendant's been identified and before the elder dies, but you still can't cross-examine that.

Page Ulrey: Well, individual defendant is entitled to a right to confront the witnesses against him. It's not just a generic right.

Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. So it didn't seem like that would work, but, OK, good.

And then several people identified public education — that we need to get our elders educated about elder abuse and make them proactive in their own safety.

And then some statutory reforms, power of attorney laws, that was probably Virginia attorneys or prosecutors; widen the category of neglect and financial exploitation and harsher penalties.

OK. Now, if we do look at whether prosecutors think these types of elder abuse are harder or easier or the same to prosecute, 73 percent said neglect are harder to prosecute than other kinds of crimes, 56 percent thought financial exploitation were harder to prosecute than other kinds of crimes, and 43 percent thought physical abuse were harder, but you can see for physical abuse, actually, about half of them also thought that they were easier to prosecute.

So the neglect which we just heard somebody saying that those are really difficult cases to prosecute is reflected here as well. But, as I mentioned in the beginning, we were very interested in financial exploitation, and so what we did is we tried to dig a little deeper into financial exploitation.

Oh, I forgot. This slide just shows that Virginia was more likely than the other states to find financial exploitation very difficult to prosecute, and, again, that's because they don't have any kind of statute that allows them to pursue those kinds of cases.

OK. Now, we also heard from our caseworkers that prosecutors are unlikely to take their cases unless it involves a lot of money, but the prosecutors in our study said there's really no minimum amount required. It depends on the evidence, of course. But 20 percent of the prosecutors felt weaker to pursue a financial exploitation case, and this is what I was thinking earlier. Our caseworkers also thought that financial exploitation cases were harder for them to investigate as well. There's some different kinds of issues involved with financial exploitation.

And I also mentioned what we call “hybrid cases” or co-occurring financial exploitation and something else. Our caseworkers thought that about 50 percent of the cases that they get involved co-occurring financial exploitation and some other kind of abuse, but it looks like for the prosecutors that happens in less than 25 percent of the cases that at least make it to their office.

Half of them said that really doesn't matter if there's more than one thing going on, but there were a third of them who thought that it was more willing, and I think that that suggests that they were more willing to take those kinds of cases because there's a lot going on in those kinds of families, and we found with our hybrid cases that they were the most intractable cases. They involved family members. The abuse has gone on for decades, and it's really hard to get out of those kinds of cases, get out of that situation.

OK. And then some factors in deciding whether to pursue financial exploitation. Some of that had to do with the amount of evidence, but, generally, we heard that there's a lack of documentation, a lack of corroboration, and a lack of victim participation, that they're less likely to get involved in these kinds of cases. But one prosecutor kind of summed up what everybody else was saying, which is, “I have to prove the elements of the crime to the degree required by law,” and that's what it comes down to, and that the evidence in financial exploitation cases tends to be weaker.

OK. What are the goals in pursuing financial exploitation? We want to hold perpetrators accountable. We want to make sure that they don't harm others. We want to restore the victim's loss, and we want to make sure — we want to send a message to society that this is not OK to do, so deter other people from committing these kinds of crimes and then provide a sense of justice. So you can see that over two-thirds of the — I think if we did this again, we'd kind of try to rank-order this a little bit because, obviously, these are good goals.

Now, back to restoring the elder's loss, though, we heard from our prosecutors that they always ask for restitution, and in 75 percent of those cases, the elder is awarded some restitution, but, indeed, less than 25 percent — I mean, the elders received less than 25 percent of what they'd been awarded, suggesting that if you were going to be financially exploited, it is very unlikely that you are going to get anything back. And that was true in our study as well. Eighty-four percent of the elders in our study got nothing, and that's not restitution. That is just of the money they lost; 84 percent received nothing back.

OK. So, my conclusions, I have five minutes, and I'm good.

So over half of our prosecutors thought that elder abuse is harder to prosecute, that it comes down to evidence. And one of the things that we're really interested in is victim cooperation and how to get victims to cooperate, and I know there's a number of pieces of evidence that you can use, but victim cooperation seems to be a stumbling block in a lot of cases.

So some of the barriers have to do with elder characteristics, prosecutor training, the legal constraints that we mentioned, and that neglect and financial exploitation seem to be particularly difficult to prosecute, but there were facilitators, elder characteristics again. They can either be a barrier or a facilitator, depending on how they come out, but APS and law enforcement involvement seems to be helpful and useful. Most state statutes are working well, and that the reforms that have been instituted — and I know Lori has written a number of articles on reforms, and that's certainly where we got a lot of these, but that they've been helpful. They are perceived by prosecutors as being useful.

OK. So, I end with this idea about a multidisciplinary response, because what we are interested in is trying to figure out how we can increase victim cooperation. And we certainly saw, as I mentioned, our elders, 75 percent of them didn't want prosecutors involved in their case at all, and one of the things that a multidisciplinary response can do is kind of help that process along, I think help the elder along. So you've got Adult Protective Services who knows how to talk to elders. They come in with a social service kind of agenda, “I'm here to help you.” Law enforcement goes in and they get the evidence that they need, and the prosecutor says, “I need this from you. I need this from you,” and I've seen this work in child advocacy centers, and I just really love the idea of using this model with elders. And I know I've been out to California to their elder forensic centers, and I've watched how the multidisciplinary approach works in those cases. It's phenomenal, and we would love to do some more research on multidisciplinary response to elder abuse.

OK. I think that's it.

Lori Stiegel: Good morning. I want to thank NIJ for funding our project and for asking me to be here today to talk about it, and thank all of you for coming and expressing your interest in this subject.

Our project entails an assessment of five court-focused elder abuse initiatives. We called them that because they're all a little bit different. One is actually a court. The other four are connected to in or just very closely connected to and involved with courts. So we just had to make up our own term to describe them, and I will tell you more about them in a while.

So, first, just to give you an overview of what I'll do in my time today is talk about our goal, how we did our project, and then for some context as well as to give you the measures that we used to assess the five projects, I'll talk about barriers to pursuit of legal remedies and guidelines for the state courts, and some of it will be what we just heard Shelly talking about, too. I'll describe the five court-focused initiatives and our findings from them and then just talk real quickly about next steps.

So, our goal, this is the long statement of the goal. Our goal was really to look at what these five projects are doing. Because there is no baseline data about any of them, and we're not doing an evaluation, but we're really looking at their processes, their structure, to some extent their outcomes, and really trying to make some assessment of whether these are good projects that should be replicated in other communities and other states.

Those of you who've been involved in the elder abuse field a lot know that because of the lack of research in the field, people come up with what they think are good ideas and often are good ideas, but then everybody is like, “Oh, we have to go do this,” and there is never any research to determine whether that's really a good idea and whether they are making a difference. So we were, to the extent that we were able to, trying to do that.

My colleague, Pam Teaster, from the University of Kentucky, was our subcontractor and co-PI on this project. She's the researcher; I'm the lawyer, so we made a good team. We had a great multidisciplinary advisory committee, and Page is actually one of the members of that advisory committee.

We used the court-recommended guidelines that Shelly talked about and that I'll talk more about a bit and some other guidelines that were created after our early project as the standards for assessing the five projects, and we've looked at an enormous amount of qualitative and less enormous amount of quantitative data for this project.

For each of the five initiatives, we identified a key informant that was usually the founder or the manager of the program. We then did a very in-depth survey with those people to get background and a lot more information than we had when we wrote the proposal about the project, how it was working, who was involved with it, and then used them to snowball and identify stakeholders in the five communities, so that we would know who to interview when we went and made our five site visits.

So we interviewed 92 stakeholders across those five sites visits. We talked to the chief judge in each community. We talked to other judges who were involved with the project. We talked to court managers, court staff, court clerks, all kinds of court people. We talked to Adult Protective Services. We talked to law enforcement if they were involved with the project. We talked to the prosecutors. We talked to public defenders. We talked to lawyers in private practice. We talked to all kinds of folks at all of those sites.

We talked to three victims as well. We certainly had hoped to talk to more, but even managing to talk to those three was quite a challenge, unfortunately.

We also reviewed court case files, and we reviewed 73 files across the five projects. And we were looking for a variety of things in doing that, and I'll talk more about that later.

I can't tell jokes, but I like cartoons. So, in starting to talk about barriers to going to court, I thought this one nicely illustrates. If you can't read it, it says, “It's bad enough being cheated out of my life savings, but what I really hate is having to get it back in small claims court.”

Older people don't like to go to court. They're very afraid of it, and younger people are, too, but I think older people are more so. Back in the mid '90s, when we did the project that developed the recommendations for state courts handling elder abuse cases, we did a research project. This was funded by the State Justice Institute, which is a quasi governmental agency that provides research and technical assistance to the state courts. And we looked at experts all across the country, including prosecutors, to the extent that there were elder abuse prosecutors in the early '90s, civil lawyers, APS, and all kinds of other folks, judges and other folks, and asked them, “Are elder abuse cases going into court? If not, why not, and what can we do to help get those cases that should be in court into court?”

So lots of barriers to the pursuit of legal remedies were identified. Now, these are the system ones. I think we often talk about the more personal ones, and Shelly talked somewhat about the more personal ones of just that fear of going to court, the embarrassment that, you know, your life savings were so small that you have to go to small claims court to get it back, but that's all the money that person had. The reluctance to get your abusers in trouble, particularly when they are your family members, the fear that intervention will result in you having a guardian appointed or ending up in a nursing home, all those are the personal barriers about going to court or reporting to APS or some other authority. These, again, are the more systemic barriers about the pursuit of legal remedies.

First, victims often just don't know what's available out there, and they don't understand what's available. So we often hear about victims who don't want their abuser prosecuted because they don't want him to go to jail, and they don't understand that judges have many other remedies besides jail that they might want, such as substance abuse or mental health treatment.

The lack of legal services — and this particularly related to civil legal services, but the lack of a lawyer to help you try to get your money back, if it's your money that has been taken, or to get a protection order to keep physical abuse from happening.

Victim difficulty just getting to court, victim difficulty sitting in court.

How many of you have ever been to court? So you know it's a zoo, right? A circus is often an apt description for it, and they have a cattle call, and, you know, lots and lots of people show up for hearings. And you have to get there at 8 or 8:30 in the morning, sort of like today, and then you can sit there for hours before your case is called. And if you are an old person who is frail or you have a medication schedule that you have to keep on or you have to eat at certain times in the day, that sort of environment can be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for you to do.

I remember a case that I handled as a legal services lawyer at the beginning of my career where our client bailed, basically. We went to court, we sat there for a while, and he couldn't take it anymore and he left. And he just didn't pursue his rights because of that.

Victim fear of, ignorance of court proceedings, like I said, older people just tend to really be terrified by this process. And I think particularly when we have people in minority cultures who, whether here in the United States or in countries if they came here from other countries, had very different experiences with the court system and with legal authority maybe than white people have had here, there may be enhanced reluctance and fear of the court system.

Professionals' lack of knowledge — and that's what we heard Shelly talk about and what Page is going to focus on, I think in her comments, but certainly early in the '90s, I think this was a bigger problem than it is even now of prosecutors not have training on elder abuse. Judges didn't have training. Lawyers certainly didn't have training. This isn't stuff you learned in law school back then. You don't learn it very much in law school now, 15, 18 years later.

Where I'll probably focus my comments here is on the disparate impact of court practices. Courts like to think, and they say all the time — and we heard it during our experiences — that they treat everybody the same, and I think they really believe that they do, but the reality whether they really do or not, the reality is that treating older people the same has a disparate, more onerous impact on them than on younger people for the reasons that I just talked about. If you are reliant on public transportation and particularly on transportation for disabled people to get to court, it may literally be impossible for you to get there at 8 or 8:30 for the cattle call. I talked about the difficulty of sitting there for hours. All those things then mean that court just doesn't work for you the same way it does for a person who has a car and the ability to sit on the hard benches in the courtroom for hours at a time.

As a result of finding those things during our study in the early '90s, we developed a set of 29 recommendations for state courts handling cases involving elder abuse. These that are up here represent about half of those. I focused on pulling out the ones that were most relevant to what I was going to talk about today, and these sort of consolidate the 15.

Clearly, in our first recommendations back then were that judges, court staff, and other professionals, including prosecutors, law enforcement, lawyers, and even APS needed to have more training about elder abuse and how the court system, the judicial system needed to respond to it.

Expediting cases. So, here in 2010, Shelly is coming up with some of the same recommendations that we came up with in the early to mid '90s, but, of course, with older people who are more likely to die in the first place and maybe as a result of their abuse or exploitation or neglect, even more likely to die, expediting cases is an important issue for them.

Accommodating persons with disabilities. Some of the ways I have talked about already represented several of the recommendations. Providing emotional support and assistance, helping people get to court, explaining how it works, trying to make them less fearful to overcome that reluctance to pursue their legal remedies, to cooperate with law enforcement or prosecutors, those were several of our recommendations.

Referrals to community services. Very often, older people who have long-standing abuse problems or other problems, too, going on end up in court and have never gone to any other social services program or anything else in the community for help, and it's the court that then ends up trying to refer them to appropriate helping agencies. Well, the courts need to know more about those agencies, then, in order to do that, and that was that recommendation.

Enhancing intra-court communication and coordination. I remember very distinctly Judge Kirkendall, who was then a probate judge in Ann Arbor, Michigan, said — and probate judges, he handled guardianship cases. Most probate judges do but not all. He said, “I can be in probate court deciding whether to appoint son as guardian for mom, and I have no idea that down the hall in the criminal courtroom, son is being prosecuted for having abused, neglected or exploited mom.” And I am going to talk about why that's still a problem 17 years later.

We also recommended that the courts could provide leadership in the community about elder abuse. Much was being done and is still being done with domestic violence and with child abuse. We thought they could and should do the same thing with elder abuse. So that again gives you the context of what the problems are, what recommendations we suggested to help solve those problems, and those were the standards that we then used, as I said, to assess the five projects.

So let me tell you quickly about the five projects. One is an actual court. It's the Elder Protection Court in Alameda County, California, which is Oakland, right across from San Francisco. And it was started by a Judge Julie Conger, who was a criminal trial judge at the time, had been for a long time and had been handling their domestic violence protection order docket as part of her role. And at about the same time that this got started, California expanded its protection order law, so that it became easier for older people to get protection orders against their abusers. Sometimes protection order laws don't really include elder abuse situations very well. They may cover partner or spouse but not cover if it's your kid and your grandkid who's beating you. So California broadened its law, which meant the court was starting to see more of these cases.

So she, out of concern that they were seeing more of these cases and because of the problems that I talked about earlier, decided to work with the court to create a special docket for elder abuse cases. And the way this works is that on Friday mornings, the Elder Protection Court is held. Friday is normally not a trial day in Alameda County, and court starts later than usual, so that deals with the problem there that I talked about. Many fewer people, it's much less of a cattle call than typical court, and it's a much calmer, quieter, softer, gentler process. We sat there, and it was really very interesting how it worked and how respectful it was of older people in that they were a little slow.

The Prosecutor's Office in Alameda County is very, very strong on elder abuse — had a dedicated elder abuse unit before the court was started with several prosecutors — and, interestingly, the Public Defender's Office ended up playing a key role, which we did not expect to find in this situation, and I'll talk a little bit more about it later.

The Elder Justice Centers are both in Florida, and that's about their only similarity there is their name and that they're both in Florida. One is in Hillsborough County, which is Tampa, actually where I used to practice; the other is in Palm Beach County, West Palm Beach.

The Hillsborough County project wanted to become an elder abuse court, and the Florida Supreme Court said no when that idea was developed. And that was sort of early on in the development of specialty courts, and they just didn't want to do that. So, instead, the Elder Justice Center there became a resource center as well as provided victim advocacy services and now is doing much more on guardianship monitoring as well, and I'll talk a little more about findings after I give the description of all of them.

Palm Beach County sort of misled us about what they do, I think. It turns out that they are — they help criminal defendants, and they help them by actually — they help the court in recognizing whether older criminal defendants may have Alzheimer's or some other dementia or some other problem that really means that they are best suited to be dealt with outside of the criminal justice process.

They had told us that some of those criminal defendants were elder abuse victims who maybe were now shoplifting because they had been exploited and needed to steal, for example, in order to live. You know, I think in reality, it turned out that they weren't helping elder abuse victims very much, and I'll talk again more about why not, where they're going, maybe how they are hoping to change that in the future.

The Elder Protection Order Projects are more similar than the Elder Justice Centers are to each other. One is in Jefferson County, Kentucky, which is Louisville. The other's in Kings County, New York, which is Brooklyn. Interestingly, they both started at about the same time. Neither one of them knew about each other until we found out and started — about them and started our project.

What they do is help homebound older people who need a protection order apply for and obtain their protection order from the court without going to court. So they do it telephonically, and both of them have a process whereby law enforcement and a service provider — it might be Adult Protective Services or somebody else — go out to the person's house and do the paperwork and then hook up with the court by telephone and the judge hears the application, the petition for the protection order, makes a decision whether to grant it or not, and then if it is granted, the service providers and law enforcement help serve the defendant, the respondent, the person who now needs to stay away from the older person, and then helps protect them in that way.

OK. Let me give you a sense of findings. I'm going to, for the most part, glom all of them together in this part, and then I'll go a little more specific about each of them and focus on how they relate to prosecution.

So what we sort of need to do here, though, is take out the West Palm, the Palm Beach Elder Justice Center, out of the picture because, as I said, it's really not helping victims very much. OK?

But, for the most part, the other four projects did help enhance access to justice for elder abuse victims. The victims received emotional support. They received help in getting to court. They received accompaniment in court. They received referrals to other services as needed. They received, often, protection from law enforcement. They helped them get accommodations in court. So, if it was necessary to have an interpreter or to try and schedule the hearing at a certain time because of a medication schedule or something, they helped in doing that. I told you they helped them get to court by arranging transportation, sometimes driving them themselves, I think, even though they probably shouldn't be doing that.

In general, the four projects felt that more elder abuse cases were heard as a result of the project. Certainly, with the Protection Order Projects, those cases would never have gone to court in the first place because the victims simply could not get to court to obtain the paperwork to do the protection order and then to present their case to the judge. In the other cases in the Elder Protection Court, it's just an environment that's more conducive to older people getting to court, to feeling comfortable being there, and to the prosecution and the public defenders being involved with these cases. Everybody felt, even if more cases weren't coming to their specific project, that cases were heard more quickly, more efficiently. They were expedited on the calendar and just handled much more effectively as a result of the project.

They also felt that, a sort of ripple effect — and there were many ripple effects of the projects — that the judges and not just the judge who might be handling the specific cases but the other judges in the courthouse, too, were made more knowledgeable about and more sensitive to elder abuse as a result of the project being there. They felt that service providers learned more about elder abuse and about the court and about the court's role, and because of these projects, that politicians were made more sensitive; the media was made more sensitive as a result, too.

All of the projects helped link older victims to other services in the community, which was very important, as I talked about before, and, again, enhanced public and professional awareness, far beyond the immediate players in the court projects and initiatives but beyond that as well.

So let me focus a little bit — how am I on time? — on prosecution a little more closely. The Elder Protection Court, as I said, in general, enhanced knowledge and sensitivity. Everybody felt — and again, it was the Prosecutor's Office, it was the Public Defender's Office, it was the investigators who worked with the Prosecutor's Office and others — that having that sort of central focus for elder abuse in the court really enhanced everybody's gain. It made them understand each other's roles better. It made them understand the approach and had a consistent approach because they were dealing with one judge rather than with multiple judges, and the judges had — even the prosecution and the public defender both had some concerns about the judge and about being before one judge.

And interestingly, Judge Conger had formerly been a public defender. So the Prosecutor's Office was a little worried that maybe she would be too lenient on abusers, and the Public Defender's Office was a little concerned that maybe, again, just having one judge and having — you know, the Prosecutor's Office is usually always stronger. It's better funded than the Public Defender's Office. So they had that concern as well, but I think they all felt fairly comfortable with it.

They all, by working together so closely, consistently and often, developed trust in each other. They realized that they all had a shared goal of pursuing justice, and that was really important because it enabled everybody, as they put it, to sort of look outside the box and trying to come up with remedies that best helped the older person, not just the system.

The environment was conducive to elder abuse prosecution there. As I told you, the Prosecutor's Office had a long standing, multi-person unit on elder abuse prosecution.

The Public Defender's Office role was critical because they had to basically consolidate — Alameda is a big county with multiple courthouses — they had to consolidate all the elder abuse cases into the main Prosecutor's Office in Oakland, which basically put all the workload on one person, who was already overextended, and so, if the Public Defender's Office had not been willing to play, this whole system never would have worked. The court would never have been able to take off, which was quite interesting. We did not expect that finding.

In terms of the Elder Justice Center in Hillsborough County, where it relates to prosecution is by helping to prevent guardianship abuse. Their main focus now is on guardianship monitoring. That has come about due to budget cuts and because they think that that is what will make the program indispensable to the court and will keep it from being destroyed as a result of the current fiscal situation. So, by doing that monitoring, they are preventing abuse and they are detecting abuse that's going on. Interestingly, law enforcement was not really involved in that project, and we did not interview anybody in law enforcement or the Prosecutor's Office there, but there's the tangential key from that project.

I told you about the Elder Justice Center in Palm Beach, which is really much more focused on diverting older criminal defendants with dementia or other problems out of the justice system. So they're not helping victims directly, but maybe because they're doing that, they're making it easier for victims to report, to go to law enforcement. Back to what I said earlier about you don't want your abuser to go to jail, you want your abuser to get the treatment that he or she may need, that helps there. And the prosecutor felt more comfortable about these cases and the outcome of these cases because he knew that the Elder Justice Center folks would do some follow-up and some monitoring, and so they felt like this was the right system.

The Elder Protection Projects, of course, helped prevent further crimes by the abuser in this case, and because the violations of the protection orders are crimes, there may be more prosecutions of those cases as a result. And it also helps to develop evidence that can be used by the prosecutor in these cases.

Intra-court coordination, I mentioned was still a problem, 17 years after Judge Kirkendall in Ann Arbor mentioned it. I had sort of hoped that with the advent of computers that these things would be less of a problem, but, apparently, they're not. It still is a problem. The courts still aren't communicating with each other.

Now, a lot of judges will say, “Well, that's because we're not supposed to know what happens in other cases. We can't consider that in making our decisions,” and that's valid to some extent, but I think to some extent, it may also be an excuse. Judges were telling us that unified courts do help with that problem, but just having a court-focused initiative or having computers isn't helping with that problem.

Providing leadership in the community is still an issue. In Alameda County, Judge Conger started, and the judge who has replaced her now that she has retired, was continuing the Elder Access Committee, which the court sponsored quarterly, held at the court, brought everybody together to come to talk with each other, to share, to talk about issues, problems with the court, as well as problems systemically in the community related to elder abuse.

I think we still see judges very reluctant to take a leadership role on these issues. Some of that is for ethical reasons. Judges, of course, have to be careful about not taking sides, but I think also there, too, that can often be an excuse, that they just don't know about this issue still, they don't care about this issue still, and aren't willing to forge ahead in a leadership role, as has been done with domestic violence and child abuse. So those are things that hopefully will change.

In terms of the court-filed data, I will just say that we found very little. What was in the court files was about as basic as it gets in terms of demographic information about the victim, maybe about the perpetrator. Often information about the perpetrator was in a probation record or in a sealed court file, a health or mental health file that the judges gave us authority to look at, but, of course, what that means is that it's very difficult to do research and evaluation on these issues and that has policy and funding implications, of course.

I'll wrap up just telling you we are in the process of wrapping up and writing our report. We'll do some articles as well. The project ends on December 31, and we have — information will be on our website once we can put stuff up on this project, and there's lots of other elder abuse information up on our Web page, too.

Thank you.

Page Ulrey: Good morning. I'm Page Ulrey from the King County Prosecutor's Office, and I'm going to just talk a little bit about how these studies relate to my experience as an elder abuse prosecutor.

I work for a prosecuting unit that is now comprised of two people and a half time paralegal. We prosecute cases of adult neglect, sexual assault, financial exploitation and homicide. We also are mandated by our elected to do trainings of first responders, the theory being that if we don't train people about how to respond to these cases, they're not going to come into our office.

And we also work on the coordinating community response to elder abuse, that theory being that if we don't work on working with APS and working with geriatricians and others in the field who are dealing directly with elders, we're not going to be handling these cases properly.

So that's just a little bit of background, and I want to spend a few minutes taking you inside the Prosecutor's Office, because that will give some context to some of the things that Shelly was told by the prosecutors she interviewed. And I think before I do that, it's important to remember that very few of the people she talked to were specialized elder abuse prosecutors, and even of the ones that were, I can bet you that they had very little training on elder abuse prosecution since there hardly is any.

So, usually, in most prosecutors' offices, there are no specialized elder abuse prosecutors, and a prosecutor who's handling one or two elder abuse cases on top of their other 98 cases is not going to be having an easy time of it. They're not likely to even know what a multidisciplinary team is. They're not likely to have ever heard of Adult Protective Services. They're not likely to have connections with the elder abuse detectives in their jurisdictions, if there are any.

And other cases that are murder cases or bank robberies or kidnappings that are kind of higher visibility in the office are inevitably going to take precedence, and they're also not going to have the knowledge to handle those cases effectively.

Elder abuse is not sexy in the prosecutor's world. The cases are considered to be onerous. The victims, as Shelly articulated, are considered to be difficult and high maintenance, and the cases do not have cachet in a typical prosecutor's office, and that affects how they get handled.

And it's true that they're difficult. These are big cases. The trials take longer. They're more complicated. They involve issues like capacity and dementia and powers of attorney and guardianships and things that, as Lori said, none of us get taught in law school.

And, also, elder abuse prosecution is more expensive. In almost every case I've tried, we've needed an expert witness, and that can be thousands and thousands of dollars, which is tough on a budget that is limited.

Also, a lot of prosecutors' offices really emphasize convictions over justice, and convictions aren't always the best thing for our victims. So, if we handle a case and it turns out that if we dismiss the case and arrange for different care for our victim, and treatment and offenders in treatment, that could actually be a better outcome for our victim than sending the defendant off to prison for the rest of his life.

But the way we tend to operate as prosecutors is going to trial is valued, getting a conviction is valued, and the longer the prison term, the better, with very little regard for what's best for our victims. So that is also a thing that I think complicates how we're handling these cases, especially when we're not specialized.

We also are not really trained to be empathetic with elders and elder victims in particular. A lot of prosecutors will insist on their coming in to testify, even if it means damaging their relationship with the offender who may be the last person they have left in their lives.

Again, failing to consider the needs of the victim in negotiating a case, so as Lori was talking about, what the victim wants more than anything is for her son, the abuser, to get alcohol treatment. That is not consistent typically with how a prosecutor is going to handle a case. That's not going to trump the esteem they get from their colleagues for sending that defendant off to prison.

We also just automatically request no-contact orders in our cases. There's no services or resources for supervised visitation, so she can see her son. There's no thought, even, that maybe a blanket no-contact order is actually going to do more harm to her than good. And, again — and I think this is also consistent with what people told Shelly — there is a perception of elder abuse as a family matter, as not being criminal, the same way we used to think of domestic violence decades ago.

We have little or no training on abuse of power of attorney cases. We don't know what undue influence is. We have no idea how to handle an adult neglect case. When we get one of those cases, we get a stack of medical records and maybe a description of a crime scene, and for most prosecutors handling that, they have absolutely no idea how to proceed and they assume they can't. So the statute's too narrow or they don't have enough evidence or there's some other explanation that they come up with, but it may actually be a lack of training.

We aren't taught about competency and capacity, especially with regard to elders. We don't know how to present massive bank records, which we have to do in almost every financial exploitation case we handle. We don't know how to present medical records to a jury. What do you do with that stack of records when you're trying to convey the symptoms and signs of neglect someone had, how do you present that evidence, it's just not something any of us are taught in law school or in any subsequent training that we get. We're not taught about the need to make accommodations for victims with physical disabilities or victims with dementia.

And Crawford, which also came up in Shelly's talk, is a case that basically says that elder hearsay, in other words statements that elders make to law enforcement in an interview context, are not admissible at trial unless that elder is available to testify at trial. This is a case that came out of my lovely state, and that pretty much eradicated all of the state's elder hearsay statutes that existed. So where beforehand, officers could interview victims and do videotapes and those videotapes could be offered against the defendant at trial, even if the victim had died or was no longer able to remember what had happened, after Crawford v. Washington, all of those hearsay statutes became unconstitutional. So those videotapes no longer are admissible, but there are ways around that. There are other hearsay exceptions that many victim statements still apply to, but a lot of prosecutors think about Crawford and they say, “Oh, we can't get in any victim statements. We can't even try if we don't have a victim. No victim, no case,” and that really is, again, a training issue.

We're also used to working in a silo, we as non-elder abuse prosecutors. Again, I'm familiar with APS. We're not used to staffing cases with a multidisciplinary team, if we even know what that is. We're not used to working on the coordinated community response to a problem. All of those things are foreign to how we're raised in a prosecutor's office.

So these are the different explanations that Shelly was given about why elder abuse is harder to prosecute, and I just want to break down each one of those and talk about it briefly.

Elders don't make good witnesses. Prosecutors, like other people, often assume that if you're older, you lack credibility; that if you're older or you suffer from dementia and that even if you have dementia, that means automatically that you can't testify at trial.

We typically lack training as to what dementia is, as to the fact that a victim actually, even with dementia, may still be able to testify, depending on what time of day it is, what kind of medications they're on, how their other underlying health conditions are doing.

They are unfamiliar with the UCI study that came out recently — and Aileen Wiglesworth is here with us, who worked on that study — regarding the impact of dementia on the ability to remember traumatic events, and Aileen's study actually says that even with dementia, there is evidence that you have a better recall of traumatic events than non-traumatic events. So, with studies like that, we may actually be able to put on testimony of a victim who has dementia, even if they're unable to recall other parts of their history or their lives.

We also lack training and knowledge of the fact that if consent is the defense and there's a dementia issue, we need to get a psychological or psychiatric evaluation of the victim. We don't just write off the case.

The statement that the prosecutors made to Shelly that victims are unavailable, therefore elder abuse is harder, and certainly that's true, but I also want to give some background as to why that's true. Elder abuse, as you all probably know well, is lethal to many of our victims. Mark Lachs found that elders are 300 percent more likely to die a premature death, no matter what kind of abuse they've suffered.

Still, we can prosecute cases without victims. In most of the trials that I have, we don't have a victim. The victim has either died or has lost their memory of what happened, but you have medical records and you have financial records. We have evaluations that should be conducted immediately in an investigation by a geriatric psychologist or psychiatrist where dementia is an issue with your victim.

We have hearsay statements that the victim made to other people. If a victim makes any statements to medical personnel about what happened to them, that's admissible in court. If the victim made excited statements to law enforcement or to a 911 operator, that's still admissible in court, even with Crawford. So a lot of the way we look at cases now is we go through all the different victim statements and we say which ones of these still fall within hearsay exceptions and can be admitted, despite the fact that Crawfordexists.

And on the financial records point, I think people also told Shelly that financial cases are very difficult to prosecute, and I actually think they're the easiest type of elder abuse to prosecute because we have bank records, and the bank records tell a beautiful story of what happened to that victim's assets before and after the perpetrator got into their life. They also show what happened to the perpetrator's assets. So, typically, we will put on evidence of the perpetrator having nothing and then moving into the victim's life and suddenly buy new cars and new houses and spending money like crazy. Meanwhile, at the same time, the victim, who had a lot of money, their assets very quickly go down to nothing, and at the point when they hit nothing, the perpetrator leaves their life, typically. So that kind of evidence, even without a victim, can be very compelling for a jury.

Obviously, you have issues if the victim consented to that transaction, but if you have evidence — or to those transactions, but if you have evidence from family members saying that the victim isolated them from — or the perpetrator isolated them from the victim, that the perpetrator was emotionally abusive to the victim, that the victim never spent their money the way they're spending the money once the perpetrator is in their life, all of those things can come in as evidence in trial and can be used successfully, but, again, it's a training issue.

The next statement, weak or lack of evidence, this is purely subjective. It's claimed. Sometimes it's true, but it's also claimed when a case is difficult, particularly when you have a caseload where you have one or two elder abuse cases and a bunch of other, much easier, much more compelling cases.

It's also claimed when you don't have the training to really understand how to prosecute a case, like the one on your desk, and it's also claimed when you don't have the resources to properly try a case, when you don't have funds for expert witnesses to help prove your case, when you don't have funds for an expert to help you look at your medical evidence or your financial evidence and explain how a case like that can be proved.

The statement by the prosecutors that the perpetrator acted within their rights, that scares me. I think it rings of, well, abuse, in some way, frankly. Consent is the most common defense that we see in elder abuse cases. We see it in sexual assault cases and neglect and financial exploitation cases, and, typically, our perpetrators claim that what they did was within their right, that the victim consented, that this was what they were entitled to do.

But we have to look beyond that simple consent that's alleged. We have to look at whether or not a new influence was used to obtain that consent; in other words, whether the perpetrator took over the victim's free will and forced that consent. We have to look at whether the victim had capacity to consent, was their dementia so severe that they really couldn't adequately know what it was they were consenting to and give permission to it.

Abuse of power of attorney. Again, perpetrators who steal money under a power of attorney document typically claim it was within their right, but the reality is that a power of attorney creates a fiduciary duty to the elder. When you have a power of attorney, you are not allowed under the law of — I'm guessing all states, Lori. Is that true? — to spend that money for your own benefit. It must be spent for the benefit of the elder.

There usually is some kind of gifting provision in the power of attorney document, but it typically creates a very clear limitation on what you can give to yourself. So we can prosecute these cases. We prosecute them as thefts, theft by embezzlement, the same way we prosecute accounting abuse cases or bookkeeper financial abuse cases. We don't need a special power of attorney statute, even though they're wonderful. So this is, again, a common misconception amongst law enforcement and amongst prosecutors and one that has explained tremendously why we aren't handling these power of attorney abuse cases properly. Again, it's a training issue.

“He said/she said,” that was, I think, the last explanation that they gave Shelly about why these cases are so hard. Inherent in most elder abuse cases is a lack of witnesses. These are almost always “he said/she said,” if the “she” is still alive. But the reality is that a key indicator of elder abuse is the loneliness or isolation of the victim. So, almost always, we only have one witness to our crimes, and that is the victim, again, if she is still alive. So these are always “he said/she said” cases. The way we have to prove these cases is circumstantially. We need to look at the records that we have. Like I said before, we need to look at what the family members say, the friends who had a relationship with the victim before the incident occurred; the medical records, the geriatric psychiatrist or psychological evaluation of the victim. All of those things are how we build our cases, even if we don't have any witnesses to the crime.

We don't look at child abuse and write it off saying it's a “he said/she said” case and we can't prosecute. We don't look at domestic violence anymore and say that.

So the question for us is not whether there are witnesses, but is there sufficient corroborating evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, and if there isn't, we should be able to articulate why, what evidence on what element is not sufficient, and why is it we can't prove that evidence through the surrounding circumstances and the corroboration that we have.

I'm not saying these aren't hard cases and we don't decline a lot of these cases. We do, but they're not impossible simply because we don't have any witnesses.

I want to move a little bit more to Lori's topic about the specialized courts, and I think it just ties in beautifully to the need for specialized prosecutors. What a typical elder abuse victim has to go through if their case is ever prosecuted is, first, they have to give a statement to law enforcement about whatever horrible thing happened to them.

If it's a sexual assault case, they have to undergo a rape exam. Then they usually have to meet with a prosecutor and give a statement. Then they have to submit to a typically ugly interview with the defense attorney. Then they get to wait for months or years for their case to go to trial, if it doesn't plead guilty, and then at trial, they get to tell their story of having been exploited by the person they love to 12 plus strangers. Then they get to be cross-examined again by the defense attorney. Then they get to wait for sentencing, which usually takes weeks or months after the trial if there's a conviction. Then they get to wait for the appeal, which usually takes another several years before it's done, and if that is successful for the defendant, they could have to go through a retrial, all of this when they're probably in their 70s, 80s, 90s, and are having to deal with having been abused by someone they loved.

The non-specialized courts that are typical in our jurisdictions, as with non-specialized prosecutors, end up losing the value of these elder abuse cases in the crush of the rest of the calendar. We end up being frustrated by the delays that are caused by the special needs of elder victims. We don't have understanding of dementia and how to accommodate victims with dementia. We typically don't have victim advocates who have specialized knowledge about how to handle disabilities and dementia and what services are available to elder victims.

The prosecutors that Shelly talked to had really great things to say about what needs to happen to reform courts, and I just wanted to put them up here again because I think they fit in beautifully with what Lori talked about as far as what the courts around the country are beginning to do.

Expedited trials, enhanced penalties, priority on dockets and courtroom accommodations for elders.

Bernard Auchter: So this session is on domestic violence research 15 years after the Violence Against Women Act, and the panel will talk about the progress that's been made over the years as well as identifying what still needs to be done. And I also wanted to note that at least in a cataloguing sense, we have a violence against women compendium of research on our website. So if you're at the NIJ website and you just put in the key terms, “VAW compendium,” you'll quickly find it. And that compendium by various categories lists all the studies we've done over those 15 plus years with a brief paragraph on what the study is about, and if the study's been completed, it'll have a brief paragraph on the results. And then, of course, for full reports, the National Criminal Justice Reference Service is the place to go, ncjrs.org, and full reports of all the studies are archived there. And then if you're a researcher and interested in data, all the data is archived at the University of Michigan Data Archive.

So the panel … we will not go in the order that's in the program. First, Dr. Claire Renzetti, who is the new endowed chair at the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky, will open.

Claire has an extensive history of work in this area. She's … numerous books and articles, and she is currently working on issues relating to trafficking.

Then following Claire … or Claire's going to essentially review some of the progress we've made over the years but also identify some of the gaps and where we still need to go in terms of some of the research.

Following Claire, Dr. Connie Beck at the University of Arizona, in psychology, will speak about her project but also about one of the ongoing controversies that continues to exist in this area. Some people know it as gender symmetry. Others have said that we shouldn't use that term anymore, that there is no symmetry, suggesting that both men and women are perpetrators in equal amounts. Connie will give us her perspective on that, essentially why smart people disagree on this topic.

And following Connie will be Barbara Hart. Barbara has also worked in this field for many years, currently at the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine. Barbara will give us her perspective from the field both as a lawyer and as an advocate and someone who's worked on these issues for decades. And Barbara more recently, I think, is known for her efforts at disseminating what we do know through her many audio conferences that are held, and many people in the field, perhaps some of you, have been a part of those conferences.

So let us open with Claire.

Claire M. Renzetti: Over the past 15 years, research on all forms of domestic violence has been, I think, nothing short of prolific. It seems that research in this area has grown exponentially, and, certainly, it's not an overstatement to say that violence against women is now a major field of social science research, and within it the study of intimate partner violence is a major subfield. The area clearly has matured to the point of having a critical body of literature as the foundation upon which researchers continue to build.

And a major contributor to this growth has been the funding provided by the Violence and Victimization Research Division of NIJ. Some of the most influential research on violence against women generally and on intimate partner violence specifically has been the result of NIJ funding, the funding … the projects that we're going to be talking about today and throughout the conference.

And so, to summarize all of it in just 20 minutes in terms of what it has taught us and what we still need to learn is not an easy task. Indeed, I would say it's an impossible one.

So what I'm going to do today is look at VVRD's Compendium of Research on Violence Against Women that Bernie mentioned and give you my take on some of the strengths and gaps in our knowledge about domestic violence in light of the research that's been funded by NIJ since 1995 — actually since 1993, since that's when the compendium begins. And the compendium was just updated in April. So it does provide a pretty accurate accounting of the work that's been done and is still in progress through NIJ funding.

The compendium is really a wonderful resource, and if you're not familiar with it, I really do encourage you to have a look. It's available online, as Bernie said. The top URL is the compendium URL that will take you right to it, and you can download the entire compendium PDF file.

It summarizes 260 NIJ research-funded projects for the period 1993 to 2010, with a total dollar investment of more than $79 million. And as Bernie said, you'll find, you know, a lot of information about each individual project. It'll tell you the title of the project. It'll also tell you who the PI is, and it'll tell you how much money the project was funded for, if it's still ongoing or if it was completed. It gives you a little summary, a little abstract of the project, and then if there's a final report, it gives you an abstract of the final report.

And then that second URL is the National Criminal Justice [Reference] Service website, and you can go there and get the actual final report and download the whole final report. You can search it by the NCJ number or by subject or author or title. It's really easy to use, and it's truly a wonderful resource for researchers and practitioners and advocates.

The compendium itself is organized into nine categories of research on violence against women, and these are all the different categories: justice and related systems and definition and measurement. You can read them. I don't have to read them to you.

I've been asked to focus on the projects that address intimate partner violence, but I have interpreted that really broadly, and so I include under that heading projects that have examined sexual assault as a form of IPV, including post-separation sexual assault, projects on children who have witnessed IPV and projects in which IPV is examined in the context of custody evaluations, visitation, and situations like that; projects on stalking; elder abuse projects if the description specifically mentioned IPV or domestic violence; and projects on teen dating violence. And by my reckoning, that's 108 of the 260 funded projects between 1993 and 2010.

Now, one of the most interesting things for me in reviewing the compendium was charting the change in the research focus over the years. I did a similar presentation at the NIJ conference in 2006, and at that time, I reported that the single largest category of research projects was Category A, the justice and related systems category. And at that time, it accounted for about a third of all the funded projects in the compendium and nearly 30 percent of the total funds awarded, which was about $17.9 million.

This category remains the single largest category of funded projects. In fact, it's grown some and now represents 45.5 percent of funded projects in the current compendium and 32.5 percent of total funds, $25.7 million in funding. But what was striking to me was that there had been some really important shifts, I think, in the emphasis within this broad category and also some significant growth in other major categories.

So, for example, the justice and related systems category is divided into nine subcategories. And four years ago, I reported that the largest of these was arrest and prosecution, with the majority of the studies looking at efforts to criminalize domestic violence, specifically whether increasing arrest of offenders, giving police more domestic violence training, prosecuting more cases in the courts and imposing harsher penalties on those convicted have a deterrent effect on re-offending and thereby increase women's safety and their satisfaction with the criminal justice system.

And what I did then was I reviewed those projects that had been funded on those topics and looked at what their findings were, and overall the consensus from these studies was that arrest and prosecution have weak or inconsistent deterrent effects and do not necessarily improve victim safety or victim satisfaction with the criminal justice system.

And looking at those studies, what I found was that there were basically two major factors identified in the research that were associated with these outcomes, and the first factor was lack of victim cooperation. And that was a finding that was also supported by studies in the advocacy division of Category A projects, and then the second factor was differential resources and time commitment among prosecutors. There were studies of specialized courts and of attempts by prosecutors to substantially increase the number of domestic violence cases they prosecute, and what these studies showed was more negative than positive results, including — and I think this is really important — it significantly increased the time to disposition and reduced the amount of time prosecutors could meet with victims. So, clearly, the two factors are interrelated.

The victims feel that their concerns and their preferences and their safety are ignored by the criminal justice system, and if they feel that way, they're not likely to cooperate with that system.

As Eleanor Lyon wrote in 2002, in her report summing up the findings of her evaluation of a special session domestic violence court, and I quote, “Being heard is imperative to women who have experienced domestic abuse, which strongly influences their reaction to legal system interventions,” end of quote.

And in looking at these findings in 2006, I argued that there appeared to be then a disconnect between IPV victims and the criminal justice system, and, therefore, one of the significant gaps I found at that time in our knowledge base was evaluation of strategies and innovative programs to mend or narrow this disconnect. Now, I'm sure that my pointing this out in 2006 was what led to the funding of some of the projects I found summarized in this year's updated compendium.

Isn't that true, Bernie? You all listened to me when I spoke.

Specifically, I found this time in the arrest and prosecution subcategory a very important change. What I found was much greater attention to victims' needs and concerns; that is, I looked at the research and I found that the research was now foregrounding victims' needs and concerns rather than making it secondary. And what they had done previously was make the process primary. I thought it was really interesting during the luncheon speech to be talking about the lack of research on prosecutors and things like that because this research really focused a lot on prosecutors and foregrounded prosecutors and their actions, and victims and victims' safety and victims' concerns took a backseat. And now what I was seeing in this year's most updated compendium is much more attention to victims' needs and concerns.

So I cited a couple of examples that I thought really indicate this, and one is a study by Karin Rhodes and Catherine Cerulli that's looking at how victim participation in IPV prosecution affects victim safety. And, importantly, the PIs are not only analyzing quantitative data, they're doing what Eleanor Lyon said we should be doing. They're letting victims be heard.

They're conducting a series of focus groups to, and I quote, “explore in depth the mechanisms by which victims' experiences, empowerment, safety and experiences within the justice process influence their decisions to participate in prosecution.”

And among the goals of the project are to use the data to inform the development of interventions that can help empower female IPV victims to make efficient and effective use of the criminal justice system in ways that maximize their health and safety and to inform policy and practice in the implementation of victim advocacy within the criminal justice system.

So they're looking at the system and they're looking at prosecution and they're looking at arrest and the criminal justice system itself, but they're foregrounding victim safety and they're foregrounding victims' needs, and they're letting victims tell what their concerns are and what their experiences are.

Another example that I saw was Andy Klein's three studies. What Andy is doing is he's looking at the practical implications of current domestic violence research, and it's in three parts. One part is the practical implications for law enforcement, one is for prosecutors and one's for judges. And, again, even though he's looking at the system and the process, what he's doing for each set is emphasizing or prioritizing victims' protection and safety, and he's talking about how … he's looking at how these processes can affect that and either improve it or deter from it.

So, while the arrest and prosecution section of Category A projects is still the largest — it's 31.4 percent of the projects in that category and $5.2 million in funding — I saw a significant increase in attention to victims' needs and concerns in these projects, and I think that's really, really good news.

This observation was further supported by the growth in projects in another section of Category A: victim services. There are now 12 projects listed in this section, with the greatest increase occurring after 1999. Some of these studies are studies of sexual assault services, but also funded are … I give three examples here: a study of how to reduce barriers to help-seeking by older abused women, a domestic violence shelter study and a study of custody evaluations in cases where there are allegations of domestic violence. And this particular study was very interesting, and it shows that often court-appointed custody evaluators have little, if any, evidence-based knowledge of intimate partner violence and, therefore, may put women and children at risk of further abuse through their recommendations to the courts, so, again, looking at the system but foregrounding victim safety concerns and protection.

We see the emphasis on victim safety and concerns in other categories, too. For example, in Category B, which is definition and measurement, in the section on development of risk assessment instruments, a study funded in 2008 is an experimental evaluation of a police department's use of lethality assessments, again, to improve protection of victims. And in the section on context, meaning and motive, there is another study funded in 2007 of, again, custody evaluators' beliefs about domestic violence allegations.

Now, I'm kind of one of those people who really loves these, looking at research studies, and I would love to spend more time discussing particular studies in the compendium, but I know my time is limited. And out of the corner of my eye, I keep seeing Bernie moving. I knew it was coming. I keep waiting for the little card, and I know my co-presenters have important things to say.

So let me turn our attention to just two other major categories that I want to highlight.

First is Category D, which is social and cultural context, and that now contains 58 projects accounting for about $17.6 million, which is more than a fifth of the total funding from NIJ since 1993.

Nearly half of the studies in this category are in the division on specific populations, which includes studies of culturally, economically and socially diverse groups of women. And, again, one of the things that I thought was really exciting is that I recognize that we've gotten so much smarter about knowing, realizing that you can't generalize from a sample of a specific group of women to all women and say that their experiences are going to be the same, and so it was really heartening to see so much more attention focused to diverse populations.

This category also includes 15 projects on context and life course, one of which, funded in 2007, uses a randomized longitudinal design as well as geospatial analyses to test, and I quote, “the prediction that early coordinated victim outreach will improve criminal justice outcomes by increasing victim participation in official action and increase victim safety and empowerment,” end of quote.

This is the study that I'm talking about, and I'm highlighting this particular study for three reasons. First of all, it uses what many consider to be the gold standard of research designs, a randomized longitudinal design. So it's possible in this field to do that.

And the second thing that really struck me about it was that it's using geospatial analyses to assess how factors such as distance to and time and effort required to access services affect victims' help-seeking and participation in the criminal justice process. These are things that we probably think are very obvious, but we don't really ever measure them, and they're using geospatial analyses to do it, which I think is very cool.

And the third reason I'm highlighting it and perhaps the most important reason to me is that it evaluates a coordinated community response, and in 2006, I identified the CCR model as one of the most promising for improving victim safety and well being and for improving deterrents. So I'm really looking forward to the findings of this particular study.

OK. The other category that I want to highlight is Category I, which is teen dating violence, because although there are only seven studies in this category, six of them were funded after 2005, two in '08 and four in '09. And most of these projects focus on prevention, and they also study diverse populations.

So, for instance, there's a study funded in '08 on dating abuse prevention among teens whose mothers have domestic violence protection orders. There's a randomized control study on preventing re-victimization and the teen dating relationships of girls in foster care — that's the DePrince study — and then a study of dating violence among Latino adolescents.

And, if any of you have read Violence Against Women, the journal that I edit, you know that I have long been an advocate for more research on effective prevention and intervention strategies with adolescents, even younger children. I think we're waiting too long if we wait for adolescents. So it's especially heartening to me to see the growth in funding in this type of research.

OK. I've gotten two messages now, so I will wrap up.

Let me turn to one final although critically important question. This is one of my favorite cartoons, and you probably all can't see it, but the question is, are we making an impact? And, undeniably, I think the research conducted on violence against women over the past 15 years has resulted in substantial usable knowledge, and I was really pleased to hear the lunch speaker talk about the need for usable knowledge.

I think it's nothing short of astounding, the amount of research that's been produced in such a short period of time, and as the editor of Violence Against Women for the past 16 and a half years, I've had the honor and the privilege to publish a good bit of this research, including several special issues of articles from clusters of NIJ-funded projects — for example, one on custody and visitation issues when there is IPV, another that Bernie guest-edited on battery intervention programs. And I would argue that this research, more so than in many other areas of scientific and scholarship knowledge production, is useful not only to the academic community — that is, the community of scholars — but also to the practice and advocacy communities, and therein I think lies a hallmark, a major strength of this work.

There remains obvious challenges, just a few of which I've touched on here and some of which I know Connie and Barbara are going to discuss in their presentations and that'll come in the question and answer period.

But let me conclude by adding one other. There are, I think, clearly still tensions among the research practice and advocacy communities that inhibit real collaboration and, therefore, real progress. We often end up, unfortunately, talking to members only of our own group whom we think really understand us, and I think we have to continue to be committed to overcoming our professional differences and being open to alternative ways of examining a problem, of being willing to concede that our way is not necessarily the right way and that we don't know everything about the issues at hand.

I think NIJ has helped tremendously in fostering collaborations among researchers, practitioners and advocates by including representatives from each of these groups on its panel reviews and by encouraging such collaborations in its CFPs. In fact, Tami Sullivan and Bonnie Fisher are conducting focus groups and individual interviews at this conference to collect data for their NIJ-funded study of successful researcher-practitioner partnerships that strengthen practice and policy.

So, clearly, the opportunities for partnerships are there. All that's needed really is our willingness to be genuinely collaborative. Thank you.

[Applause.]

Connie Beck: OK. Thank you.

First of all, I would like to say it's an honor to be serving on this panel with such renowned IPV researchers. I'm relatively new to this area, so it's an honor to be here, and I thank you. These women have laid the groundwork for research for younger scholars, not in age, of course, but in years in the field, and I thank them.

I'm going to move in a little bit different direction. I'm going to talk about a particular issue that has been very at the fore in this particular area, and that is the symmetry/asymmetry argument.

There's many smart people who have debated this issue. I know you can't read everything on this slide, but I put it up here to just indicate that five different journals have produced special issues on this particular topic with over 30 different scholars who have written on this topic, and that's not including the number of different scholars who have written independent pieces. It seems to be a huge issue that we keep coming back to.

As I talk about this issue, I'd like you to think about three things and keep this in mind, and that is, what exactly is being studied, what instruments are being used to measure it, and who is being studied.

What we do know is that there are different types of domestic violence that we need — or intimate partner violence that we need to be aware of: psychological, physical, injury, sexual, stalking, coercive control. These are different types of violence that we've identified over the years, and we need to keep them in mind when we're reading a study, what is it that is being researched.

And another important factor is are they combining different kinds of categories. For instance, some of the research combines both mild and very severe physical violence and aggression and calls it “aggression.” So we need to be aware that that is what's being done in the research.

Instruments that are being used … we certainly know about act-based measures. The Conflict Tactic Scale is probably the most famous. There are also in-depth interviews, case studies, different ways of gathering information in this particular field.

Who is being studied is very, very important. Probably one of the favorites of academics at least are college students, because we have lots of them and they're all in one spot. We can give them questionnaires, and we can get information back.

Now, there's certainly an argument that can be made about whether that is the most important or just a piece of what's important to understand about intimate partner violence.

The debates … although most of us don't fall neatly into either of these categories, it's the categories that have been identified in the literature, and that is the family conflict or violence researchers and the feminist researchers.

We also have these categories, too, that are in use, and it's unfortunate because we use these labels to attack one another as opposed to, in my view, trying to understand the differences in the way we conduct research and the important findings that we find.

So, in the first two camps, as often what they're called, family conflict or family violence researchers fall into these categories, and they argue that women are as aggressive or violent or more so. So we can ask what is it that they're looking at in order to come up with these conclusions. Often what they're looking at is physical aggression, and they're looking at lower levels of physical aggression: slapping, biting, hitting, kicking — maybe not even kicking but slapping, biting, scratching, these kinds of things. At times, they include severe violence within that category, which is a problem because then it washes out some of the findings with the severe violence because it's a less frequent behavior that gets carried out. Most of these studies do not include sexual violence; they do not include stalking; they do not include coercive control, which are gendered in terms of perpetration.

Instruments being used, almost exclusively, are the Conflict Tactic Scale, and often the older version of the Conflict Tactic Scale, so not the newer version.

Samples of subjects that are used: Again, academics' favorites are college students, so a lot of these studies are done with very young college students' dating samples, high school samples, and it has severe implications for the kinds of findings that they find. It's slanted towards younger people, lower levels of physical violence that tend to be more symmetric, if you want to call it that, or have more parity; again, lower levels of physical in young people.

The next set of research … feminist researchers often fall within these camps, and what they're asking is to take a step back and look at the broader context of the relationship. Specific acts are not enough in terms of understanding what intimate partner violence really is. The definitions that are used tend to be broader. They tend to look at psychological abuse, coercive control, sexual abuse, stalking; take the gamut of research as opposed to just physical aggression.

They also tend to use in-depth interviews or national crime surveys, hospital records from the ER departments, shelter service records. So, again, they use different methods.

Again, the subjects are different. They tend to be women in shelters or agencies, court samples, ER visits by women and national crime surveys. These samples tend to look more at the married group or people who have been in longer-term relations, often with children. So, again, this data is more slanted towards the more severe violence.

What I'd like to represent today: that both of these camps are looking at very important populations. They just don't tend to be the same populations. So we need to be careful about what we're talking about when we look at research and make sure that we really, truly understand these three things about the research before we can draw conclusions about it.

So a smart person may ask, well, if we understand these things, why are we still arguing and why are we still arguing decade after decade after decade. These are some of the things that I believe happened in terms of keeping the arguments going. We failed to clearly define what we're studying. We lump categories together and call them a “new thing” instead of keeping the categories separate. We omit certain categories altogether. If we'd take out those gendered categories of violence, coercive control, sexual abuse, stalking, separation, assault, we're going to find very different things than if we keep those in.

We fail to also report the limitations of our samples. We fail to say we are studying college students, unmarried college students that are dating, and then making sweeping generalizations about all women or all men. We need to be focused about what we're really saying and what we're finding.

We cherry-pick data. We report only what we want and what fits into our frame, and then we make over generalizations.

I think the next one is the most distressing for me: where we just attack each other as opposed to truly trying to understand one another. We boycott each other's conferences. We boycott research and journals. As I think Claire talked about, what happens when you do this to a researcher, they get more and more isolated. They speak only to true believers, and so they never have critics actually talking to them in a reasonable tone where they can hear them.

I think we also … one of the strengths of intimate partner violence research is the fact that it is carried out by so many different disciplines. We have sociologists, lawyers, criminologists, psychologists, social workers. That should be an incredible strength of this research, but what we find is that we stay true to our discipline. For instance, sociologists like to look at cultural influences for certain kinds of phenomenon. Feminist scholars often look to gender as a way of explaining how things come about. Psychologists, of which I'm one, we like to look at individual differences and assessment in treatment. Lawyers like to look at the differences in how laws affect phenomenon. Unfortunately, we're not very respectful of what each other find, but I think that's a true detriment to this field and has kept us in a holding pattern in some ways, standing in our camps and attacking. We really must reach beyond our own discipline to understand a discipline and, as Claire and others talk about, work with courts, with different disciplines, with police, to really gain a true understanding of what we're talking about.

There have been some recent changes or recent movement to try to get out of these camps and look at things in a broader perspective. We need to understand there is no gold standard for measuring intimate partner violence. When we use act-based measures versus long-term interviews, we're getting different kinds of information, and we need to truly understand that.

There's no perfect dataset. There's no way that one dataset can answer all the questions. So we need to have qualitative data with small samples that give you very rich information. We need large-scale data from large populations of people beyond college students and high school students — crime survey data.

Important typologies have been developed, both of perpetrators and couples, that have given us a much richer understanding of what's going on within a couple or within particular kinds of batterer. Amy Holtzworth-Munroe has developed perpetrator batterer typologies that have given us a wide-ranging understanding of what's happening with different kinds of perpetrator. Michael Johnson, Evan Stark have also given us understanding of what couples actually look like, and I'll talk a bit about that when I talk about my data.

There are some types of intimate partner violence that are sex linked. We need to understand that. There are some that aren't, but there are some that are. Types of intimate partner abuse and violence that are not psychological abuse and low-level physical — scratching, biting — tend not to be. That tends to reach parity.

I think that we need to consider some broader consequences of intimate partner violence, social and economical kinds of consequences. Also, women biologically have a lot more vulnerability to sexual violence. They can become pregnant. Their internal organs can be damaged to the point where they won't have children. STDs, HIV are much more common. So we need to look beyond just a physical abuse or a broken arm. We need to look at some of these broader consequences.

We also need to really understand alcohol and drugs. They have such a profound effect, both in perpetration, victimization, as well as when these incidents occur. Often both the victim and the perpetrator or one of them are under the influence. We need to spend a little more time on that.

There are potential unintended consequences. I think when we broaden the definition of intimate partner violence to include things like psychological abuse, you will often increase the number of women that are identified as perpetrators. I'm not sure that that was what was intended. We really wanted to get respect for other kinds of violence other than broken bones and bruises, but I think there's been some unintended consequences.

I also think that mandatory arrest has been a wonderful thing on some levels. It forces police to do something when they come into this situation, but it's also increased the number of dual arrests. Now we're having victims and perpetrators both arrests.

There's no single estimate of sex differences. When people say “women are” or “men are,” I hope that you will think about it. I think we need to take a more nuanced view in terms of what women, under what circumstances, or what point in time, and the same is true for men.

We also need a lot more narrative and rich, deep understanding of intimate partner violence in couples, beyond the battering or intimate terrorism. We've done some pretty good work understanding what that looks like for those couples, but I think situational couple violence, other types of violence between couples, it would be to our benefit to really spend some time doing the hard work.

Where possible, I think it would be really helpful if we can assess both types — both partners and all types of violence. This isn't always possible. It's very dangerous to try to interview perpetrators when you're working with victims. So I say this very cautiously, and I can talk about my research and how I've been able to do it in a very structured way.

I think the typologies are really helpful, but we also don't always neatly fit in typologies. So we need not try to poke people into typologies but also let the data explain to us what is available out there, what things are coming to us.

So I'd like to switch gears now for just a moment and talk a little bit about some National Institute of Justice-funded research that I'm conducting, a longitudinal study of couples in intimate partner violence, and they're in mediation.

These are the description of the subject and my collaborators, hot off the press because I haven't actually published this yet. OK. So what I'm looking at is what does intimate partner violence look like in couples in divorce mediation, not what mom does or what dad does that are not related to one or the other, but what do the couples look like.

So what I'm going to show you is a table. It's very complex. You have a copy of it, but I'm going to try to explain it in a way that it makes sense. So, on this screen, the stuff in blue are what boys do, the stuff in pink are what girls do, just as a way to try to help work through the data.

Something that's really important to understand is I began with categories of violence. So I didn't begin with items. So I had the categories that I'd been mentioning, and we will go over them. I then did a latent class analysis. So the researchers out there, this is a factor analysis at the couple level. So what I did was put couples into the program and have the data tell me what the combinations look like — when dad is doing something, what is mom doing — and have different classes come out.

I used a common mean. So I put all of the subjects together, men and women, came up with a common mean. So the data that I'm going to show you are means and standard deviations. The mean is zero. So if you see minus numbers, that's less than the mean. If you see positive numbers, that's greater than the mean. An argument could be made that men and women perpetrate at different levels, so that was unrealistic to use a common mean, but I wanted to be comparing apples and apples. I did not want to be comparing apples and oranges looking at men and women differently.

OK. So the types and categories that I looked at with the measure I used, it was an act-based measure, except for coercive control, where questions we're asking: “demanded I obey,” “controlled how much money I could and how I spent it,” “controlled my coming and going.” We had 10 items on that particular scale. You can see the alpha reliability was good in most all of these. We also had threats in escalated and sexual violence.

So, on the far left, you'll see the types of violence, and then in the next set of … the next row, you'll see what wives are reporting and what husbands are reporting. OK?

So the first category to fall out is mutually low. These people are below the mean on everything, and if you look at the bottom of the scale, you'll see that that represents 37 percent of my 918 couples that I was able to classify, and that's 348 couples. So at least these couples in divorce mediation that cannot agree about custody and visitation, we have at least 35, 37 percent who are reporting mutually low everything.

The next category, I put a small “cc” for “coercive control” because I'm not quite sure how to label this. You've got wives reporting that they are being coercively controlled, psychologically abused. There's some of that really high-level violence — breaking bones, sending to the hospital, threatening with a gun — and then we also have sexual violence.

This is a category that Evan Stark talks about in terms of if you've got coercive controlling violence, you don't need a lot of physical violence. If you break a bone once in a while and you rape them once in a while and you control them, you don't need a lot of physical violence. I don't know if this is what's going on, but I really think we need to look at this category, particularly since it's 35 percent of the population. We've got 323 couples that fall into this.

The next one is more of a traditional battering category. If you look, if you just look at the number of categories of blue, you have father … mothers reporting that fathers are well above the mean and, in fact, two standard deviations, over two standard deviations above the mean on that high-level escalated violence and certainly close to two standard deviations the mean on sexual. So this is a very, very violent group.

Now, if you look at the pink, you've got some response by mom or you have moms responding with violence as well. Now, I want to be really careful when I talk about this because you hear of bidirectional violence being the most common or you have mutual violence. Well, I would like to present to you that this could be called mutual violence, but it's definitely not mutual, OK, based on the levels that are being reported.

Next one, we have female, mostly female perpetration. Again, you've got some categories of men, but most of them are women. There are lower levels, and there are fewer categories. Which is the category that's missing that women do not do? Sexual, of course. So, again, we have a category that if we do not include in the studies, it's very gendered, and it biases the research.

Our last category that only represents 4 percent of the population, 32 couples, and this is just “mutually violent control,” if you want to use Michael Johnson's terminology. It's only 32 couples, whereas the mostly male, mostly female, 115 couples, 100 couples.

So this is what the data told me. I didn't force these couples into these categories, but this is what the data told me.

So some conclusions: Asymmetries in partner violence, intimate partner violence occur, but the mostly male is at much higher levels and more types than mostly female, and we read over and over that bidirectional violence or situational couple violence is the one that's the most common. This did not happen in this particular study. That's not what we found in this particular study.

The limits of the research — I want to be very clear about the population that I was studying. It's a divorcing population who are contesting custody and visitation. These assessments happened in divorce mediation. It was at one jurisdiction and one point in time. It was an act-based measure, but at least we had 10 items addressing coercive control, which I think is very, very important. It's an archival study of existing records. So there were no assessments of consequences, meaning of violence and social health outcomes.

But it does address one longstanding issue in mediation, and that's power differential. I think we're borrowing a concept, coercive control, from the intimate partner violence research, and it's a short screening measure that captures these important power dynamics.

Future research: I think, you know, one of the huge issues is what happens to these children. Right now I'm attempting to locate funding to collect data from CPS and juvenile court on what happens to these particular families. Juvenile court and CPS have a rich data source in terms of what … the ongoing family dynamics.

It also shows us a connection between family court and juvenile court. Right now, we have a multi-court collaboration going on at the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Families often get caught between these two court systems. Women are told in juvenile court, “You must protect your child.” She goes to get a divorce and goes to family court and is told, “You must have your child see the other parent.” So she's told completely different things from two different court systems.

I think another thing I will look at is if couples with intimate partner violence are accurately identified by mediators. And then what is done, once it's identified? Do they change procedures to help accommodate victims? And which couples return to court? Which couples return to mediation? What are the reasons and how is it resolved? And which couples call the police and sheriff? We begin taking these classes. I have about 15 years of police and sheriff data on these couples, and we've begun looking at the classes and who calls the police and who are arrested.

And thank you.

[Applause.]

Barbara J. Hart: It was a privilege for me today to hear the Honorable Laurence Tribe. You know, somehow lawyers just resonate to his messages about access to justice. It was just a great privilege, and I want to reinforce a few things that he said because they fit with what I want to talk about.

The first was that knowledge should have practical application. I went to the Ben Franklin Institute almost monthly, was a member when I lived near Philadelphia because of the incredible knowledge, practical knowledge that that institute provided for my children. So Ben Franklin talked about that all of our inquiries should have a practical application, and I commend that to you, both in terms of practice and public policy. I think that the closer we get to offering guidance to both, the more valuable your research will be because we will actually be talking about it and using it in more familiar ways, I think.

The other thing that he talked about was soft knowledge. Soft knowledge is very useful, and in this field, you'll see how we have built on soft knowledge. And we must — we who are practitioners and policymakers — must learn to better appreciate the empirically derived knowledge. So both of those are knowledge, so I appreciated his addressing that.

And the third was that — and I'm not quite sure what he was talking about — the person-focused versus the problem-focused research. I look forward to having further discourse with him about that because I think that much of what practitioners are interested in may be a combination of both of those.

So, anyway, let's start. I want to start with the oldest researchers in the field, just so that you can have some familiarity with them. So the check mark means that they weren't … these were newspaper reporters, these two women at the top, and back in the '70s wrote battered wives and first started talking about institutional misogyny, a very important construct as we shaped both public policy and practice in the future. And then Straus, Gelles and Finkelhor did the Conflict Tactics Scale, which has shaped discourse and debate for the last 30 years, 40 years, very important work.

Lenore Walker was incredibly helpful in focusing responsibility for intimate partner violence on the abuser, rather than talking about the masochistic psychologically impaired woman who invited the violence in her life. So it was incredible contributions to shift the view towards the perpetrator and then to talk about battered woman syndrome. And the asterisk when it appears on these slides for me talked about researchers who engaged in close collaboration with practitioners in doing their research. So Lenore was very attentive to the input of both policymakers and practitioners in doing her work, as were the Dobashes — as are the Dobashes and … but I also suggest to you that their work on patriarchal roots and gendered violence certainly has informed the discourse in the last 30 years, as have Stark and Flitcraft's work on injury prevalence.

And then this last person, you don't even know unless you're from New York and a certain part of New York, because she's a judge. At that time, she was a legal services attorney, and she first identified separation violence. It wasn't you all researchers. It really was practitioners. She was in legal services and noticed that the women who came in to get … for divorces that were on these long, horrendous waiting lists that will hopefully be reduced if Laurence Tribe has his way, they will actually get to see a legal services attorney in their divorce. She noticed that something like 50 percent of the women who came in to get divorces had been battered, and it helped shape protection orders.

I mean, Marjorie was the one who gave us the idea that protection orders independent of and attached to divorce would be very critical. So that was the very first decade of — and these are Barbara Hart's view of who did the research that was … created the foundational construct.

So this is the second decade; you can see it was very rich. I want to start with the top, Susan Schechter, our dear, beloved and passed on friend who really … she wrote in 1982 or she wrote on little three-by-five cards a book that is still the seminal, if you will, book on the shaping of the battered women's movement. It's an incredible history. In that book, she also charged us to listen and learn from battered women and activists and to spend some more time. So that's the “listen and learn” that Eleanor Lyon was talking about, listen to what battered women want. Susan was talking about this way early, and she also asked us to begin to look at class and race because we were not — we practitioners and policymakers were not doing that well then.

We still aren't doing it well now, and that research … I must give a little plug to the Violence Against Women journal because it is one of the few journals where the issue of race and class and ethnicity and immigration and LBD … LBGTQI … I don't … they just don't trip off the tongue. What can I say? Those things are explored, and they aren't explored in other … if you don't have … subscribed, you might want to. It's the most, I think, practitioner policy-friendly journal. So you might want to consider it, anyway, if you have extra money in your budget. The Violence Against Women Act funds will pay for it.

We go down here. They're just … I want to go down to Ellen which is down … Ellen Pence, which is down sort of in the last one-third. So this is the person that among any of the researchers on any of these lists has clearly focused on practical application. You know, Michael is here, too. So Michael has been her partner in this wonderful journey for the last 40 — almost 35 years, and Ellen was … is so clear about the importance of taking the information that's there and applying it to answers to questions.

Right now they're doing evaluations of custody. They're looking at custody evaluator products in order to figure out what's good and what's not so good about those products and to inform practice about that. So Ellen has always done that.

The other thing that's important to know is that you can have some fun doing some collaboration with practitioners. Michael will be able to remember this better because it was more of a traumatic experience for him, but when we were creating power and control, when we were thinking about power and control, we were at Ellen's house, where we had no plumbing in the middle of winter, and a whole bunch of us sat around and we talked about “So, why do men batter?” And I think that sort of the … it was the genesis of this, and it was a shift in thinking, frankly, for Michael and Ellen to power and control from where they were before. And the stories about this are really quite amusing, but I won't embarrass Michael or myself with those stories, except to say that, you know, these collaborations that we are commending to you, I am commending to you, can be fun as well as onerous, and I think many of you in this room may feel that they're onerous, whether you are practitioners or researchers. They can be quite entertaining actually and then give you lots of stories for later.

I'm going to move to the next. These are all important constructs, and the reason that they are listed here is because I think they shaped both research and practice for years to come, and they still are shaping much of the thinking that we're doing on all of these issues.

Richard Berk's, the criminal justice system resistance to response, all of these … then David Ford's work on victim agency and engagement in criminal prosecution and the utility of criminal prosecution if victims were engaged and were interested in pursuing criminal prosecution. So all of these people began the thinking on all of these subjects, and then we have derived much of our thinking from them both in agreeing and disagreeing with them on a bunch of things.

I'm going to look at this list, and I'm going to pick out only one. There's so many. There's so many people that I would like to talk to you about, but I don't have time to do that. I'm going to go to Ed's work on two things on this slide, but there was one on the slide before as well.

This is the measuring batter intervention effectiveness slide where he began to look at the context, not the program itself but the context of the program, the context in which the program was embedded, the criminal legal system. And you heard earlier about sure and swift consequences. I mean, one of the things that came out of Ed's work was that unless you have a system that embeds the batterer program in it and, in fact, does deliver sure and swift consequences, predictable sure — is sure, isn't it? OK.

Anyway, Ed was the first to help us understand the importance of the context in which this kind of intervention program is embedded, and he also was very responsive to a couple of practitioners who informed his work. He was very much a … he is very much of a collaborator. He really needed to measure the success of batterers programs in terms of the outcomes for battered women, and so that unless you could demonstrate that there was well being for battered women on the far end of batterer participation not just in VIPs but also in the criminal legal system, then you might want to question the utility of that intervention. OK. So that's a decade. Whew.

Next decade. Now we're in the 2000s. Some of that was violence against women research. A lot of that on the prior page was violence against women research, as was much of this, and so we have some new measures that have come out in this last year that I'm particularly interested in: Marianne Dutton's course of control measure, Adrienne Adams.

OK. One of the things I didn't tell you about Ed Gondolf is his early research in the '80s was on shelter study, and it concluded that … one of the findings was that if victims don't have access to economic resources, like child care, transportation, housing, et cetera, they're likely to return to the batterer. It was the greatest predictor of reconciliation with batterers was whether women had access to economic resources.

And Adrienne Adams now has created a scale of economic abuse, which helps us build the argument for economic resources as an essential intervention or contribution in terms of services and advocacy to battered women, and that without that kind of economic resource, battered women would find it very difficult to establish independent and safe lives that are stable and secure with their children.

Jim Ptacek is now asking us to look at restorative justice. This has been a no, no, no, no, no. This has been heretical. I mean, many things are heretical, but this has been heretical, too. And so he has begun to ask us to look at restorative justice as it might be utilized in the domestic violence field. I've been in many debates about this. This is really an exciting, I think, direction to pursue. And his work on probation efficacy is renowned and among the other things that Claire talked about earlier.

I think the JODI research, the Judicial Oversight Demonstration Initiative that was funded by OVW and the research that was funded by NIJ helped us understand the critical importance of judicial leadership in a legal process. We have had reluctant judicial participation in this work for many, many years, and in the last 10 years, we've begun to see them to step to the plate, and this research helps us understand how important that is.

And then Pat has done the earliest work that I read on stalking, and that was her study of the divert process in Colorado Springs and the failure of police officers to understand, to recognize stalking when it was in their face. They just didn't understand it unless it was a violation of the protection order. I mean, it had to be that obvious. We have many police officers who are still not recognizing stalking when they see it, and we are working on that.

He hasn't even … see, he didn't know I was going to get to this slide, and he didn't read it before either. So this is … I do want to … this is not my end slide, but I thought I'd tuck it in here before he would tell me my time was up.

[Laughter.]

Hart: I want to just express my great appreciation, as I know yours, for NIJ and particularly for Bernie and Angela, who have shepherded this work so faithfully and so carefully and I think with impeccable care to the critical issues that need to be answered. So thank you for your excellence in all of this. Thank you for including practitioners in the discourse, in the selection, in the review, et cetera. I think this has really been a rich dialogue, and I'm hoping that we will continue in this fashion as we add the access to justice. I am so excited about that, the access to justice research that's coming down the pike.

Now, so there are challenges to this dialogue and collaboration. There are infrequent venues for us to talk, and if we do come to these venues, then we have all these people up here that do the talking instead of you. We have different — as Connie talked about it — different understandings in language. That “DV” is my “IPV.” You know, what can I say? I am an attorney, and I'm of the field. So I don't do IPV very well. I almost had as much trouble with that as the LGBTQI. OK.

We don't have very many practitioner-friendly publications. We don't understand what you write. As a consequence, we do factoids. Richard is right. We do factoids better — we practitioners and policymakers do terrible factoids, and it's because we really don't grasp what you're telling us because you write it in your own journals and you talk to yourselves. OK.

We have many formal educational differences that make it very difficult, and you can read the rest of this. I think that we don't even talk about participatory action research. So, since this is being recorded, I want to say the words again: Participatory action research in which we engage the participants as well as the practitioners in design through dissemination is really important.

OK. Now I'm almost there, Bernie, actually. So here's some opportunities. You can get the Violence Against Women journal. You can come listen to my audio conferences, or you can even volunteer your research for my audio conferences and webinars. The MINCAVA website has much of this up there, as well as, you know, the obvious is to look at the NIJ and the NCJRS stuff, but these are additional pieces.

There's an interesting research collection that I bet you don't know about if you're a researcher and maybe not if you're a practitioner, and that's the National Domestic Violence Resource Center has solicited writings from various researchers on various topics in which they do a full analysis of what's out there.

So you need to publish in our venues. You need to consider doing RSS feeds to us practitioners about your products. You've got to go to the blogosphere, and I don't, but you can. And I went there last night to try to figure out how to spell the word, and it could be either an “o” or an “a” in the middle, just so you know both are correct.

OK. So here's what I think needs to happen in the future, just a few things that aren't done yet. We have a lot. Prevention is up at the top because it fit this slide. Not necessarily in any order of priority is my listing here, but I think it's really important for us to look at all the many questions that remain unanswered and to engage in those.

So I think that's the end. It's been a privilege to throw these many ideas at you. I look forward to your questions.

[Applause.]

Karen J. Bachar: Today's presentation is on “Sex Offenders in the Community: Post-Release, Registration, Notification and Residency Restrictions.” The management of sex offenders in the community post-release is an issue of increasing concern to law enforcement, policymakers and the public.

In recent years, there've been many efforts made to strengthen registration and notification. At the same time, we haven't paid a lot of attention to related matters, such as how residency restrictions may impact offenders' efforts to find work and stability, how their living arrangements — what happens when they get released from prison, whether rates of recidivism have changed according to these policies and whether these policies have succeeded in increasing public safety. These are some issues that a lot of people ask.

And to talk about these and related issues to sex offenders, I am happy to have a panel of experts to share their information.

First up will be Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau, who is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina.

She's worked on Family Services Research Center since 2000 and studied various aspects of sex offending and sexual victimization for more than 20 years. Her research examines interventions for youth who engage in risky behaviors, including juveniles who have sex offended, youth with HIV who engage in unprotected sex and delinquent youths who engage in risky sexual behaviors.

Next, Dr. Kristen Zgoba is the supervisor of Research and Evaluation at the Office of Policy and Planning for the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Her research involves studies of homicide offenders, sex offenders and geographic analysis. She serves on the board of directors at the American Correctional Association and is on the editorial board for Victims and Offenders,Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency and Criminal Justice Abstracts.

Last but not least, we have Alisa Klein, who is a public policy consultant to the Association of Treatment for Sex Abusers, an international, multidisciplinary organization dedicated to preventing the sexual abuse through assessment, treatment and management of individuals who have sexually abused or at risk to abuse.

Without further ado, I will bring you Dr. Elizabeth Letourneau.

Elizabeth J. Letourneau: Several years ago, I received funding from the NIJ to look at the effects of South Carolina's sex offender registration and identification policy on several outcomes. Those outcomes include primary prevention or general deterrence, recidivism, judicial decision making, and then we've also looked at failure to register and recidivism, whether failure to register is associated with sexual or nonsexual recidivism.

I don't have enough time to talk about that last study, but all of these studies have been published, and I give you a partial citation there. I'm happy to send the publications to anyone who cares to e-mail me.

I'm going to be talking about the first three of those four topics, and 20 minutes is not a lot of time to talk about three studies then. So I'm going to cut to the chase on these and not give you a lot of detail. Again, these are all published. The full citations will be listed, and I can send you the articles if you e-mail me or they're pretty easy to find online.

And I think we're saving questions until the very end. So we have 30 full minutes for questions. So you will have time to ask your questions, we'll have time to answer them, but if you could save them to the last speaker, that would be great.

South Carolina's SORN policy is very similar to the Sex Offender Registration Notification Act, the part of the Adam Walsh Act that legislates SORN policies nationwide. So, in South Carolina, our policy is based solely on conviction offense. There's no risk assessment, which is similar to the Adam Walsh Act, and includes a very wide range of offenses. There are almost no sex offenses in South Carolina that are not registry-eligible crimes.

We require lifetime registration, which is misspelled. That's the only place where we actually are a little more severe than what is required by the Adam Walsh Act, and then we require online registration for all registrants over the age of 16 and several who are under that age as well.

Given these similarities, it is my belief that the findings that we get from our research might forecast the effects of nationwide implementation of the Adam Walsh Act.

The first study that I'm going to talk about has to do with the effects of South Carolina's SORN policy on general deterrence or primary prevention of sex crimes. So the question we asked here and tried to answer is did first-time sex crime arrests decline after SORN was implemented, and, again, there's the citation for those of you that want to read the article.

Using adult arrest data across a 15- … 16-year period of time, we modeled the effects of two intervention years, 1995, which is when South Carolina initially enacted SORN, and 1999, which is when online registration was enacted in our state.

We looked at the rates of first-time sex crimes using ARIMA analyses, and then for comparison, first-time assault and robbery crimes because, if we saw a decline in sex crimes, but the decline was the same or occurred at roughly the same time as decline in other violent crimes, then that would not be attributable to SORN, but if we see a decline in sex crimes that corresponds with 1995 and/or 1999 and we don't see that for other violent sex crimes, that supports a SORN-related hypothesis.

We had quite a few arrestees, nearly 20,000 sex crimes, over 173,000 assault crimes and 13,000 robbery crime arrests from these data, so these are population analyses for this data, South Carolina, and not samples.

What we found, which frankly was surprising to me, is that there were declines in first-time sex crime arrest rates following 1995 for sex crimes but not for the other two types of crimes. This translated to about a 10-to-11-percent decline in first-time sex crime rates or about three sex crimes averted per month following the initiation of SORN in South Carolina. We didn't see similar effects for assault and robbery, and we concluded that this supported a general deterrent effect or primary prevention effect for South Carolina's initial SORN policy. There was no similar effect for online registration, just for the original registration policy.

These results replicate those of Prescott and Rockoff 2008, an unpublished but widely circulated study on multiple states' worth of data. They also found a deterrent effect.

Sandler and Freeman, in New York, found no evidence of deterrence, and so our results are markedly different from theirs, and they used the exact same methodology, ARIMA analyses across a 20-year period of time.

We think that our differences are due to variation in state SORN policies. For example, South Carolina registers twice as many citizens as New York does. New York has a much more — has a risk-based SORN policy, and consequently, they register fewer people.

My working hypothesis right now is that when you register a lot of people for a wide variety of crimes, the message might actually get out to the general public, and I don't know if the message is “hey, this is a sex crime, you may not have known that, but now you do,” or if the message is simply “don't do this because your face is going to — you're going to be on a registry at some point.”

What we need to do, however, is compare some state policies in the same study to find out if it's really policy variation that's driving the differences in the outcomes between our studies and, for example, those of the New York folks.

Moving on to our second study, here, we looked at the relationship between South Carolina's SORN policy and recidivism, and we asked the question did SORN reduce sexual recidivism, which is its main function. It's to reduce recidivism, right? And we also looked at other forms of recidivism, and, again, there's the full reference. It's still in press, and I keep checking, and it's not out yet, but it should be soon, I'm sure.

Again, we did population analyses. We took all men convicted of one or more sex crimes between a 15-year period of time, and at some point a little over half are registered during follow-up. The mean follow-up time frame was 8.4 years with an average standard deviation of about four years. So, basically, anywhere from four to 12 years, we were following recidivism.

We looked at new sex offense charges and then separately we looked at new sex offense convictions, and we also looked at other violent offenses, any kind of person-related crimes, and nonviolent offenses.

Regression analyses. We used regular standard Cox regression analyses, and we also used some comparative regression analyses where you can include all types of outcomes, but the results did not vary. In the models, we examined several covariates, including whether the offense was a registry-eligible offense, and then some demographic characteristics of offenders that we know influence recidivism: age at start of follow-up, offender race, number of prior convictions; and we looked at whether the victim of the index or the first sex crime was a minor or not.

There were a few new sexual charges across this average 8.4-year follow-up, only 8 percent. Registration status did not significantly predict sexual charges. Several other variables did, as predicted.

There were even fewer new convictions as we would expect, only 5 percent, and if that looks low to you, that number actually corresponds very closely with other research that has been done in South Carolina that was funded by the Bureau of Justice in a follow-up study to the three-year recidivism follow-up rate of all rapists and all child molesters. They found similarly low recidivism rates, as have recent reviews of national data.

So, when you're looking at people, not people who are referred for treatment but if you are just looking at folks who have been arrested and convicted of sex crimes, their recidivism rates are low, and so that's actually not surprising. In any event, registration status was not a significant predictor of new sex crime convictions.

All of the predictors in our model predicted violent recidivism, except registration status and the same with nonviolent offense charges, and so we concluded a couple of things. Sexual recidivism was a rare event, and SORN did not influence it, and SORN did not influence any other type of recidivism either.

The folks in New York, Freeman and Sandler, Naomi Freeman and Jeffrey Sandler, also did not find that SORN influenced recidivism, they ran very similar analyses to ours.

Other researchers have found conflicting results. Duwe and Donnay, who are in Minnesota, found that the Minnesota notification process actually reduced recidivism. That process is a risk-based process that targets very high-risk offenders with the highest level of notification. They published a study in 2008, I think it was, where they found significant reductions in recidivism in relation to a comparison group of offenders who weren't subjected to notification. On the other hand, Prescott and Rockoff, who I just cited a moment ago, found increased recidivism rates for men who were subjected to notification, and so the results really vary widely, and, again, I suspect strongly that that is due to differences in state policies. But, again, there's been no research that has specifically compared different state policy characteristics to see if some characteristics are actually associated with increased recidivism, a criminogenic effect; whereas, others might be associated with decreased recidivism and others, like South Carolina's, are just plain ineffective at changing recidivism rates.

Our third study looked at the effects of SORN on judicial decision making, and, specifically, we looked at whether the likelihood of pleading from a sex crime to a nonsex crime changed after SORN was implemented and whether the likelihood of a final guilty determination changed after SORN was implemented. And, again, we looked at two different time periods, 1995 time period, 1995 to '98, which is when SORN was implemented, and 1999 to 2004 when online SORN was implemented. Again, these are population analyses with a very large number of defendants who have been charged with at least one sex crime in a 15-year period of time.

And we included other covariates in the models, including whether the arrest was for a registry-eligible offense, whether the victim was a minor, offender age, race, number of priors and whether the arrest was a no-parole offense, and that's a truth-in-sentencing designation, so if this was an offense that would get you some extra time per truth-in-sentencing laws, which were passed at almost the same time as registration laws were passed in South Carolina.

What we found is that the rate of pleading from a sex to a nonsex crime doubled over time, and so we went from about 10 percent of defendants pleading from a sex to a nonsex crime pre-SORN, so 1990 to 1994, before we had any SORN policy, to 20 percent after online registration was implemented, and those changes were all statistically significant.

Variables that increased the likelihood of pleading included registry-eligible charge and having minority race, and then if you had a minor victim or you were older at the time of your charge, you were less likely to be permitted to plead to a nonsex offense. But so here we see that SORN has actually doubled, responsible, I think, for doubling the rate of pleading. We did not see similar increases in pleading for other crime types.

There are approximately 1,100 sex crime charges against adults per year in South Carolina, and that means we went from allowing 110 of those to plead to allowing 220 of those to plead. That's a lot of people who are being permitted to plead to a nonsex crime, and when they plead, pleas are almost universally associated with guilty determinations, of course, so you're being found guilty of aggravated assault and battery. Almost all the offenses are pled to that particular crime, which means you will not get sex offender treatment, and you will avoid registration notification, which is the whole point of pleading in the first place or it's a big part of it. So these folks are effectively opting out of any kind of treatment that might have been offered to them.

Results for guilty dispositions were also interesting. Sixty percent of all sex charge cases resulted in guilty dispositions, and the likelihood of getting a guilty finding increased after SORN was initially implemented and then declined after online notification was implemented, and when we removed the pleaded cases, which you will remember increased over time and they're almost all associated with guilty determinations, when you take those out of the equation and you just look at people who were charged with a sex crime and adjudicated for a sex crime, the likelihood of them getting a guilty determination declined after online registration went into effect to below pre-SORN levels.

So we started out at about 48 percent of these individuals being found guilty for a sex crime that increased for a brief period of time after SORN was initially implemented, and then it declined below the pre-SORN levels to 45 percent. And although that doesn't seem like a big decline, 48 percent versus 45, it is statistically significant, and it indicates that after online notification, we actually had more people being acquitted, so we have more people pleading, a significant increase in pleading to nonsex offenses. If you don't plead, you're actually now much more likely to simply be acquitted outright.

In combination, the results suggest that South Carolina's policy did achieve some modest effects in deterring new sex crimes, as I mentioned earlier, about three per month, but you have to look at that positive effect in light of the entire effect of this policy, I think. There's no effect on recidivism, which is what it was designed to reduce in the first place, and there are real significant changes in how these sex crime cases are handled. Many more are allowed to plead to nonsex crimes, and then significantly more now are simply not found guilty at all.

We did not find similar changes, by the way, for other types of violent crimes, and so we did do our comparison analyses.

As I mentioned, sex offenders convicted of nonsex crimes are going to not receive specialized treatment. They avoid registration and the notification altogether. Exonerated sex offenders are going to avoid any kind of judicial consequences, and, potentially, the effects of that are that they may not view their actions as having been particularly detrimental. We also know that victims are hurt when offenders are not held accountable. There's a long history of research in that area.

South Carolina's public registration policy relies entirely on the conviction offense. There's no risk assessment. It targets a very broad category of offenders. There are people who are on our lifetime online registry for voyeurism and for indecent exposure, as well as for much more serious sex crimes, but because our policy is so broad, it overwhelmingly targets low-risk offenders. But I think that the results from our research suggest two policy modifications.

I think there's a strong argument to be made for reserving registration and particularly for reserving notification for high-risk offenders. These are costly interventions. We're starting to look into the costs. My colleagues, actually all the colleagues here, Kristen and Alisa and some others are starting to look into the costs of registration and notification, and it's really quite astronomical, not to mention when you have so many offenders on the registry, it, I think, does the community a disservice.

I'm not sure what you would do to protect yourself from someone who is an indecent exposure versus someone who is a child molester with repeated victims. When you treat those two people the same, I think it makes it difficult for the community to use these tools in any meaningful way.

I think online notification, in particular when there is no discretion, there's no judicial discretion, there's no risk assessment, we see some very significant changes in case processing, and these changes were completely unanticipated. Nobody expected more sex offenders to be let go, and nobody expected more sex offenders to be permitted to plead to nonsex offense crimes.

Those are some effects of South Carolina's policy, and I suspect those will be the effects of the Adam Walsh Act when it's implemented nationwide because the two policies share so many characteristics, and so I think the second policy recommendation is that online notification should be curtailed significantly, if not eliminated, but certainly curtailed.

In several cases, our results conflicted with other researchers, and as I've said, I think that policy characteristics probably account for those changes.

New York registers relatively few offenders compared to South Carolina. That might account for their differences in general deterrence. They found no effect; we did find a general deterrent effect, but both states found no evidence of reductions of recidivism.

On the other hand, Minnesota, which has a different tiered and risk-based policy, did find reductions in recidivism. Prescott and Rockoff, using national data, found increases in recidivism.

We really have to move beyond single-state studies, and this is a note that I have been sounding for the last couple of years. We have got to have some comparison studies that take data from several states, not just aggregate data. You really need individual-level data, so you can identify offender characteristics and specific offender recidivism and see how those are influenced by policy characteristics, such as whether registration is conviction-based or risk-based, whether duration is 10 years or life, whether notification involves online notification or some much more targeted notification or no notification. I think those are the three main areas of variation across state policies that probably are having influences on these outcomes, in particular the outcomes in judicial decision making.

I believe that when judicial actors perceive that they have judicial decision, that they have some control over what happens, that you wouldn't see the increases in plea bargains or the reductions in guilty determinations that you see in our state when judicial actors have zero control over the process.

And that's the end of my talk. Thank you very much for your time.

[Applause.]

Kristen M. Zgoba: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm here to talk to you today a little bit about NIJ's funding of a study that came out of New Jersey. As I'm sure you're all familiar with, the birthplace of Megan's Law was in New Jersey, and we thought given that fact, that coincided with the 10-year mark of the implementation of Megan's Law, that it had been a good time to really apply for some funding that would track some long-term outcome of what we were seeing in that state. And when we started to look at the literature, we saw that presently all 50 states had some version of SORN, some version of Megan's Law, as well as the District of Columbia and many countries abroad.

So we started to ask ourselves, well, all of these states have these laws, what really is the effect, what's happening, what can we see as the likely outcome of what we've implemented. So we realized that despite this widespread support for these registration and notification laws, there was little evidence, if any, that supported any type of reduction in first-time offenses, which we saw through protective measures or general deterrence, or any literature on sexual re-offense reductions, which would be through protective measures and specific deterrence.

So, to provide you a little background of the study, the National Institute of Justice awarded myself, as well as a number of colleagues, this grant in 2006, and what we're looking to do within this grant that has since ended was to compare a potential pattern of sexual offending rate specific to New Jersey, so before and after the implementation of Megan's Law.

What I should also note here is that within the context and within the interest of time, I'm presenting to you two phases of this study. There are actually three phases to this NIJ study, the last phase being a cost-effectiveness analysis of Megan's Law specific to New Jersey, which, again, in the interest of time I'm leaving out, but, as Elizabeth has mentioned, Alisa, Elizabeth and I are working on an analysis of that.

Also, we've been able from the results of this study to parlay a number of different analyses specific to sex offender registration and notification, particularly whether or not sex offending characteristics and predictors of recidivism have changed over time. So we were able to have this 10-year time span of sex offending recidivism information, and what we were able to also do outside the scope of this grant was to analyze whether or not those risk predictors of recidivism changed from when we started to see Megan's Law implementation and risk assessment instruments being utilized to where we are now because, as we know, our risk assessments haven't changed all that much. OK.

We were happy to see that risk predictors of sexual recidivism remained stable over the 10-year time frame. So they haven't changed a whole heck of a lot from what we saw from our research.

So there are two different phases to this research, and I'm presenting you the methodology on both of them. The first was a simple pre- and post-research design that determined whether or not there were significant changes in the rates of offenses reported by law enforcement agencies prior to the implementation of Megan's Law and after the implementation.

We looked at rates for sexually based offenses, nonsexually based offenses and drug-based offenses from 1985 through 2005. We utilized data from all 21 counties in New Jersey as well as the aggregate form of New Jersey as a whole, utilizing, again, Uniform Crime Report data.

What we did was look at the prevalence rates for re-arrest, re-conviction and re-incarceration over the time frame, and we compared population estimates from the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. These population estimates from New Jersey were cross-referenced with the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, and there was no significant difference between the population estimates between the sources. So we utilized UCR data for the data that was significant, obviously, for the study.

Again, as we all know, one of the limitations that I'll discuss in the last section are the limitations of utilizing official data and arrest report.

We also thought it was necessary to not only take sex offending data but also to look at nonsexual offending patterns over this 20-year time frame and also drug offense patterns. The reason that we chose drug offense patterns was because we've seen, specific to New Jersey, very similar legislative pathways. So we thought it would be interesting within these time frames if we could take all of this information and sort of fit it into the context.

Phase two of this grant had a very, very different methodology. We utilized a sample of sex offenders that were released from the New Jersey Department of Corrections, so all of the offenders in phase two of the study were convicted sexual offenders. They were released either from our adult diagnostic and treatment center or the general population.

In New Jersey, we are one of only two states in the country that have a prison facility specifically devoted for the treatment of sexual offenders. Those sex offenders are incarcerated just like they are in general population, with the exception that they receive treatment specific to sex offending. OK.

So we utilized 50 sex offenders per year, 25 from the ADTC and 25 from the general population. We randomly selected them for these 11 years, from 1990 through 2000. This yielded us a sample of 550 cases of sex offenders. Within these 550 cases, we collected quite an assortment of data on each individual offender, approximately 100 variables on each offender.

They ranged from historic information to demographic information, sentencing and re-offense patterns for each individual sex offender in the sample.

Phase two analyzed these pre- and post-group differences on three specific outcomes that we were interested in.

The first was the most obvious: the reduction of recidivism. We thought it would be in our best interest to utilize a sort of triangulated methodology here and look at re-arrest, re-conviction and re-incarceration.

We were also very interested in increased community tenure. What we meant by increased community tenure here was the number of days it took to the first arrest for general offending and the number of days it took to arrest for sexual offending.

The reason that's important is because whether or not you see a statistically significant reduction in recidivism is, of course, the hallmark of your outcome study, but if an offender is also staying in the community at a longer time span prior to recidivism, that, in some ways, is still a very significant outcome because we start to see cost benefits, a number of different benefits that can be gauged from that.

We also looked at reduced harm. Within the context of reduced harm, we were interested in whether or not the obvious happened. Are there fewer sex offenses occurring after the implementation of Megan's Law?

Within that, we were also interested whether or not offenders in general were less violent, OK, so whether or not this sample of sex offenders after the implementation of Megan's Law, whether or not they just happened to be less violent offenders and whether or not we saw offenders who had fewer child victims, because we know through the majority of research, Megan's Law is going to focus primarily on those individuals that have those child victims. So it was important for us to really gauge whether or not we were seeing a reduction there.

The first results you see here are for phase one, and the next few slides, I'll point out to you, were all for phase one. The rates varied here, so you'll see on the bottom portion, the X axis of your scale here starts you off at 1985 and then brings you up to 2005. So what you see here at 1994 is the point of implementation for Megan's Law. The rates varied from a high of 51 offenses in 1986 to a low of 29 offenses per 100,000 individuals in the population in 2005. In general, we saw a consistent downward turn of sexual offending rates over this 20-year pattern.

What you are looking at here is the rates before and after the implementation of Megan's Law. The upper line represents sex offenses through the years 1985 to 1994, and the lower line represents sex offenses for the year 1995 to 2005. Superimposed over these data points is a linear trend analysis that will ultimately provide us the information to see whether or not the slope has increased or decreased over time.

The first thing that should be noted from what you're looking at here is that beginning in 1995, which is your bottom line, the rate of sex offenses have never again approached the pre-1994 levels. The intercept and the average of these two lines are different.

And the second important thing to take home is that the slope is deeper in the post-Megan's Law period. This is particularly notable for us, for the facts that these are sex crimes, and we all know that sex crimes have a low base rate of offending, so one wouldn't necessarily expect to see a steeper dropoff of these rates.

Now, when we do the same with our nonsex offenses, just to sort of get it into context, we see that the average number of crime has been changed to per 1,000 population, and the average is 50 crimes per 1,000 individuals and the highest is 56 in 1989. We see here at 1994, again, is the point at which Megan's Law was enacted. The lowest rate we see here is in 2003 at 45 nonsex crimes per 1,000.

For the last five years of these data, we ultimately see that the crime rate has remained stable. There is a significant change point, however, if you look four years past the 1994 at 1998. For these data analyses, we utilize what's known as a Mann-Whitney U test, which rank-orders all of your data and is particularly useful for individuals when you don't know where your data points change. OK. So, within the nonsex offending rates, we saw a significant data change point at 1998.

These are what our statewide drug offenses looked like for the same time frame. Rates varied from a high of 89 in 1989 to a low of 52 in '85. Again, so we can see that in 1989, our drug rates spiked, there is no significant change point with our drug offense rates during that same time frame.

This moves us over to our recidivism information for phase two of the sex offending study. What this does is present pre and post contrasts that are controlled by time at risk. So these are year-by-year graphs that analyze our different data points for arrests, convictions and incarcerations for the 10-year time frame, so this is phase two.

OK. So, going from 1990 to 2000, five years prior to Megan's Law, five years post-Megan's Law, and, again, it represents the rate of sex offenders released during these time frames. Overall, 46 percent of offenders were re-arrested, 41 percent were convicted and 35 percent were re-incarcerated, and, again, this is hard to gauge simply from this, and you'll see this in the next table that I'm about to show you. This is for general recidivism by year, so this is not broken down for sexual or for drug offenses.

This is what became particularly important for us with our sex offending study, and this represents the outcomes pre- and post-Megan's Law. You'll see that at the top of the table, we have recidivism information. You see it broken down by pre and post total, utilizing either an ANOVA or a chi-square.

Of particular interest are the top three. This weighs general recidivism. So, within general recidivism, we took sexual recidivism out. OK. So this is just general types of recidivism here. We did see a significant pre/post effect on general recidivism after Megan's Law. So, on all three categories post-Megan's Law, we do see a significant reduction for general recidivism.

When we look, then, at community tenure, community tenure, as I explained to you, was days to arrest for any crime. So, for our general recidivism or days to arrest for our sex crimes, we see no significant difference within these two categories. So sex offenders are spending approximately 772 days in the community prior to Megan's Law before they commit any crime, and 726 days in the community prior to committing any offense after Megan's Law. OK. We see slightly higher time frames pre-Megan's Law for sex crimes, and then post, 765. This didn't achieve any sort of statistical significance.

When we look at harm, this is what, again, is the primary interest particularly for us because we know that our Megan's Law study is supposed to have an effect on sex crimes. So we show here the percent re-arrested for any type of sex crime. Prior to Megan's Law, 10 percent of the sample was re-arrested for any type of sex crime. After Megan's Law was implemented, 7.6 percent of the population had been arrested for any type of sex crime. Again, no statistical significance. When we looked at re-conviction and re-incarceration, we also did not see any difference.

Also, of importance was the type of sex crime. As I explained to you in the first few charts, we were interested in whether or not the type of offenses that sex offenders were committing actually changed over time, and, again, we didn't see any change with that. We didn't see that sex offenders were committing crimes against a smaller amount of children or larger amount of women, adult women, anything like that. The only place that we saw a reduction was in the percent of violent offenses. We saw that post-Megan's Law implementation, sex offenders were generally less violent offenders, OK, and that reached a statistically significant level.

Our survival functions, you'll see before you, considered are censor cases or time at risk here. Our offenders in our previous analyses were capped, so all offenders had the same amounts of time at risk, which ultimately became six and a half years, and you'll see from the graph that there's very little difference between the offenders pre- and post-Megan's Law implementation in terms of those staying within the community. This, of course, did not reach a statistically significant level either.

So the results tell us that New Jersey has experienced a downward trend in sexual offense rates with the change point at 1994, and this became a very important issue for us because, ultimately, what was happening was phase one of our study was indicating that sex crime rates were down, that they were down from the 20-year mark, and they were consistently going down, OK, which led many individuals in the community to surmise, “Megan's Law is having an effect,” because your sex crimes are down. OK.

We then, when we moved on to phase two, did not see that same result. When we took our aggregate data and sort of de-aggregated it, we no longer saw that effect over time. OK.

The majority of the counties, sex offense rates were higher prior to 1994 and were lower after 1995, which is ultimately when we know Megan's Law came into effect, but we couldn't in any way point to the fact that Megan's Law was having that effect.

While sex offenses have rebounded somewhat, they are far lower than they were in the '80s and early 1990s. In terms of sex offenses, the general decline is similar to that of nonsex crimes; however, the statewide change point for sex offenses occurred during the time frame that we would have expected it to, around 1994, while our nonsex crime rate changed in 1998.

The wide year-to-year fluctuations in drug crimes were, we assume, a reflection of our drug policies and our practice efforts, although those efforts have not been sustained over time, and in the case of sex offenses, we know the statewide change occurred when it was predicted to change, and we have seen that it's maintained that power, primarily the statistical power, over time.

Again, when we look at the pre- and post-Megan's Law analysis, though, we see that Megan's Law was not effective in increasing community tenure, so they're not spending longer amounts of time in the community. It has not reduced the number of sex crimes. It has not changed the type of sexual re-offense or first time sexual offense, and it has not reduced the actual number of victims involved with sexual offending.

Before I move on to the limitations very shortly, just to say again this is something that we struggled with in New Jersey and had to be very careful with how we worded it in our final report to the Department of Justice because we knew that this information could easily be misconstrued particularly within the media and the legislature saying that Megan's Law was, in fact, effective. And we knew primarily that was coming from individuals that really didn't have a strong concept of the statistical analyses when, in fact, this actually did happen, particularly with one of the state senators who drafted Megan's Law ultimately came out saying that, “Look, Megan's Law is effective, you know. Bottom line, are sex crime rates lower after Megan's Law was implemented, or were they higher?” you know, and your obvious answer is, “Well, they're lower,” and he said, “Well, you see, it's effective, then.” So, again, we had to be very, very particular in how we drafted these results.

The limitations for this study are those limitations that we would see in most research, including official reports, particularly that of utilizing UCR data. We know about the underreporting, and we know about the low base rate of reporting.

Particularly with sex offending, in all of our studies, it's become very difficult for us to achieve statistical power because we simply don't have enough sex offenders committing re-offenses of a sexual nature, and that is in no way advocating that sex offenders have to commit more sexual re-offenses for us, but what it does is make our jobs harder because of obvious statistical power. OK.

Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

Alisa Klein: Hi, everybody. Thank you for being here. This is a topic that isn't so pleasant to listen to some of the time.

So I'm curious just to know, if you could just raise your hands and let me know how many of you are researchers? OK. And how many of you do policy-related work or make policy, influence policy? OK.

So I'm going to take this discussion in a little bit of a different direction and look at some of the kind of policy questions that come up for me, and I'm going to pose a lot of questions more than I'm going to offer answers because these are the kinds of questions that I'm constantly grappling with and kind of keep me up at night, and I'm going to share some of them with you and also see if we can get a little bit of feedback from the other presenters about their thinking about how their research can translate to sound policy.

I actually want to pose a question and just hear briefly from each of you, Kristen and Elizabeth — how have your studies been received? How has your state, how has the federal government responded, because that's really going to lead us, I think, down a path of kind of talking about what we can do in terms of policy.

Elizabeth Letourneau: So that's easy for me to answer. I don't think my research has had any effect. It certainly has not in my state, and I don't think it has at a larger level, and part of that, I think, is because I haven't effectively targeted my findings to policymakers in my state. It's actually a question I was asked in Australia recently when I was over there presenting, and they said, “Well, you know, what have you done for the U.S.?” And the answer was nothing in terms of the effects that I'm having.

So, yeah, I haven't figured out how to translate. I'm so delighted to see so many hands raised when Alisa asked how many policymakers, policy analysts were in the audience, because that's probably the largest number that has heard anything that I've had anything to do with.

Kristen Zgoba: It's been a very interesting situation in New Jersey. The federal government was very supportive of our findings, certainly promoted the findings. The state, unfortunately, was not as supportive, if I can say that.

[Laughter.]

Zgoba: We began reaching out to the governor's office early on when we saw that our research was indicating that there was no reduction in sex crimes consistent with Megan's Law implementation, and, ultimately, we got no response.

We got no response for many months until our final warning that our deadline was fast approaching to NIJ, and that the findings would become public. And when that occurred, we were told we could give interviews, and the Associated Press was the first interview at which point it was then picked up by many, many newspaper articles. And it just kind of became a firestorm in the state, and, at the same time, everything sort of exploded, and Maureen Kanka came out with a statement and state senators came out with statements, and then the governor at that time immediately issued a statement within days saying that Megan's Law would never be changed and that no study would have an effect on changing the policy.

I can't imagine that given the sort of political background of our new governor that we'll see much of a change consistent with that either, so, unfortunately, that's the case.

Klein: Also thinking about it in terms of timing, the Adam Walsh Act with the Title I, which is the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act that is mandating to all 50 states, 197 Indian tribes and the five U.S. territories, how to create a uniform system for public notification, and, as Elizabeth was discussing, how to tier offenders based on offense, not based on assessed risk and so forth.

So that was passed in 2006. We're coming up on a deadline, the final deadline of July 2011 for the implementation of SORNA. In the meantime, these studies have come out, several other studies have come out, and I've just been thinking about how this kind of information does either get kind of sidelined or ignored because we now have a major federal project on our hands of implementing SORNA, which essentially is going against what the data tells us is, in fact, effective.

And we see this around sex offender management policy community, management of sex offenders, that kind of policy, we see this all the time, that policymakers essentially often find themselves in a dilemma. We're seeing more and more research that's showing that a lot of the things that we are turning into policy, that we're seeing being turned into policy, are not effective, residence restrictions being the other significant way that sex offenders are managed when they return to communities.

So, you know, we have to think about what is compelling — not sex offenders — what is compelling policymakers to legislate in these ways when data is telling them otherwise.

So one of the things we do know — and this is something for all of you researchers to think about certainly, but also the policymakers here — we do know from a lot of research, ironically enough, that policymakers don't make decisions based — I mean, I'm saying something fairly obvious, I guess — based on research, the decisions that are made about laws that are implemented, especially around things that are very emotional, very painful for communities, individuals, families to grapple with. They're not making decisions necessarily based on what research tells us.

So one of the things we need to be thinking about is how can research play a more influential role in influencing policy, and how can we provide policymakers — this is the slightly more complex piece of this — how can we provide policymakers with the kind of cover that they need to make the decisions that might not be perceived as popular when it comes to sex offender-related policy.

We know that sex crime issues have little to do for people with facts and research, so we're talking about kind of communities. Common sense says if you want to protect kids from predators, you need to know where they are, thus community notification, thus residence restrictions. If we just move them away from where children congregate, we can protect them; it seems to make sense. And the terms that are used, you know, don't sound so bad. And so one of the things that policymakers need to be thinking about is how do you change or reframe those terms and the concepts behind them.

And then another very interesting piece of this community notification discussion is, again, what the public thinks about it. The Washington State Institute for Public Policy did some interesting research in 1998. They did — just in Washington, in the state of Washington, they asked people about their perceptions of community notification. And what they found was that almost 75 percent of respondents reported that they learned more about sex offenders, sex offenses, how sex offenders operate because of community notification; their awareness was raised, and over 60 percent said that community notification makes released sex offenders behave better. So they had a sense that it actually would influence sex offenders to feel like they're being watched. People know who they are, so they are going to be less likely to re-offend.

And the vast majority — and I can't remember what the exact percentage is; I think it was in the high 80s — felt safer knowing about convicted sex offenders living in their communities, and they indicated that they were more safety conscious, they took precautions, that kind of thing.

The question here is, you know, are policymakers making these decisions based on what they think the public wants to hear; if so, how do we educate the public properly, and then how do we get the policies to shift based on research, of course.

And then one of the things that just has come up for me in listening to these two folks or reading their material is, you know, all of the policies historically since the early '90s that have legislated these registration notification laws have been named after three different children, nationally known situations of extreme, deep pain of children who have been abducted, have never been recovered. In one case, we know, Megan Kanka was, in fact, raped before she was killed. Adam Walsh was never found; we don't know what happened to him. Jacob Wetterling was never found. These are the three children upon which federal policy has been set around community notification.

And so I just pose this question, you know, does this make it psychologically difficult for anyone to oppose or question these policies because somehow it might be detracting from the pain, the very real pain that we all feel around what has happened to these particular kids, is it an affront to the families, the bereaved families.

I also am struck by something that isn't talked about quite as much when we talk about notification laws, the sex offender registration and notification laws, and that is this difference between reportage and incidence.

So one of the things that some of us that do this work have a sense of is that the policies that we're increasingly legislating around sex offenders returning to communities are policies that may be having a deep influence on the decision to report, to bring to light situations of child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault.

We know that the vast majority of sexual violence is perpetrated within intimate circles, communities. With child sexual abuse, 93 percent is perpetrated by someone known to the victim. About — what is it? — 35 percent is actual family members of the victim, and with adult sexual assaults, it's about 64 percent of women we know have been raped, physically assaulted or stalked by an intimate partner.

So we know that this is a crime that is perpetrated within intimate circles, and the reportage rates are kind of in keeping with those statistics. We know that only about 12 percent of child sexual abuse is ever reported to the authorities, only about 16 percent of rapes, 20 percent is what Tjaden and Thoennes tell us. So, with sexual violence happening in these intimate circles, are we somehow, with these laws, keeping people from feeling like they want to bring forward these members of their families, their communities to — are we somehow keeping situations underground?

Let's see. And the last thing that I wanted to bring up is something that these two studies that we heard about don't focus on, but that is particularly significant, are the unintended consequences that are associated with community public notification on sex offenders.

We know that sex offenders returning to communities who are publicly notified upon suffer from loss of jobs and unemployment, employment instability. They suffer often from harassment and physical assault. They have chronic difficulties finding places to live, finding jobs, and they are frequently forced to the outskirts of communities into increasingly rural areas where they're not going to be able to access the kind of specialized supervision and services that they may need to not re-offend.

These kinds of stressors on sex offenders' lives are shown to actually raise their risk for recidivating. We know from the general criminogenic literature and we know from the sex offender-specific research that when sex offenders have stable jobs, housing, social bonds to the community in which they live and they are able to continue their family relationships, they are going to be less likely to re-offend.

So, certainly for policymakers, we need to be thinking about those kinds of questions, you know, what are the unintended consequences, what are the collateral consequences of the decisions we're making, especially when they're not based on the research that we're seeing.

So that is what I wanted to share, and I know that we're all open for questions now.

Karen Bachar: Please join me in thanking the panel.

[Applause.]