In 1981 a group of citizens in Duluth, Minnesota became frustrated with what they perceived was a lack of commitment by the criminal justice system concerning “wife beaters.” With private funding they founded the Duluth Abuse Intervention Project. http://www.duluth-model.org/ The project was a coordinated community wide effort that contained a number of agreed upon written protocols that were intended to connect the police, the court system and social service agencies.
The Duluth police department put in place a policy that mandates when their officers respond to a domestic violence incident and there is (1) enough probable cause to identify the offender and (2) there was an injured victim present, an arrest must be made. And most people would agree that if someone beats their wife they should be arrested, sanctioned, and perhaps placed in an effective treatment program.
The courts and social service agencies then have specific advocates to assist the victims in all steps of the post arrest process. Recognizing that many offenders (1) would return to their home after the arrest and (2) that many victims did not want the offender to be jailed they put in place a courted ordered education and counseling program for offenders. This also seems to be a good idea.
So What Went Wrong
During the 1980s the issue of “family violence” first was intermingled with and later would become secondary to “women’s rights.” Then issue morphed from “family violence” into “violence against women.” Mandatory or preferred arrest policies were changed and the changes ignored the most basic and central tenant of law enforcement. The historic tradition of allowing officer discretion was eviscerated.
Further, mandatory arrest policies and “no drop” prosecutorial policies would transform the “victim’s desires, needs and rights” into being secondary to the rights of the state. The state became the “victim as viewed through the feminist lens” and the domestic violence victim became a secondary witness to the state crime of “violence against women.”
Ironically “no drop” policies remove from individual women their newly discovered power. The system that for the first time provided to individual women, a choice and a means of altering or controlling the behavior of their intimate partner or spouse was removed from their hands and once again “the state knows best.”
Under mandatory arrest policies law enforcement officers have become robots, mechanically responding to calls with the only mandate being “you call, we haul.” The original intent of domestic violence intervention, to stop the violence, arrest someone who had beaten their wife, to stop ignoring the wishes and desires of victims and provide assistance requested by the injured victims was all but forgotten. All that mattered now is that someone, anyone, be arrested. Well, not quite anyone.
The authors of the Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/181867.pdf write that “A comparison of police responses to reports of physical assault committed against women and men by intimates showed that police were significantly [emphasis added] more likely to take a report and to arrest or detain the perpetrator is the victim was female.” They write that they do not understand why this takes place. However, the answer is quite clear.
It is difficult if not impossible to believe the authors, Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, claim that they do not know the answer to their own question. Are they not both “experts” concerning the issue of domestic violence? Perhaps they cannot see “why” because they view the issue of domestic violence always and only through the feminist lens. The feminist view clearly exhibits a bias for women as victims and men as predatory domestic violence offenders.
The Obvious Answer
When it is difficult for officers, particularly in minor incidents, to establish enough “probable cause” concerning who is the offender, officers are trained to arrest the “dominant aggressor.” After all, the law demands that someone must be arrested. Probable cause is often reduced to “she said/he said.” Where there are no injuries or a lack of any serious injuries and victims do not want an arrest to take place, officers are now trained to arrest the “dominant aggressor” http://www.caadv.org/.
Who-hits-who first, traditionally is, and other than domestic violence interventions, continues to be of paramount importance in assault cases. However, officers are now being trained that in domestic violence intervention they should ignore who-hits-who first.
In fact they are told that if someone is in “fear” of being assaulted it is understandable that person would be the first to hit the other in self defense. If that is not strange enough, regardless of reams of evidence to the contrary the officers are told that there is no such thing as “mutual combat.”
Bites on chest area, scratches on wrist or forearms, fingernail marks gouged into the skin, amount of force [wife pushes and husband punches] and a small woman using a weapon to resist a large man are all to be viewed as evidence of acts of self defense. This does not appear to be gender neutral training.
And if that is not enough to convince officers who “should be arrested” this training model lists the negative effects that an arrest could have on a woman. Apparently there are no negative effects on men as none are listed.
Where’s the Evidence?
The Duluth Model counseling program claims that domestic violence is caused by the patriarchal organization of a society. The patriarchy causes men to use violence as a means of maintaining their traditional “dominant” role in the family. The behavior of abusers is the result of masculine culturally created and accepted learned mores and norms. Might one suppose there may be a possible link between “dominant aggressor” training for law enforcement and this particular model that clearly proffers that all women are the victims of dominant male culture?
Statistics Don’t Lie
A study of the men arrested and placed in the Duluth Model counseling program documents that 60% of the men were not rearrested for abusing the same victim. These results were heralded nation wide by fundamental feminists as the reason why the Duluth Model should become the national model. And so it was. Because of its proclaimed success, the Duluth Model remains the most replicated domestic violence counseling program.
Another study, the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment reported the when the offender was arrested there was a significant reduction, approximately 50%, for repeat offending. The results were heralded nation wide by fundamental feminists as the reason why mandatory arrest should become the national model. And so it was. Because of is proclaimed success, mandatory arrest is the most replicated domestic violence interventions by law enforcement.
Because of these reported success rates in deterring offenders these two models or some form of them are mandated in the majority of states. However, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and researchers recognized the danger of putting in place programs based on the results of a single study. The researchers understood that they socio-economic and educational demographic of Duluth and Minneapolis are dramatically different than many other urban settings. NIJ funded studies in five different jurisdictions in an attempt to replicate the results of the Minnesota criminal justice intervention policies and programs.
The results of the follow up studies are published in The Effects of Arrest on Intimate Partner Violence: New Evidence From the Spouse Assault Replication Program http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/188199.txt. This report is an analysis of 4,032 domestic violence incidents. As the authors note, the findings of their research should have had several implications concerning domestic violence policies. Rather, the results have been ignored.
The Facts
The startling results of this report should have become national news and resulted in the re-examination of mandatory arrest policies and the Duluth Model of counseling. However, the report received little to no attention in the media and it continues to be universally ignored by fundamental feminist. In fact the majority of people in the criminal justice system and social services have never heard of the report.
The report documents that more than 70% of offenders, arrested or not, did not repeat their aggression against the same victim. It also reports that whether or not the offender was arrested more than 50% of them committed no subsequent criminal offenses against the same victim.
This report documents quite clearly that the evidence of success against re-offending produced through the use of mandatory arrest policies and placement in the Duluth Model counseling program demonstrated little to no independent results.
A More Effective Intervention
The Violence Against Women Office and our public policy makers continue to ignore the results of this NIJ report and continues to spend many millions of dollars on mandatory arrest policies, the Duluth Model counseling program and what is clearly biased domestic violence training for law enforcement.
The results in this NIJ report document quite clearly that the majority of offenders would cease their repeat offending without an arrest taking place and without the Duluth Model counseling program. And most importantly, a key finding of this study has been dangerously placed in the corner, kept in the dark and hidden away.
What should be troubling to both the criminal justice system and domestic violence advocates is the fact that, “This suggests that policies requiring arrest for all suspects may unnecessarily take a community’s resources away from identifying and responding to the worst offenders and victims most at risk.” The report documents that, “While most victims reported no new incidents of aggression, about 8% of them reported a total number of incidents that represented more than 82% of the 9,000 incidents.
The authors also conclude that, “Future research in this area needs to assess the benefits and costs of arresting all suspects before there can be a systematic conclusion of preferred or mandatory arrest policies.” There is no question that “wife beaters” should be arrested, but what have we wrought with this biased and obvious sexist approach to family violence.
The sounds of silence from the media, fundamental feminists and our public policy makers concerning this NIJ report is deafening. And worse still, continuing to ignore these results, simply because they do not fit “the feminist lens” may further marginalize the safety of victims and their children at the hands of chronic abusers.
How much longer can the media, fundamental feminist and our public policy makers ignore these facts? And perhaps a more important question, “Why do the results of this NIJ report continue to be ignored?”
