Anne P. DePrince, Associate Professor, University of Denver
NIJ Conference 2010
June 14-16

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Improving Responses to Domestic Violence Incidents

Anne P. DePrince, Associate Professor, University of Denver
NIJ Conference 2010
June 14-16

Anne P. DePrince: This particular community-coordinated response program is called the Triage Project, and it basically brings together representatives from law enforcement, prosecuting attorney's office as well as community-based agencies to review incoming cases, new cases reported to law enforcement, and then this interdisciplinary team works together to think about the particular needs of the woman, the characteristics of the case, and then assigns a community-based agency to take the lead in making outreach to the victim, with the idea being that in the aftermath of an incident of domestic violence is not really a time that women can be organizing and making phone calls, et cetera.

So what we did, we were able to actually randomly select women to get this innovative outreach and compare how things went for those women relative to women who were in what we call the “treatment-as-usual” condition. And what we found was some really exciting evidence that early engagement with victims has an impact not only on victim and survivor wellbeing but also on criminal justice outcomes.

The thing I'm most proud of in this project is that it is a true partnership between practitioners and myself and my research team. Our partners, they were the ones who developed this program, are doing this frontline, innovative, interdisciplinary work, and so, when we partnered to do this research project, it was a conversation back and forth about what is the best and the wisdom of the practitioner world, and what's the best that the research world and the wisdom the research world can bring in order to have a really real world highly … a design that is going to be really good science and work for the real-world situation.