One in four women will fall victim to domestic violence in their lifetime, statistics say, and one ASU researcher is working to make the ways police respond to this social problem more effective.
Jill Theresa Messing, assistant professor in the School of Social Work, said the current interventions police use to prevent harm to victims are not effective.
“I feel that it’s important to bring victim services in at the same time we are incarcerating batterers in order to help [victims] change their lives,” she said.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Messing dedicated most of her time to interdisciplinary violence research.
She collaborated with researchers from Hopkins and the University of Oklahoma to develop a lethality assessment and intervention program.
“The goal of the program is to increase the safety of domestic-violence victims by providing a social-service [counseling] response to them when they call the police for help,” Messing said.
The lethality assessment is a shorter version of a danger assessment created by retired Maryland police officer Dave Sargent and is now implemented throughout his home state.
In this program, police are instructed to ask a person calling on a domestic-violence claim a series of 11 questions.
The researchers will ask the victims questions like whether their partner owns a gun, if their partner has used strangulation or if their partner is violently jealous.
If the person answers yes to the majority of these questions, the police will turn the phone call over to a domestic-violence hotline that provides social services.
Messing said a victim of domestic violence is most likely to seek help immediately following a battering incident.
“Because we’re getting them in that phase, we expect that they’re more likely to tell the truth about what’s going on in their home and are more likely to seek help if it’s offered,” she said.
Messing’s research team will begin collecting data in March by interviewing volunteer domestic violence victims throughout eight Oklahoma police jurisdictions.
The research team will then contact the same victims six months later to determine whether the intervention increased the victim’s health-seeking behavior and decreased domestic violence.
“We want to know what types of violence, both from the past and present, these women have been involved in and what types of health-seeking behaviors they have utilized,” Messing said.
She has also been collaborating with Lt. Robert Bates of the Phoenix Police Department’s family investigations bureau.
“In domestic violence, unlike other crimes, we have more opportunity for violence prevention,” Bates said.
Over the past nine years in Phoenix alone, Bates said the police received 50,000 calls a year claiming domestic violence.
“Only about 15,000 of those calls turn into actual domestic violence reports,” he said. “Thirty to 40 percent of the time, the suspect is still there, and we arrest them.”
With only 20 detectives to work all of the cases, Bates said the bigger question is which of the 50,000 cases are dangerous and have ongoing victimization.
“The lethality instrument is going to be one piece of the model we’ll use to determine this,” he said.
Messing and Bates agree domestic violence is not about aggression; it’s about power and control.
“There’s no law for control and, most of time, control is invisible,” Bates said.
The usual response to domestic violence is criminal justice, but more attention needs to be paid to the victims, Messing said.
“There are a lot of myths out there,” she said. “It’s really important for everyone to understand that it’s not the victim’s fault and that she doesn’t like it.”
Reach the reporter at jodi.cisman@asu.edu.
