The Integration of Criminal Justice & Human Services, Essay Example

The battered women’s movement is to be commended for reframing the discourse about domestic violence, particularly intimate partner violence against women, from assumptions that it was principally an issue affecting impoverished African American women. Nonetheless, it is problematic and indeed unfortunate that popular conceptions of intimate partner abuse center on supposedly passive middle-class European-American women. Firstly, intimate partner violence affects women of every ethnic background. Unfortunately, higher rates of domestic violence have been observed amongst ethnic and “racial” minorities.

But this conception is also problematic because of its stereotyping and simplification. Although the rates of prevalence of this phenomenon are controversial, it is nevertheless attested that women also commit acts of domestic violence against men. To be fair, domestic violence committed by women appears to be likely to be less forceful than that committed by men, and it also appears to be more commonly initiated in self-defense. Domestic violence also occurs in lesbian and gay relationships. For all of these reasons, then, it is unfortunate that such erroneous and simplistic conceptions dominate popular discourses of domestic violence. Misconceived, erroneous and simplistic narratives are problematic because they do not serve to advance proper awareness of the problem, an awareness that could potentially help the survivors.

Beyond doubt, the NIPVS improves greatly upon prior data-gathering methods. Firstly, it is a random digit dial (RDD) telephone survey, one that samples both landlines and cell phones. The instrument is administered over the phone, making it far more convenient for the participants. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in very high rates of cooperation: a weighted cooperation rate of 81.3%. A key advantage of the instrument itself is that it addresses lifetime prevalence and occurrence over the preceding one year of a wide variety of offenses, including different forms of sexual violence, stalking, and intimate partner violence. Psychological aggression is addressed as well, making the instrument all the more robust and accurate. The comparison with previous methods is indeed instructive: the UCR, for example, relies on data from cases which the police have actually responded to. While the data that it does provide is very useful, the UCR is nonetheless limited in that it cannot take into account domestic assaults that are simply never reported to the police, or otherwise fail to garner police attention. The UCR is also offender-based, and even the quality of the information that it does provide is questionable, precisely because it relies on police. The NIBRS is an improvement in many ways, but it is not widely implemented. The SHR is much better than the rest of the UCR, but it is still based on police reporting. Though the NIPVS is an improvement in many ways, its cardinal weakness is probably that it is focused on the 18-and-older population.

I would have to say that the trend in IPV that I find the most worrisome is the prevalence of violence against women, both because of the considerable asymmetry in rates of sexual assault between the sexes, and the fact that violence committed by men against women seems to generally be more severe, aggressive, and probably more frequent as well. The disproportionate rates of intimate partner violence amongst African-Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic Americans are also very concerning, inasmuch as they evince profound sociocultural stressors owing to marginalization from the dominant culture. And the soaring rates of domestic violence homicides are certainly of very great concern, inasmuch as they seem to be the most notable and prominent trend in intimate partner violence overall (Buzawa, Buzawa, & Stark, 2012, pp. 25-26). Domestic murder-suicides also seem to be becoming more common, certainly another problematic trend that calls for address. It is somewhat difficult to know what to make of all this, but perhaps a very important part of the answer is economic distress, which can exacerbate other strains and instabilities (pp. 25-26).

References

Buzawa, E. Buzawa, C. and Stark, E. (2012). Responding to Domestic Violence: The Integration of Criminal Justice & Human Services (4th Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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