wayed by findings of little or modest effect of arrest. For many advocates, batterer arrest is seen as an important symbol of a woman’s legal right to be free of intimate partner violence and, moreover, argue that police continue to arrest other types of offenders without strong evidence of its effectiveness. Arrest is believed to be an important message to children that abuse of their parent is illegal, and perhaps also a deterrent to male children as they become men.††† This belief has not yet been properly studied, however.
† Nearly ten percent of the more than 3,000 studied battered repeatedly regardless of the intervention. This group of 250 batterers accounted for 7,380 battering incidents in the six months after the initial intervention. Interventions, even arrest, did not deter this small but violent group.
†† The researchers found that batterers who battered again had an increased likelihood of battering a third time, and offenders who were under the influence of alcohol or drugs at the time of the incident were more likely to re-offend. The researchers did not find that marital status, poverty, race, education or gender improved the effect of arrest, but because they did not have access to employment information, they could not rule out that arrest deters employed offenders but not unemployed offenders.
††† Victims of domestic abuse have also called for police agencies to monitor, address, and more appropriately sanction officers engaging in domestic assault. Although some police agencies have been responsive, additional efforts are required for victims to have higher levels of confidence in police agencies’ domestic violence response policies.
Domestic violence restraining orders are frequently violated although some offenders may be deterred by them. Some research findings suggest that a victim is more likely to seek a protective order if the partner had a criminal history of violent offending, which may be why so many orders are violated; those with robust abuse histories may be the least likely to be deterred by written limits††† so police are advised that more must be done in these cases.
† In most jurisdictions these are obtained from civil court; however, some jurisdictions also grant concurrent jurisdiction to criminal court. Criminal courts can also issue these once a criminal proceeding begins.
†† Civil restraining orders were in fact developed to counter the reluctance of police, prosecutors, and criminal courts to treat domestic violence as a serious criminal matter (Buzawa and Buzawa, 2003).
††† For a good review of the research about protective orders, see Buzawa and Buzawa (2003).
† The rationale for “no-drop” policies is that the state has an independent interest in seeing domestic violence offenders prosecuted because of the harm caused to victims, victims’ children, and potential victims.
†† Victim recanting remains high. As a result, many prosecutors rely on physical evidence such as photographs and medical reports of victims’ injuries and out-ofcourt statements (e.g., 911 call tapes of in-progress assaults) to counter uncooperative and fearful victims. For an excellent review of prosecutorial response to the increased numbers of domestic violence cases and studies of prosecutorial case screening practices, see Buzawa and Buzawa chapter 11 (2003).
“No-drop” policies have some drawbacks. Victim discretion is further reduced, case backlogs increase, and time to disposition is lengthened, which can strain resources devoted to pretrial victim safety. The increase in prosecutorial workload can force prosecutors to trade off the prosecution of other crimes for misdemeanor battering. It is now apparent that prosecutors in “no-drop” jurisdictions rarely prosecute all cases; they retain some level of discretion in case filing decisions, typically at the intake and case screening point. Police must therefore help prosecutors identify the most severe and chronic cases from among the many arrests and encourage prosecutors to prosecute such cases vigorously, make special efforts to protect the victim,† an