Conference Report
Sexual assault and domestic violence in Maine:
Strengthening relationships between research, practice, and policy
Friday, November 18, 2005
Buchanan House, University of Maine, Orono
Conference sponsors:
Research Collaborative on Violence against Women, University of Maine
Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Maine
Women in the Curriculum and Women’s Studies Program, University of Maine
Muskie School of Public Service, University of Southern Maine
Contact:
Research Collaborative on Violence against Women
University of Maine, 101 Fernald Hall, Orono, ME 04469
Ph: (207) 581-1228 Fax: (207) 581-1218
E-mail: Angela.Hart@umit.maine.edu
http://www.umaine.edu/wic/collaborative.html
Table of Contents
Synopsis…………………………………………………………………………………………...3
Report Overview ………………………………………………………………………………….5
Notes from the breakout sessions
Offender Accountability…………………………………………………………………..6
Prevention…………………………………………………………………………………9
Tribal Efforts & Practices………………………………………………………………..11
Victim Services…………………………………………………………………………..12
Maine research agenda…………………………………………………………………………...14
Next steps………………………………………………………………………………………...16
Appendices
Appendix A: Conference Advisory Committee
Appendix B: Conference schedule
Appendix C: List of participants
Appendix D: Evaluations
Appendix E: Text of the keynotes
- Excerpts from speech given by Attorney General Steven Rowe
- Powerpoint presentation by Vera Mouradian, PhD
- Deer, Sarah. (2004). Toward an indigenous jurisprudence of rape. The Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, 14(1), pp. 121-154.
Synopsis
On November 18, 2005, practitioners, researchers, representatives from state agencies, and policy makers met on the University of Maine campus for a daylong conference on research on sexual assault and domestic violence in Maine.
Sexual abuse and domestic violence cause harm to families and communities and also burden Maine’s economy. Crimes of sexual abuse and domestic violence consume a significant amount of the State’s criminal justice resources. According to Maine’s Uniform Crime Report in 2002 law enforcement agencies reported 4,598 instances of domestic violence; in 2003 this number increased 11.4% to 5,364. This means that in 2003 almost half of all reported assaults (45.8%) were classified as occurring between household or family members. Homicide statistics over the past years indicate that almost half of each year’s homicides in Maine are linked to domestic violence.
Domestic abuse offenders are costly to Maine employers in terms of workplace safety and lost productivity. A 2003 pilot study by the Maine Department of Labor and Family Crisis Services estimates that almost 4 out of 5 male domestic abuse offenders use workplace resources to harass their victims. National U.S. estimates from the mid-1990s have put the cost of domestic violence at $67 billion per year, and the costs of rape at an additional $127 billion per year. Similar estimate exist for other countries.
The conference had several goals:
- Strengthen partnerships between researchers, practitioners and policy makers;
- Facilitate the assessment of research needs by considering the existing evidence and gaps in knowledge;
- Help prioritize research needs;
- Generate a collaborative action plan to increase the knowledge base that informs local services and statewide policy in Maine; and
- Serve as kick-off for development of regular meetings between practitioners, policy makers, and researchers.
Outcomes:
The almost 100 conference participants represented diverse perspectives on research, practice, and policy. Two keynote speakers, Vera Mouradian (Wellesley Centers for Women) and Sarah Deer (Tribal Law & Policy Institute), started the conference with presentations on researcher-practitioner collaboration and on violence against women in tribal communities. Maine Attorney General Steven Rowe delivered a luncheon address on the importance of research for the development of good policy to intervene in domestic violence and sexual assault.
Morning and afternoon of the conference were organized into interdisciplinary breakout groups on prevention, offender accountability, victim services, and tribal matters. The breakout groups generated five large areas of topics and research concerns that a research agenda for Maine needs to address. The areas are prevalence studies, research on vulnerability and risk factors, social ecology studies, evaluation of prevention and intervention programs, and research on offender accountability (See page 14 of this report).
Evaluations from participants indicated that the conference served its purpose of galvanizing Maine’s diverse communities of practitioners, researchers and policy-makers. Participants appreciated the opportunity to share experiences and develop research ideas and found it helpful to convene practitioners and academics at the same forum. Networking with others in the field decreased a sense of isolation. The tribal breakout sessions generated ideas for future tribal collaboration.
There was widespread agreement that the conference generated useful momentum for the field and that a follow up conference would be desirable. After the groundwork of the November 2005 conference, a follow up event should move beyond the initially needed sharing of needs and ideas to more focused events that can address specific research issues.
Report Overview
The conference format consisted of presentations by featured speakers (Sarah Deer, Vera Mouradian, and Stephen Rowe) and concurrent break-out sessions on prevention, victim services, offender accountability, and tribal efforts and practices (for a complete schedule, see Appendix B). Summary notes for the break-out sessions follow this brief introduction. A compilation of the issues and priorities that emerged from the concurrent sessions are then presented as a suggested agenda for future research on domestic violence and sexual assault in Maine. The report concludes with recommendations for possible next steps to be initiated by scholars, policy makers, and practitioners in Maine.
Offender Accountability
Overarching questions:
- What best practices have been identified?
- What is success? By whose standards? By whose definition?
- How do we define accountability?
- Language: how do we define offender? How do we refer to people who batter, offend, rape, harass, abuse, prey? What terms do researchers draw upon? In what ways are these inconsistent or consistent with terms used by practitioners?
- What measurement tools exist?
Problem: Data on domestic violence are not transferable to the sexual violence arena, and data from neither arena are transferable to workplace violence, or child abuse, or bullying. What is a conceptual umbrella for these behaviors and do (could any) interventions apply to all?
How do we measure what is actually occurring versus what is in the system?
Batterer Intervention Programs (BIPs) only serve a small percentage of batterers, and due to discriminatory factors in the judicial system, a greater percentage of those referred to BIPs are poor and/or non-white. Thus, how do we measure battering in privileged groups (e.g., white, rich)?
Points of Analysis
Individual Level
- What is the unique experience for different populations referred to BIP? For instance, some sub-groups of batterers have characteristics of personality disorders or conduct disorders. If psycho-educational groups only show a 10% 'effectiveness' impact in reduction of violence among its batterers, then would a program geared for those with personality or conduct disorders be more effective for those groups?
- Investigate behavior change: what moves a perpetrator from denial to accountability, and long-term behavior change?
- What is the duration of (any) behavioral changes (short-term, long-term)? To what extent are offender accountability efforts effective in reducing offending behaviors (incidents)?
- If perpetrator behaviors fall along a continuum, then in what ways do our interventions and accountability mechanisms correlate with that continuum (e.g., effectiveness of censure, probation, referral to BIPs, anger management, jail for different behaviors)? [Typological analysis of behaviors and interventions]
- What are risk factors for (re)offending?
- Investigate factors and conditions that appear to be associated with reduced sexual offending.
- The effects of witnessing abuse (e.g., victim of child abuse) on later offending.
- Understanding perpetrators, examine perpetrator behaviors (e.g., Lisak, 2002; Lisak & Miller, 2002).
- What is the role/influence of victims on offender accountability?
- Overwhelmingly, the focus is on male perpetrators in opposite-sex relationships. What is the scholarship on female perpetrators and same-sex relationships (male-male, female-female)?
- Examine intersection of offending behaviors with identity statuses (race, class, sexuality, age, etc.).
Programmatic
- What is the impact of BIPs? Evaluate their effectiveness.
- Evaluation of training for BIP service providers.
- Evaluate sex offender programs designed to break through an offender’s entrenched denial, rationalization, minimization and manipulation.
- Test this assumption: awareness + acceptance + action = behavior change.
- Evaluate role and effectiveness of restorative justice.
- Assessment of mediation as a strategy.
- Need for a typology of interventions that respond to different types of battering (batterers).
- Impact on program’s effectiveness (e.g., if participant is hung over, using drugs).
- Effectiveness of DV courts and task forces in promoting offender accountability.
- The readiness to change model in offender treatment.
- Assessment of criminal justice system’s response to domestic violence.
- Evaluate correctional treatment services for youth/young adult offenders.
- Identify and evaluate programs designed to prevent re-offending.
- Need research to enhance understanding of “dual arrest” and the relationship of such incidents to the adequacy of police training and other system policies.
- Design probation intervention evaluations to measure both DV offender and system accountability.
- Evaluate training for probation officers working with DV cases.
Community Level
- Evaluation of coordinated community responses to violence against women (see Shepard, 1999).
- The impact of model legislation on judicial decision-making in custody and visitation disputes involving domestic violence.
- What role does prevention education have on offender accountability?
- Case study of community initiative to redefine battering and to collectively hold batterers accountable (e.g., Penobscot nation initiative).
- What factors contribute to community intervention, and what are the implications for different geographic regions? (e.g., social ecology studies).
- Determine people’s assumptions about abuse (e.g., equating abuse only with broken bones and blood) and target community education/intervention on other perpetrator behaviors (e.g., manipulation, withholding resources).
- Role of criminal justice system (policies, protocols, training) and intervention with (reduction of) offending incidents.
- Investigate effectiveness of public education campaigns.
Socio-cultural Level
- What are different cultural perspectives on accountability?
- Intersections with other social problems (e.g., substance abuse, child abuse, teen pregnancy, poverty).
- Analyses of workplace culture: policies and practices that interrupt and/or enable battering (e.g., school administrator assaults his wife but is allowed to continue employment, or background check on new employee reveals history of battering, however employee is still hired, or school principal on sex offender registry but still working).
- Relationship between social acceptance of violence (e.g., in media, children’s toys) with offending behaviors.
Reference:
Lisak, D. (2002). The undetected rapist. Boston: University of Massachusetts. Retrieved March 10, 2006 from http://www.sexualassault.army.mil/files/RAPE_FACT_SHEET.pdf.
Lisak, D. & Miller, P.M. (2002). Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists, Violence and Victims, 17(1), pp. 73-84.
Shepard, M. (1999). Evaluating coordinated community responses to domestic violence. National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://www.vawnet.org/DomesticViolence/Research/VAWnetDocs/AR_ccr.pdf
Prevention
Overarching questions:
What resources for researchers (databases) exist?
How can researchers access them?
What scholarship exists?
What best practices have been identified?
- Need baseline data
- Scour state agencies, dissertations/theses, and elsewhere to find out what data have been collected and for a literature review of scholarship in Maine.
- Can serve as a pre-test baseline against which to compare (longitudinally)?
- One person suggested looking to Rhode Island as model for data collection (through police departments).
Themes and potential research threads:
Prevention Strategies
- What prevention efforts exist? Descriptive study needed to document what exists.
- Catalogue as primary, secondary, and tertiary approaches.
- Language, terminology: what language is used by/in schools? How is this similar or different to what providers/prevention educators use? What terms do researchers draw upon?
- How do we survey risk?
- Need research to enhance understanding of factors that make some populations more vulnerable to victimization (vulnerability factors) and more at risk for perpetration (risk factors). Further, what are contributing factors (e.g., individual, relational, community, and societal factors)? What vulnerability factors and risk factors are correlated with what contributing factors?
- What instruments exist to measure attitudes and beliefs?
- Impact of prevention efforts: to what extent are prevention efforts effective in changing abuse-supportive attitudes? What is the duration of (any) behavioral changes (short-term, long-term)? To what extent are prevention efforts effective in reducing the incidence of sexual assault and domestic violence?
- Role of education on healthy relationships and respect.
- Role of men in prevention (e.g., MCSR, 2003).
- Social norming (e.g., Berkowitz, 2003).
School-based prevention curriculum
- Middle school health curriculum.
- School-based DV education.
- In what ways do curricular approaches build upon each other, from pre-school to high school?
- Conduct longitudinal study with children.
- Comparative study of college students who were in a secondary school system that had prevention curriculum with those who weren’t.
- Practitioners need data to present to schools to gain access (meaning, evidence that the problem exists locally, which then warrants investing in prevention curriculum).
Community factors (other than schools)
- Role of families in prevention efforts?
- Investigate role of community groups in prevention efforts (e.g., churches).
Intersections
- Identified need to enhance collaboration between sexual assault and domestic violence educators: there is a clear need for these two fields to become more integrated in their approach to prevention. Underlying these social problems are similar risk factors at the individual, family, community, and societal levels. Recognizing these similarities should lead to a common purpose in prevention efforts.
- Examine intersections of gendered violence with other identity statuses (race, sexuality, class, etc.).
- For instance, investigate relationship (impact) of economic issues (e.g., living wages, access to affordable housing) on domestic violence.
- Substance abuse services: prevention intersection.
- Investigate (pilot study?) using “techniques of the drunk-driving movement” as a framework for DV prevention.
- Comparative analysis of public service campaigns (and other uses of media): drunk-driving and domestic violence.
- Inter-disciplinary prevention efforts: How do we ensure our work complements each other’s?
Other
- Abuse and the elderly: research needed.
Reference:
Berkowitz, A.D. (2003). The Social Norms Approach to Violence Prevention. San Francisco, CA: Family Violence Prevention Fund. Retrieved March 9, 2006 from http://www.endabuse.org/bpi/discussion4/IV.pdf.
MCSR. (2003). Men Can Stop Rape: The Strength Campaign. DOJ Grant # 2001-WT-BX-K019. Washington, DC: Office on Violence Against Women. Retrieved March 9, 2006 from http://www.endabuse.org/bpi/discussion4/II.pdf
Wolfe, D.A. & Jaffe, P.G. (2003). Prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault. National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. Retrieved March 10, 2006 from http://www.vawnet.org/DomesticViolence/Research/VAWnetDocs/AR_Prevention.pdf.
Tribal Efforts and Practices
This break-out session met in the morning and afternoon; the afternoon session was only open to tribal members. Notes gathered were few. For more information about tribal efforts and practices, please contact Esther Attean, Site Coordinator, Maine Youth Opportunities Initiative, c/o Maine DHHS; 207-561-4221; eattean@usm.maine.edu.
Brief summary of topics:
- Grassroots initiatives.
- Funding.
- Coalition work.
- Historical and political context.
- Pilot projects: screening for domestic violence.
- How to create respectful judicial process: Tension among tribal courts and states.
- Enforcement issues: within tribes, from/without state.
- Need data to document and understand scope and prevalence.
- Language: terms may not transcend cultures.
Victim Services
Overarching issue:
- Language: what terms do we use? In what ways are these inconsistent or consistent among practitioners and researchers? Further, are these social problems framed in ways that can be understood by policy-makers, juries, prosecutors, etc.?
- To what existing research projects, in-take forms, databases could researchers add a few questions (e.g., pharmacists)?
Areas for study:
Prevalence
- Investigate problems affecting specific populations, i.e. women living rural communities, women in prison, nursing homes.
- Document incidence of stalking, elder abuse, human trafficking in Maine.
- Examine differences in rape prevalence relating to age, gender, and race/ethnicity, as well as other factors such as whether victims were first raped as minors.
- Elder Abuse:
- Investigate (aging) perpetrators still offending when in nursing home.
- Incidence of victimization in nursing homes (chart reviews), both by peers, family, and personnel.
- Identify prevalence of relationship abuse (sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking) among children in group home settings.
- Identify the prevalence of abuse among teenage parents.
Services
- Prevalence of victim services, particularly in rural areas.
- Identification of creative strategies and best practices for providing services, particularly for special populations (e.g., rural, elderly).
- Evaluate hospital response to victims.
- Evaluate training for medical/nursing staff.
- Assess faith-based communities response.
- Investigate the intersection of victim services with child services: what are the problems, challenges, successes; what are recommendations for improvements?
Legal issues
- Case review and tracking (dismissed, plea bargains, prosecution) for sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking.
- Factors that impact jurors’ perceptions and decisions.
- Investigate qualifications of expert witnesses.
- Evaluate effectiveness of probation officers’ approaches with DV cases.
- Impact of batterers’ release on probation on victim (and community).
Other
- Phenomenological study of life with an abuser, impact on children, victim’s parenting choices.
- Impact of the lifetime experience of sexual and physical abuse on women’s economic situation (including dependency on welfare).
- What factors contribute to reporting?
- Women’s stay/leave decision-making process and experiences reuniting with batterer (see Mouradian, 2004).
- Relationship abuse (sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking) and the workplace.
Reference:
Mouradian, V.E. (2004). Battered women: What goes into the stay-leave decision? Research & Action Report. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://www.wcwonline.org/p-comm-abuse.html.
Maine Research Agenda
Below is an overview of research needed in Maine, sifted from the conference discussion notes, and supported by relevant scholarship as appropriate. The five points below are not listed in any particular order.
- Prevalence study: “If trends are to be estimated and the general effectiveness of interventions assessed, prevalence data must be improved” (Kruttschnitt et al, 2004, p. 3).
- What's the scope of the problem of domestic violence and sexual assault in Maine?
- What is the prevalence of victimization with particular populations, and what are implications for outreach and prevention efforts?
- Elderly.
- Native populations: According to Dugan & Apel, Native American women have considerably higher rates of victimization than other racial groups of women (in Kruttschnitt et al, 2004, p. 51).
- Rural populations (see Johnson, 2000; Lewis, 2003).
- Causes: Need research to enhance understanding of factors that make some populations more vulnerable to victimization (vulnerability factors) and more at risk for perpetration (risk factors). Further, what are contributing factors (e.g., individual, relational, community, and societal factors)? What vulnerability factors and risk factors are correlated with what contributing factors?
- Social Ecology Studies: (see Kruttschnitt et al, 2004, p. 5)
- Investigate which social and spatial features influence rates and types of violence (e.g., rural community).
- Distribution of services: Examine whether access to local services can affect localized rates of intimate-partner violence, and consider implications for prevention and outreach efforts.
- Investigate the effects of social area factors on legal sanctions and other interventions.
- Evaluate prevention and intervention programs.
- Offender accountability initiatives.
- Evaluate batterer intervention programs, sex offender programs, and similar treatment programs.
- Examine how social stigma for committing violence against women is generated and either sustained or eroded.
- Investigate how perceptions of the risk of sanctions are generated and sustained over time for offenders (Kruttschnitt, McLaughlin & Petrie, 2004).
Some noteworthy methodological options for future research were prominent in conference discussion notes, and could apply to any of the five agenda points above or to any of the four conference foci (prevention, victim services, offender accountability, and tribal efforts and practices).
- Conduct longitudinal studies: Among the many possible research initiatives, it is imperative to support long-term evaluations of prevention and treatment programs in order to improve chances of affecting long-term reductions in incidents of sexual assault and domestic violence.
- Improve definitions and data: It is important to develop clear definitions of the terms used by researchers and practitioners in their work, as well as to develop and test (new) scales and other measurement tools to make operational the key definitions (see Kruttschnitt et al, 2004, pp. 97-8).
References:
Domestic Violence Resources. Tribal Court Clearinghouse. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/domestic.htm.
Dugan, L. & R. Apel. (2003). An exploratory study of the violent victimization of women: Race/ethnicity and situational context. Criminology, 41(3), pp. 959-979.
Hamby, S.L. (2004). Sexual Victimization in Indian Country: Barriers and resources for Native women seeking help. National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://www.vawnet.org/SexualViolence/Research/VAWnetDocuments/AR_SVIndianCountry.pdf.
Johnson, R.M. (2000). Rural Health Response to Domestic Violence: Emerging Public Policy Issues and Best Practices. Health Resources and Services Administration. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://ruralhealth.hrsa.gov/pub/domviol.htm.
Kruttschnitt, C., McLaughlin, B.L., & Petrie, C.V. (Eds.). (2004). Advancing the Federal Research Agenda on Violence Against Women. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309091098/html/R1.html.
Lewis, S.H. (2003). Unspoken Crimes: Sexual Assault in Rural America. National Sexual Violence Resource Center. Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://www.nsvrc.org/publications/booklets/rural_txt.htm.
Sherman, L. (1993). Defiance, Deterrence, and Irrelevance: A Theory of the Criminal Sanction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 30, pp. 445-473.
Proposed Next Steps
The following are general recommendations for next steps for practitioners, researchers, policy makers, and representatives from state agencies to engage in discussion about research on sexual assault and domestic violence in Maine:
- Organize another conference to extend the conversation.
- Focus future conference sessions on subpopulations (e.g., children, elderly, Native population) and/or on more narrow topics (e.g., rural issues, abuse in nursing homes, workplace violence, human trafficking).
- Use morning sessions for brainstorming, and facilitate afternoon sessions with the aim of consensus building around specific (research) goals.
- Intentionally cluster participants to involve all systems in break-out discussions: police, victim services, district attorney, batterers’ intervention program personnel.
- Invite and facilitate a small group to develop “standard” definitions (accountability, success, effectiveness, recidivism).
- Continue to focus on research priorities.
- Determine what data are currently collected and what surveys are regularly administered.
http://www.state.me.us/dps/cim/crime_in_maine/2003pdf/023violent.pdf, retrieved 7/20/2006.
Domestic violence project serving Cumberland and Sagadahoc counties.
Ridley, E. (2004). Impact of domestic offenders on occupational safety & health: A pilot study. Maine Department of Labor; Family Crisis Services.
Miller, T.R., Cohen, M.A., & Wiersema, B. (1996). Victim costs and consequences: A new look. U.S. Department of Justice: National Institute of Justice.
Walby, S. (2004). The cost of domestic violence. Women & Equality Unit; Department of Trade and Industry.
The term "psycho-education" refers to an approach to education of individuals with emotional and behavioral problems.
See Recidivism of sex offenders (2001), available at http://www.csom.org/pubs/recidsexof.pdf.
See http://restoreprogram.publichealth.arizona.edu/research/default.htm
E.g., Marilyn Armour’s research project http://www.utexas.edu/research/cswr/projects/pj0199.html.
The following resource page features a compilation of publicly-accessible online national data sets on violence against women, http://www.vawnet.org/DomesticViolence/Research/OtherPubs/VAWDataSets.php; see also Kruttschnitt et al, 2004, pp. 36-46.
This observation and discussion at the conference is echoed in Wolfe & Jaffe (2003).
As if intentional in the conference design, the topics, issues, and needs that emerged from the November 18, 2005 conference are consistent with the federal research agenda on violence against women (see Kruttschnitt, McLaughlin, & Petrie, 2004).
The National Policy Summit on Elder Abuse drafted a call to action (2002) that delineates the need for research and data collection on alder abuse prevalence (see http://www.elderabusecenter.org/pdf/agenda/agenda2002.pdf).
