Issues in Family Violence

Summer 2003

Current Projects: The Children and Batterer Accountability Initiative

In addition to our research on batterers' perception of their children's exposure to their abuse, the Non-Violence Alliance's Domestic Violence Intervention Training Institute is actively involved in a number of projects related to child protection.

These projects include participating in team piloting a new domestic violence assessment protocol, working with other agencies to host statewide retreats on child protection and domestic violence and exploring batterer intervention and accountability strategies. The overarching goal for all these projects is improving child safety and well-being by a) increasing batterer accountability and b) decreasing the negative impact of child protection interventions on the adult victims of domestic violence. The following highlights the efforts of one of these projects.

Under auspices of Connecticut's Department of Children and Families, the Non-Violence Alliance is conducting an approximately year long project to improve the batterer intervention and accountability capacity of one child protection regional office. This project developed out of the recognition that despite an increased emphasis on domestic violence in child protection cases, there had not been an increased emphasis on batterer accountability.

Together with the office management, a team of social workers and evaluation services for Matrix Public Health, Inc. the Non-Violence Alliance has gathered a baseline measurement of a number of variables. The office investigations and treatment units completed an extensive case review (n=170) which asked questions about the presence of domestic violence, the severity of the violence, allegations of abuse of the children by the batterer and the different steps taken to intervene with the batterer. Results from this survey were interesting and useful. For instance, the case reviews found that the batterer was almost three times more likely to be the father of one of the children in the house than an unrelated male partner. The entire social work staff also completed surveys to measure their attitudes toward domestic violence and batterers, their perspective on collaboration with other agencies and prior training and experience with batterer intervention and accountability strategies. These case reviews, along with in-depth case reviews, are being used to formulate trainings, and recommendations for changes in case practice.

The project interventions include weekly case consultations with social workers with the goal of supporting their capacity to intervene with batterers' batterer accountability training for social work staff and others in the community; monthly workgroup meetings that bring together juvenile court personnel, community providers, police, the local prosecutor and others to discuss ways to improve collaboration around batterer accountability in areas that involve children.

(c) 2003, The Non-Violence Alliance. Permission to reprint with the following information "Originally published in Issues in Family Violence, Volume 5, Issue 1, Summer 2003, The Non-Violence Alliance, www.endingviolence.com."