Developing Policies and Protocols in Domestic Violence Cases’ in

The Duluth model's major contribution to the national legal reform effort has been its method of negotiating agreements with community agencies that intervene in domestic violence cases. Included in this interagency effort are victim advocates, law enforcement officers and administrators, prosecutors, probation officers, court administrators, mental health providers, policy makers, and in a limited role, judges. The model focuses on ensuring that practitioners respond to domestic violence cases in a consistent manner and that their response centralizes victim safety. Although coordination is a method to reach the overall goal of victim safety, it is not in itself the primary goal of the Duluth model. When reform efforts focus on coordinating the system rather than on building safety considerations into the infrastructure, the system could actually become more harmful to victims than the previously unexamined system. If we measure success by counting increases in arrests, conviction rates, or a reduction of repeat cases entering the system, coordination may seem to be the key to an interagency effort. However, if we use the criteria of insuring victim safety, holding offenders appropriately accountable for their violence, and changing the climate of tolerance for this type of violence, we see that coordination is merely a means to far more complex objectives. Many cities adopt a strict mandatory arrest or a no-drop prosecution policy on domestic violence cases, as if apprehending and convicting batterers is the only goal of intervention. This course of action is shortsighted and ultimately fails because typically the victim is the bigges