Evaluating Criminal Justice Interventions for Domestic Violence

Abstract

In this article, the authors consider various approaches to the evaluation of criminal justice interventions in the area of domestic violence. Evaluations have been conducted on a range of interventions, but this article focuses particularly on evaluations of arrest and programs for violent abusers. The authors contrast randomized designs used in the primarily North American studies of arrest with the extant evaluations of abuser programs and argue for the use of more theoretically informed contextual evaluations of criminal justice interventions. Using their own 3-year evaluation study of two Scottish abuser programs, the authors demonstrate how the contextual approach is attuned to both outcome and process and results in more empirically informed assessments of how change is achieved in the behavior and orientations of violent men. The authors argue that evaluations of criminal justice-based interventions should be designed to fit the phenomena under consideration as well as the intervention itself.