Associate Magazine-Jan/Mar 2021

TRAPPED WITHOUT RESCUE DURING C THE IMPORTANCE OF AN INTEGRAT JUSTICE SYSTEM AND VICTIM SERVI RESPONSE TO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

SHANNON B. HARPER, PH.D. AND WILLIAM P. MCCARTY, PH.D.

The Veritatis Institute is an educational, non-profit foundation designed to foster a greater understanding of contemporary issues our leaders face today. The Institute is designed to take a research-to-practice approach to critical public policy issues and connect leaders and organizations who want to collaborate, in a nonpartisan forum to solve critical issues facing our society. The research reported here was conducted with the support of the Alliance For Safety and Justice . Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of Alliance For Safety and Justice. D omestic violence (DV) is a devastating social problem where 1 in 3 women and 1 in 10 men expe- rience physical assault, stalking, or rape by an intimate partner across their lifetimes (Smith et al., 2018). Such violence often escalates in severity or homicidal risk across time (Campbell, Webster, & Glass, 2009). Approximately 18.3% of women experience sexual violence and 21.4% experience severe physical violence during their lifetimes (Smith et al., 2018). Research shows that 13.5% of ho- micides globally are perpetrated by intimate partners (Stockl et al., 2013), and up to 50% of calls to police in the U.S. are DV related (Li, Levich, Eichman, & Chang, 2015). Considering these destructive consequences and the inherent complexities of DV cases (Eigenberg, Kappeler, & McGuffee, 2012), this paper argues that a more robust and rigorous criminal justice system (CJS) DV response involv- ing enhanced victim services coordination, as well as community corrections offender supervision and conditions enforcement, are particularly important within the drastically changed COVID-19 so- cial landscape. This argument is contextualized within an enduring pandemic crisis for many DV vic- tims encompassing stay-at-home orders, social distancing requirements, work-from-home arrange- ments, and reduced access to police and DV services providers (Cajner et al., 2020; Kahn, Lange, & Wiczer, 2020). Such crisis may increase DV victim entrapment within dangerous home environments, which may exacerbate DV risk, especially severe and life-threatening DV risk (Sety, James, & Brecken- INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

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