Balanced Collaboration: How Vermont Built a Protocol for Law Enforcement Response to Children and Domestic Violence

• NCJ Number: 217527
• Author(s): Jane M. Sadusky
• Editor(s): Lore Roethke
• Date Published: June 2004
• Length: 16 pages
• Grant Number(s): 1997-WT-VX-K006
• Sponsoring Agency: US Dept of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women
• Corporate Author: Battered Women's Jusstice Project
• Sale Source: Battered Women's Jusstice Project
• Publication Format: Document (Online)
• Publication Type: Program/Project Description
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Downloaded February 28, 2007.

Annotation

This paper examines the collaborative process that Vermont used to develop an instructional curriculum on the police response to children at domestic violence calls.

Abstract

Initial action brought together the Vermont Network Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault and the Domestic Violence Unit in Vermont Social and Rehabilitative Services. Although participants agreed on the objectives of keeping children and victims safe while holding offenders accountable, they could not agree on how to achieve these objectives. In an effort to break through this stalemate, the partners consulted with the Battered Women's Justice Project. This resulted in a change of focus from writing a curriculum to a broad statewide effort to address the differences in philosophy and perspective that had been blocking progress in the curriculum design. This involved bringing together 21 practitioners who represented key points of intervention for children living with domestic violence. The goal of the 3-day forum was to address seven key questions regarding how police officers should respond to children at the scene of a domestic violence call. In order to address the complexity of the police response, forum participants examined a hypothetical case. They developed a chronology of police intervention from when officers arrived at the scene to when they left. They identified every decisionmaking point, the possible police responses, and the positive or negative consequences of responses with reference to the safety of the battered women and their children. Impacts were examined for various racial/ethnic parties. The forum's outcome was a protocol with common themes and broad guidelines, the application of the guidelines, and the complexity of most decisions within the guidelines. The training curriculum, which has yet to be developed, will present multiple scenarios, practice decisionmaking, and an analysis of potential outcomes of various decisions.