NCJ Number
248450
Date Published
June 2006
Length
53 pages
Annotation
The primary purpose of the study was to create an inventory of court-referred batterer intervention programs in Ohio and to gather general descriptive information about the programs listed in the inventory.
Abstract
This study was meant to lay the foundation for more extensive research aimed at developing sound, evidence-based policies for integrated batterer intervention systems in Ohio. One-hundred sixteen probation departments throughout Ohio participated in the survey to identify court-referred batterer intervention programs and a substantial number of their agencies' probationers have a history of domestic violence. The data indicates that participating probation departments referred 14,563 probationers to 167 different community programs due to domestic violence in 2005. One hundred thirty-seven (82 percent) of the programs participated in the survey. Nearly 40 percent (54) of the programs self-identified as actual batterer intervention programs. Fifty (92.6 percent) of those programs completed all or part of the batterer intervention survey before the end of the study period. More than three-quarters of all batterer intervention programs in the study (76 percent) operate as part of a larger agency, of those most are part of a larger mental health agency (41.7 percent) or community service organization (27.8 percent). On average, programs served approximately 60 participants; however, individual programs served anywhere from 12 to 700 participants. The surveyed batterer intervention programs predominantly served white male offenders between the ages of 28 and 35. A significant majority of programs in the study (85.7 percent) report that some or most of their participants are parents. Batterer intervention programs rate the level of judicial oversight of program participants as being very good (36.2 percent), to good (38.3 percent), to fair (25.5 percent). More than 80 percent of the batterer intervention programs surveyed employ elements of the Duluth and/or cognitive-behavioral models. The study found no statistically significant association between program completion and the staff's assessment that a batterer will not re-offend. An inventory of court-referred batterer intervention programs identified in the study appears on the following pages of this report.