Domestic Violence Reduction Unit (DVRU)

The research experiment dealt with the Domestic Violence Reduction Unit (DVRU) which had two goals one of which was increasing the sanctions for batterers and to empower victims. In order to fulfill the first goal it required investigation of misdemeanor domestic violence cases. The second goal required the victim to have access to the community and criminal justice system services. The study was designed to see if the Domestic Violence Reduction Unit strategies led to reductions in domestic violence. The theory was that increasing the cost of violence to batterers such as increased prosecution would reduce domestic violence.

The questions that were asked were Do DVRU interventions increase prosecutions of misdeanor domestic violence cases? …show more content…
A computer program generated a random five-digit number for each eligible case. The last number determined whether or not the case was to be classified as treatment or control. The experiment received its information from two sources The Portland Police Data Systems computer files and from the interview schedules they developed for the study. From the Portland Police Data Systems they received 927 cases and from the interviews they had 478 study cases. The cases that were involved occurred in Portland between March and November of …show more content…
When the police officers reached the victims they were most likely to tell them about how to go about prosecuting the batterer. In seventy percent of the cases the officers gave victims safety plan information. For measures of victim empowerment, the study revealed that those in the treatment group sought assistance from the criminal justice system more than those in the control group. In the treatment group the victims were more likely to request batterer release information from the jail and more likely to call the police upon revictimization. There were more victims in the treatment group than the control group that reported a sense of increased