The Quincy, Massachusetts, District Court initiated an
aggressive, pro-intervention strategy for dealing with domestic
violence cases in 1986. This study was funded to examine the workings
of this court and its impact on the lives of victims. The four main
goals of the research were: (1) to describe the workings of the
primary components of this model jurisdiction in its response to
domestic violence, specifically (a) what the police actually did when
called to a domestic violence incident, (b) decisions made by the
prosecutor's office and the court in their handling of these
incidents, (c) how many victims talked to a victim advocate, and (d)
how many offenders received batterer treatment and/or were
incarcerated, (2) to describe the types of incidents, victims, and
offenders seen in a full enforcement jurisdiction to determine if the
types of cases coming to attention in such a setting looked similar to
cases reported in studies from other jurisdictions, (3) to interview
victims to hear directly about their experiences with a model court,
and (4) to examine how well this model jurisdiction worked in
preventing revictimization. Data used in this study were based on
domestic violence cases that resulted in an arrest and arraignment
before the Quincy District Court (QDC) during a seven-month study
period. Six types of data were collected for this study: (1) The
offender's criminal history prior to the study and for one year
subsequent to the study incident were provided by the QDC's Department
of Probation from the Massachusetts Criminal Records System Board. (2)
Civil restraining order data were provided by the Department of
Probation from a statewide registry of civil restraining orders. (3)
Data on prosecutorial charges for up to three domestic
violence-related charges were provided by the Department of
Probation. (4) Data on defendants who attended batterer treatment
programs were provided by directors of two such programs that served
the QDC. (5) Police incident reports from the seven departments served
by the QDC were used to measure the officer's perspective and actions
taken relating to each incident, what the call for service involved,
characteristics of the incident, socio-demographics of the
participants, their narrative descriptions of the incident, and their
stated response. (6) Interviews with victims were conducted one year
after the occurrence of the study incident. Variables from
administrative records include date and location of incident, number
of suspects, age and race of victims and offenders, use of weapons,
injuries, witnesses, whether there was an existing restraining order
and its characteristics, charges filed by police, number and gender of
police officers responding to the incident, victim's state at the time
of the incident, offender's criminal history, and whether the offender
participated in batterer treatment. The victim survey collected data
on the victim's education and employment status, current living
arrangement, relationship with offender, how the victim responded to
the incident, how afraid the victim was, victim's opinions of police
and the prosecutor, victim's sense of control, satisfaction with the
court, victim's past violent relationships and child sexual abuse,
victim's opinions on what the criminal justice system could do to stop
abuse, and whether the victim obtained a restraining order.