Do domestic violence courts work? : a meta-analytic review examining treatment and study quality/ Leticia Gutierrez, Julie Blais, and Guy Bourgon.

Washington, DC : Justice Research and Statistics Association, 2017.

87697

Family violence.

Family violence -- Prevention.

Courts.

Recidivism -- Prevention.

Domestic Violence Courts (DVCs) have become an increasingly popular model in the problem-solving court system. To date, there have been no efforts to summarize the extant literature regarding the impact of DVCs on recidivism. The present study is a meta-analysis of 20 DVC outcome studies reporting on 26 unique DVC samples. Using a mean odds ratio (OR), the results indicated that DVCs are having a significant impact on the odds of general recidivism (OR = .81, 95% CI = .68 to .98, k = 18), as well as domestic violence recidivism (OR = .81, 95% CI = .67 to .97, k = 21), compared to domestic violence offenders processed through the traditional court system. These results however, became negligible when considering studies of sound methodological quality (as assessed by the CODC guidelines). The study also conducted a preliminary investigation of treatment quality (adherence to risk, need, and responsivity principles; RNR) in the DVC literature. The results indicated that adherence to the RNR principles was low, but significantly related to greater treatment effects. Future research should aim to increase the quality of evaluation designs and the courts should look to existing offender rehabilitation literature to inform best practices with domestic violence offenders. - Abstract.

Title taken from title caption of the PDF document (viewed on July 24, 2017).

Domestic violence resources.

1 online resource