AN ECOLOGICAL STUDY OF NONRESIDENTIAL SERVICES FOR BATTERED WOMEN WITHIN A COMPREHENSIVE COMMUNITY PROTOCOL FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

This paper is an ecological study of services provided to 392 battered women under a comprehensive domestic violence protocol. It focuses on microsystemic interactions between battered women and battered women' s services and legal systems. We examine the relationships between wom en's receipt of services from a battered women's agency, receipt of pr otective orders, and completion of prosecution of batterers. We also e xplore the associations between women's receipt of services and protec tive orders and their partners' subsequent arrests and police contacts . We use open-ended interviews with battered women and with staff of t he battered women's agency to expand and illustrate the quantitative d ata. The analysis shows that when a woman received battered women's se rvices or had a protective order a completed court case was more likel y and numbers of arrests rose. We found that these associations were s trongest when women received both battered women's services and at lea st one protective order.