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 women's receipt of services from a battered women's agency, receipt of protective orders, and completion of prosecution of batterers. We also explore the associations between women's receipt of services and protective orders and their partners' subsequent arrests and police contacts. We use open-ended interviews with battered women and with staff of the battered women's agency to expand and illustrate the quantitative data. The analysis shows that when a woman received battered women's services or had a protective order, a completed court case was more likely and numbers of arrests rose. We found that these associations were strongest when women received both battered women's services and at least one protective order.