Vol. 1, No. 1 (March 1991) pp. 20-21
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE RESPONSE by Eve S. Buzawa
and Carl G. Buzawa. Newbury Park: Sage, 1990. 157 pp. Paper
$14.95.
Reviewed by Alexander Weiss, Northwestern University.
In recent years a large group of scholars has examined how the
criminal justice system has responded to domestic violence. Of
particular interest has been the dramatic change in police
policy. Many police departments that only a few years ago en-
dorsed a crisis intervention approach in which arrests were to be
avoided, have now adopted policies that either encourage or
mandate arrest.
This apparent change in police practice raises two important
questions. First, why did the police community, which is general-
ly thought to be highly resistant to change, modify its policies
so quickly, and second, why did police departments adopt an
approach as rigid as mandatory arrest, particularly at a time
when there is great movement in the police community to increase
police officer discretion and to decentralize police management?
In their recent book, Eve and Carl Buzawa have sought to explain
these, and other important changes in the criminal justice
system's response to domestic violence. Their work will likely
serve as a useful primer for students in this area. They have
produced a thorough literature review and provided some valuable
insights obtained through interviews with principals in the
policy process. Their evaluation of domestic violence policy is
particularly attractive because they relate the policy to theo-
ries of domestic violence causation.
A principal thesis of this work is that even though the criminal
justice system would prefer not to intervene in domestic
violence, it has been influenced to do so by federal agencies,
social research, lawsuits, and through the lobbying of battered
women's advocates. The authors rely heavily on the research of
others to support their argument. However, there are several
examples of how their use of this research is problematic.
In their discussion of the Minneapolis Domestic Violence
Experiment they argue that the study had an "enormous
impact" (p.72). They provide no evidence of this impact. In
fact, that impact is still the subject of considerable debate
among schol- ars. They suggest further that the impetus of the
Minneapolis Experiment can be found in the National Academy of
Sciences report (1978) on deterrence research. Surprisingly, they
fail to mention that James Q. Wilson in his foreword to the
Police Foundation's study of domestic violence (1977) suggested
that the study should be expanded in an "experimental and
carefully controlled manner." Lawrence Sherman, the
principal researcher of the Minneapolis study has credited Wilson
as the inspiration for the experiment.
Page 21 follows
In another section the authors describe the impact of the Thurman
v. Torrington (1984) case. In this case the Torrington,
Connecticut Police Department was found to be liable for failure
to protect the civil rights of a victim of spouse assault. A
large judgement was awarded to the plaintiff. Buzawa and Buzawa
suggest that the fear of liability became a "prime
factor" motivating police administrators to adopt pro-arrest
policies. Again they provide no empirical evidence for this
argument.
In addition, they suggest that the Thurman case caused a
"proliferation" of class actions suits, and that police
depart- ments such as "New York, Oakland and Dallas"
have been operating under consent decrees. In reality, the
consent degrees in both New York and Oakland were litigated long
before the Thurman case (1978 and 1979 respectively).
Finally, the authors examine whether changes in police policy
have influenced police practice in domestic violence cases. They
argue that while police arrests for domestic vio- lence remain
relatively low, police practice can now be charac- terized by its
"inherent unpredictability" as compared with its
previous "inaction or apathy."
These examples illustrate several critical problems in this book.
First, some of the key arguments and assumptions are largely
unsupported. Second, the authors are often very unequiv- ocal
about issues that others are still debating, and where the
evidence is still relatively weak. Third, Buzawa and Buzawa often
impute causality between events merely because they are
contemporaneous or because one is antecedent to the other.
Fourth, they attempt to make their theory match the data. This is
only way to explain how they would ascribe different descrip-
tions to the same observation (eg. levels of arrests) and then
try to explain why there was a "change."
In conclusion, it is important to assess this book in terms of
others in this area. The literature on domestic violence contains
a number of fine works, prepared with great care and rigor. There
are other works, principally those of feminists and battered
women's advocates, that are less rigorous but have, nonetheless,
been instrumental in bringing the issue of domestic violence to
the national agenda. This new work by Carl and Eve Buzawa, seems
to have elements of both approaches. Unfortunate- ly, this new
book will do little to either influence policy or to contribute
to our knowledge in this area.