Analyzing Domestic Violence Incidents

Domestic violence continues to exist in American society in spite of legislative and community-level strategies aimed at eradicating this social problem. Likewise, prevention and intervention efforts by professionals in the fields of law enforcement, public health, and social work have been met with some success. One particular challenge to addressing issues related to domestic violence is the lack of knowledge about the nature and extent of the problem in American communities. Correspondingly, this arises, in part, from the inconsistencies in definitions of circumstances and behaviors used to categorize incidents as domestic violence.

Addressing Definitional Issues of Domestic Violence

In attempting to address these challenges, two important definitional issues are pertinent. First is the question of what constitutes domestic violence. In addressing this question, it is important to consider the changing nature of interactions within various interpersonal relationships. The relationships that individuals maintain in contemporary society are varied and often elude clear definitional categories. Relationship classifications most often used in both crime data and other survey data typically fall into the categories of ‘‘family,’’ ‘‘acquaintance,’’ ‘‘stranger,’’ and ‘‘unknown’’ (Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] 1992, 2004). Some argue that these categories pose problems as to the mutual exclusivity and collective exhaustion of many relationships that exist among individuals. In certain situations, individuals initially seeming to be strangers are not truly complete strangers; they may, in fact, be acquaintances. That is, they may be relative strangers, but not absolute strangers (e.g., the grocery bagger, the video store clerk, public transportation passengers).

The second question concerns the definition of what constitutes violent behavior. Recognizing the extent of violent behavior is a challenge, as the classification of various types of acts may differ across law enforcement reporting mechanisms. While behavior that shows evidence of criminal injuries is certainly reflective of violence, in some instances similar behavior may not result in criminal injuries. Similarly, other actions, such as intimidation or verbal threats, while not producing physical injuries, may constitute violent behavior depending on the categorization of these actions. Regardless of the degree of injury, some of these conflicts may go unreported. Even when these incidents are brought to the attention of law enforcement, they may not be classified as involving domestic disputants. In certain situations, determination of what constitutes violence may also be based upon the consequence of the behavior rather than an absolute standard. These classification and reporting problems are not restricted to domestic violence. Often measuring other socially defined behaviors and interactions involves similar ambiguities.

Historical Reporting

In the past, definitional aspects of domestic violence were less of a concern than obtaining reliable information on these victimizations. What was known about these conflicts was derived mainly from anecdotal information, victim accounts, or cases that made headlines in the local or national media. Aspects of this problem continue to persist into the twenty-first century. However, beginning in the early 1990s, pursuant to inception of the Violence against Women Act, efforts to collect more systematic information about domestic violence included the use of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Criminal Victimization Survey (NCVS), in addition to various large- and small-scale surveys.

These efforts were designed to gauge the frequency of occurrences and to more fully describe the nature of the conflicts and injuries that occur between disputants in domestic settings. While these sources are informative, questions have been raised at times about the accuracy of the results, as they sometimes have appeared inconsistent or contradictory. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2003, p. 1) nearly 5.3 million intimate partner violence victimizations occur each year. However, UCR statistics report as few as approximately 258,000 of such criminal victimizations on average (FBI 2004, p. 342). Many of these reporting disparities, however, are likely of more of a technical than a substantive nature. For example, differences in what is considered a domestic conflict and what is considered criminally violent behavior are often at issue. Varying definitional debates at least partially explain variances in the data that often inform policy and practice discussions regarding the incidence and prevalence of domestic violence (for a similar debate pertaining to general crime reporting, see FBI 2004, pp. 502–504).

To study domestic homicide, the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) of the UCR is often examined to provide information about the dynamics of lethally violent events. These data not only contain the critical relationship categories noted above, but also describe some of the circumstances (e.g., weapon use, location of incident) and demographics (age, sex, race) of the disputants in these incidents. Data for 2003 show 1,804 (12.5 percent) victims of homicide at the hands of a family-related offender and an additional 4,401 (30.5 percent) victims of homicide by an offender who was identified as an acquaintance (FBI 2004, p. 21). Additionally, these data reveal that in incidents in which the victim knew her assailant, about 29 percent involved related offenders (FBI 2004, pp. 18–23). While the SHR allows for more detailed examination of criminal behavior resulting in death than the UCR, unfortunately it does not provide information about other forms of nonlethal assaultive behavior, ranging from intimidation to aggravated assault incidents.

Through examination of various official measures (i.e., UCR and SHR), one gains some information to more fully comprehend the nature and extent of some forms of domestic violence. However, it must be noted that such information is representative only of those incidents known to the police. One important exception to this is the self-report household survey, the NCVS, which for the year 2003 conveyed that the estimated proportion of completed criminal stranger violence not reported to police was about 36 percent, and unreported violence involving non-strangers was 47 percent (U.S. Department of Justice 2005, Table 93). This clearly reflects the fact that some victims are either reluctant or unwilling to disclose to law enforcement their victimization. Additionally, while some incidents of domestic violence may and do come to the attention of other authorities or community assistance centers, the UCR (and most police data relating to criminal behavior) does not give any specific indication of the noncriminal behaviors that occur (i.e., forms of verbal or psychological abuse).

The Promise of the National Incident-Based Reporting System

The existence of more comprehensive law enforcement reporting mechanisms that allow for in-depth analysis of various aspects of domestic violence incidents could prove useful in the development of more effective laws and programs aimed at curbing these events. To this end, one development that may assist in the understanding of the dynamics of these violent encounters is the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

The NIBRS is a complete redesign of the original UCR summary reporting data system. This relatively new reporting system to be used by all law enforcement agencies across the United States includes up to fifty-three data elements (including weapon use, location type, injuries suffered, etc.) and allows for recording of forty-six different criminal offenses that may occur in a criminal incident (FBI 1992 and 1999). The importance of these data is that they are incident, rather than offense, oriented. That is, in any given criminal incident, all the criminal offenses that occurred in the incident as well as all associated information pertaining to victims, offenders, property loss, offense type and dynamics, and any arrestee associated with that incident is reported in the NIBRS. Additionally, all person crimes (homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, simple assault, and intimidation) reported require documentation of circumstances of the incident (e.g., weapons used, presence of substances used by the offender including both alcohol and drugs), relationship categories for all victims and offenders, injuries sustained, and victim and offender demographics (age, race, sex, and residency), as well as the location of the incident. Lastly, many of these attributes are available for all offenders, all victims, all offenses, and all arrestees reported in the incident.

This wealth of information compared with previous criminal offense data is a remarkable advance but also poses a number of computational challenges (Akiyama and Nolan 1999). The computational issues aside, this detailed information has afforded a number of recent efforts to explore the dynamics of domestic violence that show the promise of data of this nature. For example, Thompson, Saltzman, and Bibel (1999) showed that in Massachusetts 10 percent of women victims had experienced more than one offense in the incident. Moreover, they found that when it came to female victims, intimate partners were more likely than non-partners to commit simple assault, intimidation, and aggravated assault (Thompson et al. 1999, p. 163).

Additionally, a report from the FBI utilizing 1998 NIBRS data showed 1.6 million criminal incidents reported. Of these, 421,493 victims of violent offenses were identified and 112,042 victims of violence were found to have related offenders involved. Considering these numbers, about 27 percent of all violence was determined to be family related (FBI 1999, p. 280). More recent analyses of NIBRS data reported even larger percentages, with 43 percent of incidents of violence having occurred among family members (FBI 2004, p. 342).

Studies of this nature may provide better insights as to the structure of domestic violence and assist in the formulation of policies and practices associated with combating these situations. For example, analyses of the time, location, and day of domestic violence incidents as well as the nature and scope of behaviors that are common to these incidents may assist social service agencies, community prevention efforts, and law enforcement to coordinate more effective response plans to calls of domestic conflicts.

Limitations of the National Incident-Based Reporting System

While the promise of NIBRS is considerable compared with previous efforts to examine crime and specifically domestic violence, it is important to note that NIBRS is not a panacea to the information and reporting needs associated with the many challenges of domestic violence. As of 2005, there was no direct mechanism in NIBRS for identifying repeated incidents of domestic violence that commonly occur in abusive intimate partner relationships. Moreover, as noted earlier, the codes used in NIBRS, like those used in other reporting systems, have limitations such as designations for workplace victimizations, location codes lacking specificity, and injury classifications that are somewhat restrictive. As such, analyses of certain types of domestic violence may be obscured.

Lastly, as with other official record systems, the lack of reporting of incidents to law enforcement results in a proportion of these criminal events remaining unaccounted for. This is likely the explanation for much of the differences among police data, health statistics, and ad hoc surveys. Complicating this situation, NIBRS remains to be fully implemented across the country, with these data as of 2004 reflecting reports from twenty-five states covering 20 percent of the U.S. population (FBI 2004). In fact, much of the data reported are from small to medium-sized rural jurisdictions. Therefore, the patterns revealed to this point in the data are more likely reflections of these types of jurisdictions rather than of urban jurisdictions that are not as of this point reporting in NIBRS.

Tempering this limitation are the increases in NIBRS participation by law enforcement agencies nationwide and the increased emphasis on enhancement of crime reporting content and frequency in support of initiatives to combat terrorism. NIBRS reporting may well benefit from these efforts. As such, information systems pertaining to the dynamics of domestic violence as well as other domestic crime problems may similarly advance.

These developments may provide for more analysis and better opportunities to formulate effective strategies for confronting not only domestic violence but also a number of other crime problems. The difficulties of obtaining uniform data on the incidence of domestic violence are not limited to the issues noted above either. In fact, it is unrealistic to expect that a single large-scale national reporting system would be able to provide all the information that authorities, citizens, advocates, and others would desire and make such information available on a regular basis. This said, the NIBRS perhaps shows the most promise for moving toward a more comprehensive and detailed source for data pertaining to domestic violence and also a large number of criminal behaviors that may be precursors to later violence, theft, and destruction of property.

Also check the list of domestic violence research topics or all criminal justice research topics.

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