Intimate partner violence (IPV) also called domestic violence, battering, or spouse abuse is violence committed by a spouse, ex-spouse, or current or former boyfriend or girlfriend. It can occur among heterosexual or same-sex couples and is often a repeated offense.
Costs of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in the United States,
Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, 2003.
Programs that attempt to prevent the domestic violence before it occurs face additional challenges. On the one hand, most people would agree that investment in preventing a problem will eliminate the far greater cost of responding to that problem if not prevented. A well-known example is public support for education campaigns to encourage the use of seatbelts and laws mandating seatbelt use in order to prevent deaths and serious injuries due to automobile accidents.
“We asked a cross-section of California adults about their willingness to pay for domestic violence prevention programming. Of the 522 respondents, 80% were in favor of the prevention work. We also asked about methods by which to raise funds for domestic violence prevention. Methods receiving the most support were humanitarian donations (e.g., check-offs on income tax returns) and “user fees” (e.g., increased fines for batterers).
Susan B. Sorenson, Ph.D., Professor, UCLA School of Public Health. March 25, 2004.
Funding Public Health: The Public’s Willingness to Pay for Domestic Violence Prevention Programming.
The American Journal of Public Health, November 2003, Vol. 93, No. 11, 1934-1938.
Available at: http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/full/93/11/1934.
“Surveys have shown that Californians want more money to go into prevention rather than prisons and other after-the-fact interventions.”
Susan B. Sorenson, Ph.D., Professor, UCLA School of Public Health. March 25, 2004.
On the other hand, justifying a prevention program is far from simple in that measuring what has been prevented as a direct result of a specific program is quite challenging using the seatbelt example above, how can we prove that our education campaign contributed to a decrease in those deaths and injuries? Ultimately, looking at the costs of a problem and the benefits of the prevention activities through careful documentation and analysis will help us to demonstrate that our prevention efforts are worthwhile.
“It’s one thing to be excited about what we’re doing, but how do we know it’s making a difference?”
Donna Garske, Executive Director
Marin Abused Women's Services, San Rafael, California. September 23, 2005.
“I believe that mainstream acceptance around prevention in our community is shifting, and that’s very positive. Our board has been doing results-based accountability for about eight years, but nobody’s made the case for this analysis yet. So it’s exciting to see tools and materials to help us make the case that prevention is cost-effective.”
Devorah Levine, Special Projects Manager
Zero Tolerance for Domestic Violence Initiative
Contra Costa County, California. September 23, 2005.